The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: distractions

  • Ignoring Thunderdome

    I honestly spend very little time thinking about the future of the publishing industry. I find the blank page intimidating enough as it is, and I don’t need additional reasons to feel insecure about what I’m doing.

    I try to avoid news about who is merging with whom or what Mrs. Megapublisher’s stance is on digital rights because I know what would happen if I ever started down that particular rabbit hole. My eyes would be opened to a larger reality that would do nothing to instill confidence in my aspirations. In turn, I would feel the need to exhaustively search for as much positive news as I could, stories about how it’s not nearly as difficult to break in as I had feared.

    (For the record, I equate the difficulty of reaching and maintaining success in publishing somewhere on the order of surviving Thunderdome.)

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  • Hitting the Reset Button

    I liked that this was a switch more than a button. I spent way too many hours playing games on this old console.
    I liked that this was a switch more than a button. I spent way too many hours playing games on this old console.

    “Butt in chair, fingers on keys.”

    I don’t know who said that first and I guess it doesn’t really matter. It’s true. It’s how I have motivated myself to spend the time I need to writing. My Twitter feed tends to be filled with people who are also writing stories and when I’m distracted from actually making words into stories, I can usually find some motivation in there. The You Should Be Writing meme is helpful, sometimes, too. Especially when it’s Neil Gaiman glowering at me. I don’t want to give you the impression that I make time to write exclusively out of guilt because that’s not the case but sometimes it’s true. Like most of us, I’m easily distracted.

    You played what in Words With Friends? Who beat my high score in Solitaire Blitz? (more…)

  • The Redwood Retreat

    Once upon a time, in the fabled woods of the writing life, a quaint cottage nestled in the trunk of a giant redwood.  A magic garden provided food for its inhabitant(s) with just the tiniest bit of foraging; a fresh stream ran through the kitchen.  Inside the cottage stood a desk and many shelves of books, lovely novels that teased the imagination into ever-expanding realms. Endless stacks of paper remained perfectly aligned there by an array of fountain pens with all possible colors of ink and the smoothest tips.  Only the music of birds disturbed the air in that writer’s paradise, and the bold weaver of worlds woke up well-rested each morning, wrote several thousand words of brilliance before noon, and polished the previous day’s already-sparkling prose to greater clarity, humor, and communicative power in the afternoon.

    Ah, to live there.  Ah, to have no obstacles to writing–no time management problems, no distractions, no depression or cynicism, no other job, no basic human urges to satisfy, no human relationships tempting us away from the paper and pencil, no headache-inducing stress that makes you watch television mindlessly for hours rather than writing.

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