Productivity in bursts

February 1st 2012 at 9:12 pm

In late December I stumbled across this article: How To Increase Productivity and Enjoy Life More.

Intrigued. Here’s the nut:

Our most fundamental need as human beings is to spend and renew energy.

and

In the renowned 1993 study of young violinists, performance researcher Anders Ericsson found that the best ones all practiced the same way: in the morning, in three increments of no more than 90 minutes each, with a break between each one. Ericcson found the same pattern among other musicians, athletes, chess players and writers.

Well huh, that is not at *all* how I usually work. I usually struggled to find big huge blocks of time without interruption so I could attain ‘flow.’

But experimentation is important. I used the principle to divide my productive time into chunks of the day with specific breaks (walking, napping, and playing video games) in between them.

I could talk more about it, in fact I wrote like a 1,000 word entry, and deleted it all. But that article is a very interesting one, and it helped me write 30,000 words in one month, revise half a book, and do this while dealing with walking pneumonia.

I’m curious to see if that holds true. In fact, even though this month was an experiment in self examination, I’ll be extending the schedule designed using it to February to see if I get the same result.

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My first novel, Crystal Rain on sale for $2.99!

February 1st 2012 at 3:48 pm

Hey, been toying with the idea of picking up my first novel Crystal Rain as an eBook but not gotten around to it? You may be interested to find out it’s on sale for $2.99 for those of you with Kindles.

Don’t forget, you can read the first 1/3 of it for free here.

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The Apocalypse Ocean: January Report

February 1st 2012 at 3:28 pm

I started writing The Apocalypse Ocean on January 1st. I mentioned that I’d recently quit my afternoon gig as an editor for a cool blog to focus more on writing and making eBooks. A terrifying jump, but it’s one that will hopefully allow me to write more, and get the snowball rolling. Focus on what you are best at, and all that.

My last day at the editing gig was on the 16th. Since the 9th I’ve been battling something my doctor strongly suspects is ‘walking pneumonia,’ which has left me exhausted and coughing up all sorts of nastiness.

All that aside, I’ve been focusing on working every day on repeatable, achievable chunks of manuscript averaging about 500 words a day so that I can get a first draft in, and have time to have it copyedited and looked over by readers I trust for editing purposes, by June (as promised). And so far we look to be dead on track for it.

The Apocalypse Ocean is currently 26,186 words and 15 chapters, which means I’m putting the finishing touches on the first third of the book (est. 45 chapters long). I did have 8,000 or so words already written in the form of a short story, which had been adapted/reduced/boiled down from 20,000 words I’d written back in 2008. I’ve written roughly 18,000 new words on the book this month.

Of course, those words don’t matter if they’re not the right ones! So far I’ve been very pleased with the first third of the book. I’ve been waiting to write it for almost three years, so it’s been a very pleasant task, returning to this world.

Now comes the tricky part. The second part of the book is less outlined and explored in my own mind, which means more exploratory writing and backtracking as I go along.

However, I’m beginning my third week of focusing more on writing, am healthier (still not out of the woods, but no longer wake up feeling like I got run over the night before), so I’m guessing those two will cancel each other out.

I’m a nerd of a writer in that I keep an excel spreadsheet that I update the novel’s word count in, as well as what I write during each writing session. It calculates my words per hour and extrapolates the deadline I’ll hit based on my average rate over the last month’s work of work, and everything is green on The Apocalypse Ocean.

I can’t wait to share the whole book with everyone.

If you haven’t pre-ordered The Apocalypse Ocean, you can see the direct sales page for it here.

Some people have asked about upgrading their existing reward levels. I’ve set up a page that allows you to do that here as well.

I think that covers all the bases. I’ll send another update on February 29th summarizing where the book is to everyone.

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The ill-fated Lady Be Good

January 31st 2012 at 12:02 pm

I was doing some quick referencing digging about how long people survive in the desert without water when I came across the story of the ill-fated Lady Be Good, a US bomber that went down in Libya during WWII.

