wrong project, but oh well

Disabled

Man, I don’t know what it is. All I have to do is decide, “I’m working on Thing X!,” and I will without fail come up with ideas for Thing Y instead.

In the current instance, that means I decided I would try to finish “The Unquiet Grave” by the end of the month, and promptly put down 1,022 words on “Mad Maudlin” instead. Not really complaining — I don’t care which short story I make progress on, so long as it’s one of them — but I really wish I could find a way to leverage this for novels. As I said on matociquala‘s LJ the other day, it seems to me like there should be a way to do it. Contract for Book A, write Book B instead; then contract for Book C, somehow convince yourself you’re working on that one for realz, whereupon you write Book A. Or something. But I fear deadlines might make that tough to wrangle.

Time to go think about “The Unquiet Grave” some more, in the hopes of finishing “Mad Maudlin” in the near future.

0 Responses to “wrong project, but oh well”

  1. diatryma

    I read a how-to-be-incredibly-productive-by-procrastinating thing some time ago that described more or less what you mean. It’s how I used to study for finals. For longer projects, it seems to be a matter of having ‘firm’ deadlines, rather than firm deadlines, and keeping something scary on the back burner to spur you to comparatively benign projects. Like dwarf bread, only with stories.

  2. la_marquise_de_

    This happens with me, too. All I need is a hard deadline, and every other project wants to queue jump.

  3. lady_puck9999

    Totally off-topic, but are you coming to ICFA again this year?

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