The Monthly Reset and Dodging Curve Balls

By

Scott D. Parker

 

A few weeks ago, I wrote about giving yourself the grace to start, stop, and then restart a habit. That was just after Quitter’s Day 2025.

 

Today is 1 February 2025. It’s been thirty-one days since New Year’s Day. How are you habits coming along? How’s that new story or book working out for you?

 

I picked up an older story sitting at around 10,000 words on 1 January and, as of yesterday, I reached achieved a hair more than 21,000 new words. Not quite the pace I imagined as I opened my laptop early on New Year’s Morning—I frankly expected at least 31,000—but those are 21,000 new words I didn’t have. So that’s a win and I’ll proudly wave the flag.

 

It’s important we celebrate our victories, both large and small, because things can change your life in the blink of an eye. Like it did for me this past week.

 

My day job changed our in-office policy from hybrid (in office Tuesday through Thursday; work from home on Mondays and Fridays) to the full five days in the office. Naturally, after three-plus years of that kind of working routine, everyone is having to adjust.

 

But aside from the disruptions and the adjustments and the very obvious blessing of still having a job, a silver lining appeared.

 

On my WFH days, I would always each lunch and play games (backgammon and Yahtzee; 3 games each) with my wife. Now, I truly miss those times, but I quickly realized that with me being in the office, I have two additional hours of writing. It doesn’t easily equate to the missing time with the wife, but my writer self can be two hours more productive.

 

Now, fellow writer, we face a new month, one with a nice and even twenty-eight days. What are your goals for this month? Mine is quite simple: forge ahead on the novel and write at least 21,000 new words. And, like I always say, if you’ve fallen off the writing wagon, all you have to do is the simplest thing possible.

 

Start.

by Scott D. Parker

I’m not sure how many folks might need to read Chip Copley’s Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age, but I certainly did. 

Now, before we go any further, I must say that I am not going through a midlife crisis. At all. Most people who see me ask me why I’m always smiling or be-bopping to a song I hear in my head. I’m an optimistic, happy person. Have been for as long as I can remember.

But this book ignited something in me.

I refer to my current age as “fifty f*cking five!” so you know where I am in life. It’s true that when it comes to, say, my writing career, I used to lament that I didn’t start at a younger age. If I did nothing else other than write a book a year, I’d have more than twenty out there. Heck, if I’d even have kept up that pace since 2005 when I wrote my first book, Treason at Hanford, I would have had more books published.

That’s not how it went, and stewing about that fact and the choices I made gets me nowhere. I do, however, have control on where I am now and where I’m going. And that’s where this book comes in.

A Shift in Perspective

Chip Conley is a little bit older than I am so I see him as one of those more seasoned voices I can listen to and learn from. A central tenet of Chip’s philosophy is shifting our perspectives on aging. 

Many folks hate getting older. They look at old photos and see their youthful bodies, recall that zest for life, and were confident they never forgot where they put the car keys. 

Shifting our perspective from negative to positive actually has good benefits. We’ll ultimately be healthier, our brains function better, our days will become more happy, and we’ll actually live longer. And who doesn’t want that?

Those same folks who see me walking the hallways at work with a grin on my face ask me why I’m smiling. “Because I woke up today.” Yeah, there will be bad days. There always are, but the good days always best the bad. 

The Midlife Chrysalis

Chip sees midlife in three stages. Early Midlife (ages 35-50) involves the emotional and physical transitions. He calls it adult puberty. In this stage, we’re no longer young, but we’re still spry enough to play with our kids or maybe run a marathon or ride a bike 150 miles for MS. 

Your fifties is the center of midlife. We’ve changed our way of thinking about ourselves and have settled into who we are. Chip quotes David Bowie here: “Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.” Kind of also echoes the famous quote from George Bernard Shaw: “Youth is wasted on the young.”

Stage Three of midlife is roughly 60 to 75. You’re probably still working, probably still somewhat youthful, but you see your golden years approaching. 

