{"id":896,"date":"2013-08-01T19:39:59","date_gmt":"2013-08-02T00:39:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/?p=896"},"modified":"2013-08-01T19:39:59","modified_gmt":"2013-08-02T00:39:59","slug":"thrashing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/?p=896","title":{"rendered":"Thrashing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"typewriter\"Okay, my plan for today was to post a link to a video of a hillbilly dancing with a raccoon, but I recently got a link to here<\/a> from Carnival of Words, <\/a>and that kind of cornball antics won’t play with the new folks I expect to visit the blog and class up the joint (not that there is anything wrong with the people already reading it – love you guys).<\/p>\n

So, on to a serious literary topic.\u00a0 There is plenty of advice for the aspiring writer out there – N.E. White has been going through a bunch of them from the good folks at Pixar, for example<\/a>.\u00a0 A lot of these rules focus on the getting out there and getting the wordcount up, fighting writer’s block, fighting through feelings of crippling inadequacy common to all writers, etc.\u00a0 Heck, that’s pretty much NaNoWriMo <\/a>in a nutshell.\u00a0 Much of this advice is useful, I’m sure, to all those single-minded, driven, hard-headed writers out there who can focus like a laser on a given topic, and maybe just have trouble keeping up momentum on that project.<\/p>\n

But what about the likes of me?\u00a0 In computer science, there is a term “thrashing”, that basically describes what happens when multiple users or programs are competing for the same resource (virtual memory, say), and the computer spends more time allocating resources and switching back and forth than it does actually doing any of the things it was allocating resources for.\u00a0 That tends to be my problem.\u00a0 I don’t have trouble writing per se<\/em>, it’s just that I generally have so many varying works in progress and beta reads and so on that I can find myself switching back and forth between projects, writing a few hundred words here and a few hundred words there.\u00a0 It is progress of a sort, but not the kind that would amaze an onlooker.<\/p>\n

Alas, I suspect that my tendency toward thrashing is related to my inability to write a decent outline of a plot until I’ve already finished a first draft; just a personal flaw I can’t do much about.\u00a0 But if anyone has any great advice on ignoring all but one writing project, let me know.<\/p>\n

Of course, I also do find other ways to procrastinate<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Okay, my plan for today was to post a link to a video of a hillbilly dancing with a raccoon, but I recently got a link to here from Carnival of Words, and that kind of cornball antics won’t play with the new folks I expect to visit the blog and class up the joint […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-writing-things"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}