Year: 2017

I refuse to give in to resistance

Lynn

Again today I’ve let the time creep on, and here it is 7:09 p.m. and I haven’t written any fiction at all. I really don’t know why I keep doing this, but I don’t want to break my streak, which is up to 4 days now, so I’m going to overcome this. Since I also don’t want to stay up until 2 a.m. again (although tonight it will immediately become 1 a.m. again!), I need to start now.

I’d like to get in 4 or 5 hours of writing. Honestly, I’m toying with the idea of just setting my clock back now and pretending it’s 6:11 p.m. Why not? There’s nothing stopping me.

Except every time I look at the clock on my computer, it’s 7:11 and it’s hard to play mind games with yourself when the clock is conspiring against you.

Still, it does mean I can stay up until 1 a.m. writing, go to bed, and get up at 8 and feel like I got 8 hours of sleep instead of 7. Of course, reality says I’ll wake up at 6 and find it impossible to get back to sleep because it’ll be daylight. No simple change to the clock is going to change what time my body thinks it is until I’ve retrained it.

That’s the beauty of working for myself, at home, though. I can adjust, or not, as I see fit. This would be the perfect time to start getting into bed earlier and getting up early, because my body will feel like I’ve slept until 8 at 7 a.m.

What that means is that I’d better get to writing. Turns out I don’t want to stay up late tonight, because I’d rather let the time change do the hard work of readjusting my sleep schedule for me.

 

A small win last night that bodes well

Lynn

Yesterday I somehow made it until nearly 1:00 a.m. without writing. But I was determined not to break my 500 words a day streak so I finally overcame the resistance to getting started and sat down and wrote.

Instead of 500 words, I ended up with 1,004. Considering I didn’t use a timer and honestly only intended to get 500 words and then go to sleep, I think that’s pretty amazing. I went to sleep around 2:20 and don’t feel so hot this morning, of course, because I’ve now had two nights in a row of about six hours of sleep, but I feel great that I had that small win turn into a big win.

After four days of the 500 word minimum, my daily average of 644 words is already better than my all time daily average of 614.

This is exactly the result I was hoping to see. It only takes a few days of better than 500 words a day to start pumping up my average. And 500 a day feels like such a doable number of words. It’s enough of a commitment to writing each day to make me feel accomplished and it also seems to be enough words to set off the creative part of my brain so that I’m actually getting somewhere instead of just staying stuck in place.

What I mean by that is that with say 100 words, I can often add a little here and there and never actually move the story forward. I might be able to get away with editing enough words into a scene to reach 500 words once, maybe twice if the writing was thin to begin with, but after that, I have to move forward, which is what happened last night. Once I started moving forward, I didn’t even have to work to pick up momentum. The story was pulling me forward.

Now, despite all that success after midnight last night, I don’t want to repeat the after midnight part tonight, so I’m going to go write. This story is actually interesting me again, and I feel a need to make some more progress on that never-ending ending I’ve got going on! I’ll post later with results, unless I fall asleep at the keyboard. :D

The path of least resistance

Lynn

What can I do tomorrow to make sure I write early? What’s the path of least resistance?

This was last night’s musings, something I wrote here just to remind myself of what I wanted to do today: start writing early.

It didn’t happen. It’s 3:01—approaching late afternoon—and my word count is 0.

:-0

I should have tried harder to come up with an answer to those questions, because I didn’t even open this site until a few hours ago, and by then it was already past noon.

Then again, it’s only been 5 hours since I dragged myself out of bed (a 2 a.m. bedtime again after doing so well with an earlier (but creeping) bedtime this week) (but I got my 500 words, so yay!). I woke up much too early and tried much too hard to go back to sleep but couldn’t, so ended up wasting several good morning hours. And I have a headache from lack of sleep.

That kind of thing should count as self-sabotage, no joke.

I’m left with the question: how do I make writing my words the path of least resistance?

Update: It took a while, but I finally started writing sometime after midnight and ended the day with 1,004 words.