Chip’s metaphor of a chrysalis—of when a caterpillar consumes, then gestates, and then transforms into a butterfly—is the core of this book. It’s the lens through which he advises us to see our lives. He calls everything that came before a dress rehearsal. 

And butterflies? What do they do? They pollinate and, in his take, this is the stage where we can pollinate the world with the wisdom we’ve all accumulated.

What Does This Mean?

The book examines the twelve reasons why Chip sees life getting better as we get older. If nothing else, take a look at the sample pages on the store of your choice and you can see the table of contents. (Or you can click this link that will take you to Chip's page where he has a video on what inspired him to write the book and other resources.) In addition to the twelve, he also breaks things down into broader categories: the Physical Life, the Emotional Life, and the Vocational Life. 

The more I pored over those pages, the more I saw the possibilities of what I want to do and how I can accomplish the things I want. 

A driving factor in all of this is the growth mindset. Chip defines it not as winning but learning. “A growth mindset facilitates seeking out, exploring, and enjoying new experiences. It is the antidote to midlife boredom.”

It is also the antidote to boredom no matter how old you are. 

For us writers, a growth mindset can manifest itself into improving our craft, learning how to write better stories, and letting folks know about our books. For us readers, it might be going to a bookstore and going to a section you’ve never visited and selecting something brand new to read. For anyone, it can be learning a new language, a new skill, or trying something completely new. 

In short, this is a book that can make you ecstatic to be alive, no matter your age. 

When You’re Down in the Dumps, Be Open to the World Helping You

By

Scott D. Parker

Sometimes, creativity is hard, discouraging, and challenging. In every creative project, there is always a moment (or moments) when you question what you’re doing. It’s an inevitable part of the process. What do you do?

Be open to the signs the world is sending you.

By the way, I’m using “creative” here because this applies to any type of creative thing you do, whether it be writing, painting, composing, researching, or building something.

The Challenge of the Tedious Work

I experienced a couple of challenging days earlier this week. They were days in which I began to question why I do the writing stuff and all the surrounding things an author does to sustain a writing career.

I’m updating my author website this spring. For one thing, I think it’s a good idea to refresh all the public-facing stuff from time to time. My site had been static with one design for …well, I can’t remember the last time I updated it. Another reason is as a cost-cutting measure. The theme I was using is one of those subscription-based plans and, now that my taxes are finished, I was able to see that the money going out (for hosting, webpage theme) was not as much as the money coming in. Thus, I revised my website and opted to use a modern, responsive theme for a single purchase price.

I was struggling with the website mainly because it was not properly formatted. I was beginning to sweat it out, to be honest. What if someone—especially a fellow sax player in my church orchestra who only discovered on Easter that I write books—visited my site at the very same time the site was garbled? Would they ever return?

I was able to slap that thought out of my head rather easily. Is that something I can control? If yes, then worry about it. If no, then soldier on and do the work of updating the website no matter how long it took.

How Long Is a Novel Supposed to Be?

On New Year’s Day, I started my current book. Last year was pretty bad writing-wise so my simple goal was to start and finish this book with the only rule of thumb being write every day. I have met that goal, but, after 104 days (as of yesterday), I have not completed the book.

Which was weird. And it got to overthinking things.

It took me about ten months to write my first one back in 2005-2006. Then I spent seven years not writing the second only to complete my second actual book in about a six-week span in 2013. In those intervening years, I’ve complete more manuscripts, with the fastest being a three-month span in early 2017 in which I completed a novel a month. I was enamored with the pulp writers of the 1930s and fancied myself in their company.

That’s not me.

Thinking my book was too long and too slow, I recently purchased Dean Wesley Smith’s classic Pacing course over at WMG Publishing. In my email conversations with him, he banged my head with the Bat of Obvious: “As for your present book, just write until you find the end of the story and don't worry about length. Then keep learning, as you are doing.”

