Pen to Paper

I get frustrated with myself.

Right now, my falcon cannot hear the falconer and the center is not holding.

I was thinking today about Edison’s workshop. Though the man was a bit of a jerk sometimes (and isn’t romanticized by steampunks like Tesla), he knew how to get things done.  According to radio-electronics.com, at Edison’s ‘invention factory’ in Menlo Park

“He said he would create a minor invention every ten days and a “big trick” every six months. In fact he had over 40 projects under way at any one time and he was applying for around 400 patents every year.”

Menlo Park was founded when Edison was 29, so clearly age was not a factor.

I keep hearing about the tremendous output of professional authors, people I respect. TV writers have astounding production when you look at what a good show does in a season.

So what’s my problem?

I’m starting working on my submission for the ABC Television Writing Fellowship, and I’ve added a progress bar to reflect that. (So far I’ve just brainstormed and started outlining, ergo zero progress as of this post). But since this is time sensitive (a very hard deadline), I’m going to be focusing on this project for a bit so the other status bars probably won’t be moving for a bit. FYI.

See, when you’re working with things you only half understand (like, for example, css and php and other wordpressy things) and you know one way to solve your problem, it would be a bad idea to spend two hours looking for another way just because you think it’d be “the right way” to do it. You can solve things in about 45 seconds and move on to the way you’d planned to spend the night. Looking for another way to do things would be silly. It’d be idiotic, and roughly as painful as smashing your head against a concrete wall.

Sigh.

New site is starting to come together, although trying to figure how to make Wordpress do what I want is taking time I’d like to be using writing. The first round of that’s closer to being over every day, though.

Set up two interviews today; a new one for tomorrow and a redo of one from last week where the manager was transferred to a different theater.

Made a few tweaks to the new site, made notes of a couple more for tomorrow. Got some writing done on WIP, started brainstorming for a couple more. Will be tweaking status bars soon to add them.

Tonight did not go as planned. My internet connection went kerfritzen for a while somewhere between the wall jack and the rest of the world, so that threw off a lot of my plans for the evening (job apps online, working on the new site, etc).

So instead, I tackled one of the projects around the apartment I’ve been putting off. Not only did I clean up the pile of chaos that’s been following me around for the past few years (well, this particular pile anyway), I then put my new productivity plan/strategy/thing to work and started brainstorming/planning some things I’ve been saying I wanted to do for about 9-10 months.  So while it’s only been a couple days, I’m liking how this productivity thing is working out.

Because of the brainstorming, though, I didn’t get any writing done on the current WIP.  Which I guess is okay: they way things are looking, I’m about to add two or three WIPs, and I’m gonna want to be working on them all. If I get in the habit of high production, that can only help.