Thoughts on WordPress’s new Gutenberg editor

Lynn

So I ran across mention of WordPress 5.0 and the new editor that’s going to be in it and I was immediately overcome by visions of fear and loathing for something that was sure to ruin a good thing. :-0

Then I followed up on it, downloaded the add-in that’s available (Gutenberg) to give it a test run on one of my websites. :-)

I like it.

I was really surprised by how easy everything was and the clean look of it, and now all that fear and loathing has morphed into something much more like cautious excitement.

My one big reservation about it is how cluttered the text view is now, because it does add in a lot of extraneous (necessary, I’m sure) code to make everything work.

But overall I’m pretty well comfortable with the idea of it, and I look forward to it becoming part of WordPress’s core functionality.

Focus on action and small wins; a new daily minimum

Lynn

Today I’m starting work on my book much later than I planned. Mostly because I’ve spent too much of the day thinking about a decision I made a couple days ago and trying to decide if it’s the right one. I’ve finally decided it is.

Tuesday, I decided to lower my minimum word count for a day to 500 words. That was a good call, I think. My average daily word count is 614 words. Since I have a complete record of every day’s word count since mid-2012, this isn’t a guess. This is my actual daily word count average for more than 5 years of writing.

That said, just because I’ve averaged 614 words a day for 5 years doesn’t mean 500 words a day should be a no-problem, no-trouble, easy daily goal for me. Averages are just that: averages. And averages never tell the whole story.

Consistent daily writing is still a major problem for me. I do not do well with long term daily writing. My longest streak to date is 122 days and I had to count many days of less than 100 words to even get that.

Writing 500 words a day, every day, will be a considerable challenge. But I don’t think I can go any lower than that, just because it doesn’t feel reasonable and it doesn’t feel like a challenge. It feels like giving up.

Daily, it’s only a small win, but 500 words a day will get me a book of average size (50,000 words) in 100 days. Meaning even if I totally fail at all else and ONLY write the 500 words a day every day and never one word more, I’ll write more words in the next 12 months than I wrote in the last two years combined by a little more than 40,000 words.

That’s a win, no matter how I look at it.

And my hope is, as always, that this small win will drive me to write more and reach some of the bigger goals I have.

Every time I write more than 500 words a day, it’s going to push my average up, and I’m going to get that much closer to my long-term goal of being a prolific writer. I can’t ask for much more than that considering where I’m starting from.

But I have to start somewhere and becoming a consistent daily writer is where I’m choosing to start.

The fact is, a small win is better than no win, and I have to start focusing on action if I want to change.

This isn’t just a post about intentions; this is a post of action! I made this minimum word count change two days ago on Tuesday. On both Tuesday and Wednesday, I successfully met this challenge with 517 words and 533 words, respectively.

Yay! I have a new writing streak going. :-)

Now, it’s time to go write and keep this thing alive.

Update: Yep, I did it. 520 words for the day.

Writing and an experiment with mealtimes

Lynn

Yay! I’ve been writing today. Nowhere near the amount of writing I wanted to do, and my only excuse for that is distractions, but it’s nice to NOT be struggling to sit down and write.

One distraction of note is my new mealtime schedule. I’m still trying to lose some of the weight I gained after transitioning from a job to writing at home and it seems I’ve plateaued. Therefore, I’m moving meal times to 7 a.m., 11 a.m., and 3 p.m. :-)

The new mealtimes should make snacks much less appealing, reduce my meal sizes, and give me a longer fasting period overnight. It’s also a mealtime schedule I grew up with and maintained into my twenties. It’s an experiment, doubly interesting because it loosely matches the mealtimes I had during all the years when I was at my ideal weight. I’m hoping the new mealtimes will work to my strengths and shore up some of my weaknesses. I like going to bed on an empty stomach and always try not to eat in the few hours before bed, but I don’t like feeling hungry during the day—in fact, when I get hungry, I feel sick and weak, and I don’t like that feeling at all. Ideally, I’ll go to bed on an empty stomach, but won’t actually get hungry until really close to my bedtime which I’m finally getting moved back to a reasonable hour for me. :-)

As a first run today, I’m pretty happy with what I found. I ate almost exactly what I ate yesterday, just so I’d have something to compare. Because I ate it all so much closer together, I realized really quickly that my meals these days are probably still too big. I think I’ll be able to scale back the amount of food I eat and not really notice it at all. And that, I hope, will help me lose a few of these stubborn pounds I need to lose!

