Keeping on task

I know a fellow writer turning pro, I'll post about his work sometime in the near future. He got an agent, which in itself is a pretty good accomplishment. After a few months of waiting, his agent was negotiating with a big publisher where at least a few of the editors loved his work.

That's good news, soon to be followed by bad news. A week from last Saturday, he had a “minor” heart attack. It was somewhat fortunate, because it turned out he had a whole bunch of artery blockages. It's better than a "silent" heart attack, where a part of your heart dies without saying anything, and much better than a "loud" major heart attack. He's only 44, and is a health nut and martial arts expert. You talk about being struck just on the edge of success. He must have a very strong family history of heart disease to have that happen to him.

He went through his multi-bypass operation and is now recovering, but what a scare and ordeal. And no, I don't know what's happening with the book deal. He hasn't shared that.



I went to a certain site, 750words, which is basically a running contest to make you produce 750 words a day. I did it for eleven days, and found to my relief and pride that I could produce 750 words of raw text in 20-30 minutes. It took other people on the site an average of 59 minutes. For once, I've become fast at something. I can pretty much spool text out as fast as I can type. Also, I did it for eleven days in a row.

However, today I deleted my account. Somehow, the commitment to write that much of anything every morning was throwing the rest of my day out of kilter. I proved that I could do it. I could have kept it up through the August challenge they had. It was easy to do. I could have produced 24,000 words in a month.

But it felt like a waste if I could be writing that for my blog or my fiction. To be cranking out doggerel every morning. I proved I could write fast, and that's a real confidence-builder for me. With my attention deficit problem, I've been slow at things all my life. However, I didn't find the points and badges the site gave out to be rewarding enough.   

Creative writing isn't a matter of production. Yes, certain writers will tell you their production that day in terms of hundreds and thousands of words, and I've done that. However, it's misleading. You must re-pharse, correct, restate. You have to find the right words, not just the ones that come quickly.

Nevertheless, it's such a relief to know that if I'm stuck, all I have to do is take off the filters and go full  throttle. If I can write 750 words in a half hour, there's bound to be something in it that leads me out of the block.

Why have I been gone? I've been doing a lot. A list of tasks I've challenged myself to complete. Some are big projects, some are small tasks. Such as I've organized my computer with dozens of automated backups of data, which turned out to be very convenient when I had to reload Windows yesterday. Suddenly today I got permission locked out of one of my hard disk partitions. I mean, it just happened after my computer downloaded some Windows updates last night. All of a sudden, one of my backup partitions was telling me, the Owner/Administrator, that I didn't even have permission to read the disk! I thought I had a virus and downloaded Malwarebytes and SuperAntiSpyware, two of the best cleansing programs out there. Sure enough, the programs found a few things, but before they did, (the thorough searches take a few hours) I already regained access to the disk partition. It turned out to be simple, I needed to grant access to myself, and not just my group.

I think it was a glitch that had something to do with the Windows updates. That's the only way I can account for it working perfectly yesterday and blocking me today.

Reloading Windows 7 is boring, but there's really nothing to it, as long as you already have everything backed up, and have all the drivers on hand, and have all the programs that you need to reload. One of the reasons why I had to do a reload was the previous one wouldn't let me make restore points. That was only one of the glitches. Then it took to freezing up on me, so I decided to throw my plans away yesterday and just reload.

I am looking into Ubuntu. I've been somewhat reluctant since my previous effort with Linux wasn't really satisfying.

Tomorrow I'm focused on getting my installment done for the writers' group. It's a good thing I've got a fully working desktop again, though the laptop could have filled in.