Big Surprise: Productivity Is Good For Productivity

This website is teaching me a lot about how to get things done. I’ve made a few really good decisions so far, and they are definitely bearing fruit.

Here they are so that I’ll remember them and so that you can consider making them yourself:

I decided to make drabbles the bread and butter of the website. This was important for me, because I’m the worst kind of procrastinator, and, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I suffer from Creative Attention Deficit Disorder. By focusing my content around super-short fiction, I can write a fiction post easily in one sitting, and I can publish a few a week. And being able to actually finish projects (no matter how small) is extremely important for my morale as a writer.
I keep a positive attitude, and I just keep going. My site is just over a month old, I’m averaging about 2 posts per week (and change) and I have the audacity to check my Google Analytics statistics on an almost daily basis. I’m fairly certain almost half of my views are me. That would have gotten me down a year ago, but I’ve learned that websites don’t grow an audience that’s 10,000 strong overnight.
I am writing for me first, for you second, and I’m not after your money. If you haven’t read Seth Godin’s Linchpin , you should really go do that. That book is the reason this website exists. It taught me that I should be thinking of my art (my writing) as a gift. And that helps me not worry about “making it” as an author, so I have more emotional energy to do what authors do: write. THAT’S making it.
I asked my friends for support. This was actually really difficult for me to do. I’m pretty sensitive to the limits of the generosity of others – especially when asking someone to give me (for free) what they get paid to do on a regular basis. But then I thought about Linchpin again, and I figured, if I’m willing to see my art as a gift, maybe these talented illustrators will too. So I asked some people to illustrate my drabbles, and some said yes. That list is growing. My gift and theirs join to make an even better gift that visitors to this site can enjoy. Also, having my work illustrated makes me feel like a boss (in an 80′s way, not in an authoritarian way).

The upshot of all of this is that I can write often, and I feel good about writing. The drabbles make it so that I can finish projects on a regular basis instead of abandoning them, and that leads to better ideas, more frequently. I took 10 days to write a 1,500 word story (still to be edited, I’ll let you know how that goes). Today I started writing a new story while I was waiting for my car to be serviced. After one writing session I’m more than 500 words into what I expect to be a 2,000 word story. If I can finish it in fewer than 10 days, I’ll consider it progress. And I expect to do so.