First Cup of Coffee - February 11, 2019

Thoughts on how Dread & Procrastination act like ice slowly freezing up creativity, and why this metaphor works better for me than the term "Writer's Block," which I find to be damaging and misleading. Also a recap of my weekend, getting business items off my list, and how nifty technology is. The phone app I mention is ClearScanner (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.indymobileapp.document.scanner)

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy. Today is Monday, February 11th. A little bit chilly here in Santa Fe this morning. Oh well actually not that bad. It's only I mean it's 35, so it's not even freezing, but there's a wet and chill feel to the air because we're gonna get some snow today. Some neat clouds over the mountains. I took a picture. Although I couldn't quite get the cotton candy pink with my phone. I might actually use a filter to try to capture how it actually looked, which I don't often do, but uh I should have gotten out my real camera because it was such a pretty color. I am unexpectedly snotty this morning. Not that I am not always kind of snotty, but uh in this case literally snotty. I slept a unusually long time last night, and uh woke up this morning with a head full of mucus, which is totally what I get for going out among people, right? I did go to my Lyra meeting on Saturday, met the fabulous Katie Lane for brunch beforehand, and we had good conversations about life and writing and so forth. And then I went to the meeting and yeah, it wasn't terribly eventful. I didn't stay out late. Came home yesterday. I uh got the house clean, towels washed, all that, and uh took care of a lot of business. I'm very happy because I really whittled down my business list. I spent a great deal of time uh doing a project for Agent Sarah. She had asked me to scan in all my contracts for books uh from my previous two agents so that she can look into rights for versions for me. So those are important to do, and also uh to do things like um you know try to sell the audio rights and the foreign rights. She calls it found money uh because it's you know, I don't have to write new books for it. So I used a um my scanner is kind of a pain, especially because I don't want to pay Adobe to use to make their PDFs, which you know I suppose uh it's only fair if I do, but I just don't want to. I don't use it enough. And um my printer scanner no longer functions as a printer. The ink jets are hopelessly clogged, so I've kept it as a scanner, and now I don't have the software that works for it. I might just get rid of the thing because it turns out uh I could use a scanning app on my phone. Probably you kids all knew about this, but I've discovered that I am not a super early adopter, but that I am a reasonably early adopter. So even though I don't know things that the really hip people know, I usually do know things that you know more than I'm like at the I don't know, the 20% or 30%. So I'm gonna tell you what this app is because I ended up having to do some research. The first app I tried didn't work with a darn, as my grandmother would say. So I ended up work going with Clear Scanner. I'll put that in the podcast notes. Um the and clear scanner was amazing, you guys, technology, huh? I could just use my phone to take a picture of a page of the contract, and then that gives me an option to adjust it a little bit, and then it translated it, and you would not believe the clarity with which it did this translation. I would translate it into uh the document, and I could do as many pages as I want, and then I could save the document to Dropbox, and then I just pulled it up from Dropbox and moved it over to a shared Dropbox folder I have with Sarah, and now she has copies of all of my contracts. It's amazing. She had also asked me to uh give her uh Word documents and cover images of all of my self-published books for the same reason. So that was something that had been lurking on my list for a while, and I mean it just took a lot of you know, it was kind of busy work. I started some of it during the Lira meeting on Saturday. Uh, we had a speaker on overcoming writer's block, which, yeah, you guys are all like raising your eyebrows at this point because you're like, yeah, Jeffy went to a program on uh getting rid of overcoming writer's block when she doesn't believe that writer's block exists. Uh which is not precisely true. I do think that some people struggle with uh issues, and this gal put it in terms of getting stuck, not writer's block, which I did think was a positive. But you know, frankly, I go to the meeting because I enjoy seeing everybody and I like hearing the updates and I like uh yeah, it's uh rejuvenating for me to get to see people. The program doesn't always this particular program was not uh at all interesting to me. Uh yeah, it was just um I did like that she talked about it as getting stuck instead of being blocked. But overall it was a little too a little too touchy-feely for me, you know. She talked a lot about, you know, that it's you know, it's just that you're putting