Yeah, but what about that other book when….? was my first reaction. That’s when another author showed up in my feed.

I subscribe to the Writer Unboxed blog posts and read those posts daily. This week, Kathleen McCleary posted a just-for-me (no, not really) blog post entitled How Long Does It Really Take To Write a Novel? Eager to learn The Secret, I read her post.

And, again, found the Obvious Answer: it depends on the story and the author. In reading the details of how long it took her to write her novels, I found encouragement. She mentioned that writing every day helps (I absolutely concur with that statement) and it doesn’t matter what others have done. Then, like Dean, Kathleen lays it out in a clean, obvious statement: “Let it go.  Meaning, let go of your ideas of how long it should take you to write your book, and just write. You have a story to tell and you are the only one who can tell it, so let it unfold.”

The Work is the Win

The bow on top of the Cake of Encouragement this week came from Billy Oppenheimer. He is Ryan Holiday’s research assistant, Ryan being the guy who is bringing Stoic philosophy to the 21st Century and showing us how it still applies. Billy has a weekly newsletter in which he shares six things he’s learned each week. It’s a great resource.

Billy appeared on The Best Advice podcast and in this episode, he said he followed one of Ryan’s basic habits for sustained creative success:

The Work has to be the Win. “You control the effort," Ryan says, "not the results. You control the work you put in, not how it’s received. So ultimately, you have to love doing it. You have to get to a place where doing the work is the win & everything else is extra.”

The World Can Help You…If You Let It

All of these desperate threads wound themselves in my brain and thoughts this week and cleared away the cobwebs of doubt. Doing something creative is always difficult. There will always be challenges. The key to maintaining the creativity is to keep moving forward. The work is going to take as long as the work takes. When it’s over, you’ll know.

So just keep being creative, because being a creative is a wonderful thing to be.

Photo courtesy of Steve Johnson via Unsplash

It’s Never Too Late to Restart Resolutions and Habits

By
Scott D. Parker

How are your New Year’s Resolutions coming along?

I saw a statistic that said by today—Day 36 of 2023—a shocking 80% or more people have already given up on the resolutions they so fervently made at midnight on 1 January. Eighty percent. I think the figure is higher, to be honest. There’s even a holiday to help folks who waver on their resolutions. It’s called National Quitter’s Day and that was back on 13 January.

As I wrote back in December, I had certain personal goals—okay, let’s just call them habits, okay? That’s what they really are—that I wanted to do in January. I started re-reading the Psalms (one a day for 150 days), I re-read the Proverbs (31 chapters for 31 days in January), and have started to re-read Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic. Taking a cue from Bryon Quertermous, I bought a weekly planner and kept track of every habit I wanted to set.

So far? Success. It’s feels very nice to have reached the last day of the why-does-it-feel-so-long January and all my boxes were checked.

The other thing that also was checked? The writing habit. My writing goal for January was simple: start a new project and write on it every day. I had no word count goal but I tend to zero in on 1,000 words per session. Again, 100% success.

Now, it wasn’t perfect. There were a couple of days when I had to slog through the writing, but I sat down and did it.

By the 31st of January, I had amassed approximately 39,000 words on the new novel. That’s not quite NaNoWriMo speed (50,000 words over 30 days) but considering the dismal writing I did in 2022, I’ll take the win. You know how I knew the new habit was locked in? When on that first Saturday morning, I opted not to watch a movie before I finished my words for the day. That Saturday Habit has continued. That, my friends, is a fantastic feeling.

But what do you do if life threw you curve balls in January and you’ve had to catch them, dodge them, hit them, or let them hit you?

Start again. Seriously it’s that simple. Just start.

What’s great about February is that it has the fewest days of any month. If you’ve wanted to start a new habit and have fallen off the wagon, start again on Monday. Do the writing, do the exercise, do the reading, do the calling of your friends or family you haven’t spoken to in a long time. There are only 24 more days in February. It’s a nice, short length of time to get back to the habit you know you want to ingrain in your brain.

