Time Management Tuesday: The Self-Discipline Nightmare

Though I've been writing about time management here at Original Content for nearly half a year now, I've been seeking the perfect time management plan for much longer. Recently I've been going through my writers' workbooks and seeing all kinds of efforts I've made over the last three years to get control over my time or, rather, to make better use of my time. For a couple of months I've been thinking that the issue of self-discipline needs to come into play when managing time. But it's not something I've been thinking about a lot or thinking about in any coherent way.

Then last Thursday night I had an honest-to-God self-discipline nightmare. I could address different aspects of the dream and where they came from in my waking life, but not many people enjoy reading about that kind of analysis. So I'll just stick to the basic story.

I was on the first day of a multiple-day classroom visit. I was supposed to be making a presentation in one classroom, but when I got there, I realized that I had nothing prepared. (Yes, this is a variation on the Yikes! I have a political science exam and I haven't cracked the book all semester dream!) I truly didn't know what I was going to talk about. I turned to the chalkboard (Point--not many classrooms have chalkboards anymore. What does the chalkboard mean here? Wait. I said I wasn't going to discuss things like that.) and wrote the word "self-discipline" on it.

Then, the next thing I knew, it was night time and I was asleep on a bed in the classroom. (A family member asked why there was a bed in the classroom. I am not addressing that kind of issue here.) I was horrified. I had no recollection of what I had talked to those kids about, so I didn't know what I should talk to them about the next time I met with them. Also, I had every reason to believe that I had fallen asleep during my presentation, since I couldn't recall anything happening after writing "self-discipline" on the chalkboard. My humiliation was total.

This dream was so disturbing that I woke up. It was so disturbing that I was awake for a couple of hours afterward and never did more than doze until I got up for the day. By 7:30 I was guzzling diet Coke with caffeine because I was already exhausted.

I'm no fool. I know when I'm getting a message from the Universe or the great beyond or some higher intelligence that thinks I need a nudge. So by the time I got up, I decided I needed to do some studying on self-discipline. Right off the bat, I started hunting on-line for an Idiot's Guide to Self-discipline or Self-discipline for Dummies. Well, guess what? I didn't find one. Okay, if those fine series weren't covering the topic, there must be some go-to expert on the subject. Someone who had done some research. Someone who could write about the science of self-discipline. If so, he or she isn't easily found. Yeah, I turned up a few books, but what I was looking for was THE book.

I have not given up, though. The quest has hardly begun. You can expect to find the subject of self-discipline cropping up periodically on Tuesdays for the rest of the year.

The Inner Workings Of Superheroes And Their Readers

I'm spending a little time this evening with my blog reader. Here's a choice post I found at Oz and Ends on The Psychoanalysis of Superheroes and Their Fans 

A Blog Tour About Blogging

This week you can follow An Unconventional Blog Tour, which is, essentially, a blog tour about blogging.

This is particularly interesting given the publishing world's embrace of the blog tour as a marketing device. The Unconventional Blog Tour doesn't appear to be about promoting anything. It seems to be more informational/educational.

Memorial Day Weekend Blog Visits

It's a holiday weekend, and I'm taking it easy for a few hours. Time for some NESCBWI blog visits!

I met Brendan Gannon last month. His blog, Brendan Gannon, deals with "writing, reading and technology." He hasn't updated since the NESCBWI conference, but if you scroll back a bit, you'll find the tech talk you crave.

Marlo Garnsworthy (a Facebook Friend) is a writer, artist, and editor. This past winter, she was writing at her blog, Wordy Birdie about her progress on a novel--she's writing it, not reading it.

A.C. Gaughen's debut novel, Scarlet, was published this past February by Walker Books, a division of Bloomsbury USA. Many of her blog posts this past spring have been about the launch of her book. Check out her charts relating to The Apocalypsies.

Caroline Gray is a student at the Rhode Island School of Design and a greeting card designer. Her blog, Caroline Gray Illustration, includes a lot of images of her beautiful work.

I am a fan of Tommy Greenwald's first book, Tommy Joe Jackson's Guide to Not Reading. (Tommy is another Facebook Friend.) His blog covers a lot of info about what's going on publishing-wise with his books, but there's also thoughts on writing.

Slice of the Blog Pie is a bit of a mystery. The blogger is Alicia Gregoire, but who is Alicia? What is the Campaigner Roll Call. Or, for that matter, what's the campaign? Recently, Alicia has done a number of reviews, but there are also posts on her writing and...ah...zombies. Those are written by a zombie expert.

Okay. That's enough Memorial Day relaxing. I need to go do some other kind of relaxation now.

