Making and Unmaking Ourselves

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Sometimes I think the person any of us knows least is the one that looks at us from the mirror every morning.

One thing I’m coming to realize – having been felled by another ear infection – is that it’s quite possible this cycle of sickness and getting slightly better then getting slammed again, before I can even meet deadlines, is caused by my short attention span.

Short attention span? You say.

Well, I didn’t realize that was my issue, until I’d been married about five years and Dan, during an argument, told me he hated my habit of wandering away from conversations at parties without even an excuse.

I’d never realized I did that, but then I started noticing.  Yep.  Things get “boring” and I wander off.  In fact, I have the same issue with staying in line.  If I’m not alone I – still – leave poor Dan stuck in line (or one of the kids, but that falls under turnabout) and go do something or look at something.

At our favorite thrift store, this usually translates to going and looking at the jewelry counter, even though I have no intention whatsoever of buying any jewelry.  In grocery stores, I’ll read all the tabloid and magazine headlines even though I’m so non-media-oriented I’m likely to have no clue who these people are.

If I can’t move away, I go inside, and start rearranging thoughts and ideas.  You know what I mean “Um… I wonder if I took that character from here…”

This is the real reason I can’t be without a book to read, and when my mind is too fried for anything else, I read comic books.  And the reason the ONLY way to get me to exercise is with an audio book while walking outside, or something interesting to watch inside.  (And most stuff that is on TV is not interesting enough and I start making excuses to end the session early but the truth is that I’m bored.  The last thing to keep me on a regular indoor exercise schedule was Foyle’s War. This is why mostly I walk three miles a day, outside, even when it involves putting on the padded leather coat.)

So, how does my short attention span cause me to relapse, or just catch another sickness before I recover?

Because I get bored, but my mind isn’t quite up to the effort of writing and applying itself (though curiously, this time, it’s getting there.)

So, I do the next best thing, and start cleaning the house, or pushing furniture around, or refinishing something.  Because I got bored and I can’t stand to be bored.  (When I tell people my big issue with being on low carb – though I’ve managed it for four years – is that I’m not someone who eats meals, I’m a snacker, they look at my girth and wonder if I’m out of my mind.  Well, that’s actually hormonal and heaven knows what.  The metabolism tilted out of balance when I was in bed six months in my first pregnancy (because G-d has a sense of humor) has never been normal since. Though I confess until audio books, I could only go walking if I got someone to go with me, so it wasn’t regular.  (It has been regular unless VERY ill for three years, though.)  At any rate sitting down and eating bores me.  It’s better if the guys are being amusing, but I usually still need a book on hand. I need to be careful the book isn’t too interesting, or I’ll eat just to keep reading, too.)

Yes, I know, several people have told me to acquire a computer game habit for those times, but here’s the thing: very few computer games hold my interest and most of those are puzzle/matching games.  I’m not visual, and the same thing that keeps me from paying much attention to TV makes games not riveting enough (and yes, I know the state of the art.  My sons play them.) Unfortunately if I find a game that is riveting enough to play for extended periods, I’m likely to become addicted.  Which is why I’ve played very lightly ever since I lost two years to Tetris.  (Laugh, go ahead.)

Anyway, none of this is a whine just I realized yesterday, as I decided it was a wonderful time to do three hours of ironing, that I was overestimating my strength, and that I’ve done this before.  I simply wasn’t well enough for it.  So I ironed enough shirts for the guys for the week, but didn’t keep ironing.  And when I felt like taking a nap I did it, even if it felt difficult as hell because it made me feel guilty.  And then I went to bed at eight pm, and got up at around eight today.  I’m trying not to feel guilty about this.  I do, of course.  An ear infection even if it’s a reprise of the one that I caught/caught me in October should not lay me this flat.  But I’m also starting to think the cycle is because I push myself, and not even out of some heroism – though blowing deadlines upsets me, and I keep trying to dig out, of course – but because I get bored.

So I’m trying to discipline the inner child (not THAT way) and take things easy, though I think – as I said – that I’m well enough to write today.  (Might entail a nap in mid day, though.)

And this brought up, as I was making tea this morning, that we don’t know ourselves.  And what we see of our fellow men from the outside might not be true either.

During one of the worst possible times of our economic life, right after the tech bust, when Dan had been unemployed six months and we were wondering where to find the next job, a relatively close friend told us he wasn’t worried about us because we were “lucky” – we always came out right.

