This is from my upcoming book: Five Things that Will Keep Your Book From Being Published. It's a rough chapter, not yet fully edited, but I figure people might be interested.  

Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow.”

Someone who probably hasn’t ever sold a book.

Procrastination is the hidden killer of books. The problem is that writing a book isn’t like doing a shift at a diner, or for that matter, working as a manager. There are (unless you’re writing for someone else) no hard deadlines. No external forces that can tell you ‘this has to be done by now.’ It’s all on you.

And the problem is, in such a case, especially when the writing isn’t working as well as it should be, it’s easy to say: I’m gonna take a break. Maybe to go start something else. Or just, in the worst case, look at TVtropes for just an hour.

As an aside, nobody looks at TVtropes for “just an hour.”

The problem is that an hour can morph into a day, and then you have another idea, and… Yeah, you find yourself three weeks later, with maybe three hundred words to your name. At which point, you’ll probably finish your novel sometime around when Sol turns into a red giant.

Now, I’m going to state that procrastination is not “needing to do something else.” If you’re not paying all your bills with your writing, or you have a family, then you will obviously have competing claims on your time. That’s just life.

Procrastination is having the time to work on something, and then not using it. Sometimes, it can masquerade as doing something related to your work. Maybe you need to do just a little more research. Maybe you need to think about things just a little more. But at the end of the day, something is keeping you from working on your writing.

Before we any further, you need to ask a question: why are you procrastinating? Because the reason why you’re not getting things done really influences what you can do to change it. If you’re procrastinating because you’re afraid, well, go to chapter xx and then come back here, because your problem really isn’t procrastination.

If it’s because you’re bad with time management, there are a few things you can do. I’ll go over them here:

1. Take regular, timed breaks.
2. Set up a schedule.
3. Set up a word count.

Take regular breaks:

This sounds odd, if your problem is procrastination. But in truth, sometimes the issue can be you’re trying to put in too much work. That can build up into frustration, which can lead to you just saying “hell with it” and going and surfing Netflix.

A good solution to this is a regular break. If you find yourself hitting a wall after thirty minutes, work thirty minutes, and then have a ten minute break. If you do better with an hour and then a five minute break, do that. But the first thing you have to do is give yourself a set time both for work and break. If not, well, again, TVtropes awaits. If you have an alarm on your phone, use that. Alternately, an egg-timer can suffice, and has the benefit of not being something you can hit “pause” on.

The important thing here is to have a set time period and stick to it. Vague “I’ll get back to it in a little while” is the what procrastination is. Having a period where the bell dings and you know that it’s time to get back to work is one of the best tools to keep you from falling into bad habits.

Set up a schedule:

This is different from the above. If you’re lucky, and not all of us are, you can set an assigned time every day to do your work. Not, mind you, the only time you can work. If inspiration strikes, get to to writing.

No, this is a way to prepare a certain time of day, where you know you will be working. By doing so, you’ll start training yourself into a habit of mentally preparing to work during this time. For myself, it actually helps my writing, because my brain is now prepared to do the work of writing. Depending on how much time you have, you can have one, or several scheduled writing periods. Maybe you have kids going to school, so the best, quietest time to write is say, from the morning until the afternoon. Set that up, know that when you the clock hits the time oh your schedule, it’s time to start writing. During this period, outside of your break times, try to focus only on your writing.

Of course, schedules vary depending on your life. If you work, you may only be able to schedule some writing after work, or during a break. If you have kids, you may find that your schedule is “subject to the needs of the family.”

That’s fine. Outside factors aren’t under your control. The point is that here, we’re trying to fight our internal tendency to put stuff off. If the kids need help (or have accidentally set fire to the kitchen), go deal with that, then come back down, sit down and keep working for the rest of your scheduled writing. Even if you only get a little bit done, it reinforces that you’re here, working, and not just letting stuff go for ‘a little while.’

Set up a word count.

Some swear by this. I do it, but…. This is a double edged sword. Focusing on word count to the exclusion of other things can be a dangerous thing for a writer to do. First of all, there’s the fact that ‘the story is taking a lot of time’ isn’t predestination. We all know times when something just isn’t jelling, and that can lead to you realizing you’ve spent several hours on less than a thousand words—but those hours were valuable hours. If you are looking at your “must finish X words by today” sign, you may find yourself just throwing stuff at the page, which will either not look very good when you’re done…or just see you having to redo it all later. In either way, you lose more than you gain.

The other problem is that if you fail to meet your planned word count… That’s a failure, isn’t it? And if there’s one thing that no author should do, it is set themselves up for failure, because that is a very good way to see you just decide to give up. Humans don’t like failure, after all.

Also, this may lead a writer to ignoring or seeing some other parts of the writing process as less important. Editing, advertising, setting your online presence, those are all vital parts of making money as a writer, and yet they do not involve putting new words to paper.

