Procrastinate to Avoid Fear

Earlier this week one of my old college buddies - Summer - posted this article on her Facebook account: Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators by Megan McArdle.

It was an interesting read, and one that doesn't relate to just writers; it can be said about anyone who showcased natural talent in something. However, I feel like she sort of lost focus somewhere along the way. The end of the article didn't seem to relate at all to the starting thesis of "Writers are too good at English class". Which, by the way, you can therefore come up with the similar theses: "Lead singers were too good in Show Choir" or "Athletes were too good in gym" or "Lawyers were too good on the debate team", and so on. Anyway, while she did seem to get a bit off-track with her article's train of thought, she also came up with some pretty good points along the way. Thing is, these points aren't REALLY about procrastination. They're about fear. Fear of inadequacy - specifically - and how it tends to drive us towards procrastination.

A fear that she believes stems from school, and how English classes being easy for the majority of writers is actually a bad thing.

This teaches a very bad, very false lesson: that success in work mostly depends on natural talent. Unfortunately, when you are a professional writer, you are competing with all the other kids who were at the top of their English classes. Your stuff may not — indeed, probably won’t — be the best anymore.

She then explains how believing in just your natural born talent - which has gotten you through English classes effortlessly - makes you one heck of a procrastinator out in the real world; especially after realizing that you probably aren't the Cream of the Crop any longer.

If you’ve spent most of your life cruising ahead on natural ability, doing what came easily and quickly, every word you write becomes a test of just how much ability you have, every article a referendum on how good a writer you are. As long as you have not written that article, that speech, that novel, it could still be good. Before you take to the keys, you are Proust and Oscar Wilde and George Orwell all rolled up into one delicious package. By the time you’re finished, you’re more like one of those 1940’s pulp hacks who strung hundred-page paragraphs together with semicolons because it was too much effort to figure out where the sentence should end.

Does this fear sound familiar? That Schrödinger's cat theory of authorship: you are either excellent or terrible, but you won't know which until you're done writing, and so until you're done you can still be both. Therefore, procrastination allows you to stay in your "I really am a good writer; I'll prove it when I'm actually done writing" bubble. Once you stop procrastinating and you finish your project, however, that bubble just might have to pop. Sure, you could very well be just as awesome as you perceive yourself to be while in that bubble, but then there's that fear that maybe you aren't. As long as you procrastinate and don't finish your project you can avoid showcasing how much of a writing schmuck you truly are.

Megan McArdle discusses this concept with Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, who - according to McArdle - is "one of the best-known experts in the psychology of motivation."

[Dweck] discovered through her research, not everyone reacts to [failure] by breaking out in hives. While many of the people she studied hated tasks that they didn’t do well, some people thrived under the challenge. They positively relished things they weren’t very good at — for precisely the reason that they should have: when they were failing, they were learning.

All of us who procrastinate out of fear of failing should really pay attention here.

...the people who dislike challenges think that talent is a fixed thing that you’re either born with or not. The people who relish [challenges] think that [talent is] something you can nourish by doing stuff you’re not good at.
[Dweck] now identifies the former group as people with a “fixed mind-set,” while the latter group has a “growth mind-set.” For "growth" people, challenges are an opportunity to deepen their talents, but for “fixed” people, [challenges] are just a dipstick that measures how high [a person's] ability level is. Finding out that you’re not as good as you thought is not an opportunity to improve; it’s a signal that you should maybe look into a less demanding career, like mopping floors.

Haven't we all more-or-less felt this way at some point? Isn't this why it's so hard for people to both willingly ask for critiques and happily accept them? All us beta-readers and critiquers wish to do is help the writer improve. To show off the failings - maybe teach why they are failings - and help the writer overcome them. Help them grow. Yet, instead of seeing it as a growing opportunity, so many of the people I have beta-read for shrink away at the massive amount of notes I gave them; assuming it's official proof that they truly can't write.

They completely ignore the positive feedback I give them; the encouragement. They don't seem to recognize that I wouldn't bother putting in that much effort in correcting them and helping them improve if I didn't have faith in their writing. If I didn't see the talent they just need to nourish.