Maybe we ARE lucky, but from inside it doesn’t feel that way.  Oh, you can look at my career and how I managed to break in when the midlist was falling apart, not be one of the “pushed” darlings, and yet continue working all through the horrible years (which I understand still continue) when most writers in my position got a book or two and then were never heard from again.

But I was there, from the inside.  There was some luck in for instance Dave Drake introducing me at Baen.   That was unexpected and very, very lucky.  BUT at the same time, there was the other stuff – that kept me working at the other houses.  There was the summer of the seventeen proposals.  (At the time these consisted of outline and three chapters for each.)  There was another six proposals, when I was asked to submit for the project in which I got assigned Jane Seymour, proposals I didn’t even count in those seventeen, (and which I’d completely forgotten I’d done, till just now.  Oh, frabjus day.  Other than Jane, I have three chapters and an outline I can use for all of those.  Ah! Yes, I’ll still need to research, but I think I have research notes still with those, too.  Not that any of this will happen until I finish the books for Baen and also the four Shifters, Bowl of Red.)

At that time I was in a discussion group and someone was lamenting her series had just died and her agent wanted three proposals for three different series, within the next six months to see if one stuck.  This person was saying she couldn’t, she just couldn’t.  She wasn’t a machine to generate three different SERIES in six months.

I marveled at it, because I’d just done all those proposals.

I’m not saying that to brag.  I know there are different types of writers – those who work only in one universe, often the first they thought of – and those who work in many.  I confess that working in many and in various genres is a particular kind of madness, and that at various times people have attributed to this any issues they see in my work.

Might be true, too, but here’s the thing, the issue is my choice is not between writing a lovingly plotted book over two years, or writing three books very fast, in three different genres.  There is no choice.  Part of the issue with my writing to contract – I’ve found – is that I stop myself writing anything else, even shorts, because I feel I “owe” the book.  But that, inexplicably, then blocks me on the book and slows everything up.  The quality is not … perceptibly different, except that books written more slowly take more editing.  Noah’s Boy took me almost six months (plus three earlier last year, when it fell apart on me and had to be ditched) but A Few Good Men was written in a week and revised in another.  (Though the first paragraph was written six months? A year? Before.) I don’t know how much difference there is between the two, quality wise, (how could I?  I might in ten years) but AFGM was much easier to edit.

So I can block on a book and write it over two years, but the writing time will be about a month, unless I have to ditch several false starts.

The point here is that I have to work in a certain way, because I am who I am.  In some ways, I’d prefer to be the type of person who is methodical and slow, and researches everything in advance, and has bibles for her worlds, and produces two books a year rain or shine.  Much easier than the wild jags of three books in a month, then silence for six months, then…  Or blocking because I’m under contract and can’t allow the safety valve of jumping around genres.

Much better too, to be a grown up of the sort who doesn’t go and over-exert while recovering from illness and therefore gets ill again.  But that’s not my choice.  My choice is to know what I am, instead, and to try to control the wild creature inside when she gets bored.  Lure her away with something more sedentary and calmer “Look, kid, you can design covers.  Pretty covers.”  Not, mind you, wonderful, because I’m fairly sure this last lapse/relapse was brought about by the insane idiot learning to do createspace editions by working 16 hour days, but better than letting her hare off and remodel the bathroom.

This is not an extended whine.  I’m fifty one.  I’ve got used to the fact I yam what I yam.  I just have to live with it and work around it.

When dealing with some of her own character issues that she couldn’t change, my grandmother was known to sigh and say “We don’t make ourselves.”

And this is ultimately what I come to. We don’t make ourselves.  Sometimes we don’t even know ourselves very well.  And people outside had no chance of getting it either.

Our friend thought Dan and I were “lucky” – not panicked enough to look for work – both writing and a job for him – so desperately that we were bound to find something.

And my first reaction to the lady whining about writing three proposals over six months was to say “buck up.  Why are you whining?”

But for her that might have been an Herculean task.  It would be for someone who needs to “live” in a world before they write in it, and I know people who need to do that for years.  It might be an impossible task.