expectations on yourself and that everybody needs to be feel loved. And, you know, it's not stuff that's necessarily wrong, but I didn't find it very appropriate for a professional writers meeting. Uh, you know, there are I think some people in the group got some stuff out of it, so that's good. But you know, overall, you know, when she's saying things to us, um, you know, like talking about writing and then versus our real life. And the gal I say next to is also a full-time writer, and we're kind of looking at each other and going writing is our real life, it is our career, it's how we, you know, it's how we pay the mortgage, hopefully. It's um, you know, it's not something that you divide out, and I do think sometimes she was coming almost um from a more literary side, and they tend to be what I think of is more precious about their art, um, you know, and sort of thrash about it. And I think um one thing I like about genre writers is genre writers are like, you know, you you tell the story, and this girl did um say, well, you know, and all of this goes out, you know, when you have deadlines, she understands if you have deadlines. But the whole point, really, the entire point of people who have problems with writers' block. And and I'll say, um, I'll mention Dorinda here because I think she would very openly talk about this. I've heard her talk about this at signings and so forth, you know, that she has uh a terrible time with getting with being blocked. You know, she'll work and work on her uh outlines, and she has this uh terrible cycle of procrastination until she ends up writing all of the book at once in a very short period of time, which is very hard on her, and it's um incredibly stressful for her. And she would love to find a way to, you know, she misses her deadlines by a lot, uh, but she's forever laboring under the deadline. So, you know, this isn't uh be kind to yourself thing necessarily. It's very hard on her, but she needs um very specific tools for trying to get herself to produce on the schedule that she needs to. Well, she wasn't there at the meeting because she was sick. I would blame her for my snottiness this morning, only I didn't actually see her. I only texted with her. Maybe she sent me her virus over text. I am taking a lot of vitamin C. We'll see if that hopefully knocks this out early, whatever it is. So, anyway. Uh it was overall a productive weekend, and I got my things done that I needed to do. We finished watching uh Bohemian Rhapsody on Friday evening. You know, we only watched part of it Thursday night because David fell asleep. So then we watched the second half and um really it was really a very well-done movie. They took um, as they always do, dramatic license on a whole lot of stuff. Um, and so some of the most dramatic beats of the movie uh did not in fact happen in real life, which I always find kind of interesting. It's like, oh, real life wasn't uh didn't make for a good enough movie. But you know, they have gotten a nominated for best picture, so that tells you something. But um I was reflecting that being a child of the 80s as I am, uh the song We Are the Champions was co-opted so early in my life to being a sports team anthem that I've really never paid the song much attention. Uh and you guys know it, you know, we are the champions. We are the champions, no time for losers. Um and I yeah, I've I totally associate it with arenas and high school pepperalys, you know, kill me now. And so listening to the live aid concert and his live version of that, and after we turned off the movie, we uh put on the YouTube a YouTube recording of the actual Queen Live Aid performance, and they really did do. Uh the producers of the movie did an incredible reproduction of making it almost exactly movement for movement, like that Live Aid performance. But I had never really paid attention to the lyrics of that song, and it's too bad because it really is a moving song, and it does capture so much of what it's like to uh to be creative, to be an artist and to be selling your art and the the fame and the notoriety and the fortune that comes with it. I don't know about all of those things, but I know about some of them. Yeah. And I I liked that it was a song about, you know, overcoming otherness. I thought that was an interesting theme of the movie that uh Freddie Mercury they brought it out a number of times, that you know, this happens with creative people, that they very often are not uh the popular people. They are often not the mainstream person. The thing that makes a person creative is often the thing that also separates them from the herd that makes them weird and not always um not always beloved by their peers. Their art may be beloved, but the person is not necessarily. And so I thought uh that being instead an anthem to individuality, to otherness, um the no time for losers is really about the you know, we shall keep fighting till the end. Really, I really like that message of that movie and of that song. And I like that the movie changed my idea of what that song was about. We shall take it back. I think it's no