Month: March 2022

Sprinting in Discord

Lynn

If you’re in many writing themed servers on Discord, you’ll probably know all about sprinting and sprint channels. What it is is something like a chat with features specifically for people sprinting to get words.

Most use a bot that you set as a timer with something like _sprint for 20 in 3 which translates to start a twenty minute sprint in three minutes, for me and whoever joins me. Then you join the sprint with a beginning word count, and when it’s over, you update your word count and it tracks the numbers for you, doing all that pesky math if you want it to.

I don’t need it for that, because I use my own spreadsheet. But I like the community of it when I’m having a hard time focusing.

Today, I realized that although I like the community of it, I never seem to get in flow doing them in the same way I can when I run my own timer, and I rarely end up with any appreciable word counts after even long sessions of them.

Basically, time spent in the sprinting channel does not translate into a commensurate number of new words.

This is probably a case of me liking them the way I like chocolates and candies. They’re delicious, but they aren’t doing me any favors.

So, this is my post to myself to say I’m not going to do them anymore.

I can hang out in Discord when I want to chat about writing with other writers, but using it for sprints is not a fit for my personal work style. It’s time I admit that and take the necessary steps to make sure I’m writing to my fullest potential when I’m focused enough to do it.

Sometimes, it’s hard for me to remember the things I’ve set my mind to do and not to do, but writing things down sometimes helps. I won’t say always, as the dining room chair I am now doing my writing in again reminds me. My post about that is coming sooneventually. ;D

Making changes

Lynn

I changed my website’s WordPress theme. I like this new one for the most part.

My sidebar is missing, and I miss it, but the options for themes with a sidebar were limited by my requirements and what I wanted. So I’m learning to live with it.

All the links you could find in the sidebar are now at the bottom of the page.

And the good news is that my archive pages, category and tag pages, too, now show a summary or excerpt instead of the whole post. So you can skim a little easier to find what you want, if that’s something you want to do.

I also added a new link into the top menu called “I write” to make it just a little quicker to get to some of those pages that were linked in the sidebar.

Overall, I’m happy with the change, but we shall see if I like it long-term. Sometimes it can take me a few weeks to really decide how I feel after I make a change. :)

Ah, the critical voice

Lynn

Critical voice is that part of yourself that wants you to be perfect. Since perfection doesn’t exist, that voice will win any argument it starts.

The trick is not to argue with it.

It’s that person at the party that you can’t have a discussion with because they aren’t really listening, they’re just thinking ahead to their next rebuttal. But, but, but…

You can’t argue with those people (why are you trying?) and you can’t argue with your critical voice.

It knows all your secrets and it knows all your weak spots.

It knows mine.

I’m going through my own battles with critical voice right now. I recognized today that something I thought wasn’t even related was, in fact, just a sign that my inner critic had gotten the best of me.

When the critical voice is winning, it’s hiding from you. It doesn’t want you to realize it’s there, because you might fight back.

But you can’t attack it directly, with words, with reason. It’s not reasonable. And it will win.

You have to put it in a closet, or in the ground. You have to bury it, and ignore it, and pretend you don’t see its ghost out of the corner of your eye. It will hide in the shadows and it will claw at your brain. The moment you look at it and say I know you’re there, it will go into hiding again, to wait, to lurk, to sulk.

Face it and it will hide. Ignore it and it will lose.

Give it a voice, and you’re the one who loses.

It can feel like an unending effort to ignore something buried so deep inside you that you can never cut it out.

It’s worth it. Writing is never more fun than it is when you’re completely, unabashedly ignoring your inner critic.

I see critical voice as one facet of perfectionism. Perfectionism will destroy your soul. It will kill every creative thought you have. So guard against it. Fight tooth and nail to keep it out of the light and out of your head.

Here are some of my favorite links about critical voice for further reading. Some address critical voice directly. Some talk about things that are a sign that your critical voice is making trouble, even if you don’t recognize it as such.

Boy am I glad I’m not exclusive to Amazon (one more reason to be happy wide)

Lynn

Ah, I got fired up tonight and wrote a post for my personal site about Amazon and their shitty ways of mistreating people. If you’re bored, go read it. If you want to share in the hate, leave a comment. :-)

The incident left me deeply unsettled as an author who depends on KDP for a significant chunk of author earnings.

Although I’ve been wide with my books from the beginning and intended to stay that way, this made me even more so determined to stay away from exclusivity with anyone, but especially with Amazon. They just can’t be trusted. Whether it is incompetence, willful ignorance, or deliberate shady dealings by the employees in charge, there’s just no way to know. But I won’t risk it.

I finally started a Patreon and opened a Ko-fi account. I’ve been looking at some other alternative publishing paths, too. Specifically for a Kindle Vella story I started last year. I had put off branching out with it, even though they had to cave on their terms to allow authors to put their stories up with other paying markets, or risk no one being willing to give it a shot. I’m going to make sure I get that taken care of this month.

Amazon doesn’t deserve my exclusivity, anywhere, even for a little side project I only started to get me writing regularly again.

At the time the incident happened, I wasn’t in the mood to write about it. Then I was supposed to work on something tonight and my inner procrastinator came out. I started looking around for things to do, got reminded of how badly Amazon had pissed me off, and I wrote a post. :D And then a bit of another one here.

TL;DR, Amazon sucks can’t be trusted.

1,499 posts about nothing?

Lynn

Well, I’m passing a milestone with this post. This is post number 1,500. :)

Most of the posts of Perpetualized.com are just my ramblings about my writing days. Considering it’s been about 7,000 days since I started this site, and about 3,550 since I started writing to self-publish (as opposed to writing to send to a publisher or hobby writing), that’s not so bad.

Most of the posts don’t really have any meaning for anyone but me. There are a few gems scattered around the site, though I admit they’re hard to find.

:)