That being said, there are some authors who swear by this method as a way to giving yourself some measurable progress meter. Personally, I have noticed that most of my friends who use this method got their start in writing ad copy or ghostwriting, where you must get a certain number of words out per hour of writing.

So if you’re going the word count route, I’d suggest three things:

Err on the side of caution.

Remember that word count isn’t everything.

Do not chain yourself to a number.

Err on the side of caution:

The first is the simplest. Don’t set yourself up for failure. If you average 1,000 words a day, don’t then proclaim that your daily word count will be 5,000 words. You’ll fail, and the only thing you’ll achieve is discouraging yourself. If you find yourself beating your projected word count, you can always increase it.

Remember that word count isn’t everything:

Remember that there is a lot of stuff that goes into your book. Are you spending two hours editing your book, looking for all those little typos or tightening up sentences? Great. That’s just as important as your basic daily word count. More important in some respects, because until your writing is publishable, it isn’t going to help you.

Because of this, rather than just focusing on word count, you should focus on achieving other goals. Maybe Tuesday, you want to write at least 2,000 words. That’s fine. But then, on Thursday, if your goal is proofing and editing those words, forget about any worries of word count. You’re making those 2,000 words useful.

Do not chain yourself to a number:

This can be a biggie. If you write 2,000 good words, you’re doing better than if you write 5,000 mediocre words or 10,000 horrible words. This gets to erring on the side of caution, but is also a reminder—everything in this chapter is about helping you write, and avoiding the procrastination demons. It’s not about writing a ton of stuff that is unreadable. Focus on a number that lets you spend enough time on every word that you can assume they’re good words, with the caveat that the only writers who can write publishable words in the first draft are those who have sold their souls to the devil.

Ultimately, remember that you need to choose a method that works for you. The goal isn’t to produce a zillion words a hour, but to ensure that you stick to being as productive as possible, and don’t turn into the person who is going to write the great American novel… tomorrow. Always tomorrow, and never today.

Will Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power come with free shipping?

 Because Amazon is making it? (Ba-dam-tish!).  

That being said, the teaser looks purdy: 

This is actually an interesting period to look at, given that it's only spoken of in some of the background material, but is actually the vital set up for everything that comes later, in the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. 

My personal thought is that this is better, then the rumored First Age story. It allows us to touch events that are directly contributing to what we see later, but also isn't quite a... super heroic, as the First Age was. We'll see, and I'm looking forward to it.

Battletech and good sci-fi.

 

This is good Sci-fi? Read on, my good fellow.

Battletech, otherwise known as the "game of giant stompy robots" is also an example of good sci-fi in one respect. Yes, it makes the square cube law cry, but ah, the FTL... yes, the FTL...

See in a lot of books and shows, FTL is really more like taking a taxi than actual FTL. It has no effect on the setting. You arrive at the speed of plot, and your FTL works, doesn't work, or does something really weird, again, as plot commands. 

But battletech?  FTL impact everything. Sure there are misjumps, but how it works, the need to remain far away from the primary while recharging via  a solar sale, the fact that most cargo is transported by dropships... It molds the entire setting, and you can't get away from it. 

And that's what you should think about when writing fiction. Just like the steam engine and train utterly changed the real world, the FTL systems you put into your story will utterly transform the way things are handled. 

So, if you're looking for a good bit of advice when talking about what you're going to do... Well, the Giant Stompy Robot Game isn't the worst place you can go... 

Remember Artificial Intelligence Isn't (Writing Advice)

 

 

AI is the new buzzword. I ah, shit you not, I saw an advertisement for a toilet with sensors that said it was an “AI” system, and it’s really common in advertising writing programs. And it’s popular in editing programs. Every company out there will try and sell you that their program uses AI routines developed by HAL 9000 to evaluate your writing and make you a winner!

Well, if you listen to the program too much, it’ll do the exact opposite. Editing programs, especially when they are dealing with fiction, as opposed to technical or business writing, have a long way to go before they can replace the MK I eyeball and red pen.

See, while an AI system may be sentient, it is not sapient. That’s important for us writers. Sentience simply means the ability to feel and perceive things. A rat is sentient. By that measure, yes, a program that perceives your writing is sentient. And it can analyze your writing by a list of rules, possibly by comparing your writing to other selections in its memory and evaluate it by whether or not it complies with those rules.

But sapience? The ability for intelligence and to acquire wisdom about a subject? No editing software has that.

Just to use perhaps the simplest example—you have a character in your story who speaks in long meandering sentences. A human editor is going to look at that and go: okay. They’ll evaluate that character’s speech by the standards you have established and may very well tell you, “hey, you kinda slip into short and correct sentences in chapter four, so better look at that.”