Anyway, I’m sleepy and I’m calling it a night. 466 words. May tomorrow be better than today!

Here I am writing about my schedule again instead of writing

Lynn

(1) I need to write. I have a book I really should have finished writing months and months ago.

(2) I tried another schedule. I hate schedules. I don’t know why I keep trying to make one that I’ll like, because I’m never going to like one of them, except in the most theoretical way possible. Those I love. Then I try to actually use them. My most recent schedules were great on paper. None of them worked, not even once, in my actual life.

(3) Word count goals inspire me and terrify me. I love the idea of them, but I hate having to do the work.

(4) I haven’t finished reading Do the work.

(5) I should probably finish reading Do the work.

(6) I’m spending valuable writing time writing this blog post.

(7) I deleted all my writing schedules.

(8) As soon as I publish this post, I’m going to switch to my book document, start my timer, and start editing the last full paragraph I’ve written. Then I’m going to keep writing until it’s time to stop. (I have clothes in the dryer.)

(9) I don’t know why I’m so convinced I love writing stories. I sure do spend a lot of time not wanting to write them.

Mindset this morning

Lynn

I’m ready to get to work this morning. I’m getting a lot closer to an early morning rise, but I’m still not there yet. My 9 to 12 block of writing time is still just a little off because of that.

It’s 9:51, though, so not too far from it, and I’m going to start writing as soon as I finish this post.

In my post about breaking patterns, I mentioned that I had picked up some books on writing and started reading them and that I have started listening to author/writer podcasts again.

One thing I’ve done on my schedule that seems to have made a difference is to change my “Writing time” to “Yay! Writing time.” I do realize how silly that sounds, as if just adding “Yay!” to the block is enough to change how I feel about it, but… it kind of is. :-) Silly or not, it seems to be helping my mindset.

I got the tip from Stick with It, a book I have not finished reading (and I admit, I got on sale, because I would not have paid what is currently the full price for it). I got bored after the first few chapters and skipped ahead to the chapter on neurohacks and read a little of it. (This was nearly a week ago.) (I read nonfiction out of order all the time, so this isn’t unusual and it’s not a knock against the book.)

I’m pretty excited that it’s working for now, but I know not to get ahead of myself. I oftentimes react well to novel things and then lose the ability to benefit from them as they become less novel to me. :-)

Anyway, it’s 10:04 and I want to get to work on my book. I’m holding out considerable hope that if I get on a roll today I can finish it. I’ll post updates later about my writing.

Recommendation! Don’t use Wix for your author website

Lynn

I wanted to save a few articles from an author’s website to read later, so I sent the links to Pocket using the right-click context menu. It’s something I do regularly when I want to follow links but don’t actually want to do it right then for whatever reason. (Because I should be writing!)

So I went to do some reading in Pocket later on my phone and here’s what I found:

See that “books”? Those are supposed to be posts/pages on that site, specific pages that I wanted to read. “Books” is the site homepage, and if you chop it off books like lots of people do (myself included) to get to the main author site, you don’t get a page at all. You get a 404 error. Now that could be the author’s problem, maybe they set up the site wrong, but the thing I’m concerned about, for every person out there who might be using Wix as a website, is the fact that individual pages are not viewable in things like Pocket.

From the pages I’d saved:

Every page I had saved was just like this. Blank.

I’m blaming Wix for this because Wix supplies the templates. Isn’t that the whole point of Wix, to make it easy for people who don’t know how to make a website or just don’t want to fool with the details?

Now I have to go try to remember what pages I wanted to read and find them again. Or if it’s even worth the trouble.

My suggestion to anyone considering Wix for anything as important as an author website is to skip it. Wix does not function the way it should.

Breaking patterns

Lynn

I had to take some drastic measures to get myself working again, and it’s turned out to be a pretty simple thing. What I’ve done, I think, is just break some patterns I’d slipped into.