And this is why most government social programs – you knew I was coming to it, right? – are ineffective, and also possibly why they oscillate between permissiveness and harshness.  Because people tend to assume other people are like them and it depends on who is in charge.  If I were in charge of social relief, I’d be mildly puzzled at people who don’t even try to dig out, and I’d try to chase them up slope.  People like me probably invented work houses.  (Fortunately I have zero attention span, so I’d institute wo- houses.  There would be this system, designed to do… something, but I’d be off to the next project.)  Though of course, because I know – I KNOW – how different people can be and because I hate the blunt force that is government, I’d just have these places where you could get fed when you hit rock bottom, but where you could only stay for x amount of time.  Not ideal, mind, but possibly the best that could be done, like the best that can be done with my mind is writing a lot of books at the same time.

On the other hand people like the writer who was having trouble doing three proposals, would overestimate how hard things are for people, and would be all therapeutic and nurturing, and end up with a lot of life-long welfare cases.

Because some people are self starters, some people are starters, and some people never start – though they might work well enough if told where and when to do it, and kept on task.  (I don’t like that last.  It’s ripe for abuse.  But some people need it.  “Structure” the schools call it.)

If our own close friends had a view of us as “lucky” instead of “scrambling”, how can the government access what type of person you are and what you need to dig out of a hole?  They can’t.  Or to figure out how you got in it? – note how long it took me to figure out I was circumventing my own recoveries – or…

It always ends up devolving, in any top-down system, into people who think you’d be exactly like them, “if only” which usually translates to “if only you were working ‘properly’” – i.e. how they do. Or if the system were working properly.  (I think part of the issue, if you are envious of the “rich” is that.  You view the “rich” as lucky.  Are some of them lucky?  Oh, sure.  Right time, right place, right contacts.  But most of them – those who aren’t crony capitalists – also did something to deserve their good luck.  Desperate work, or blood, sweat and tears, or wild creativity.)

But none of us from the outside can tell how ‘lucky” someone was, or what they “should” be doing.  And anything that is centrally administered and from the government ends up devolving into a pseudo moral code – with deviation a sort of sin.

(I have more to say here, about body types and centrally regulated health care, but that has to wait till tomorrow, because this is already too long.)

And when you depend on the public purse to pull you out of a hole, you’re vulnerable to the public view of how you operate.  Even if it’s not sane or accurate.

It’s like living under your parents’ roof, you have to live under their rules, even if you turn out to operate in a very different manner.  Only when it’s the government, it’s much harder to move out of the basement and get your star trek posters off the walls, and sometimes the rules themselves prevent it.

So – you don’t know yourself.  And your friends might have a totally inaccurate idea of who you are.  So, why would you trust a government bureaucracy to know better than that?

 

 

 

92 thoughts on “Making and Unmaking Ourselves”

  2. I think I drove my parents nuts when I was a kid because of my short attention span. One week it was chemistry, the next it was electronics, then biology, then astronomy …

    Part of the problem is that I’d read everything I could get my hands on on whatever my interest was, and when the supply of readables on topic [X] ran out, I really had to move on to something else.

    Like

  3. People outside don’t see the duck’s problem, they just see the duck moving smoothly across the water. The frantically paddling feet and the alligator gar lurking just below and behind the duck are invisible. And then people are surprised and upset when the duck/writer suddenly goes bonkers, wings flailing, quacking like mad. Or (in my case), the duck keeps going, trying to ignore the gar, and suddenly vanishes underwater, emerging downstream minus some feathers and wondering what the h-ll just hit her.

    Like

    1. Oh yes.

      The difference between the visible and invisible. You can see it in fiction where the stories from Sherlock Holmes’s POV — or the one from Jeeves’s — are insufferable because we have to see their inner workings, but the ones from the outside are excellent.

      If only we could produce things as wonderful for our surprises.

      Like

  4. Branch Rickey, builder of multiple successful Baseball franchises and the man who brought Jackie Robinson to the majors, had this to say about luck:

    “Things worthwhile generally don’t just happen. Luck is a fact, but should not be a factor. Good luck is what is left over after intelligence and effort have combined at their best. Negligence or indifference are usually reviewed from an unlucky seat. The law of cause and effect and causality both work the same with inexorable exactitudes. Luck is the residue of design.”

    Like

  5. We don’t make ourselves.

    Yes, we do.

    Our parents and our culture set the initial conditions, but we build our self and rebuild our self constantly.

    We just don’t get any choice about the raw materials.