Yes, Omnibladestrike, I am looking squarely at you here!
STOP BEING SUCH A FIXED MIND-SET PERSON!!!

Although, to be fair, it has happened to even the best of us. To this day I have yet to submit anything in to the critiques section of Writers’ Huddle. Mainly because I see these more experienced writers on the board, and instead of thinking the way I should - that they are there to help me, and have the wisdom and experience to do so - I end up fearing that my work - which is still largely fanfiction - won't be deemed "worthy" in comparison. That they'll scoff at my lack of talent and/or ability. That they won't even bother critiquing because they don't see enough potential to put in the effort. That they'll look at my works like "Come on, kid, send us something when you're being serious."

Even though I KNOW none of that will happen, I KNOW that they will be kind and sincere and will genuinely put in the effort to help me improve, I still have that fear. I still get nervous that having more experienced writers than myself critique my work will prove that I just don't have the talent. Ignoring that I can still NURTURE the talent so I can become "good enough".

I won't state who because I wouldn't want to embarrass anyone, but I even had a member of the online writing group I started up - The Struggling Writers Society - inform me that even though he would love to have some of his things critiqued, he was afraid to show off what he had to the group. I reassured him that we're all very kind and nurturing people who just want to watch each other succeed. I don't think it helped though, because he hasn't spoken on the matter since, and there is still nothing in the critiques section of our group forum.

Megan McArdle discussed this idea even further in her article. Turns out it's more than simply a fear of hitting a Talent Plateau in something you thought you were astonishing at. It's a fear said plateau will reveal that you were never truly good to begin with.

This fear of being unmasked as the incompetent you “really” are is so common that it actually has a clinical name: impostor syndrome.

If [Fixed Mind-Set people are] forced into a challenge they don’t feel prepared for, they may even engage in what psychologists call “self-handicapping”: deliberately doing things that will hamper their performance in order to give themselves an excuse for not doing well.

"No, I'm not an impostor. I really am as skilled as I claim I am. I just didn't give this one my all, and that's why it's crap."

It's a nice shield to hide behind, isn't it? A way to explain why you can't measure up to The Greats in writing; or whatever field you're afraid of hitting a Talent Plateau in. The problem with self-handicapping is that you never show off your best. You're too afraid to show your best to anyone because your best might be crap. You're too afraid that your best won't cut it.

But, what if your best really is as great as you hope it is? No one will ever know, and you'll never become the success you wish to be. If it turns out that you were right in your fear and you CAN'T cut it right now, how do you ever expect to improve so you CAN cut it if you never give it your all, and then try to make your all better next time?

On top of all of that, you also need to remember that none of those Greats that you're measuring yourself against are truly as "great" as you think. The works you love so much you practically memorized them are all the finished, polished product. You never read any of them as a first draft.

Think about how a typical English class works...Students are rarely encouraged to peek at early drafts of [the works they are reading]. All they see is the final product, lovingly polished by both writer and editor to a very high shine. When the teacher asks “What is the author saying here?” no one ever suggests that the answer might be “He didn’t quite know” or “That sentence was part of a key scene in an earlier draft, and he forgot to take it out in revision.”

I know I always hated that part of English class. Teachers trying to get us to read in between the lines to see what the story is REALLY about. Always made me feel like my stories were too simplistic because they were straight forward. No hidden agendas. No subtle commentary. I wrote what my characters showed me and told me. Simple as that. Heaven forbid the same were true about any of the stories we read in school.

There is another valid point that McArdle makes in regard to not being able to read the earlier drafts of a classic novel.

“You never see the mistakes, or the struggle,” says Dweck. No wonder students get the idea that being a good writer is defined by not writing bad stuff....

Unfortunately, in your own work, you are confronted with every clunky paragraph, every labored metaphor and unending story that refuses to come to a point. “The reason we struggle with insecurity,” says Pastor Steven Furtick, “is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.”

Alright, so if we ignore McArdle's random sidetracks about kids being coddled and whatnot, what did we learn?

