I don’t need to listen to music every time I’m writing, but if I’m writing anything long form I definitely need music. Lately the only writing music I can listen to is Orbital. The mostly instrumental, techno dance music thing keeps me moving when I slow down, and seems to give my brain just enough to chew on to keep distraction at bay (most of the time).
I first started listening to Orbital when I was writing my dissertation. They quickly took their place within the regular rotation alongside the Beastie Boys and other 90s dance staples like Muziq and the Chemical Brothers. While the Beasties were a huge help with motivation, I was surprised to find that the instrumental techno music also had a pretty enormous impact on my productivity. The samples are clever but not so overwhelming that my brain needs to think about where they came from, which happens with some music (Girl Talk, for example). The melodies are mostly upbeat, which is important when you’re facing a mountain of writing. I often found myself listening to the same Orbital record on repeat for hours as I trucked through loads of descriptive text about the numbers and kinds of animal bones we found on site and what they could mean.
Since then, Orbital’s In Sides and The Middle of Nowhere have been my go-to records for getting writing done. But when I started on the book I’m writing with my research partner at the beginning of the summer, it was clear that I’d need more, more, more! I bought a couple additional mp3 albums with an iTunes card my sister gave me for my birthday (thanks Kie!), though sadly they were the only 2 records available on iTunes that we don’t have yet. The problem with the ability to buy records instantly online is that you get used to it, and it’s easy to get all annoyed an ungrateful when the exact record you want isn’t available.
Still, 2 new albums and 2 that we already had but I forgot about should take me pretty far in writing this book. And if not, there are still 3 more to go.
One thing I’m pretty stoked about is that I’ve been keeping to my daily writing goal most of the time since the beginning of February, barring a weird low point in late March-early April. Some days it’s still hard to fit it in, like today, which was all get up (insomnia before the alarm went off yay!), get dressed, scoop the cat litter, grab my stuff, head to the gym,* work out, shower, get dressed, head to work, triage email while eating breakfast, cross some stuff off my list, go to a 2 1/2 hour meeting, get coffee, more email triage, weed the architecture books, finish some more list stuff, take the subway home, help pack up the evening’s food and head to the botanic gardens for the summer members’ picnic, eat dinner, drink pink fizzy wine, look at the amazing sky, chat w/folks we ran into that we haven’t seen in a while, catch fireflies, walk home, do the dishes, take out the trash, make Gus’s lunch,** tuck Gus in, take a shower, write a blog post.
* Now that it’s summer and there aren’t any swimming lessons on the weekends it’s been harder to fit in family gym time, so last week I started trying to go one morning each week. It’s only about a 10 minute walk from work so there’s really no excuse, though it kind of messes with my accustomed caffeine levels to have to wait til after the workout for coffee. Plus last week someone took my towel by accident when I was in the shower. But today my towel was unharmed, woo hoo!
** OMG the joie de middle school is that the child makes his own lunch! We’re practicing over the summer and he’s done it most nights this week, but tonight it was late and he needed a shower so I made it. He’s got some crazy sandwich specs and insists that the toaster be set to 7, which is awfully crunchy if you ask me.
So finding time to write amidst all of that can be hard, though all of a sudden you write out your day and bam, 300+ words, nice job! Still, I can’t write this every night.
I think I might be ready to take this to the next level and set a specific, consistent daily writing time. I want to consistently write every day, with only unusual days off for sickness and the like. And the thing about writing at different times each day, whenever I can scrape together the time, is that sometimes there’s a day like today and it’s 10pm and damn, haven’t written a thing yet. Of course the problem is when: mornings are my best writing time but won’t always work. Still, perhaps I’ll try for most mornings with flexibility if needed. There’s always something to write, for sure, so it’s not like I’ll be grasping about for things to do.
So I guess this is a heads up: expect more blagging here if the plan works.
Hey, it’s the weekend! But I’ve clearly got Sundaynightis, because despite spending the day hanging ’round the house there are still Things That Remain Undone, and that vague feeling of not having enough time to do them in. Perhaps I’m being infected by Gus’s gloominess at returning to school tomorrow after last week’s Midwinter Break (not that we can even have a Midwinter Break when we haven’t even had Winter yet, but I digress).