    Like

    1. One of my favorite quotes from my favorite Psych professor in college: “From correlational studies, we can show that 49% of personality comes from genetics and 49% from environment. The other 2%? Yeah, we really don’t know where the hell that comes from.” :)

      Like

      1. Really? they’ve established that environment does that much? What factors? I’ve heard that it’s about half genes. And half Heaven knows what — maybe even free will.

        No one is blame for his nature, only for what he does with it. A principle so old that it was first used to discuss stellar influences.

        Like

        1. “half genes” is REALLY REALLY close to 49%.

          I wouldn’t give it that much, but I don’t have a soon-to-be-retracted-or-refuted study to point to :)

          Like

          1. I think it depends on the person. If my dad had — G-d forbid — died when my younger son was born, I’d be convinced he was dad’s reincarnation. They have the same expressions, the same tastes, and hit the same developmental points at the same time. (Like stopping sucking their thumbs at six.) their clothing taste is the same, they enjoy the same sports… It goes on and on.

            Like

            1. Funny thing that. My Dad graduated high school at 6’2″, 220lbs, wearing a size 13 shoe. So did I, though I did end up adding another inch to that. Compare our senior photos side-by-side, mine’s in color and I’m wearing contacts, otherwise they’re identical. And the first time a family doctor met me as a child, he looked at my Mom and told her that he’d know I was her dad’s grandson because I walked exactly the same as him.

              When Dad joined the Army, he was first a radar computer mechanic (yeah, he literally had a set of wrenches to adjust the computer) and later went into electronic organ repair on the side. One brother and I are IT guys. There are other parallels going back even further in the family tree. One of the biggest differences I see between my family and most “normal’ people is an increased mental flexibility. The ability to wrap our minds around different skills, the ability to apply lessons learned and pull inspiration from one area to create success in other, unrelated pursuits. From reading comments here over the last few months, I think the same could be said about most of the people around here.

              Like

        2. Keeping in mind that this took place around 19 years ago (holy cow, it’s been that long?!?!?!?!), that’s the way the math from several studies into personality development broke down. The other thing that I took away from that day’s class was that those same studies showed that personality essentially crystallizes at around 30. We still change after 30, but our base personality really doesn’t, short of a net external stimulus. If anything, we learn to compensate or mask that part of our personality that seems to change after that point.

          Like

  6. Not only do we only get half the picture — exterior vs interior — but we also only get a single point in time. People change. You can’t tell what person is like today from a brief snapshot taken ten years ago. It’s not valid.

    ===================

    I’m desperately afraid to trust myself to the gentle ministrations of the state. Never seen any indication that it’s trustworthy. I resent it deeply that the communists are taking destructive steps to try to force me into a position where I’m left with no good choice BUT to take their bait or die. It’s enough to make a feller want to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and lay about himself with sharp edges.

    M

    Like

    1. I look at things the state and fed levels of government have, ahem, messed up, misjudged, and miscalculated over the years, and my dread and loathing only increase. I’m not a policy expert, I didn’t stay at H-liday Express last night, but I know that there’s a lot I don’t know. Which may be the biggest difference between the first four hundred names in the Boston phone directory and the Ivy League “geniuses” attempting to run the country right now. It’s safer to trust someone who looks at, oh, health insurance in the US and shrugs and says, “Beats the h-ll out of me, but I know this part don’t make sense,” than the person who smiles and says, “I’m an award winning ethicist and economist and the economic models say that you must . . .”

      Like

      1. Exactly. They’ve been told and re-told and proven and re-proven that they’re just so darn smart over and over and over again, that the mere possibility that they could be wrong about something (or that, heaven forfend, their map differs from the territory in several striking and dramatic ways) never enters their heads.

        Which is one of the reasons that world-grade weaponized idiocy usually requires some kind of ivy-league advanced degree.

        Like

  7. The key thing to remember, I’d say, is something along the lines of “if your guilt is over being late, stop doing things (like pushing yourself to work hard while sick) whose net result is that you end up even more late, and stop feeling guilty about doing what it takes to get yourself back to production condition”.

    Like

    1. You shouldn’t push our hostess to feel guilty about feeling guilty. That is only allowed in southern California and I don’t think that she wants to move there.

      Like

      1. Of course not. Because then she’d feel guilty about feeling guilty about feeling guilty. And then she could feel guilty about that, too.

        Recursion is fun! :) (But less so when it’s about feelings of guilt. :( )

        Like

          2. You realize what this means, of course. There is only one way out – There Must Be BLOOD!

            (N.B., all calls for blood are metaphorical, no actual bathing in the blood of lambs, literal or symbolic, is being advocated.)

