What’s one small improvement you can make in your life?
Consistently cleaning my home every week.
The stereotype about bachelors is that they’re messy fellows living in pigsties. Cleanliness is supposedly a foreign concept to the unmarried male. Well, I don’t live in a sty, nor do I have a pile of unwashed clothes taking up half my bedroom, nor do I have strange species of mold growing in my refrigerator. I’m … adequately tidy. But I could stand to clean just a bit more often.
Go figure. Some of us grow up being taught to perform our daily chores diligently every week, then we become adults, move out, and regress into Neanderthals. Maybe independence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s certainly no excuse for lack of self-discipline.
Regardless, performing my cleaning chores on a regular basis is a small but significant improvement I can make in my everyday life.
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Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.
“Hermes is not having the best time. He walks a fine line, and his duty as messenger of Olympus weighs heavily on him. Being a god in the modern age means living in a world that no longer believes in gods. How much can one deity accomplish when no one respects him anymore? And why do his instincts tell him that he, the son of Zeus, is losing favor with his own family?
Tensions abound. The upstart Young Gods play dangerous games using entire cities as their boards. Formless monsters strike from the nighttime shadows, terrorizing hapless mortals. Agents of rival pantheons scheme to thwart Olympus’ designs. In the thick of it all, Hermes does what he does best: trick, lie, and cheat his way to victory.“
You walk through life. Everything is going according to plan. Every day like the one before – the grating yet comforting grind of monotony. Then BAM. You’re caught by a curveball. A piece of bad news or a freak event. Something you could never have possibly foreseen. Your plans implode, and you’re left with your head spinning.
On the other hand …
Something joyous happens, something spectacular that you never dared hope for. It’s the greatest news ever, the most wonderful unplanned thing to happen to you. Your plans are upended in the best way possible.
What do you do when life hands you the unexpected? I like plans. I like organization. I like to go through life knowing what’s going to happen next. When something pops up that isn’t part of the plan, I bristle. Even good things, sometimes. My control freak tendencies take a hit from things in life beyond my control. The older I get, the more thankful I am for that.
I could go on about how life is a test and molds us and so forth, but let’s dispense with the cliches. What I’m most thankful for is that the unexpected in life – good and bad – show us who we really are. We dig deep when confronted with a crisis to prove our real mettle. A disaster buffets us, and cracks in our supposed good character can appear. We get to know ourselves a little better. No need to fret, though. Knowing that they are there gives us a chance to address them.
I don’t believe that anyone can truly know themselves fully. Our “real” selves are a bit of a mystery to our own minds. We humans are simply simply too complex and too multilayered to be able to completely comprehend ourselves, much less others. But we do get glimpses of insight every now and then. Life isn’t the only thing full of the unexpected. We can defy our own expectations. We accomplish things we didn’t know we could, we possess virtues we never, ever suspected we had, and we also display vices we never thought we possessed.
Okay, life is a test at times. But testing isn’t meant to break. I’m very glad that life has thrown curve balls at me. I’d be stagnating in my own self-satisfaction if I didn’t know where and how I could improve. Always room for growth and all that jazz.
This naturally extends to writing. No great writer ever rested on his or her laurels. They keep improving, working, pushing themselves to become better. And writing is a career where you put yourself into the public’s eye. Readers can detect if you’re improving or not. Scary, no? And no writer can ever 100% predict how readers will react. What form will the criticism take? What will be the readers’ reactions? Are we ready? Can we ever be ready? But we roll with the punches as best we can and figure out what went right and what went wrong. And we write a better story next time.
Expect the unexpected. Welcome it. You’re going to be thrown for a loop someday anyway. Might as well as learn to embrace the good that comes from it.
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You’re running at a steady pace. You’ve been running for the past thirty minutes. Sweat streams down your back and drips from your brow onto your nose and neck. The marathon is halfway done. Only halfway. Your thoughts stray. You think of a cold glass of water. You think of resting – just for a moment – and catching your breath. Or maybe longer than a moment. You ran half a marathon. That’s good enough.
But you don’t stop. You keep running. You stumble and nearly trip. You regain your balance. You find your rhythm again and keep running. You feel out of breath. Now, the temptation to stop feels more like a necessity. Can’t finish the marathon if you can’t breathe. You feel like you’ll faint from exhaustion.
