On Good Work

“What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips's new album is ravishing and I’ve listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say.”

—	Dave Eggers

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The Courage to Write

"Advising writers to go ahead and ignore their anxiety and forge ahead is like telling a ten-year-old who's about to get a shot, "There's nothing to be scared of." That kid knows better. So do writers." (from The Courage to Write-How Writers Transcend Fear by Ralph Keyes)

I just started reading this book and am finding it tremendously useful. To be cliche',  writing is as essential to my life as breathing.
Even so, I love it and I hate it.
Getting the narrative out of my head and into print is freeing
Getting the narrative out of my head and into print is terrifying.


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Observation

~Writing brings one's various neuroses front and center.
  ~ this can be helpful because then they can finally be used
   ~This is not helpful because they make one aware of various weird quirks they have that they enjoy
being unaware of.
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Productivity and Fiction

Recently I discovered an easy way to keep myself on task throughout the day. I program into the calendar on my iphone all the things I want/need to do in the course of the day with the beginning times. Once that is entered I program the alert to go off 5-15 minutes before my next task. It has worked wonderfully in the past but not today.

Today I was supposed to:
finish reading a book I'm writing a paper on
Make an outline for the paper to make the writing easier
Tackle the mountain of laundry that needs folded
Sort, purge, and bag clothes for Goodwill
Vacuum and dust
And do outside work because it is an amazingly beautiful day and my gardens are begging to be worked on.

Instead I decided to start writing.
Then I couldn't quit.
It has been many hours and many words, and I have discovered characters that I love,despise and admire- all at the same time.
I have heard authors say that writing is lonely; and obviously it can be, since one is alone. However, I find when I write fiction- especially when I stumble upon characters like I did today- that it is not so lonely, because there are these newly created people who have a story to tell.
That is the essence of what I love about writing fiction-meeting these people and dragging their story out onto paper (or Word)
What I do not love so much is making interesting the mundane details of their lives. 
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