Start today or tomorrow and do that new habit every day for a week. Your reward? The Super Bowl. Then aim for the next week. You make it that far, you’ll only have ten more days until the end of the month.

You know you want to create that new resolution, that new habit. I’m here to tell you that it’s never too late. But you will have to do one thing:

Start.

Non-Monogamous Writing

by
Scott D. Parker

I celebrated a big accomplishment this past Wednesday: the Consecutive Writing Streak reached 100! I have written every single day since Memorial Day (27 May), amounting to 177,000 words. I think we can all do the mental math to arrive at an average of 1,770 words a day. I don't consider that a bad thing since the bulk of June (24 days) was spent writing less than 1,000 a day, but the bulk of July (28 days) and all of August were spent writing more than 1,000. I'm proud of myself, which is kinda funny. I mean, think about it: a writer is proud that he's written. Big whoop, huh? But I've spent so many years *not* writing that  actual writing seems so joyous.

What had characterized my writing this summer has been the monogamy. When I pick up a project, I write on it until I'm done. It's been a great single-minded approach. It's likely been one of the reasons why the word count was able to flow as easily as it did: I was thinking only of one story.

In the closing days of August, I had to do double duty. I'm firmly in the middle of this second book, but I needed to write and submit a short story for an anthology to be named later. Now, this might have been relatively easy for some folks, but it's a challenge that I've never experienced. Add to that my desire to maintain the novel-writing streak through August and I ended up forcing myself to work on both the novel and the short story on the same days. Novel in the morning, short story in the evening. It worked well enough, and I was able to switch gears with relatively ease. I spent Sunday polishing the short story so much so that I didn't get to the novel. That streak was momentarily broken, but I got back on the wagon the next day.

For you writers out there who work on multiple projects, do y'all have any challenges you must overcome? Or is it merely a job and you just do it? I assume it's the latter, as it was for me, but I'm just asking around. I found that I enjoyed working on more than one thing at a time, tiring as it ended up being.

The Ebbs and Flows of Daily Writing

by

Scott D. Parker

I wrote last week about momentum and immediately followed it up with two 3,000-word days for a 6,000-word weekend output. Momentum was moving. Monday was back to a basic grand, but Tuesday was a personal best: over 4,000. And that was a workday. Man, the words were flowing and the story was just chugging along nicely.

So, I thought to myself, if I can keep this up, I can easily have this thing finished in August. True, 4,000 words is a prodigious output for a working guy like me, but I got it done. I went to bed on Tuesday with visions of grandeur.

The Wednesday hit and it was like I was going in slow motion. The. Words. Just. Did. Not. Flow. It was like pulling teeth. For the first time in days, existing books on my bookshelf started to look more interesting than the scene I was writing. The iPad was there...did I have any plays on Scrabble? What’s the latest news on …well, anything? I turned aside all distractions andI managed nearly 2,500 words, but it was a slog. I opted for writing a number of smaller scenes versus one larger one. It enabled me to keep making progress.

More than anything, the Easy Tuesday 4,000/Difficult Wednesday 2,500 was a reminder that each day is a new writing session complete with obstacles to overcome or smooth sailing to ride. Those visions of grandeur was, on Wednesday, turned to delusions. This writing thing can be as easy as or as hard as it wants to be.

The key for me was to keep moving forward. Keep writing. And I kept the words of Joelle’s post from last Sunday in my mind as well, especially her third point: Repeat this phrase—“I will get to THE END.” And frequent commenter, Dana King, also made an incredibly salient point [my italics]: "Woody Allen once said 80% of success is just showing. In writing, that means finishing the book. Writers are often terrible judges of their own work, if only because they are the only person who knows what they wanted the book to be; everyone else takes the book at face value." That is an incredibly obvious point but one that I've missed way too often.