First, I bought a couple of books, after writing a blog post I never posted.

I would resolve not to make excuses for these behaviors but I’ve already done that. And I don’t often make excuses. I just don’t do the work.

That’s what’s going to have to change. I have to become someone who does the work.

Which brings to mind a book I’ve been meaning to read for a long time but haven’t.

Do the Work by Steven Pressfield, and Turning Pro.

Reading books about writing is always motivational for me. I need to spend more time doing it. Even when I feel like it’s using up writing time, because the alternative is a low interest in writing and using none of that bountiful writing time to write anyway.

Do the Work is interesting. A little hype-y at times, but I’ve picked up a few thoughts from it that I really want to remember. I’m really looking forward to reading Turning Pro, but Do the Work felt much more like it was what I was meant to be reading at that moment. :-)

I’m just over halfway through it now, 56% according to my Kindle, and my goal is to keep reading it and Turning Pro (and The Warrior Ethos) until I’ve finished them all before I move on to reading anything else.

Second, I’m listening to writer podcasts, something I used to do but stopped when I decided I was probably wasting time doing it. I think it was a mistake to stop, because listening to them makes me excited about writing even when it’s material I’ve heard before. Yes, they use up a lot of time, but since I listen while I cook, eat, and do other things, that keeps my interest in writing high even when I’m distracted with other things.

I credit listening to these yesterday and the day before with my sudden increase in discipline and my renewed interest in writing. I stuck to a schedule yesterday, even if it was a loose schedule, and I really put some effort into writing for the first time in nearly two weeks.

:D

So there, that’s what I’m doing to break the patterns that I’ve felt like I was trapped in for the last few weeks, and I’m finally making progress on my current book again.

If you’re having difficulties sitting down to write, not because you don’t have time, but because your interest has waned (especially for reasons you don’t understand), try something like this. It really has helped. :-)

Tomorrow

Lynn

Whoa. I know it’s October, but this is a very unpleasant forecast from weather.gov.

I don’t like the cold and those temperatures will certainly feel cold to me.

On another note, totally unrelated to the forecast, I’ve let it get to 11:14 PM and I still haven’t written anything today. Looks like I’m going to have to take charge of myself and my excuses.

Probably tomorrow.

>:-(

Or not.

Guess I better start now. I’m going to settle in (in bed!) and do at least a twenty minute session before I call it a night. I know now what I need to do to this book and I’ve put off doing it all day. I will do it tomorrow, but tonight, I’m going to start doing it now.

I’ll feel better about myself after I do it, too.

I’ve been reading (instead of writing!)

Lynn

Today I read a book. Actually, I read a book the day before yesterday too.

Yesterday, I’m not sure what I did, but I didn’t write, so I had to have done something to pass the time. I did watch this interview with John Banville/Benjamin Black—it was actually fascinating, despite the fact that I’ve read none of the man’s books. Oh, and I did write a post about not writing. It’s quite obvious I wasn’t happy about that. :D

But back to the book I read today: Dauntless by Jack Campbell.

I’ve been planning to read this book for a very long time. At least two years. But I finally got to it today.

The thing that most interested me about the story was the idea that Captain Jack Geary is found in stasis after a hundred years where everyone thought he was dead—and believes he’s a hero. Only he doesn’t see himself that way at all. I like this theme and it’s one that I find difficult to pass up as a reader. :-)

I liked Geary a lot, and I liked the way the book was written. The space battles were ridiculously slow and nail-biting, which sounds totally weird, I know.

But when I say slow, I’m not talking about the tension or the pacing, I’m talking about the fact that it takes hours for these guys to make contact after getting visuals because of the time delay that is light in space. It was nerve-wracking waiting for things to happen. :D

I have no idea what is and isn’t possible or correct, but as the reader, I believed it, and that’s what matters when it comes to reading fiction.

It was a good book, and I enjoyed it. I still wish I’d spent the day writing instead, but that’s not the fault of the book, trust me.

The day before yesterday I read The Naturalist by Andrew Mayne and got halfway through it before I realized I’d read something else by this guy. It was a book on writing called How to Write a Novella in 24 Hours. I don’t remember much about the book, to be honest.

