Hi! I’m Andy! I’m a professional writer! Many people trust me for advice on how to make technical things work!

OK. So here’s what I was getting at.

We all get frustrated about our writing projects. Don’t let it set you back.

Frustration is the villain with a thousand faces. I’m bored. Or I lose focus. Or I lose faith in this idea; I think there’s something else I ought to be doing with my time. I remember a workday when the writing felt like I was just reaching down into a wishing well and pulling up fistful after fistful of quarters and today is nothing like that.

I usually get myself out of this sort of mood by reminding myself that the words aren’t supposed to flow easily every time I sit down at the keyboard. This stuff is work. Why is this specific writing problem any different from the time a switch broke on my washing machine, and I couldn’t immediately figure out how to put it back together so that the thingy would stay engaged with the whatchamacallit? A problem can only be solved if you keep working on a solution, as the Tide-fresh Alien Skin Software tee shirt I’m wearing today attests.

Also oh-so-correct: this question that Neil Gaiman recently answered on his Tumblr:

“You being lazy and unmotivated and not writing allows another writer, who does sit down and write, to get published in your place. Magazines and publishers only have so many pages, so many annual publishing spots. You’re letting someone else who wants to do the work get published. Surely that’s a good thing…?”

Similar: that scene from “Tootsie” in which Dustin Hoffman is Teri Garr’s acting coach. She’s struggling with an audition piece. “I’m no good with confrontational characters,” she lamely apologizes. “Well, that’s too bad,” Hoffman snaps back. “Because you’re competing with hundreds of actresses who have no problem with confrontational characters. And that’s why one of them is going to get this part instead of you!”

(The takeaway from the scene and the Tumblr: it’s hard for everybody. Some people will work through it and some won’t.)

To these motivational tools I now add the tale of the hardworking screenwriter of “Death Bed: The Bed That Eats.” Via Patton Oswalt’s “Werewolves and Lollipops” (NSFW language):

Oswalt is absolutely right. George Barry (the filmmaker) can definitely call himself a writer. The English professor who’s had an incomplete novel moldering in his or her desk forever can’t. The novel is bold and original and ambitious. The professor believes it’ll inspire the peoples of the world to coalesce into a single, higher being. “Death Bed” is schlocky drive-in tripe. George Barry only believed that a sufficiently lurid low-budget horror movie couldn’t fail to make money.

Aha! But George Barry finished his screenplay.

Becoming a writer isn’t like becoming a doctor or a civil engineer, or a luncheonette that serves “the best coffee in town.” You don’t have to go through a seven-year accreditation process. If you want to call yourself a writer, all you need to do is finish writing something.

Oh, and: writing about writing almost doesn’t count as writing. I suppose I should get back to work. Just remember that as a writer, you’re not a passive receptacle for some mysterious Muse. You’re a worker. The good news is that when you’ve finished something, you’ve earned something.

Pro Tip: there aren’t “ten different kinds of writers’ block.” There isn’t even _one_ kind. There is no such thing as writers’ block.

Okay?

On a physical level, writing involves just sitting in a comfy chair and doing this for hours (mimes typing). This creates the entirely false impression that it isn’t hard work. And it is. Every writer seeks one of those effortless days in which it seems like you just go into a trance and the thread keeps revealing itself as fast as you can pull it. But! That’s rare.

Every driver hopes that they’ll get to their destination in forty-three minutes, just as the GPS promises, without encountering any traffic, construction, accidents, or unclear road signs.

Every contractor hopes that the walls of this house’s kitchen were built plumb and level and according to building codes, and that the custom-cabinet maker built these units to the exact measurements provided.

Every cook who ever made a Thanksgiving dinner wants all of the parts of the turkey to be equally succulent, for the skin to be a crispy golden brown, and for the bird to be on the table on time.

Every scientist who ever tried to solve a fundamental problem of theoretical physics wants the numbers from his predicted result to be so close to the experimental result that the difference is statistically insignificant and the theory is supported.

But those things almost never happen, either. There’s no mystical, mythical obstacle in any of these physical activities. In each of these cases, there’s a goal and there are simply a bunch of unforeseen obstacles preventing you from reaching that goal. You took a serious wrong turn somewhere; the two pieces that are supposed to fit together perfectly don’t fit together at all; it’s become very clear that you’re not going to be able to carve a food-porn-grade turkey at the table in front of your guests at 1 PM; your theory suggests that E = MC Hammer.