I showed up this week, in the easy times and the not-so-easy times and, by Friday, I was rewarded not only with 17,000 new words on this novel-in-progress, but I have achieved a 9-day streak of writing more than 1,000 words a day. Most importantly, however, is not the streak of 9 but the streak of 47. That is the number of consecutive days I’ve now written. (It’ll be 48 by the time this post goes live.)

I have a paperweight on my growing manuscript that has an inscription by Benjamin Disraeli: The secret of success is constancy to purpose. I’ve had the weight for years and only now, in the summer of 2013, am I really understanding what it means with writing.

The progress continues...

How are y’all doing with your writing projects?

February and the Power of Course Correction

by
Scott D. Parker

Many of us make New Year's resolutions for the most honest of reasons. We want to get fit, lose weight, eat better, or anything else. When you are still in the halo of New Year's Day, the year feels new and young and everything seems possible. We have visions of our new selves, sometime later in the year, all fit, healthier, and with our new habits firmly ensconced in our new selves.

Here in the writer world, many a new habit boils down to writing more. Finish the book. Finish the story. Finish anything. Back in December, I realized that I had not been setting aside time to write. That had become the norm, the habit that was hard to break (ba-dum-dum ching!) I decided to try an experiment: write something, ANYthing, each day. And I've succeeded. As of last night, I've written something, anything of fiction for 64 straight days. What's great and most important to me is the inner urge. It's not back at the full blazing glory I've previously experienced in my writing life, but the pilot light is lit.

There the the flip side, the downside to what I've been doing. Often, I've not taken the time to write until late at night. Once it's past 11, if I'm not writing something I've already planned out--typical for these 64 days--I am in no mood to create. Thus, I'll satisfy my daily duty/habit by writing the bare minimum, around 100 words or a long paragraph. That is no way to get anything done, but it's becoming a habit.

And that's where course correction comes in. I think many of us start a resolution or a habit without a good idea of how to ingrain the habit within us. We fail at our resolutions by the end of January, get mad at ourselves, sigh, and go back to the way it was in December.

But don't forget February. The second month of the year is, in many ways, more crucial than January. It's the time where you can readjust your outlook on your resolutions. Knocking out soft drinks cold turkey too much for you and the failure has already happened? Try cutting back one a week. That's not hard. Then, after a bit, keep another sugary drink on the shelf and out of your stomach. That new story/novel you've thought about and shelved in the internal file cabinet in your mind? Get it out of your head and onto pixel or paper. Chances are you can salvage something.

You see, by February, the year is no longer new. The real world has crept in. You've lived life in the new year, with new challenges to overcome. February is that time where you can see what's not working and fix it. Oh, and the beauty of the months March through December? You can course correct anytime. I just find February to be the best time.

And for me and my new "habit" of writing the barest minimum to for the right to put a red "X" on a calendar? Yes, I've started writing again. No, it's not very good or very productive. It's not working the way I wanted it to. Okay, then, what can I do to change it so that I can continue to move forward? Course correction. Or, to put it another way, the first, big obstacle. Overcome it, and things get much easier, or, rather, manageable.

February. The Month for Course Corrections. Your second chance at resolutions. It doesn't have all the romance that resolutions have in January, but they tend to have more real-world experience with which you can get those resolutions completed.

My course correction for writing is simple: make my time to write be at an hour before the last thing I do every night. Find that secret, special time where I can bust out multiple paragraphs in the space of 15 minutes. And then do it again. Double my effort. In the daylight, if at all possible.

Are there any course corrections y'all are planning to make to better accomplish your resolutions?

Tone: You Know It When You See It

by
Scott D. Parker

Like Russel yesterday, when tone came down as the subject of the week, I groaned inwardly. How the heck do you talk about tone? Remember that saying a congressman or judge once said about porn: that he'd know porn when he saw it but couldn't quite put forward a definition? That's how I see tone.