I didn’t mean to read the whole book in one sitting (of ten hours! because I’m a slow reader), but once I’d started it, I just couldn’t bring myself to stop.

That might say more about me than the book in my current state, but I actually liked this book a lot. If the last couple of chapters had been just a little different I might have loved the book. :D

Dr. Theo Cray was a great character and the science in the book was really cool. I’m not a biologist so don’t ask me if any of it was accurate, but it was interesting and entertaining trying to guess just how knowledgeable Mayne is about this stuff, because he did a fantastic job of making me believe he knows quite a lot. But—and there’s definitely a but—the ending of the book disappointed me.

It ended a little too abruptly to be satisfying. (And now I feel a lot more sympathetic to the reviewers who complained about that with a couple of my books, lol.) (Although, honestly, I felt pretty sympathetic to start with. I still have a problem with endings despite the fact that I’ve been publishing for five years and that’s how I make my living. I’m working on it!)

I’m not even sure why I decided to read The Naturalist instead of something else, but once I’d started the first page, I was hooked. :-)

The book was a Kindle First selection a while back and that’s how I got my copy. This makes the fourth (I think) Kindle First book I’ve actually read all the way through. (Let’s see if I can remember: Doubt, A Death in Sweden, When They Come for You, and The Naturalist.) I definitely liked The Naturalist best of all those books.

Holy crap, I just don’t know what the problem is

Lynn

I can’t seem to get started writing. I’m at a total loss as to what the problem is.

I’ve tried setting goals, ignoring goals, getting more sleep, writing early (couldn’t get started!), writing late (couldn’t get started!), tracking my time, journaling before I write, journaling as I write (couldn’t get started!), reading, staring at my book, blocking the internet, blocking distracting sites, journaling in a notebook, journaling on the computer, calling myself unpleasant names, being gentle with myself, and I could go on but what’s the point?

The point is I can’t get started even though part of my brain wants to get started. It’s an inexplicable feeling that makes no rational sense, and when I try to click to my document, it feels like a compulsion forcing me away.

It should not be this damn hard to get yourself to do something you know you need to do, and that, overall, you actually enjoy doing.

What it comes down to, it seems, is that I want to have written the rest of this book but I don’t actually want to write the rest of this book.

This is probably why it’s important not to let yourself think of writing as hard. Because when something becomes hard in your head, whether or not it is in fact, it becomes susceptible to resistance.

Is there any way that accepting this can help me get over my resistance to getting started?

And on a tangent, I think the whole idea of creating a writing habit is stupid. You can’t create a writing habit. Habits are involuntary behaviors. How the fuck is sitting down to write thousands of words an involuntary behavior?

Well, I can see the sitting down part as being involuntary if you repeat it often enough.

(I’m probably being too literal again, or reductionist, but I can’t help it. That’s where my thoughts go when I think writing habit.)

It’s just something that has annoyed me, and maybe it’s because of this habit creep that’s going on in the self-help world.

Or maybe I’m just annoyed because I should be writing fiction and I’m writing this instead. GAHHHH.

The fact is, just sitting down at my computer out of habit, even opening my document, isn’t enough to get me to write. I’ve been doing that for ages. I’m still not writing as often or as much as I want. Not in any universe.

And I’ve been at my computer all day today, and it sure the fuck hasn’t led me to write my book’s ending.

Not again—no, really, not again

Lynn

Yesterday I didn’t write. Today I’ve had trouble getting started and it’s already into the late afternoon.

I had hoped to write without a timer today, but I don’t think that’s going to work for me. Oftentimes, if I start the timer, I feel obligated to let it run, and once it’s running I feel obligated to stay on task. So although I want to write without the necessity of a timer, I seem to have a lot of difficulty actually doing that. It makes me feel a little bit like a failure to need that crutch, but the rational part of me says that’s ridiculous, because the timer is a tool that helps me overcome the difficulties I have focusing on anything long enough to get anywhere.

On that note, I must go write, because time is running out and I have a lot to write today.