So you just crack your knuckles and work on the problems. You acknowledge that you went the wrong way and you get back in the right direction; you modify one piece or the other so that they do fit; you stop mourning the loss of your original plan and embrace a new one that’s just as good; you put it aside and determine to go back to it in a week or two with fresh eyes.

As a writer, you are never “blocked.”

Here, let me say it again, with more markup tags:

As a writer, you are never “blocked.”

The fact that you’re not actually writing doesn’t mean that you’re not actually working. You’re also working when you’re thinking. Figure out what the problems are and _solve_ them. Solve them in a half-assed way if you have to; slap enough duct tape over the problem that you can proceed to the next step. Go back later and improve it in the editing process.

Or! Just put the whole thing aside. Just for now. Even in the worst, most frustrating situation, you’re not “blocked.” You just can’t make any progress on this one thing.

So write something else. One good page about anything in your line of sight will prove that you can still write, and even if it doesn’t help you with a project that’s due soon it’ll still exercise those muscles that convert synaptic misfirings into something readable.

Or, walk from the desk to the sofa and _read_ something else. Reading something that’s very good will inspire ideas of your own. At minimum, you’ll stop thinking about the kind of writing that you hate (your own Projectus Horribilus) and start thinking about writing that you love (Wodehouse; always reliable).

Or just knock off work for the day.

But don’t say you’re “blocked,” ever. And for the love of almighty God, don’t seek answers from the sort of madmen who insist and reinforce the idea that “writer’s block” is a real thing.

Your brain is highly malleable. If you train it to believe that you need to pull over to the side of the road and stop moving forward the instant a “Writer’s Block” indicator on the dashboard turns red, then over time, that’s the only solution it’ll ever offer you.

Writing is hard. That’s why so few people stick to it and actually finish things. And why you have a right to be immensely proud when you finish something.

There is no such thing as “Writers’ Block.”

People often do weird things when they’re chasing productivity. Alas, despite my efforts towards higher things, I am a People.

I do a lot of writing in coffeeshops and where-have-yous. Partly it’s because of the Very Writerly Thing where you get a little energized by the presence and activity of people around you. Partly it’s because I work out of a home office, and going out to write every day or two pretty much insists that I maintain a sensible and regular schedule of showering and shaving.

I’ve come to really like the tables at coffeeshops. They’re meant to take abuse and thwart theft, so they’re solid and heavy. They’re about the perfect height for sitting and typing at, and they’re the perfect size. They’re just big enough to comfortably accommodate a writer, a laptop, a beverage, a muffin, and one source of distraction, such as an iPhone or a hamster in a small cage.

(Don’t bring a hamster into a Panera Bread. You can have the quietest wheel in the world…the management will still get upset.)

So when I came across a nice 28″ coffeehouse table at a consignment shop, I gave it a couple of days’ thought and then came back for it with cash in hand. The sensible part of my brain said it was a nice, well-made table at a great price. The irrational but still useful part of my brain imagined that I might be able to get more writing done late at night if I could occasionally move from the desk in my home office to a room with a coffeehouse table, the arena where I have so frequently plucked victory from the gaping, snapping maw of unproductive defeat. Productivity is productivity, even the cargo cult kind.

But there was a third element to this buying decision. I try not to be a wuss about hot weather. If it’s hot, I turn on a fan. If it’s really hot, I’ll pack up and spend the day working in a series of public places that offer aggressive AC, free WiFi, and unlimited free refills.

If three days of possible triple-digit weather are forecast, however, it turns out that my response is to buy a table and set it up in the bedroom, so that I can work in the one place in the house that has air conditioning.

The only hitch: I’d probably have to Expedia the tickets, and the really good deals require at least a three-week advance purchase. So I’d definitely be denied the giddy pleasure of drinking mimosas in Rio eight hours before anyone even realized I was gone. Instead, I’d be in a nondescript motor lodge in New Hampshire Delaware, where I’d be holed up for most of a month no fewer than seven weeks waiting for my departure date. I think you’ll agree there’s a lack of satisfying drama in this scenario.

See what I almost did there? I nearly gave away my plans. You members of the Platinum Double-Diamond Executive Rewards Club get to see the edits. Normal readers, including my enemies, shall remain completely in the dark. I’m adding this secret note so that you folks can help me out with the disinformation campaign. You know who didn’t have Platinum Double-Diamond Executive Rewards Club Readers? Whitey Bulger and Osama Bin Laden, just to name two. I’m confident that you people will pull through for me where their blog readers failed.