We learned that perhaps English classes coming easily to writers isn't the best thing for us, since we never really learned the concept of struggling to be good at our craft. Because of this, a lot of us became "Fixed Mind-set" people who believe that there is a Talent Plateau. We think that we can only achieve so much greatness, and that's determined by natural ability. We fear that we've already hit that plateau and can no longer improve. Or worse yet, that the talent we believe we have is actually PAST that plateau, and so we're not nearly as good as we assumed. We fear that showcasing our best efforts will actually reveal us as "frauds", and so we purposely don't give writing our all. That way we have a safety-net excuse as to why our talent doesn't seem to measure up to The Greats.

One of the main ways we Self-Handicap is to procrastinate until the last possible moment. That way if it ends up really good we can say "Huh, imagine how good I can be if I had time to edit that" or "And this was only my first draft!" However, if procrastinating results in a lackluster product, we can justify it as "Well, I only had time for a first draft" or "I was exhausted; I have no clue what I was even writing at the end there."

We also learned that perhaps even with the classes themselves being easy for us future writers, we could have still avoided this Fixed Mind-set by seeing the struggle in others. If only we could have read earlier drafts of classic stories, or seen quotes from our writing mentors explaining that they had to go through seventeen complete revisions before actually coming up with something decent. Perhaps seeing our idols fail and still become amazing in their climb back up would help us aspiring writers realize that being bad now doesn't mean we can't be fantastic later.

Again, that is what this blog is here for. It may be presumptuous of me to think that my struggle in finding myself as a writer will be any sort of example for other writers. I may be expecting too much of my future self to believe that I could become enough of a writing mentor to others that seeing me trip so frequently will help prove to them that they can make it too. The entire concept that this blog is my anthology of failings on my way to "greatness" may be insanely cocky.

Yet, here it is.

On the off chance that I am right in those insane assumptions. Just in case I'm correct in thinking that I've helped someone overcome their fear of inadequacy, by proving that I grew past that Talent Plateau, surpassing my natural talent after failing so frequently with just it.

Hell, this blog post kept me about FIVE HOURS to write! I knew I wanted to talk about Megan McArdle's article, but the whole thing seemed so disjointed. I went through THREE re-writes before becoming satisfied with this version. I even had a list of about four other things I wanted to talk about this week that just didn't quite fit in the final cut. Guess that just means I have blog posts all set up for the next week or so too, huh?

Anyway, I know I didn't talk about any of the progress I made this week - like I originally intended to talk about - so I'm sorry about that. However, I do hope that this break from my normal writing style helped at least ONE person out.

We CAN conquer that fear of inadequacy! It will be a struggle, and we may procrastinate even more, but we just need to retrain ourselves to "Dare to be Bad" and embrace failure as a way to learn and grow. Easier said than done...

Anyway, I want to finish up with a belated joint Happy Birthday to both ChibiSunnie and Ronoxym who shared a birthday last week.

Breaking Through That "I Don't Wanna" Threshold

Alright, I've been putting this off for an hour. I sat here and debated if I could get away with not updating, mainly because I don't have anything to update about. With Easter this past Sunday I've been slacking off with the writing. All zero-days. I felt ashamed to type that.

Then I told myself that it wouldn't get any better if I just continued my week of zeros by ignoring this blog. If I did that then my post next week - if I even had one; it's a slippery slope once I miss one update - would have to include an apology for missing this week, and then an explanation as to why.

Either way, you were going to know about my zero week. Might as well not put it off, right? Bite the bullet, confess, and get myself back on the horse at the same time. If I can push myself past my insecurity, shame, and lack of momentum for this then maybe I can train myself to also do so with my fiction.

My biggest concern for not writing this post, however, was the idea that I had nothing really to talk about. It seemed pointless. It felt like a waste of time - both mine and yours.

Yet, as I forced myself to write that opening line the follow-up quickly came to me. Then the next line, and the next. I'm now up to seventeen sentences and five bite-sized paragraphs. I'm also hoping that I'm still at least mildly entertaining. If nothing else, I'm proving yet again that I'm a flawed human.

