Well, it worked. I finished that very rough draft of my book by my deadline, and I see three main ways I got it done:
1. I just got really, really sick of not getting it done.
2. I enlisted the encouragement and nagging of friends, including a set of high-stakes incentives with one of them.
3. I stayed off my blog, my Facebook page, Twitter, and every other "internet presence" I have.
The last of those tools was so helpful than now that I'm technically free to come back to my blog and strut, I'm not going to. I want to keep my focus going into the rewrite, which will be a longer and no less demanding job.
Hardly a week goes by that I don't hear or read someone telling me that a writer these days needs to be running a regular blog and keeping a lively presence on all the social media. Maybe that'll make sense when I have a book about to come out and not a book doing everything it can think of not to get written. But when I look around, most of the writers I admire for their productivity and quality don't keep up much of an "internet presence." I just looked at Michael Chabon's website: a caricature of his latest book's cover, a skeletal appearances calendar, a few goofy pictures, and three uncollected essays, complete with typos. Why does he have no blog, no news, no discussion? Why does he have no Facebook page or Twitter account? Because the little fucker's getting his work done, that's why.
That's why I'm not posting today. And why I'll be back soon to tell you more about why I'm not posting then either.
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