On Restructuring

So I've made a few changes to the blog! I'm probably going to keep making the occasional modification to the layout here over the next couple of weeks. The way things were arranged before just grew a bit stale, and I don't feel like it was working out very well. Let me know if you like it/hate it/gave a great big "meh" when you saw it.

Along with that, I've been trying to reorganize how I will be doing my work over the next eight weeks or so. Over the next week or so, I am anticipating a lot of the penultimate revision of Badger to get done. In fact, if I can just manage to buckle down and get to work, I may actually get the revision done this week and send it out to the copy editor early. That way we can have a secure deadline to publish it by August 14th.

While the copy editor has Badger, I will be turning my attention to other projects. Namely, I'm going to be pushing through Eagle as quickly as I can. I wrote Badger's rough draft in a crazy rush last year about this time, and I turned out to have a pretty good book at the end. I hope to do the same this time, so that we can have that book ready sometime in early 2013.

At the same time, I am going to try and get chunks of the Iron Angels final draft done. That way, by the time Badger comes back and is ready to rewrite, I can have Iron Angels done and ready to put up at exactly the same time. No muss, no fuss, just two more books done, and one left to go to meet my goal of four books in 2012.

Well, that's all the news for now. Hope everyone's doing well, and I will see you later!

On Buffers

Okay, so many of the more consistent bloggers and webcomic writers out there have managed to build up a buffer for their work. This week has been a marvelous demonstration as to why that is a wise decision. Whether it is just plain laziness, travel plans or a sudden dearth of ideas, keeping up with this blog can easily suddenly become very difficult. As such, I think that I will need to start creating my own buffer in order to get around those sudden dead spots in my productivity.

This weekend we are at my brother in law’s wedding, and the slight amount of downtime that I have available, I will try and build up at least a week’s worth of posts so that I won’t suddenly run short again. Wish me luck; I hope that my efforts are not only successful, but also of better quality than they have been. What do you guys think, good idea or bad idea? Anyway, I hope you are all doing well, and I will see you later!

On Self-Control

So, recent changes in the structure of my life made my previous system of goal setting totally unworkable. The whole deadline thing was nice when I didn’t have a job taking up a good part of my life, but once it combined with the stress from work all it did was shut me down completely by putting too much pressure on me at once. Each time a deadline would fall through I would feel awful about it, and it kept happening all the time. Finally the deadlines stopped having any meaning because so many of them were just impossible to meet as my work schedule grew more demanding. I needed a new system that still rewarded me for doing thing I should be doing, while not pushing me to the breaking point quite as frequently as before.

Of course, the solution I cooked up was quite possibly the nerdiest system ever. I decided that I would break up the tasks that I had each week into two categories, one labeled priorities and the other labeled as extra credit. For each extra credit task I accomplished, I would give myself one point. For each priority task I did not accomplish by the end of the week, I would subtract twice the number of points. Priority tasks would be things like going to work, doing exercise, writing and the like, mainly just things I absolutely needed to get done. Extra credit would be things like cleaning the dishes, reaching a certain point in the story, and so on. Church tasks I made three times the normal amount of points, while writing and work related tasks were only worth two times the points.

As the points added up, I could use them to buy certain things. For example, ten points gets me a book, while five gets me a new iTunes song. My new laptop actually cost one hundred points. I’m going to make it so that once I play video games again, each time I play will cost me points as well. That way, I have encouragement to keep gaining points, since they get traded for something of value, even to my lazy side.

Unfortunately, I’ve encountered an unintended side effect. I’m a video game nerd, the kind who loves RPGs because you can gain points in them which can then be used to advance. Sound familiar? Points are like crack to me. I’ve started point hoarding already. One day I’m sure that I will curl up in some corner clutching a tally of my earned points and muttering ‘my precious’ to myself. It’s not a good situation.

Then again, if it helps me stay motivated and on track, I guess it couldn’t hurt. Right? Sigh. The things we do for productivity…