Tone is also a bit like your life's journey: you can only see the signposts from the perspective of age and wisdom. When you break-up with your first love, at the time, it's like the world is crashing down and everything else is meaningless. With time, you can see that the new trajectory your life took was infinitely better.

The same goes with tone. Like Jay and Russel wrote, one of the mechanical things you can do to evoke a particular tone is choosing certain words to fill your sentences and paragraphs. Certain authors have a particular tone. You can read one paragraph of Charles Dickens and you know the author's tone. The same is true for Chandler, Hammett, Burroughs, Chabon, or dozens of other writers. Some authors can even mimic a certain tone. In the afterward to his new Sherlock Holmes novel, The House of Silk, Anthony Horowitz mentioned that he kept a list of certain words that he used over and over again. He did such a good job with capturing the tone and feel of Doyle's language that I sometimes forgot that Doyle wasn't the author.

Yes, you can set out to create a certain tone and wordsmith your way to that desired end. Take, for example, most network TV crime dramas. Because of the structure and the language choice, many have a similar tone. Does that make them bad? No, but if you don't like that particular tone, you probably won't like the shows.

Word choice alone is only a means to an end. In some ways, it's something that' too mechanical. An author's tone emerges over time, over the thousands of words written. Tone might be the thing only readers can discover. Yes, it's true that tone can materialize in prose, but if you want to get a good sense of your own, personal tone, read your own non-fiction, including blogs entries and emails. I have speech-to-text software on my computers and one of the things the program does during setup is to analyze your writing. If only there was an option for tone I'd have the answer to what mine is.

I'll admit that I'm not too seasoned a writer of prose to know if I have a prose tone or not, but I can easily recognize my tone in emails, especially professional ones.

Can you recognize your own tone in your prose or non-fiction?

The Start of a Beautiful …

By Scott D. Parker

All writing advice boils down to the obvious: Just Write. Those words are painted on a ceramic pencil holder I keep on my writing desk. On the back of it, I put a small red dot. When the lady at the ceramic store asked my why, I told her that I was always missing something and I needed a little reminder to help me remember what I missed.

The beauty of that little red dot is that it can stand in for just about anything: better prose, more natural dialogue, get that essay to the editor yesterday! This week, the little red dot has taken on a new meaning: schedule. I am blessed to be able to work my technical writing day job out of my house four out of five days a week. As a result, I’m in this room many, many hours. I’ll admit, too, that come the end of the work day, I am so ready to get off my butt and step away from the computer and the keyboard. Not a real conducive writing environment, that.

Like Dave on Thursday, I read Chuck Wendig’s post, “Six Signs It’s High Time to Give Up That Whole “Writing” Thing” (Hey, Chuck! Two DSD shout outs in one week!) There was a single take away from that essay: Shut up and write. The nifty thing for me was that I already was.

Taking a cue from Jeff Abbott, I started a habit five days ago: write in the morning. With summer here, my boy is not in school. In the past, when I didn’t have to get up so early, I’d allow myself a few minutes more sleep. Not so, now. I made a simple decision: maintain my wake up time from the school months and get 1,000 words done before heading “off” to the day job.

And I’ve done it, too. In this first week of summer when the mercury nears 100 every day, the mornings have been unexpectedly pleasant. So, not only have I fired up the Mac every morning a little before 7am, I’ve also pounded out my words sitting outside on my patio. I can’t tell you how fulfilling it is to have your writing for the day done by 8am—my hard cut off time since I do have to work. And, as the week progressed, I found that I, when I awoke and groggily brushed my teeth, the sentences I was to write started forming in my head. By the time I poured the coffee, I almost didn’t’ need it so thrilling was anxiousness to get to writing.

An interesting colliery: Because I have to start work at 8am, I have had the situation where I’ve had to stop in the middle of a scene. I’ve never really done that before—despite the advice from numerous sources that it’s a good idea—but found it to be a pretty cool thing the next morning. I don’t think I’ll keep that aspect of my writing, but it’s helped a couple of times.

When do you write? Are you a morning writer?