Lists will make me feel better!
Things I’ve Done Today (not necessarily in the order of doing):
– Sent two (2) longish personal emails
– Ordered a birthday present for my sister and one for a pal
– Called my nephew (who turned 4 today!) and sang “Happy Birthday” to the answering machine
– Dusted + swept the shelves + floors
– Washed + hung one load of laundry, folded + put away another
– Changed the cat litter
– Took out the trash
– Drank too much coffee
– Ate breakfast, lunch, and a snack
– Read 2 articles and wrote 2 emails about a conference proposal I’m mulling over submitting
– First-level triage of work email (= read + deleted what could be read + deleted)
– Watched an informative video about botfly reproduction with Gus
– Looked online for a new scooter for Gus, who’s getting too big for his current scooter (sniff)
– Tightened the drawer handles on the china cabinet
– Loaded the dishwasher
– Blagged
(And, in the inbetween times: read today’s paper on my phone, kept current w/twitter, tripled my town(s), got my feedreader down to 2!!)
Things That Remain Undone (but the day’s not over yet!):
– Make a birthday card for a pal and pack her gift in a box for mailing tomorrow
– Finish part of a book chapter I’m writing (due Thursday!)
– Work on a presentation with my research partner (not actually scheduled for 16 whole days! plenty of time still!)
– Start blagging some thoughts I have on developing a game for library orientation (probably over at my other blog)
– Eat dinner
– Empty the dishwasher + wash the dinner dishes
– Pack my backpack + lunch for work tomorrow
But not quite. In the meantime, I’ve written + revised 1578 words of self evaluation in the past two days, so I think I can play a pass card again tonight.
What’s good for working *and* a guaranteed mood-booster? Why the Pixies, of course!
I’ve been trying to convince myself not to write about Gus on here anymore. He’s getting older and it just feels less like something I should do. After all, this is my blag, I should be blagging about me, right?
But then we have a day like today and how can I not blag about it? Thanks to falling back he was up at 6:15am even though there was no school today. (I was up before 6am because that’s how my insomnia rolls lately.) I started in getting ready for work and a bit later he ran into the bedroom to excitedly tell me: “Mom! I just added a wiki page!”
He’s fairly obsessed with a new Kirby videogame that’s just come out for the Wii, and has watched countless YouTube videos and played it at a pal’s house last weekend. Apparently there’s a Kirby wiki out there — who knew? Which Gus found, discovered he could edit, and then wrote an entry about a boss called Water Galbaros. All before 7am. I couldn’t be more proud! He’s been working on that page and others on and off all day, and the page now has images too that other folks have added throughout the day.
Then I went to work, only to come home to the news that Jonathan and Gus had bought a small frying pan (with an egg on the handle, like this!), and that Gus could fry his very own egg. Which he proceeded to do, right before my very eyes. He even sprinkled salt on it from the salt cellar like a proper chef. (And then he ate the egg, also right before my eyes.)
I’m trying not to get all mushy and sentimental but lately I’ve been, well, all mushy and sentimental. He’s just such a great kid, and it’s all going so fast I can’t stand it.
Just so you know, this is going to be a short, boring, bragging post.
I’ve got lots of balls in the air right now, and one of the things I’m doing is looking to see where my scholarship has been cited. It’s just the best kind of nerd high to see that one of my articles has been cited once, another 3 (!) times. And the one that’s been cited 3 times has been viewed over 1,400 times, according to the journal’s website!
I’m jonesing to see how often the article that was published last week has been viewed, but that journal doesn’t make those #s visible in the author interface. Plus it’s probably too soon for anything real. Although, when I tweeted about it (see, told you it’d be braggy), someone who has 1900+ followers retweeted me, so that’s something.
I’ve got other stuff to finish tonight, but tomorrow night I’ll be looking to find my top commented-on posts at the library blog I contribute to.
And I leave you with this: go, open access publishing, GO!
