TWIC (I've forgotten what number)

Time to clean up some browser windows I've had open for more than a week.  Ah, really, I do find this stuff interesting and do feel this stuff is useful but my first sentence is entirely accurate: I'm doing this today simply to clean up some desktop space.

Bill Watterson with Advice for Cartoonists.  His advice was written into a comic made in his style.  wonderful stuff.

Writing.com  I'm still not sure what it is but parts of it remind me of Figment, a site that sends writing prompts and ideas every few days.

Write, forget yourself.  This simple advice given to help writers not feel too self-conscious.

Scalzi writes about Gwenda Bond who writes about the torturous path her novel took from idea to print and how each revision was different.

Artists who kept their day jobs.  Kurt Vonnegut sold cars.

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Regarding my personal creative efforts, I have written perhaps a thousands words on each of two stories - one about psychic university students battling psychic mafia and the other a steam punk story currently set in Nepal.

Also, I forgot eating utensils on my trip to Algonquin Park so I had to carve new ones. Simple but functional:

I'm a little fearful, but mostly tired

I have three or four blogs, each focusing on individual subjects, and haven't posted in any of them for around a month (quickly checks this blog's output and finds a post from Aug 20 - c'mon, it was a short one).  Mostly, I've been trying to enjoy summer and keep my son busy enough not to drive me crazy.

The biggest productivity-killer for me is putting him to sleep.  He insists that I lay down next to him until he falls asleep.  Then I find myself so comfortable that I choose to stay there.  I often get up in the middle of the night but feel more like an consumer of internet content rather than a producer.

Anyway, I follow Margaret Atwood's on Twitter and she linked to a Terrible Minds post on the four fears that inhibit writing.  They are 1) Fears about a lack of talent, 2) Fear about feedback, 3) Fear about publication and 4) Fear about being judged.

I have to say that most of my published writing is in in-house magazines for the universities I worked at in Korea and I didn't have much fear about them.  I am proud of this article but in the hard-copy version there some odd editing and image placement choices that my colleagues kindly blamed on the magazine staff rather than me.

Now that I have am facing a higher bar regarding quality I am feeling the fears listed above.  I especially like the advice for dealing with the fear of being judged:

This makes your writing suck. The absolute best work you have in you is always going to be the stuff that’s closest to your heart, the stuff that’s absolutely the hardest to let another human being read. It’s risky to show people those deep and true parts of yourself, but life is risk. Look that fear in the eye, spit it in the face, and then write more effing words.