See, I'm the same as you with your struggles. Be it writing, exercising, socializing, cleaning, studying, or whatever it is that you wish to accomplish. I'm the same as you. I have good days. I have great days. I have week-long successes. Then I have this week of failures.

You're not alone.

Heck, I didn't even realize I was going to work on something motivational until about a paragraph or so in to this thing, and yet here we are. Now I know that I want to show you how easy it is to get back in to the rhythm of things once you've pushed yourself past that threshold.

One of the MANY comments to Ryan's Self-Help Gold was about exercising. You want to avoid a zero-day? Get on the floor and do one push-up. Just one. It doesn't take that much effort or time, and you accomplished SOMETHING, even if it is just one push-up. Surprisingly, though, once you're on the floor and doing just one you figure "while I'm down here I could probably crunch out a few more." Next thing you know, you've done your full set. All you have to do is cross that threshold.

Same goes for writing. Ali frequently throws out the challenge - both on her blog and in Writers’ Huddle - to set a timer for about five minutes. That's it. Everyone can steal away five minutes a day to write SOMETHING. Even if you just write out a quick paragraph for your latest project. Or you finally jot down a brief overview of your plot. Maybe you use those five minutes to write a simple bio for your protagonist. Whatever. It's going to be brief and it's going to be accomplished in five minutes.

Task is done and you can move on with your life knowing you don't have a zero day.

Yet, once you've written that little bit you tend to keep going. The timer may have gone off, but you're now in the flow. That opening paragraph turns in to a full page, and maybe even the full chapter. The brief plot overview becomes more and more detailed as the story unfolds in your head. The simple bio for your protagonist leads to a bio for your entire cast of characters.

Congratulations. Now you've really gotten somewhere!

Not a writer or someone who has difficulties with exercising motivation? Well, this tactic can work for just about anything.

Bouncing back to Summer's anxiety blog, this girl writes a lot that is surprisingly helpful for even her readers like me who don't have to worry about such mental difficulties. Another super helpful blog post of hers uses the same concept of "bite-size tasks turn in to full project completion", or as Summer puts it "ADHD Cleaning".

The long and short of it is to write down simple tasks that you need to do around the house that can be completed in just a few minutes. Come on, you can spare five minutes to collect all the dishes and bring them to the sink to soak. You can take a ten minute time-out to quickly vacuum the living room. Spending a few minutes to make the bed isn't so hard. So on and so forth. You get the idea. Anyway, you take these simple tasks and you put them on individual note cards or slips of paper. Then just take one task. That's it. Just one. Leave the remaining pile there for "when you feel like it" or the next time you feel guilty enough that you want to take a break to do another task or even for the spouse and/or kids to finish off for you. But after doing that one cleaning task - and seeing the remaining pile on the table or wherever - you feel compelled to do another one. What's another five minutes out of my day? Before you know it the pile is gone and your house is sparkling. YAY! According to Summer's post she and her husband even make a game out of it to see who can complete more tasks first. BRILLIANT!

I'm sure if you think about it long enough you can find a way to apply this to just about any situation you're struggling with. Just break it down in to little bites that have a definitive completion point. That way you don't feel forced to continue because your timer went off but the task isn't done yet. So what if the rest of the living room is a sty, at least everything is dusted. Task complete. Alright, so I may not have done enough of a workout to break a sweat, but I at least got that ONE push-up done. Task complete. Eh, I'll go back and write bios for everyone else eventually, but I at least have the one for my main character done. Task complete. I'll just start up my blog and go "meh, I slacked off and don't have much of an update. Sorry folks, maybe next time." Task complete.

Easy as that.

But once you pass that threshold you feel compelled to keep going for as long as life will afford you to. You don't feel OBLIGATED to keep doing push-ups until your workout is complete. You can stop at any time if you wish, but you feel COMPELLED to keep going regardless. You don't necessarily feel GUILTY about not finishing your chores, but since that one task was so easy why not do another one? You did what you set out to do - one task off of one card - so you can stop whenever and feel proud of your accomplishment. Yet you now have that DRIVE to take another quick card, and then another. You don't feel FORCED to write out the entire plot of your story. You have the broad strokes that you can think about, and that's good enough. Although, now you're EXCITED to keep going in order to let it all spill out of your head.