longer hip anyway, to have me not being somebody who often goes to sports events. Certainly not in my now that I have more of a choice, it seems like uh as a teenager and college citizen, you are more often forced into sports events where you are expected to be enthusiastic about them. Uh whereas later in life you can, you know, like just not leave your house. And of course, we just never watch sports things on TV because neither of us are into it. So I'm trying to think of what else I have to tell you guys. I guess I could wrap back around to the idea of writer's block and why I don't believe in it. I know I talk about it um at various times, and it's it's not that I don't believe in it. Um I don't have a particular problem with it. So to me, it's not a real thing. Um, and I have mentioned a number of times that I think for many people, writer's block has to do with um greater issues like depression. I think if you're struggling with depression or you have other sorts of emotional or chemical imbalances, then it's it's very difficult to be creative. I'm also a proponent of Maslow's pyramid of needs, and I believe very strongly that you have to handle the bottom part of the pyramid before you can um handle the upper part, and that means that you have to have those things like um the very base of the pyramid are physical needs, food and shelter and safety, and then you need to have belonging, you need to feel loved, you need to feel like you are okay. And as you move up the pyramid, then self-actualization, art, beauty, creativity, those things come in. And I think it's very difficult to be creative unless you have those lower things handled, which goes totally against the whole idea of the starving artist. You know, the there's the idea that somebody can be dramatically living in the garret where they're slowly starving or freezing to death or doing massive amounts of alcohol or some drug and still producing a wild creative work. But the reality of that is that those are the exceptions, and that's why they make for interesting stories and very often are followed by the artist's death. So what we're looking for is a way to be creative and be a healthy living human being, right? This would be the ideal. So for me, yeah, I don't really get stuck because I keep writing, and that's part of my process. My process is to stop me from being stuck. And you guys know from listening to this that sometimes I do go slowly. I don't go really slowly, but I always keep going and I always write. And I think that a whole lot of what people feel like is blocking or being blocked is not getting to the point where they just write, where they let so many things get in the way of just putting words on the page. You know, it's that dread and procrastination. And that I think is a real thing. I think it's not writer's block, I think it's dread and procrastination. And as soon as you start letting that kick in, then it builds. It's one of those things that um just like layer by layer by layer. And so I think you have to set up a writing habit. That's why I'm a huge proponent of building the writing habit, because if you're in the habit of writing every day anyway, then it's much easier to just let the habit carry you through that layer of dread and procrastination. And it's like one of those things that's like um, you know, letting a pond freeze over. Like over the weekend on Monday morning, it might feel like uh a little bit harder if you haven't been writing all weekend, like I do. So you have to break through that little thin layer of ice that's formed on the surface, you know, a little thin layer of dread procrastination. But if you let it go for days, that layer of ice gets thicker and thicker and thicker until when you finally get, you know, and this is where I think of Dorinda, you know, where she's so far behind deadline, and she'll feel so stressed that she finally has to, you know, hack her way, you know, basically get out a hatchet and just stand out there and hack her way through the layers until she can get to it. And then when she starts writing, she can write and it'll flow. And she's a wonderful writer, she writes wonderful books. So, in some ways, the process works for her, but in other ways um it doesn't because it causes her so much personal unhappiness. So those are my thoughts on writer's block. And I need to find a better way to explain that I don't think I that I don't think it's real. I don't think that um the phrase writer's block is meaningful. I think it's um a a rather damaging shorthand phrase for um what could be several things going on. I think that's why it can be um damaging because you're skipping over what it is actually that's going on. And that that might be the very first step is to identify what it is exactly that's getting in the way of um producing words on a regular healthy basis, right? That's what we want to do. So speaking of, I'm going to go do mine. Hope you all have a fabulous Monday, and I will talk to you all excuse me, tomorrow when I will be cold free, right? No, we'll kick this virus today. Uh talk to you all then. Bye bye.