Easton Livingston's Reality Imagination
Fiction is the reality of the imagination.
Progress. This is something that you work for as an indie published writer. Progress going in the right direction. Progress that brings tangible results. This is what has been happening to me as of late and I’m a little excited about the direction where things are going so I wanted to let you guys in on where I am in my progress. There’s gott abe at least a couple people that are interested. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
I am often involved in some interesting exchanges on Facebook. I belong to a couple different writers groups there and I try to help out as best I can if I have something constructive or helpful to say in response to writers and their questions. But a few weeks ago, a a topic was posted that really got the home fires burning. People came down on one side of the other and it was a powder keg topic. Some writers run away from those kind of topics because they don’t want to be involved in any kind of conflict whatsoever. I think that living in a dream world and that you sometimes just have to draw a line in the sand and give an opinion one way or another. This was one of those times and this is exactly what I did in reference to profanity and vulgar story elements in novels and having a rating system.
The goal to be more productive is something that most people in business desire—or what most people that do what they love to do desire. It’s even more so for writers I think because our profession is only taken seriously when we’ve actually finished something. There is already the stigma that what were doing is not really work (which I can vehemently disagree with in one whole post alone). Add to that the fact that we are arduously committing effort and time to something where the reward is on the far back end if the reward ever comes at all. That reward is not really getting paid though that can be a part of it. No, the reward is actually finishing whatever it is that we’ve written and getting the thing published. The only way that that is going to happen is if you are cranking out the requisite amount of words to get to the end. That is why it’s so important to set goals in terms of word count. That is why mine has just increased.
How do you define success? If you ask five different people you just may get five different answers. Success – if we are looking at this with wise eyes – is a different metric for every individual. But it’s apparent that some people are more successful than others when it comes to that individual metric. People will give all kinds of myriad reasons why that is the case. The truth of the matter is, successful people have successful habits. In these habits have turned their lives into something worth living.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot and pressing into different forms of literature to renew my mind so that I will also have success by creating an environment of habits that is conducive to that goal.
As a writer, normally you are working two jobs at once. The job that’s bringing in the money right now and your writing which you would like to bring in the money later on on a full-time basis. At least this is the goal for those of us who truly want to do this for the rest of our lives and make a living at it. That being said, we are always looking for ways to be more productive in our writing.
On the most basic level, that will be how many words that were able to pound out in a day. How can we get the most words into our computers in the most efficient amount of time? Well for me, I have discovered a tool that is a tremendous help and my hope is that as you read this post that it will help you just as much.
All you need to do is purchase a lizard.