And me? Well, my simple "I done goofed" blog post that was only going to be a few paragraphs at most turned in to a great lesson once I got in to it. Here it is, an hour later and I'm still writing.

The real trick is forgiving yourself if you slacked off - or if you got WAY too chaotically busy - and didn't try even this "five minute time out" tactic. If - like me this week - you STILL end up with a zero day just buck up and try again tomorrow. Just remember to focus on pushing through next time. Maybe even have a loved one help you out with a friendly daily reminder: "Hey, did you do your five-minute task/single push-up today?"

So join me in pushing through that painful wall of "I don't wanna" - or even the more painful "I can't" - and accomplish SOMETHING today. Even if it's a simple five-minute task, it will still get you back on track with those Non-Zero days.

The Ins and Outs of Creating Gods

Well, here we are on our first OFFICIAL Wednesday update day. Hello, everyone!

I am currently writing this on my new "elevated" bed. In other words: Hubby and I finally have a bed frame and box spring. YAY! Look at us being adults and no longer sleeping on a mattress on the floor! *Ahem* Anyway....

I did mostly researching this week, and so I don't really have much to show to you guys. I'm hoping to change that soonish. My big thing was to use that digital copy of Demigods and Deities I found last week. It has certainly helped a little. I now have a better understanding of roughly how many gods need to be in my pantheons. I also recently hit a realization that should help me better structure them too.

The book suggests breaking down the most basic character classes available in the Player's Handbook. For those not real big on D&D and other such fantasy games, the basic classes are things such as "Fighter" or "Monk" or "Bard" or "Cleric." You get the gist. Well, the book suggests breaking those classes down in to more generic branches such as "Martial Arts" or "Magic Users" and then come up with roughly three deities that would be able to cover the full spectrum of character alignments for each grouping.

Again, if you're unfamiliar with the term "alignment" it's very simple. Every character in the D&D world is somewhere on a nine-point scale between Good and Evil as well as Lawful and Chaotic. Lawful Good people are like your police force. They defend the people, defeat evil that threatens innocents, and follows a strict code. The exact flipside would be Chaotic Evil which are like demonic anarchists. They want nothing else but unorganized pain and torture of every living being. The more innocent, the better. Then you have seven other alignments in between: Lawful Neutral, Lawful Evil, Neutral Good, True Neutral, Neutral Evil, Chaotic Good, and Chaotic Neutral.

Alright, now back to pantheon creation. So, the basic trick is to have three gods with different enough alignments that there is at least one god that a character can pray to given their alignment. For instance, if you have a Lawful Good deity he can be the patron to Lawful Good, Lawful Neutral, and Neutral Good characters. The only restrictions is that the god should have at least ONE element on the scale that is the same as the character - which is why Lawful Neutral and Neutral Good can pray to him as well - and that no part of the alignment opposes the characters. This is why no Chaotic characters would pray to him - it's in opposition with the Lawful side of the god - as well as no Evil characters who would have a problem with the god being Good.

So I have my break-down. Essentially it's just easy to have nine gods - one for each alignment category - and then double or triple up somewhere in order to have a god that fits that particular fighting style. For instance, just having one Lawful Good god for both magic-use and melee seems a bit odd. The god would have a fighting preference, and so he should favor one class type over another; creating the need for at least one more deity within that alignment.

It's also suggested to sprinkle in some deities that are patrons to specific races: halflings, elves, dwarves, gnomes, orcs, and possibly some patrons to the monsters the adventurers will come up against.

So now I have my ranks by way of alignment, class, and race break-down. How do I fill them, though? I feel weird just arbitrarily naming by way of "This Chaotic Good god will be named Rothbar; moving on." I fear missing something and not having the pantheons feel real, which is weird because the likelihood of my readers ever knowing of their existence is slim. But world building is world building, I need to know all because I don't know how it will affect something.