You remember your breathing exercises. You’ve trained for this. And you find your second wind. A burst of new energy propels you forward. You keep running. At last, you reach the end.
Marathons are a discipline. They take training, practice, and the determination to finish what you started. Writing is the same way. Crafting a book isn’t a quick sprint. It’s not a pole vault or long jump where you throw all of your strength into a few seconds of exertion. Writers must pace themselves and must be willing to get up every day, sit down at their computer, avoid the temptation to get hooked on Youtube or Facebook, and write their word count for the day.
For all that we exalt discipline and admire it in people, it’s not exactly the most well-practiced quality. We like people who accomplish great things: maybe build a skyscraper, or paint a masterpiece, or simply make a million bucks. We look at those people and we think how much patience and hard work must have gone into their achievements. We see the results of discipline, and think we should give it a go, but so many of us just can’t push ourselves. Why? Because discipline sucks.
It’s a slow-burning candle. It isn’t fancy and it isn’t glamorous. The results of discipline are glamorous. That fancy skyscraper, that painting, those million dollars. Wowee! I want that! But putting in the work is a pain.
Writing isn’t exactly a glamorous, exciting process either. Silently typing away at a computer doesn’t make for a great show. It’s not something you show off to others. “Look, Bob, watch me write my story! Isn’t it so cool?” Yeah, nobody’s going to care about the process. They want to see the end product.
Do you want to write? I mean really write, as a lifelong hobby or career? Do you envision yourself as a published author? That vision is the end result of discipline. You must train yourself to write on a schedule that works for you. Every day, every couple days, whatever you find works best. And then you must train yourself to be consistent about it. It’s not always pleasant, especially starting out, but it does get easier over time.
I have a day job. I had to find the time to write. Frequently, coming home from work, I didn’t want to. But I did it anyway. And the end result is, I wrote a book! I published it! I accomplished what I set out to do!
I don’t meant to scare away any of you potential writers out there. But writing can feel like a chore at times. Even so, when we set our minds to doing the things we love, we’ll make the time and effort to do them. But it does take dedication. Dreams are all well and good, but they’re nothing without action, and discipline demands action. Even a dream job has its drudgery, right?
And it’s sweeter in the end, to run toward your goal and finally reach it after a long, tiring run.
The gods and beings of ancient myth never went away. They just moved on with the times.
My book, A God Walks up to the Bar, is currently available on Amazon.com. Venture into the world of the Greek god Hermes, a world filled with demigods, vampires, nymphs, ogres, magic, and trickery. It’s a tough job, being a god!
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Editing is an addictive process for me. I love editing. I love digging into the guts of my story and tinkering with things, fixing typos and grammar, revising dialogue, picking better words to describe action and thought. It’s a huge amount of fun for me. Alas, like most things in life, too much of a good thing can be very bad indeed.
I go through many drafts, and in each draft I find something new that can be improved. And improved again. And again! As soon as I finish, I see something else that needs fixing. Eventually, the quotation marks of irony rear their ugly heads and improve becomes “improve.” Yes, I’m making my story “better” by constantly carving it and nitpicking it until there’s nothing left. I need to remind myself: You must set yourself a stopping point.
But the perfectionist in me screams out: What if you missed something? What if there’s a misspelled word somewhere in there? What if you misplaced a comma? What if there’s an extra space between words? What if, what if, what if!
I’ve gone through my drafts, I’ve had my book edited, and I’m going through my final proofreading. It’s almost done. And I must remind myself that it’s almost done. No last-minute check-ups that turn into another round of revisions. Done is done. Finis. Ready for publication. But am I ready to publish? Is anyone ever truly ready?
What if I missed something? Ah! There it is again! The dreaded “what if!”
In theory, authors could revise their books forever. The process can go on and on until, quite literally, nothing is left. You don’t have a book anymore. You’ve “revised” the living daylights out of it, cutting and cutting, until what made the book great has been destroyed by picky perfectionism.
Maybe that’s part of growing as an author, accepting that you, at any given point in your career, are NOT perfect. That your work is flawed, try as you might, and you must recognize those flaws, learn from them, and apply your lessons to the next project.