Here I am again

Lynn

It has been an odd day. I felt pretty good today, after the best night of sleep I’ve had in a while. I went to bed early, stayed warm, and woke up about two hours before I wanted to. I read for a few minutes then went back to sleep and woke up about two hours later. All told, I had a solid eight hours of sleep and it paid off.

I had two cups of a mild green tea mix today (low caffeine) and stayed away from coffee. I don’t feel jittery and my head is clear.

Yet, somehow, it has reached 8:34 pm and I haven’t written any fiction at all today.

My schedule is killing my productivity

Lynn

No joke, my schedule is killing my productivity. The unfortunate truth is that I need a schedule. That doesn’t seem to matter. I can’t stop myself from constantly making changes to any schedule I create, and even when I leave it wide open for writing and just fill in the basics like lunch, supper, and the like, I still can’t stop messing with it.

It turns out that having a schedule is just a massive distraction I don’t know how to handle.

Is this that moment where I look back and realize I really should have seen this coming? Probably.

Seriously, it’s time to end this thing

Lynn

Alright, it’s time to put an end to my misery. I have to finish this book. Today.

Toward that end—:D—I’ve set a loose schedule and some time goals. (Time spent is really the only thing I can totally control when it comes to my writing. I’ve tried to make time quotas work in the past and they haven’t but I don’t think that changes the fundamental truth that if I want to create a daily habit of writing, I’m going to have to focus on time.)

From 11:00 – 3:15, I’m going to try to get in 3 sessions of 1.25 hours each.

I’m already late getting started because of the kittens (they think my deck is a litter box and I’m trying to break them of that habit as quickly as I can) and this post (I shouldn’t be writing it now but here I am), and there isn’t enough break time built in to make the time up easily, but I’m still going to push for it even if that means going past 3:15. If the book isn’t done by then, and I don’t really think it will be…

From 4:15 – 7:00, I’m going to try to get in 2 sessions of 1.25 hours each.

First note: As of right now, I’m planning all my future sessions to be 1.25 hours each, except on days where I might just need to write and be in a hurry and don’t keep up with time at all. I don’t want to feel locked in to the idea that I can’t write or work on my stories just because I don’t have 1.25 hours available. Those days should be rare, because I’m trying to get into a routine and this is the equivalent of my job and the work has to be done. If I can’t squeeze in a few 1.25 hour blocks of time a day for writing, then I have bigger problems. A person has to make a living somehow.

Second note: I did some reading and rereading of a few things and I’ve become convinced that pushing myself past the 4–5 hour range for time spent writing is a mistake. I deal with low motivation regularly after what I consider really good writing days, and there’s a simple explanation: burnout and need for extra rest after pushing too hard.

If I were used to longer periods of focus, it might be different, but I don’t think so. K. Anders Ericsson has some really good papers on deliberate practice and high performance. (Some other related links.) Considering the fact that I’m still under the two million words written mark for fiction (probably), I still feeling like I’m doing high-level practice every time I sit down to write. I’m not sure the good writers ever quit practicing, though, so it’s not something I expect to change. I will always be trying to get better.

One quote:

Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends, and the amount of practice never consistently exceeds five hours per day.

And from one of the linked papers:

Across many domains of expertise, a remarkably consistent pattern emerges: The best individuals start practice at earlier ages and maintain a higher level of daily practice. Moreover, estimates indicate that at any given age the best individuals in quite different domains, such as sports and music, spend similar amounts of time on deliberate practice. In virtually all domains, there is evidence that the most important activity—practice, thinking, or writing—requires considerable effort and is scheduled for a fixed period during the day. For those exceptional individuals who sustain this regular activity for months and years, its duration is limited to 2-4 h a day, which is a fraction of their time awake.

Going from my daily average word count and the fact that I average 400-600 words an hour during timed writing sessions, I average about 2 hours a day of writing time. Then I read and study and think. Publishing activities drive up the time I spend working even more. I’m going to stop feeling so damn guilty for not putting in even more time. If I ever make it up to 4 hours of writing a day, consistently, I am determined that I’ll be damn happy about it.