Well, next up on the "creating gods" docket was to make sure the gods all had control of the main 22 Cleric Domains. If you didn't have 22 gods, it was fine as long as they doubled up. For instance, there are only 19 deities in D&D. What is so important about these Domains? Why were they called Cleric Domains? Why 22 of them? Well, the simple answer there is that the 22 Cleric Domains are the different concentrations clerics could take based on the god she followed; hence Cleric Domains. They're so important because if you are replacing D&D's pantheon with your own and not all 22 Domains are covered by your custom gods then a cleric can't choose that path, and the spells specific to that Domain are lost to your campaign. Finally, I believe 22 was an arbitrary number. The creators of D&D did the basic list that included such things as the four elements, good, evil, law, chaos, life, death, etc. They needed at least one domain for each god. Plus, as I said before, some gods had multiple Domains. Obad-Hai, for instance, is the god of nature and so he was obviously in charge of the four elements.

Alright, so I have at least nine gods that should include the 22 Domains. Not crucial to storytelling, but imperative if I want to use Gyateara as a basis for any D&D campaigns I run; which was the whole reason I started creating it in the first place. The easiest way to organize it would be to group like-domains together and hand them to one god. As I mentioned, Obad-Hai is god of nature and so he can cover four domains just by grouping the elements together.

Now that I know what I need in my pantheon, I now need to figure out who these gods are. My biggest thing was getting all nine alignment options. I had this world set up as "pantheons were gods that allied together during the Divine War." So, why would a Chaotic Good god ally herself with a Lawful Evil one?

I could go down the traditional route by way of Greco-Roman or Norse mythology: they are one huge family either by blood or marriage. I didn't want all of my pantheons - I'm planning on having at least four - to become essentially "Four Major God Families Fighting For Control" in terms of the Divine War. I needed another reason for opposing alignments to work together.

I then had my epiphany: Gods are just divine D&D parties. You have your warrior, cleric, magic-user, and rogue. You have differing alignments. You have some overall goal: a quest, if you will. It works. I'd like to thank the webcomic Order of the Stick for that insight.

The comic's creator Richard Burlew periodically sprinkles in reminders that while the party leader Roy is Lawful Good, his longest traveling companion Belkar is clearly Chaotic Evil. Why do these drastically opposing alignments join forces? For one, Belkar is willing to do whatever needs to be done to complete their quest and/or save their hides; things that a Lawful Good character would never fathom of doing. Therefore, Belkar gets to fulfill his bloodlust and Roy gets out of tough scrapes without having to compromise much. Roy understands that the party as a whole is better having someone being his foil. Belkar, on the other hand, couldn't care less as long as he gets to kill - which he does; frequently. Another reason for this pairing? Teaming up with Belkar is the lesser of two evils. It is better to have him as an ally - and possibly curb his destruction - then it is to oppose him and/or let his bloodlust run free and wild.

Burlew went so far as to demonstrate this point in one of his comics. ***Spoiler warning for 444-strips in.***

I'm pretty sure I'll be using a similar tactic. Sure, I'll most likely have family alliances in at least one pantheon, but I think I'm just going to look at my deities as if they were D&D characters instead. Make them mortal first, if you will. If they were an adventuring party that brought in more allies, how would that structure play out? Would there be love interests? Family? Rivals? How was the opposing alignment recruited? Why? Now that the Divine War is over will these opposing alignments and rivals now feud? I'd be alright with that. Every pantheon - including Christianity's - has at least two warring divine powers. Thor vs. Loki. Osiris vs. Set. God vs. Satan. Nearly everyone in the Greco-Roman pantheon was battling against someone else within their ranks. I'm sure if I went in to Aztec or Mayan or Native American religion I'd find at least one god who battled against another. Even in the D&D pantheon there are a few gods that don't play well together.

So anyway, that's my newest weekly goal. I am going to forget that they are supposed to be deities for a week and just come up with characters like I normally would. I have guidelines to help me form the "right" characters, but all I need to concentrate on is building a campaigning party.