Launch Party For "One For The Murphys"

It turns out that book launch parties are fun events, at least for guests  who don't have to plan or run the show. Lynda Mullaly Hunt threw a party last night for the publication of her first book One for the Murphys. Get a load of the crowd who turned up.

Since Lynda and I live in the same town, we know some of the same people. And, it turns out, we have some of the same Facebook friends. I had a grand old time going from person to person, being perfectly appalling by commenting on my real world acquaintances' tans and how great they looked because, living almost totally in my cellar, as I do, I hadn't seen many of them in a long time. (It's supposed to be rude to comment on someone's appearance. In my experience, no one objects to being told they look good. If any of you meet me in the flesh, by all means, feel free to tell me I look fantastic. Perhaps far better than you expected, even.) Some of you may remember that last year I came up with this idea for meeting and greeting at professional events that involved going up to people and saying, "Gee, you look familiar. Do I know you?" Well, I was doing it all over the place last night, because there were people there who did look familiar to me. And I did know them. One way or another, at least. With Facebook people I was going, "Hey, do we know each other on Facebook?" And there were three people there I did know from Facebook.

A great time. Great time.

Ah, but the launch party wasn't all about me having a good time. This picture of author/host Lynda Mullaly Hunt shows her in a pensive moment. A still picture (especially one I've taken) can't portray how  comfortable she appears to be speaking in front of a group or convey that she's an excellent story teller. Part of being a good story teller is being able to recognize a good story, and she had at least three excellent ones last night that she told very well.

So One for the Murphys is now out in the world. Lynda is working on her next book.

For another Murphy Launch Party write up, and better pictures, check out Liz Goulet Dubois' Chat Rabbit

Talk About A Disturbance To A World

Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor could be described as both a romance and a fantasy, neither of which I enjoy reading. I did like it, though, and I think it might be because this story also has elements of mystery. What happened? Who is the main character, Karou? Why is the guy with the wings always hanging around her?

Recently I read about story secrets, and this story has three good ones that I'm aware of. Two I wasn't even thinking about, they just hit me, and a third I realized was a secret but I was wrong about what the secret was.

Karou is a seventeen-year-old art student in Prague. She, a human, was raised in an alternative world by four creatures who physically would be considered monsters. She moves back and forth between the human world and her "family's" magical one, often called by Brimstone, a father figure, who sends her on errands to collect teeth. Soon after being attacked by a beautiful stranger with wings, she's cut off from Brimstone and her other loved ones. Her plan is to get back into her old world and find her family.

A couple of factors make this more than a traditional boy-meets-girl story. For one thing, Karou has a journey thing going apart from the romance. For another, she's a person whose identity is unknown to herself and us and slowly revealed to both character and reader.

This was one of those books that became distressing as I approached the end because I realized that it was going "to be continued," as it says on the last page. It's the first in a projected trilogy. Quite honestly, though, I would have been fine with the ending of this book being all we get.

Plot Project: I most definitely think this is a disturbance story rather than a  think-up-a-problem-to-lay-on-a-character story. Karou straddles two worlds--one of them is then shut off to her. That is a first-class disturbance. It gives an author all kinds of opportunities to ask and answer questions. Then you've got the business about the mysterious flying stranger showing up. Again, classic disturbance. It is at the point where these two things happen that the story action actually begins.

The Word "Weirdest" Here Could Mean Anything

10 of the Weirdest Children's Book Authors of All Time

My favorite comment was "You forgot Madonna"

Time Management Tuesday: To Write Or To Market?

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the amount of time writers can spend working without actually creating any new material. This week I will refer you to Should You Focus on Your Writing or Your Platform? by Jane Friedman, which was posted at Writer Unboxed. She writes about something similar, specifically the time writers are now spending on platform, which is a form of marketing. Marketing has become a huge time suck for writers, and Friedman has some suggestions about how to decide when to focus upon it.
 
To get you interested, Friedman says, "...we now live inside an unending media conversation wheel, where anyone can find a niche readership, do solid work on building a platform, and even put writing on the backburner—and still reasonably claim to be a writer." 

What Does It All Mean?

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has filed for bankruptcy. It is not one of the so-called big six publishers, so we probably won't hear anything about the sky falling over this. And what does bankruptcy mean these days, anyway? Though, really, how many companies come back from bankruptcy and last long term?

Like most publishers, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is the result of mergers of older companies. Its oldest publishing house goes back to the nineteenth century and published Ralph Waldo Emerson. If I have time in the next couple of days, I'll do some research on this and see how many Transcendentalists were involved in HMH's history.

UPDATE: Here's more on this subject from the LA Times.

The Cybils Made It Into The Horn Book

The May/June issue of The Horn Book has a section on book awards. It gave an entire column to the 2011 Cybils winners.