Anyway, I just wasted a huge chunk of time on this post and I must go write. This book is going to end today, one way or another. And yes, 5 x 1.25 = 6.25 hours. I’m pushing myself, but I’m tired of dallying with this book. I want it done.

Struggling to finish this book

Lynn

I’m struggling with the schedule I made for myself, mostly because it’s really a schedule meant for my daily writing of 1,000–3,000 words. At the moment, I don’t even have a real goal, because all my focus is on finishing my book. The more often I repeat “finish the book” though, the more I seem to avoid writing anything at all.

I’m also struggling because I have significant difficulties keeping up with the passage of time in my head. Explicit start and end times for my daily activities don’t work well for me—and they never have, even when I worked for other people. It’s just not something I’m good at. I got things done and was considered a very productive employee, although I’m really not sure how that happened. Deadlines and the fact that I cared what other people thought of me, I think. I should feel that way about the people reading my books too, I guess, but for some reason I never have. Maybe it’s because I’ve always considered myself to be writing for myself, first and foremost, and for other people as an afterthought.

Anyway, it all comes down to me needing to do something just a little different tomorrow, because what I’ve been trying to do today and in the days before hasn’t been working.

Why can’t I break the Kboards habit?

Lynn

I’ve gotten myself worked up into a state again, one that isn’t conducive to being creative, and I have no one to blame but myself. I know not to visit Kboards when I’m already having trouble writing—in fact, I know not to visit  at all—but I do it anyway because… because… I don’t even know why.

I keep thinking I need more writer friends but then I read (and occasionally participate in) threads and discover that I really don’t like half the people there. There are nice people at Kboards, really, but they get drowned out by the others, the ones that cannot stand, in any way, for fellow self-publishers to go their own way or walk their own path.

Since I experiment and choose to do things my own way, I don’t usually find helpful business advice there. I visit for the camaraderie—and yet rarely find it. It’s a well-moderated board, but even the most innocuous threads turn divisive and you end up with one or two “successful” authors gently (and then not so gently) scolding  everyone for not doing things the right away—their way. And then their minions or people who just want to be like them jump in and it becomes an echo chamber determined to drown out dissenting voices. Anyone who’s found success on a different path is labeled an outlier and told their advice isn’t valid.

To which I say, massive success in publishing is rare and elusive, and anyone who has found such massive success is probably an outlier and should not be listened to. In all likelihood, they have no idea underneath it all what it was that brought them success other than the fact that they probably work hard and know how to write a good book. (I say probably because half the world will tell you that there are a lot of bestsellers that aren’t good to a lot of people and there is a certain percentage of people in life who do just get lucky and never have to work hard at all.)

I don’t begrudge anyone their success as long as it came honestly, but man, it would be nice if people didn’t wield their sales numbers like a razor-sharp sword and try to skewer everyone on the ladder below them.

Which brings me full circle really. I want to break the Kboards habit. I just don’t know how. I’ve tried blocking the site, even going so far as to block it in my hosts file, and I still find myself undoing all my hard work and going back. It makes me sick every time I do it. Especially when I end up in this same state of mind because of it. I don’t like conflict, but Kboards is a black-hole of conflict. It’s really not the place for me.

Update: Alright, I did it. I edited my hosts file and blocked Kboards completely. I had no choice. Mind the Time tells me that just today using Firefox I’ve spent 43 minutes there—and I probably spent twice as much time as that scanning threads on my phone. >:-{

10/18 update: I’m still visiting on my phone and tablets but I haven’t undone the hosts block on my computer. If I could just figure out something similar for my phone, that would be a huge help.

Update to the update: I use Firefox on my phone with the uBlock Origin add-on. I filtered kboards.com and it will no longer come up in Firefox. I could use Chrome to get around it but since I don’t like Chrome I probably won’t. :-)

Update to the last update: I removed the block from my hosts file and I took the block off my phone. I’ve had a rethink about habits and I don’t think this solution is the long-term answer. However, I have ideas and I’m giving them a go, so this fight ain’t over. ;-) I’ll update with a link to the post I’m currently writing about this rethink once I finish it.