The nice thing about keeping track of my word count is that this here blog writing month thing makes me feel extra special because I’m guaranteed to have at least something in the spreadsheet for every day, yay! Yes, it’s gamification, but it helps keep up the writing motivation to be able to say that I’ve written something every most days. I do indeed need stinking badges, apparently.
So that’s why I can say for sure that I don’t feel guilty about a short post tonight, because the paper I’m working on with my research partner has grown to 4470 words after my efforts this afternoon. Hard to know exactly how many new words I added, probably only a couple hundred. But revising is hard, too, so I’m calling it a job well done and knocking off for tonight.
Yeah, it’s a phoning it in kind of evening. But hey, I wrote a (so very short) blag post over on the CUNY Games Network blag about the article that I wrote that just came out yesterday, so that counts, right? Right?
So this year I finally realized why it is that the month for all of those writing stuff in a month events is November. It’s because by November everyone is just too far gone down the rabbit hole of crazy overcommittedness to say no to anything. So when the internet says, “hey, you, why don’t you write a novel/blog/write an academic book/etc. every day for a month!” you’re all “well, why the heck not?!” Because what’s one more straw when the camel can’t even feel its back?
Seriously though, I can still feel my back. Sometimes it aches a bit when I’ve done the standing desk thing all day, which I haven’t this week because I had a weird one-day cold + fever over the weekend and I’m trying to make sure that I’m really recovered by being lazy and sitting all day.
I am insanely busy. The confluence of work stuff plus family stuff (including middle school tours, aiieee!) that’s all sitting on my plate right now is unbelievable, even to me. I’m so busy that I haven’t been doing any of the things I try to do to keep sane + healthy, like get enough sleep, walk to work, and … write. Every day. Just a little bit, maybe 201 words or so? (Maybe 205.)
So here I am, giving it a go again this year. We’ll see how far I can make it. 200 words/day has always been my goal, how hard can that be?
I’ve done pretty well w/writing this week, despite coming down with a cold on Wednesday. Word count’s at a respectable 4003 this morning not including this post and whatever else I manage to write today. We’re all sick now, Gus with a fever, so leaving the house probably isn’t going to happen. Right now Gus (who is crazed for cephalopods) convinced us to let him watch a truly stinky straight to netflix-watch-instantly movie about a giant shark + octopus starring Debbie Gibson. O internets, whatever did we do before you existed?
I’m working on an article about using games in my library instruction sessions so I decided to use some of those gamey tricks on myself to help keep me motivated. I’m recording my word count in a spreadsheet — watch my score rise! — and printed out a calendar sheet so I can add checkmarks to the days I get a chunk of writing done. So far it’s helping, though maybe not as spectacularly as I’d like. I find myself resisting the urge to categorize my writing: bloggy, academic, research-related, work-related, etc. I think that’s ultimately dangerous though — I have a tendency to hold research-related writing up as the most valuable thing I could be doing at any point, and I’m not certain that’s a good thing.
One thing this writing hasn’t done yet is make it any easier to write the literature review for this article. Oh literature reviews, how I hate to write you, with your endless struggles of synthesis. Sometimes I wish I could just present a list of everything I read: here’s some good research on the effectiveness of games-based learning, here are examples of games used in library and information literacy instruction, etc. I keep trying to remember how valuable a good literature review can be, but that’s cold comfort when I’m deep in the trenches of paraphrasing and summarizing, sigh.
You probably noticed that I haven’t stuck to my “what’s my current earworm?” writing prompt. For about the past week and a half it’s been “Bright Yellow Gun” by Throwing Muses. Over vacation I finally read “Rat Girl,” Kristin Hersh’s memoir of the year Throwing Muses got signed to 4AD, she was diagnosed as bipolar and also got pregnant with her first kid. As expected it was fun to read about the early history of the band, but the descriptions of her bipolar experiences were fascinating. As someone who wishes I needed less sleep it was interesting to read about how it feels to not need much sleep at all.
This earworm is much less mysterious than the last: there were lyrics sprinkled throughout, so that’s why the song’s been stuck in my head.