Short Story Collection of the Week: Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles as written by Edward A. Grainger. I think we all know that Edward A. Grainger is really David Cranmer, writer, editor, publisher, husband, and new father. A couple of days ago, the first collection of his Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles short stories was released via Kindle. I had the pleasure of reading some of these stories in draft form and I can attest that there isn’t a bad tale in this book. Even if you don’t particularly like westerns—see Chris F. Holm’s introduction if you fall into this category—you will enjoy these tales of adventure. Besides, the collection is only $0.99. Come on! You can part with a dollar, can’t you? You’ll get much more than you paid for, I assure you.

Dance With Them What Brung Ya

by

Scott D. Parker

What do you do when you get really off-kilter with you writing?

While I won’t say I’m too off kilter—as I am writing and making progress—I’m not making the progress I think I should. Thus, I diagnose a problem that may only exist in my head, but, nonetheless, is there. One thing I’ve done to see about increasing my productivity is go back and review what worked before.

As I wrote my first book, I compiled all my thoughts and notes and the occasional chapter into one of those college composition books. These are the ones with the mottled black-and-white covers. I put just about all my thoughts in there up to and including the day I wrote “The end” on the book.

I took a look at that old comp book the other day, trying to glean some of the tricks I must’ve used to complete my first novel. I even called my fellow writing buddy. He and I wrote our first books together and, so the joke between us goes, “It has taken us longer NOT to write the second book than it did to write the first.” During our conversation, I realized that my lower productivity level really is an actual thing. For some reason, I’m writing slower. Now, slow-but-sure will ultimately cross the finish line, but I just want to get there faster. Why? I’m not sure.

Two things struck me this week. They are not big revelations, but writing is a profession that seems to require constant reinforcement via basic thoughts to the neurotic people who perform the task. One, the encouragement he and I provided each other in the form of weekly “assignments” proved invaluable. Said assignments was to deliver marked-up copies of last week’s chapters and deliver new, fresh chapters. Like my friend said, it was peer pressure because he didn’t want to be the dufus who didn’t have anything prepared. Motivation. Why is it that writing needs motivation?

The second thing was much more personal. All throughout my old comp book, I started encouraging myself. I’d write little affirmations and prayers that I could get the book completed. It’s actually a bit charming to re-read that stuff, knowing how it all turned out. But that’s what helped me cross that finish line. That’s how I did it in the old days.

In the years since, I’ve tried different ways to stay organized, electronically as well as manually. My iPod Touch is a great device and, with a few apps, I can maintain and sync story ideas and note across multiple delivery sources. I didn’t have that in the “old days.” I had a comp book. And with the comp book, I wrote a novel.

I’m the type of guy whose life experiences often involve doing things the hard way or the long way. Not sure why. The very apps and electronic devices that are supposed to make writing easier have, I think, flooded my brain with too much information and too many options. Thankfully, I’m not the kind of writer who needs the special this or the special that just to make prose. I can and do write anywhere. I’m beginning to think, however, that I need a comp book to keep my ideas and notes in one place and I need to make many of those notes in longhand. Something about that just seems right for me.

Do you have something that just works for you and your writing? Have you ever tried a different path? Did you succeed?

Currently Reading: The End of the Matter by Alan Dean Foster. Completely not crime or mystery related, but I'm re-reading this book (book 3 of a trilogy) for the first time in 30 years. He was my entry into written SF and he holds up remarkable well.

Finding "The End"

by
Scott D. Parker

I did something this week that I have not done in a long time: I wrote "The End" on a story.

Long-time readers might remember me discussing my feeble explanations to my extended family last Thanksgiving when I had to explain "what was I working on". The year 2010 was not a good year for me writing-wise, and I have been working hard to turn that around in 2011. One of the things that has been hanging over my head is a collaboration I'm working on with another writer.