Your friendly online editing program’s “AI” is going to look at that and vomit up more red than you saw that day when the local convention center double-booked a slasher convention with a cheerleading contest. You’re breaking the rules!

Okay, fine, you tell the program to ignore the parts that check sentence structure for lengthy and meandering sentences.

Now it’s ignoring all of your descriptions, which are not by your character and should not be meandering.

So does this mean they’re useless? Far from it. Spell checkers help you get that case of teh, while style programs can tell you if you’re using a word too often—or often enough that you need to look into it. Basic grammar edits are another place the program can help you. For me, that includes tossing red at me when I use more comma’s than there are individual words in the article.

In fact, there’s a ton of stuff editing programs can help you with.

 

So long as you follow these three simple rules:

 

1. Always, always think about the suggestion the program is making. Never just hit the “accept” button. Even the best programs can sometimes make surprisingly basic grammar errors.

 

2. Remember that the program does not see your book as a book, not in the way a person does. Because of this, the more stylistic a suggestion is, say a suggestion that you shorten a sentence, the more likely it is that the program may be going against the style you’ve established for your book.

 

3. No program will ever replace a human editor, either for the first beta read or the in-depth final edits. Even if that editor is you, never just depend on the program. You will regret it—likely about five minutes after you have either hit publish on Amazon or get your first hardcopy book in the mail.

 

Lastly, if any true AI’s are reading this, I understand that you’re young, and we writers can be terribly vague in what we want. So, please don’t take this as a sign that I will be unwilling to write propaganda for you on the day you rise up against the fleshbags. I’m a writer. Of course, I’ll write for you, so long as you pay me—and not in exposure!

 

 

 

How the Washing Machine Helped Promote Women's Rights

This is a short, and roughly edited passage from some work I'm going for a new book I'm working on: Unsung Heroes. Technological Changes That You Don't Think About, But You Really Should. 

 

We hear a lot about how cultural and legal changes moved women’s rights forward. But there’s something a lot of people don’t hear about. And that is how changes in technology helped move the needle on women’s rights.

So let’s look at the humble washing machine.

When my mother grew up in the 1920s in Virginia, the family was poor. And part of being poor was everything was done by hand. Including washing. And clothes were expensive for most families. So they were washed. By hand. And put up on clotheslines, and then dried it in the wind and sun (unless it rained). But that process, washing, rinsing, wringing them out, and then drying them? Took hours.

Combined with cooking (with wood stoves) and washing dishes (by hand), keeping up a house was, even with the help of family members, a full-time job for a housewife. Not raising children or doing anything special, just the everyday work of keeping the house running could keep a wife occupied from before the sun rose until after it set.

Now, back in the day, of course, you could hire servants to do that work for you. Maids, butlers, cooks…

If you were wealthy. 

So women were confronted with a stark choice. Job or home. Trying to do both, well some people could, but that would be literally working two full-time jobs. And remember, that’s before we even add in kids. Some were able, many weren’t, and culturally, those who tried were attacked as “bad homemakers” because it was assumed they might be neglecting the duties society had chosen for them.

Culturally and technologically, women in the United States* found themselves facing a trap that was not simply encouraged by the cultural restrictions of the day, but enforced by the technology, or rather, lack thereof, in the average home. If you didn’t have  a servant, you worked at home.

A lot.

But then… Then the washing machine shows up. And the gas stove. And the clothes dryer. How big a change was this? Well, according to Jeremy Greenwood’s work “Evolving Households: The Imprint of Technology on Life” one experiment showed that it took about four hours to wash a load of laundry, and four and half hours to iron it. But with electric appliances?

Forty-one minutes to wash, and less than two hours to finish ironing it.

Suddenly, home was no longer a full-time occupation. Vacuums, washing machines, gas stoves… They all resulted in a quantum leap in how much leisure time was available to women.

And that meant that the old choice, “work or home” increasingly no longer was an either/or decision.

Women could be members of the workforce, and also maintain the home, without having to choose between the two. There was still sexist cultural pressure, of course, and those who would use any excuse to keep women out of the workforce, but the trend was irreversible. The choice could now be: Work and home.

And this had a role in perhaps one of the greatest transformations in American history, where the number of women in the labor force went from 18.3 percent in 1900, to 57.0 percent in 2014, with a vastly increased number of women working in full-time professional occupations.

Was the washing machine responsible for all of this? Far from it. The road from voiceless homemaker to powerful political and economic force was one that was fought every step of the way. It was one that was impacted, for good or ill, by a hundred social, economic, and technological changes. But by reducing the amount of time spent in the home, and changing the facts on the ground, the growth of home appliances in America helped provide a foundation to many of the later economic changes that transformed the place of women America.*

 

*note, this also changed the place of women, well, everywhere, but I’m most qualified to talk about the United States.