            Like

          3. You have that backwards. An infinite Guilt loop actually spurs and enhances creativity. It has to do with the way the guiltons entangle with the ideaons, kicking them into a higher energy state and allowing them to couple with the human brain.

            See: The Jewish people.

            Like

  8. I know some very nice adults related to me who have found that a prescription for mild ADHD/ADD drugs helps them focus and do better work. It helps with the distractability. No increase in dosage, no addiction – just a little chemical help with the focusing.

    It didn’t help me (have CFS, probably other stuff) enough to be worth going to a psychiatrist monthly for the prescription, then dropping it off in person, and having to go get it – but it makes the world of difference to some people. I tried it for 10 months and gave up – have you tried anything?

    Just until the boys are settled in their careers and you can THINK again?

    Worth a thought.

    Like

    1. Unless I’m ill, the “look squirrel” method of working works for me. I’d have to unmake my whole personality to become a steady plodder.
      Also, I’d be terrified of any psycho meds. Everything I’ve taken in that line has … uh… bizarre results and unexpected side effects.
      The problem was the stress tilting me into a situation where I MUST chill long enough to get well. I might rediscover crochet.

      Like

        1. Sounds familiar. I have a tendency to quit doing things unless I can do them perfect or at least damn well right away, and second, do them fast. That second part has sometimes led to working sixteen hour days days on end until I start to fail simply because I’m tired, and then giving the whole thing up in disgust when I notice the declining quality. One of the hardest things for me to learn has been plodding, working at something, then working at it a bit more while taking short rest periods (short rests are also difficult to achieve, if I take a break sometimes that can lead to abandoning the whole project), and then working at it again, and trying to just improving slowly, not deciding that I can’t do it or learn to do it simply because I’m not good right from the start. I getting better with that with age, but I can still get so very, very frustrated sometimes when something takes more time, or I don’t do it well enough for my taste (and my taste is very demanding).

          Like

          1. THIS I’m very familiar with. My brain seems to have expectations of immediate (or near so) perfection. Doesn’t help that I pick the basics up very quickly in most cases. The brain then expects perfection should follow in short order.

            Like

          2. It has to be something that I truly don’t want to do all that much before I can just drop it. Otherwise, I focus on it to the exclusion of all else until I am competent, at least. THEN I can slow up. I don’t have to be perfect, because I know I can’t (and no, it’s not because I believe I can’t. Trust me on this, I’m different from that type of person. My brain doesn’t make me slack off because of a simple belief). I have issues, once I reach a certain level of competency, in progressing any further.

            Like

          3. I read about a study children learning new things. If a kid picked up a new skill or did good work on something, some were told they were smart and others were told they must have worked hard. The ones who were told they were smart were more reluctant to take on the next task. The ones who were told the good result was the product of hard work were ready to tackle the next project. I think this was it: http://www.parentingscience.com/praise-and-intelligence.html
            The implications in the article I read were that those praised for intelligence felt that they didn’t know where it came from, how they did it, or if they could make it happen again. Those praised for having worked hard were able to attribute their success to their effort, something they could control.
            The linked article mentions that the kids praised for their intelligence took any failure as a sign of not being intelligent.
            Kind of makes one cautious about putting effect before cause, like by handing out unearned praise.

            Like

            1. I recall reading about that finding. Notice that praise for being smart is praise for what you are, while praise for working hard is praise for what you do. In the first instance that becomes part of your identity and must be protected, in the second case it also becomes part of your identity but can be exercised and developed.

              One major problem “smart” kids have is that many academic tasks come easily to them, therefore when the meet an academic task which is challenging they have no experience of overcoming that challenge. This in turn impairs them.

              Like

              1. And protecting one’s “smartness” becomes debilitating, because one is frightened of challenging it. I’ve seen this happen, both in my own cohort and with my kids’ peers.

                Like

              2. I was raised to think that hard work was the important thing. But I could get adequate results in school without it, and since I was lazy (and found school boring since I could usually understand the things easily enough) I mostly just settled for those. The end result was that I went through school with this feeling I was in some way cheating and a fake, and I was always scared the adults would find out so I would pretend I worked, talk about and so on, plus I was always feeling guilty over the fact that I didn’t work for my grades. Probably my mother knew I was underachieving, but she may have been the only one. She used to keep asking me to study harder.