Yup, work on my upcoming iPad and iPhone books is now in the “frenetic” phase. Early knowledge that iOS 5 would contain truly transformative elements forced me to write in “LEGO brick” fashion, where I do all of the research and then write big hunks, without a firm knowledge of the final form of the book and saddled with a nagging worry that I’d have to spend ages on new material and fixing up existing stuff. iCloud is just part of the problem, and it’s problem enough: I can hardly find a chapter of the original outline that wasn’t fundamentally affected by Apple’s new cloud service.

Hence my dreamy fantasies about a new life in South Korea and a new job selling straw hats at a beach resort or something. I’ve spent the past week and a half rewriting the book’s outline and pounding chapters into shape. It’ll all come out well in the end, I know, but the a quality product only comes after you spend a long time at the forge, pounding, pounding, pounding away at the steel until the object that you see in front of you looks like the gorgeously deadly weapon of truth, beauty and wisdom that you’ve been picturing in your mind all this time.

I’m taking a break today to work on some Sun-Times columns and also (yeesh) tidy up a bit. For decades, when a movie or a TV show wanted to communicate “A writer has been writing hard for hours, days, or weeks” via a single, instantly-understood visual, it would simply show an office strewn with hundreds of crumpled-up sheets of typing paper.

Alas, even when I was a kid, a typewriter was that funny thing way back in a basement closet that your Mom or Dad kept from their college days. This old trope is destined for the dustbin of history.

But as I look around my office…

…And the TV room…

…And the bedroom…

…And the room I use as a podcast studio…

I realize that a new trope has stepped in to fill the void: the half-drunk can of diet cola. Yes, if it’s possible for me to write for an extended period in any specific spot in my house, then at this moment that spot is surrounded by at least $1.80 in deposit cans containing probably about six ounces of backspit, total.

It’s a perfect modern adaptation of a familiar visual. It acknowledges the obsolescence of written pages, it reflects the fact that laptops and WiFi have made “the place where I work” into an almost uselessly-fluid concept, and most importantly it opens up whole new opportunities for commercial product placement.

Minnesota Fats (played by Jackie Gleason) is on the ropes. He’s been shooting high-stakes pool against Fast Eddie (Paul Newman) all through the night and into the morning. He’s been beaten and everyone in the pool hall knows it. The only reason why Fast Eddie hasn’t collected the victory and the stakes is the fact that when you play against a legend like Fats, “The game isn’t over until Fats says it’s over.”

That’s fine by Eddie. He came here to prove something. He wants the money but just as strongly, he wants the concession that he’s the better player.

Fats is slumped in the chair, disheveled, sweaty, exhausted. The cue rests against his open hand.

He excuses himself. He sends a kid out to buy a bottle of top-drawer booze. He goes into the washroom and washes his face and hands carefully, and then he powders both. He combs his hair. He changes into a fresh shirt. He puts his jacket back on and fixes his boutonniére.

He emerges a new man. “Fast Eddie,” he says, adjusting his cuffs and smiling, “Let’s play some pool.” From that point on, the ending is inevitable.

When I’m having a bad workday — when it’s X o’clock and I’ve only accomplished Y of the Z things I’d hoped to finish by now, where Y divided by Z is heartbreakingly closer to 0 than to 1 — I think of this scene and reflect upon its lessons:

1. It’s not over until you say it’s over. In most situations, you didn’t lose because you got beat. You lost because you accepted the loss while there was still time left on the clock, when instead you should have focused on the ways you could still win. And maybe you actually can’t win…but at minimum, you can do a better job of losing.
2. Sometimes the stink of failure is a physical thing. Wash it off. No kidding. Brush your teeth, wash your face, change into a clean shirt. Move to a different workspace. Once you’ve left behind all of the sights and smells of your Ungodly Unproductive Morning, your brain restarts and reboots.
3. The good news is, the whiskey works. Yes. Pour yourself a drink. Have a cookie. Slice yourself a bit of that nice Y Fenni cheese you bought a few days ago. And don’t just gobble it down. Nibble, sip, savor. It’ll help put some sensory distance between now and the time when you were having such a horribly unproductive day and doing such terrible work.

Then I sit back down, rub my hands together, and say “Fast Eddie…let’s play some pool.” Because nothing counts if you don’t keep trying.

Over on Twitter, @JeffCGD asked me what I thought about the Logitech diNovo Mac Edition wireless keyboard, which got name-checked in my previous post. I started to say “It’s fab.” But I soon realized that it was too fab to really talk about in just 140 characters. I headed to Logitech to grab an image for a blog post and that’s when I discovered that my favorite keyboard had been discontinued.

