Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Microsoft's Devil

Cursor… Cursor… Cursor… Cursor…

The dang cursor hangs there sometimes and stares at me, and it even has the gull to wink at me.
Damn thing. One of Microsoft’s devils.

But you know what? The devil has become a motivator for me to write. I see the winky-blink and my fingers itch to press the smooth keys of my laptop and my mind starts whirling through the hundreds of topics or projects I could write about. And there lays the problem I think many writers have. It’s not that we don’t know what to write. We can’t choose from the many voices in our heads, shouting out at us, pick me, you promised me, you need to write about me today.

Usually it’s the last scenario which wins our attention. It takes up a good chuck of our freshest muse and it’s not be our WIPs. It’s a blog post, an interview or an article due. Sigh. It’s our WIPs we really want to spend time on. What to do?

Well, we could not write blog posts or do interviews, or articles and write only your books but be warn today is the age of the world-wide info net. At some point we will need to establish a presence in the arena which will require writing other material besides our WIPs.

So how do we do that? If you’ve read any of blogs in the past, you know I make goal lists each day. The hardest part for me is to shut off the other voices which sound a lot like my four children did when they were pre-teen and focus on a project. But I’ve found if I make my list in priority order, set a time limit for the project, turn on my white noise, sit my butt in chair and stare at the cursor all this has helped me write the other projects and then drag my muse to the WIP.

So, tell me how do you handle the writing juggling act? I’d loved to learn different tactics, to change up and always beat the Microsoft Devil.

4 comments:

  1. It is difficulot to juggle sometimes. I find I work better on a deadline, so if I don't have an official one, I make one in the form of a goal. Encouragement from fellow writers, sharing page counts and successes, etc, is helpful, too!

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  2. Hi, Debra. It's been a quiet day so far. Thanks for stopping by.

    Juggling is hard. Sharing page counts is an excellent idea. I actually am with a group, during the month of, April who is doing just that. So far it has helped me meet word count on a new project. Thanks for sharing.

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  3. I'm a few days late, but I wanted to chime in. When it comes to juggling promo & writing time, my trick is to do spurts of promo when I'm stuck on my WIP. I'll write & schedule a bunch of blogs in advance - often writing an extra one just in case I get a last minute offer to guest somewhere. That way I never feel like I *have* to be working on promo when the creative juices are flowing on the WIP. And sometimes changing gears in and out of blog-mode will actually shake something loose on the WIP.

    Good luck with the juggling act!

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  4. Hi, Vivi, Writing ahead is a wonderful idea. I think I can do that while sharing baseball time with DH. Thanks for stopping and commenting. I appreciate you.

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