Speaking of weekly writing goals, still nothing with the local writing group I started. Omnibladestrike has once again hit the "self-doubt" wall that has crippled him. So his task is to learn how to keep that inner critic in check so he can get back to writing. Even with the mantra of "Dare to be bad" when it comes to his first draft, he can't shut that stupid critic up. Cyhyr has seen my quandaries as to what the group is doing since we've become dormant, but she hasn't responded to anything I've posted. So I'm not sure what's up with her right now. Ronoxym has gone full radio-silence. I haven't seen him even online since we had our Skype session last month.

I know that Ron and Cyhyr have a convention coming up that they're going to with The Bard. It's a weekend-long LARPing session where they will be in-character pretty much the entire time. I know they were working hard on getting their characters ready for that, so maybe that's where they disappeared to.

That being said, I fear that my venture in to running a local writing group crashed and burned fairly quickly. Sad, really, I thought maybe we had something the four of us could be really excited about. We'll see if I can revive the group. I'll keep you posted.

The real thing that's been killing me though about this silence between the four of us is the fact that Ron seems to have vanished from the internet this month. The forum is pretty much dead because he hasn't been on to role-play. I have no clue how his latest venture in writing has been going. Also, I spent two days this week going back through portions of the collab story we have about Devon and Willow; editing it and practically pleading for him to continue on with the story since he hasn't in nearly two months.

It's driving me BONKERS that this story isn't done, and that I can't even come up with my own ending for it since I have no clue what he was planning for the last portion of it.

I guess that's karma for not updating my own stories; especially What Is Truly Meant To Be which hasn't had an update in a year by now. I really need to start using some of my non-zero days to work on that again...

OH! Before I forget, I want to state that it seems I've had a recent flood of new readers lately, and they all appear to be coming from www.Aliventures.com. Why is that, you might ask? Well, it seems dear Ali Luke linked me in her post on the 7th: 17 Ways to Make the Most of Your Writing Time - Even When It's Limited. Apparently Ali has joined the "No More Zero Days" bandwagon, and wanted to thank me for the idea. In turn, I made sure to thank Summer for introducing me to the idea in her blog, and Reddit member Ryan for posting the idea in the first place.

The main thing I wanted to convey here, though, is how friggen awesome it is that *I* inspired my own writing mentor with a way to keep up her writing! I'm so ecstatic about this, you don't even understand! Plus, the fact that Ali clearly keeps up with my blog is awesome. The fact that in inspiring her to ban "Zero Days" from her life - and her wanting to pass that along to her readers - means that I'm inadvertently helping other writers is mindboggling. Finally, I just get such a kick out of the fact that this guy Ryan was trying to help out a guy who was feeling bummed out, and it got so much energy online that Summer wrote about his post in her blog about panic attacks, and then I shared the idea as my own personal motivation for writing, and now all of these writers have this tactic idea. The internet is cooky, and I love it! How else would Max have had Ryan's advice? How else would the WORLD get Ryan's advice? How else would information be handed over to such a diverse set of people? I'm in awe.

Anyway, WAY off topic in regards to writing. So, I'll take that as my cue to finish up.

In order to do so, I'd like to conclude with a few words for my former writing group in case they're reading:

Omni, you really need to figure out what is stopping you from writing. Don't tell me "I don't know" or "I'm not sure." Figure it out. Is it lack of drive? Fear of being bad? Intimidation when comparing yourself to other writers? Do you not have the passion you thought you did? Is it because you can't focus? Are you not in a good writing environment? Is this the wrong story for you to tell? What is stopping you!? Do some soul searching to try to figure that out.

Cyhyr, what's going on? Why the radio silence with you two? Was I right? Are you too busy creating your characters? If so, just let me know and I'll stop bugging. Otherwise, give me some sort of heads up as to why you guys seemed to disappear. I'd understand, I'm just confused right now.

Ron, WRITE SOMETHING ALREADY! YOU'RE DRIVING ME UP A WALL!!!!!

Well, until next week.