                The fact that maybe I was ‘smart’ – or had high IQ anyway – and that was the reason why I didn’t have to work the way most of the other kids did only occurred to me when I was already an adult and started to wonder how I had done it (and until I found out I myself really did have high IQ I had assumed that would mean everything would be easy to those people, they’d be ones who wouldn’t have to work at all to get dazzling results. Alas, not so, even if it’s relatively easy to understand the basics or even past them you’d still have to study, practice and memorize in order to get where you can really use anything, same as it would be when somebody has perfect pitch, that alone does not make a person into a Mozart. What a disappointment.).

                But the end result was the same anyway, I didn’t learn good work habits.

                Like

                1. And I don’t remember anyone ever telling me that I must have worked hard when I got good grades, and the fact is I wouldn’t have believed because I knew I hadn’t. But nobody ever told me I was smart either. I was easy, good enough grades, never caused much trouble, quiet, and mostly I had the feeling I was sort of half invisible to most people, people noticed me when I tried to make them notice me but not otherwise. And since I had these guilt feelings over my school work I mostly preferred not being noticed, that felt much safer.

                  Like

    2. It’s not QUITE ADHD. I can and do concentrate (and work) very intensely in bursts of up to a month or two. I had had the same issue with my oldest son in kindergarten where the teacher told me “We’d like to say it’s ADHD, but it’s not. He just works best if he works on multiple projects at once, but he concentrates very hard and has no problems sitting still if he has to.” In writing, because so much of it seems to come from the subconscious (yes, I hate that with the fire of a thousand suns, but it is what it is) it’s like what I do in other projects feeds into the main one. I often have sister-books that have bloody nothing in common — Gentleman Takes A Chance and Soul of Fire — but tilting from one to the other, you can see me working on similar techniques and doing it in one environment allows me to turn the more difficult corner in the other. The problem is guilt — basically — both guilt that gets me to work before I’m ready for it, and guilt that pushes me to try to do only “the book under contract” and then block hard because I don’t have the technique.
      I can think today, which is why the temptation to work is so bad. BUT what I’ll do is take things easy through tomorrow night, when we have house guests (and when I want to be well) and then start work in earnest on Wednesday.

      Like

      1. History majors are notorious for reading several books at once, which I thought was hilarious when I first found out — because my dad was a history major and he does that ALLLLL the time.

        I, on the other hand, used to think that the Rule of Existence was that you must read every page of every book from the beginning until the end without switching to other reading material, or it was just wrong. (I don’t feel this way anymore, but it still seems like the Platonic ideal of reading.)

        Like

          1. You’re kidding, right? Who doesn’t read multiple books simultaneously? I’m always reading a fiction and a non-fiction, and an audiobook (right now I’m “reading” two, depending on which car I’m in.) I also have at least two additional non-fiction books in process, each put aside because certain (not really relevant) quirks of the author got to be sufficiently annoying I had to put the book aside (one kept inserting quotes of Paul Erlich as if the man were other than a lunatic, the other switched parties and ran for the Senate as a Democrat.)

            That doesn’t count short story collections or the like, nor the two books Beloved Spouse and I are doing as a read-aloud. There are also a couple if books I put aside to read their appendices at a later time.

            Nor does it count the books I put down midway through because I forgot I was reading them.

            The reason History buffs do that, of course, is to get multiple perspectives on the period in question, allowing the information to be cross-referenced and cross-checked.

            I used to read far more simultaneous books but this internet thing has taken up a good bit of my spare reading capacity.

            Like

            1. I started to count the number of books I’m partway through reading currently. I gave up at around a dozen. About one third non-fiction – mostly military history – and the rest SF&F.

              Like

            3. I don’t often actually have multiple books on the same topic going at once, although I had a Napoleonic streak going last month. Christopher Hibbert’s bio of Wellington, Sugden’s bio of Nelson, a book on Napoleon’s campaign’s post 1807 and a book on the US Navy during War of 1812.

              Like

                1. I just picked up a book on the Meuse-Argonne campaign in 1918 “To Conquer Hell”. But I don’t usually read much WWI. Saw a huge wargame on WWI eastern front last summer at a convention but it is a tough topic to wargame.