No happy ending to this tale, but I’ve always been transfixed by stories of missing planes and the like. No one knew what had happened to the crew for almost fifteen years.

I can’t get the idea of these men setting out for days of travel with no water in the desert in the wrong direction out of the back of my head. It’s horrifying, sad, and somewhat epic all at once.

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Go Halo Go!

January 30th 2012 at 10:05 am

If you’ve got little ones my twins’ age, you’ve probably watched your fair share of Dora, or Go Diego Go.

If you’ve done that and played Halo, then you might, possibly, find this as hilarious as I did:

(props to whoever in my wife’s Spanish class asked her to pass the link on to me)

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Coca Cola in your body

January 29th 2012 at 9:24 am

I stopped drinking Coca Cola in high school when I was working on a small freight ship. I’d have to de-rust it. To do that, I would take a phosphoric acid solution and put it in a windex bottle, and then walk around the metal ship and spray rust spots with it.

It was usually windy, so phosphoric acid would blow into my face and mouth. The first day I did that, I had a Coca Cola on my lunch break, and realized that I could right away, and would forever, be able to taste the phosphoric acid in the Coca Cola (it’s why you can put pennies in Coca Cola to clean them). Now that I’d tasted it direct, I could taste it in Coca Cola.

It’s the distinct difference between Pepsi and Coca Cola tastes.

So I switched to Pepsi (still just as bad for me, but less smacking me upside the tongue with the phosphoric acid), and would drink 6-8 cans a day, sometimes more. I never quit until 2008, when my cardiologist banned me from it due to the fact that I have a heart defect that is not well served by goosing things with stimulants of any kinds (none of the good flu medicine for me, no caffeine, no big doses of chocolate, etc etc).

Reading this link (found via Marjorie Liu) makes me somewhat glad I have been off the stuff for 3 years now. What happens to your body when you drink a can of Coke:

In the first 10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system. (100% of your recommended daily intake.) You don’t immediately vomit from the overwhelming sweetness because phosphoric acid cuts the flavour, allowing you to keep it down.

20 minutes: Your blood sugar spikes, causing an insulin burst. Your liver responds to this by turning any sugar it can get its hands on into fat. (And there’s plenty of that at this particular moment.)

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Cult Pop interview

January 29th 2012 at 1:23 am

Jim Hall at CultPop, a Detroit-area TV show, has always been nice and taken the time to interview me over the years when I have a new book about to drop, and he hunted me down while I was at Confusion. We did a long interview about my new book, new ways to publish, and all that fun stuff.

Warning, it turns out I was fighting walking pneumonia while this was being filmed (so totally going to have that sport coat professionally steam cleaned this week), which means I was a) doing my damnedest not to break out into a coughing fit on camera, which actually took a fair amount of processing cycles and b) was pretty fatigued by Sunday, although I was writing it off then as normal. Looking back I can see I was a bit out of it.

Nonetheless, Jim and I had fun, and you can see the results by going to CultPop.com (or if you watch the show in Detroit).

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Responsive Comics

January 28th 2012 at 8:04 pm

Pablo Defendini used the opening pages of Sly Mongoose to do a quick test of his idea of responsive comics design for browsers/tablets/phones. Boing Boing recently picked up his presentation and featured it.

Here’s the very cool YouTube embed:

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New planting zone map reflects global warming’s impact on where things can be planted

January 27th 2012 at 2:37 pm

When I was adding plants to my garden this year I found a fascinating fact that some of the plants that used to not be able to be planted in my zone were now being recommended for it.

The US Dept. of Agriculture has caught up, and is changing the planting zones map. This will go out next year on all packets of seeds and planting zone recommendations:

It’s the first time since 1990 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has revised the official guide for the nation’s 80 million gardeners, and much has changed. Nearly entire states, such as Ohio, Nebraska and Texas, are in warmer zones.

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US R&D map shows country falling behind

January 27th 2012 at 2:33 pm

A presentation that comes with a map, via Neil Degrasse Tyson, that looks at the shocking change in US science research over the last 10 years:

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