So while waiting for the cake to get done, I read Jerry Oltion's 50 Strategies for Making Yourself Work over at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America website. Some great ideas there, specially if you are as pathologically distractable as I am. I love that he's collected all these because, while some people can use just the one strategy throughout their lives, he tends to subvert any given strategy after a while and so needs to switch tactics to get results. I do that. I do that more often than I admit. Subvert, that is. It's not that I don't like writing or find it tedious or anything - writing (and dancing) give me more joy than anything else. It's just getting started, which requires sifting through ideas to find the one or two or three most worth developing. And as soon as I get started on one, another pops up to distract me, so I follow it up for a while, until another one pops up, and so on. So I've got tons of beginnings and endings (I like endings), but not a whole lot to go in the middle.

I also find goal-oriented writing much more easy than just writing for the hell of it. I'm happy with deadlines. Stressed, freaked, overcaffeinated, sleepless, and generally unpleasant to be around, but happy. But artificial goals don't fool me. For a writer, I'm quite resistant to the whole suspension of disbelief thing. (Made me a frustrating kid too, because I wouldn't believe that drains gurgled because there were tigers trapped in them. Drain small, tiger big. Does not compute.) So the thing to do is to hornswaggle another person into writing with you. That way, you have the stress of not letting the other person down to keep you at the keyboard. I've only had one writing 'date' so far, but with another one this Friday it's actually working. Or I am, rather. Well, except for the cake baking and the blogging, but I have excuses for that.