                  Like

  9. There’s also the issue that our self perception lags behind current reality.
    My spinning stuff stayed at home when I went to college, and hasn’t been used since, yet I still think of myself as a spinner. But am I really? I know I could pull it out and get back to it easily if I ever had time. . . (since I play ‘cello, I have oodles of manual dexterity.)

    Like

    1. Yes. when we move from this house and hopefully reduce square footage (both for economic and “Sarah doesn’t have time to deal with this large a place” reasons) part of the issue will be clearly identifying “this hobby was important once, but I’ll never have the time to do it again.”

      Like

  10. I’m not visual, and the same thing that keeps me from paying much attention to TV makes games not riveting enough (and yes, I know the state of the art. My sons play them.) Unfortunately if I find a game that is riveting enough to play for extended periods, I’m likely to become addicted. Which is why I’ve played very lightly ever since I lost two years to Tetris. (Laugh, go ahead.)

    Last night we started in on Ragnarok 2– it’s free on Steam– with me commenting on how it looked like original World of Warcraft.

    “Shortly” thereafter, my husband looked up and said “hey, it’s (three hours later.) I’m supposed to be in bed, now….”

    It’s not that the story is amazing, it’s that it’s engaging.

    Not sure if I recommend it or not!

    Like

    1. My wife used to give me grief about Civilization for that very reason.

      Then I loaded it on HER computer. She was a couple hours late to bed.

      Like

      1. Civilization (the original one with no Roman numerals after it) was the game that taught me what it’s like to be surprised by the sunrise. As in, “Wait, it’s morning already? Wasn’t it just 10:00 PM a couple hours ago?”

        Like

        1. HA HA HA HA HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! If I had a dollar for every time that’s happened to me…:)

          Last one for me was when I started playing MineCraft on server with a couple guys at work (and this was back around beta 1.1). Got home just a few minutes after 5 one evening, changed clothes and hopped on the server for the first time. After playing for a few minutes, I got up to use the bathroom and saw the clock. It was 3 AM and then I noticed that I was kinda hungry (this coming from a guy who is rarely not hungry). That happened pretty much every night for the next two weeks. It took that long for me to train myself to push away from the computer earlier…and it still happens once every month or two.

          Like

    2. The Oyster Wife had a revelation when I got her to join me in Azeroth for the first time. After a few days (she’d been questing a lot) she told me that she had always gotten annoyed at how long it took me to get off once she asked me. It was always, “Just let me finish this quest” or “I just need to hearth and put a couple of things in the AH” and then an hour later… “But now I see”, she told me, “there really is no ‘good place to stop’. There’s always something else to do right there!” And we lived happily ever after in Darnassus (we have a summer home in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms).

      Why yes, I am a very happy, very lucky geek. No, you may not have her. No, she does not have a sister.

      Like

  11. Those things that correlate to ‘short attention span’ in your description also correlate to ‘generalist.’ The focus and attention I’d think it’d take to do a novel in a week (or three days) doesn’t read as short attention span to me, a random guy on the internet.

    I’ve had to accept that I’m a generalist, and that I live in a largely specialist world. I have wide and ridiculously varied interests, and I’ll drill down intently on an interest with obsessive focus until…I’m done. My inner demon decides he’s got enough info and it’s time for something else, because bored. I carry reading material with me everywhere, because I don’t want to be stuck reading tabloids or candy wrappers.

    The upside of all this, I have wide ranging ideas and perspectives. I find it easier to relate to people through their specialties. And I get to figure ways to utilize subfields across disciplines.

    The downside? This is a group of odds, with more than a few specialists. I don’t think I need to enumerate the downside.

    Like

  12. So is Bowl of Red not coming from Baen? Would a post at Toni’s Table help? I’m sure I could round up some support if need be. We did similar after Darkship Thieves came out and it worked.

    Like

    1. No, no, no. Hopefully it will be coming out from Baen. it’s just not under contract, and I’d prefer to keep it that way, until it lands on Toni’s desk. I want to finish the two under contract FIRST, then Bowl of Red.

      Like

      1. Understood. I thought it might be something like that. That’s why I asked. That makes a lot of sense as well.

        Like

  13. Have you noticed that certain types of stories work well together? Is it a matter of, oh, genre, tone or theme or time period/culture? While sticking to the book that is contracted and due is logical and sensible, allowing yourself to have an “on spec or maybe just to amuse the fans because it’s so bad” book going on the side might prevent the formation of the block on the contract work. It might even be useful, letting your subconscious roam a bit and possibly produce something that needs to be added to the contract book.