Let me clarify "Hanging over my head." I have thoroughly enjoyed this project and I've learned something about my character (literary as well as myself) that I didn't know. It's just that when it came time to write, the words didn't flow as freely as I would have liked. Or expected, to be honest. I had this grand vision of myself blazing away through multiple stories at a time, maintaining a high word count/day, and just being this prolific machine. Some of my own past personal success has inadvertently led to a part of my writing brain to think that this is easy work. It isn't, a point made all to clear to me throughout my lengthy and unprofessional struggle to "get it right the first time."

My part of the project had gone so long that I had forgotten my original ideas. You see, I'm a note taker and a planner when it comes to stories. So, naturally, I thought I'd wing it with this one. Wrong choice. I should have blocked out my scenes and then I would have made more steady progress instead of the fits and starts I ended up doing.

It's also taught me some personal lessons. Among them is this obvious little nugget: Do not let rejections get under my skin. It's a natural course of this profession to be rejected. Everyone gets rejected. Get over it.

Through all of my self-imposed struggles, my writing partner stuck by me. I'm thankful for his patience and his faith in the project. And getting to "The End"--something our own Joelle Charbonneau recently reached as well--is a thrill. To be honest, I had forgotten the feeling. We writers are a curious bunch. The mere act of writing two special words can send us to cloud nine. Weird that.

But it also supercharges us, or, at least, me. Finally getting past that sisyphian hurdle was a marvel. It was the little thing that made me remember why I write in the first place.

Joy. Joy at at story told well (to me). Joy at reaching the end. Ain't nothing like it in the world. It has made me already start another tale because I don't want to go too long without experiencing "The End" again.

Song of the Week: John Renbourn's "Palermo Snow." Never heard of him until NPR put up this song on Thursday. He's a guitarist from the early 1960s, says the write-up of this tune. He is new to me, but I've listened to this song at least 10 times since I first heard it. That he pairs his finger-picking guitar with a clarinet makes me even more curious to discover more of his music.

Charles Dickens and His Wax Tablet

by
Scott D. Parker

Picture this: Charles Dickens has writer’s block. He can’t quite work out what new tragedy he can inflict upon Esther Summerson. He’s stuck. So he puts down his pen and moves his ink bottle off his desk. He stands up and, from a top shelf, pulls down a wax-covered writing tablet, the kind the Romans used. Sharpening the stylus, old Boz sits down and starts writing the next chapter of Bleak House on wax.

Think that’s how it happened? Yeah, I don’t think so, either. But I sometimes wonder, judging by the habits of modern writers and extrapolating backwards, if that’s how it might’ve gone.

What am I saying? Only this: in all the discourse about writing in this modern age, many folks choose to use older technology to get their writing complete. David McCullough famously uses a 1940s-era manual typewriter for all the books he’s written. Jonathan Franzen, in the cover story of Time last week, notes that he writes on an old laptop whose ethernet port has been superglued shut, thus never allowing that computer to access the internet. Even me, when I find myself writing during vacations, I take pen and paper rather than laptop.

Why?

McCullough has said that he likes the slowness of non-digital technology. It allows him to think through his prose and the structure of his books. I agree with him. When I break out the pen and ink, often my ideas gush through my brain and my hand can’t keep up. On those non-laptop vacations (that’s a rule I put in place, not imposed by any family member), I long for the keyboard and speed of my typing. Writing longhand is, often, too slow for me. Ironically, when I find myself stuck in a particular passage, instead of forging ahead on the laptop, I start writing longhand. The log jam breaks and I keep on moving, back on the laptop. Makes me want to study the nature of writer’s brains and see if there’s some thousand-year evolution of neurons and the imagination that has been forged and that we, in the digital age, are attempting to melt and reforge into something new.

As funny as it is to imagine Dickens writing on wax or papyrus or hieroglyphics, I can’t help but ask the obvious question: given a chance do you think Dickens (or any writer pre-twentieth century writer) would have used a laptop and a word processor?

I have my answer, but I’ll let y’all start…