But I can’t perfect my craft by obsessing over one work forever. I must set myself a deadline and mark it as DONE, like it or not. Maybe that’s just my quirk. Maybe my fellow authors have struggles that are quite the opposite, or maybe you can relate. Feel free to share in the comments.
What motivates me? I want to be a published author, but why even bother in the first place? And why stick to it after I’ve started?
Well, going after big questions today, aren’t I? Before I dive headlong into existentialism, I think I better draw the boundary right here: Why am I motivated to write and publish a book?
For me, the impulse to start a task comes in waves. I’ll begin a writing project and when I first start, I’m just thrilled. Think of all the things I’ll get done! Come two days later, I can’t muster up the effort to finish it. The document languishes in the depths of my computer’s files, neglected and lonely. But then, six months later, I’ll come back to it, because suddenly the urge has hit me again.
Truth be told, coming this far with my current novel is a milestone in my life. I started a project and stuck with it, whether I felt like it or not.
What’s the deal? What does it take to stay motivated?
Motivation. How is that word used in conversation? “Be motivated.” “Got to stay motivated.” “Keep yourself motivated.” We make it sound like a state of mind. Remain in that state and only then will you get things done.
I don’t know about you, but I flip through about three dozen states of mind every day. Maybe it’s just me, but my emotions tend to jump around constantly. It’s kind of annoying, really. But it doesn’t matter. Seriously motivated people aren’t focused on their emotions, they’re looking at the goal. The climber ascending the mountain and the runner approaching the finish line aren’t driven by their feelings, they’re driven by what’s at the end of the struggle.
I’ve worked on my book when I was angry, when I was discouraged, when I was happy, and when I was convinced I was the hottest new thing in the industry. But it didn’t matter how I felt. The book had to get done. No amount of psyching myself up or putting it aside until I was “in the right mood” was going to produce tangible results. I just had to sit down, shut up, and do the work.
Motivation isn’t a state of mind. It’s actively striving. I didn’t just keep myself motivated; my motivation kept me in action.
I’m almost finished with my book. I’ll be releasing in within the next two months. I want people to read it and enjoy it. That’s my goal. That’s the thing that motivates me to finish it. And I believe that’s worth working towards.
Why bother? Because I choose to. And on that last, suitably dramatic note, I wish you a good day and your own goals to motivate you to do something great.
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We’ve all been there. The nagging in the back of your mind telling you that you’ve skipped out long enough on finishing that one last chore. Time to write out that shopping list for the big party next weekend. Time to balance your budget. Time to write thank-you letters to everyone who sent you house-warming gifts. Time to do your taxes.
“But I don’t wanna!” you say. “I can do it tomorrow!”
Tomorrow! Tomorrow! There’s always tomorrow!
And tomorrow comes, and you say, “Naw, I don’t feel like it. I need to be in the right mood.”
Sit down, shut up, and do the work.
Knuckle down and buck up. Your taxes aren’t going to do themselves. Letter self-writing technology hasn’t been invented yet. And you must be lucky if you’re rich enough that you can’t balance your budget in one afternoon. Grab a pen, or power up the computer, and get cracking.
Little chores are like gnats. They hover about you, buzzing incessantly, annoying you with the fact of their incomplete existence. Leave too many of them unfinished, and you have a real swarm of tasks waiting for the inevitable. They have to get done.
“I don’t wanna!”
Yeah, but you gotta, don’t you?
Novels don’t write themselves, either. That great story that’s been brewing in your mind since you were twelve – nobody else is going to write it, are they?
But what about my favorite show coming on in ten minutes? What about that cool video game I just bought? What about a walk in the park on this great sunny day? What about …
Life is full of distractions. What you do with your time shows what you really value. Want to write a book? Or just want to pay off your taxes and then go to bed? Then do it. Don’t wait for the perfect moment. Those moments are rare and usually exaggerated by the now-successful author when he pens his autobiography. Hindsight makes everything look easy. There’s a direct correlation between effort put in and results achieved.
So it all comes down to this: Sit down, shut up, and do the work.
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Jake W. Powell 