    Like

      1. Sic your Muse on the Guilt Thing. In my experience, the Muse always wins. It’s rooted deeper than the Guilt. “This is a creative process, Guilt Thing! Logic does not apply, but I have this nifty new virtual taser, and I will apply _it_ if you don’t get out of the way!”

        Like

        1. I have this mental image of Muse and Guilt going at it in a lucha libre match. Thaaaaanks.

          (For the non-familiar, lucha libre is sort of like WWF wrestling but with masks, among other things. It predates the WWF.)

          Like

            1. Ever since hearing others talk about Guillermo Del Toro’s love of lucha libre, I can’t watch Pacific Rim without seeing the robots / kaiju as lucha competitors.

              Like

              1. Bah — the mecha and monsters weren’t nearly maneuverable enough for Lucha Libre; watching the Free Mexican Air Force in action, one wonders how in hell people can actually pull off bumps like that and not kill themselves outright. (Yes, I watched the Monday Night Wars — I needed some entertainment. :) )

                Like

                1. Training and special effects, sir. I work with some of the guys that get hit in the head with steel chairs and fall ten feet onto concrete for *fun.*

                  Also, some of the older guys have medical history that puts pro boxers and NASCAR drivers to shame. It may be on-stage improv drama, but gravity and physics pull no punches.

                  Like

  15. Geez– I woke up this morning with a headache and I finally figured out what my problem has been the last couple of weeks– a sinus infection. Now if I would just take the time to clean them out. So I have been reading up a storm and relaxing. I was going to write today. *sigh Plus the weather is changing– hopefully I won’t have a migraine tomorrow.

    Like

  16. It’s kind of tangential to your main concern, but I have to say I’m not enthusiastic about people feeling guilty about things. I haven’t much tendency to guilt myself, but from observing people who do, it seems to me that at best, guilt has very little effect on people’s behavior, and at worst, it invites them to feel that they’ve made the behavior all right by feeling bad about it, or even that since they’ve felt guilty they deserve to make themselves feel better by engaging in the behavior again—that is, it sometimes seems to perpetuate the very acts that occasion it. There’s a certain streak of that running through the self-punitive sorts of progressivism, I think, but it applies more widely than that.

    Like

    1. No. It doesn’t make me feel the behavior is all right. Guilt is never ending… it’s very annoying.
      In my case it’s mostly brought on by falling short of what I think are my lofty standards. Don’t go there. there be dragons.

      Like

        1. Well TXRed, Sarah’s just saying “don’t intrude on dragons if you’re not welcome”. Why would Silverdrake and myself have problems with that? [Very Big Dragon Grin]

          Like

    2. I would say that such people aren’t feeling real guilt. They’re more feeling a kind of self-indulgent angst that doesn’t drive them to do something about it.

      However, there ARE types of guilt that will perpetuate the behavior that generated the guilt in the first place, such as that which leads to depression, causing the person to have a lack of willpower to do the things that will pull them out of the spiral.

      Like

    3. My spiritual counselors, pastors, teachers, and what have you have always distinguished between guilt and what they referred to as “godly sorrow”. The one says “I have made this wrong choice and am therefore a terrible person”. The other says “I have made this wrong choice. I shouldn’t have, and I am sad that I have disappointed God and myself. Now lets go do better.” The central principle can be applied equally well to a secular mindset.

      Like

  18. If you like to build stuff minecraft can be your friend (speaking as one fresh off a two day MC bender). I use it to help me visualize major story settings. I love just playing infinite legos with it. There’s something about building my own inner world in a way that enables other people to explore it and add to it that I cant get enough of!

    I have a similar problem to you, yet I have trouble finding the balance between comfortably occupied with many things and so overcommitted that I start to freeze up. I’m usually ok at hitting short deadlines but focusing long term on only one thing is a problem. Also I have a hard time saying no and I sometimes let people set unrealistic expectations for me. Which I do everything in my power to meet, including days on end with less than five hours sleep, or totally abandoning all my other non client work until I come out of the crash that happens after. Wether I succeed or not there is always a crash. Sometimes I get so stressed I kick up my heels and bugger off to do something else entirely for a few hours…. or days.

    Such as this:
    https://plus.google.com/115525282353377280191/posts

    Like

Comments are closed.