It’s still widely available but that’s still stinks. The diNovo features my definition of the perfect keyswitch design. Fifteen years ago, I might have preferred big, chonky noisy keys with lots and lots of travel. That was back when “my main computer” was a desktop that I sat down behind, as opposed to a notebook that I drag into bed off the nightstand.

Today, a classic keyboard leaves my fingers a little confused and out of sorts. I’ve trained them to tap the keys instead of pushing. The diNovo feels like the sort of keyboard you’d get on a notebook if the designers didn’t care about a keyboard’s size, depth, and cost. The keyboard you get with the Mac is the same keyboard you’d get on a notebook…which seems to miss the point.

The diNovo looks great, too. And even though it takes up very little room on my desk, its size comes only at the expense of wasted bits of casing and plastic that served no purpose anyway.

So why did Logitech can this product? I haven’t a clue. They still sell the super-duper edition: the diNovo Edge, which is a Bluetooth keyboard that integrates a trackpad and other little bells and whistles. But cripes, it’s another hunnert bucks!

There seem to be two options. You can just buy a diNovo Mac online — stocks still appear to be plentiful at Amazon and elsewhere — or you can buy Logitech’s Illuminated Keyboard. The keys are backlit, it’s corded, and I’ve never used it…but it’s still an active product. It uses the same keyswitch technology as my beloved diNovo Mac, so hopefully it’ll have that same great feel.

I try not to be too fussy about keyboards. It’s easy to become just as precious and annoying about your favorite keyboard as some writers are about The Perfect Pen and…

(Hang on…I need to channel the Great Spirit of Creative Twitbaggery…)

“The creamy perfection of the classic Moleskine; the smell of the leather and the slight crackling sound as I spread it flat on a table at my favorite coffeeshop. The way it accepts the ink, which, when I am truly in connection with my Muse, flows not from the pen, but from the mysterious wellspring from which all stories are spun…”

(Note: you are not a Creative Twitbag if you use a Moleskine and are fond of pens. You are undoubtedly a Creative Twitbag if you’ve ever described your writing tools in that way. If your writing tools inspire you only to write about how you feel about writing, you should probably switch to something that costs less than a dollar per unit at the drugstore.)

I do love my diNovo, though. And this new knowledge makes me wonder if I shouldn’t, you know, stockpile one or two of these for a rainy day.

First, my pal Jason iChatted me with a preview of what he had planned for his TV site, TeeVee.net. On April 1, TeeVee would become Radeeo, the blog that would have existed in its place if television had never been invented and radio had remained the single dominant form of entertainment and information throughout the 20th century.

I thought it was a fabulous wheeze, and it immediately inspired a brilliantly funny idea. And when I completely and spectacularly failed to figure out how to make that idea work, I went with my second idea.

This Radeeo piece really was going to be it for April Fool’s Day. But at a little after midnight on April 1, I impulsively typed something into my Twitter window and clicked “Update”:

A few seconds later, I saw that message in my Twitter feed. I immediately thought “Oh. Oh, dear…I seem to have started an April Fool’s prank that might inconvenience me for most of the whole rest of the day.”

Well, Twitter seemed to be a neat medium for perpetrating an ongoing April Fool’s gag. Fortunately, the timing worked out so that by the time I had to “leave for the airport,” it was time for me to go to bed, and my flight wouldn’t “touch down” until after I’d woken up.

So I spent the day publishing a nice, tidy little serial adventure, in about four dozen 140-character chapters. The first post starts right about here. Twitter posts appear in stack order, so start at the bottom of the page and click the “Newer” button to get to the next installments.

I prolly ought to archive them here in proper order…but it’s late and I still need to finish a Sun-Times column.

I trust that you all realize that my NaTeUnNoWriMo thing was just a gag? That’s why I wound up mentioning both NaTeUnNoWriMo and National Novel-Writing Month in the same posts. “Life of Brian” starts off with Brian attending Jesus’ “Sermon On The Mount” for much the same reasons. Were I half as clever as any member of Monty Python, I would have stuck in a “Blessed are the cheesemakers” joke, but I’m not.

You already knew that of course.

So NaTeUnNoWriMo was by no means a slap against NaNoWriMo or the thousands of fine Americans who took part therein. True, I’m less pleased with all those foreigners who had to horn in on our fun (typical!) but what the hell…it’s Christmas.

National Terrible Unfinished Novel-Writing Month was my answer to a couple of problems. I really wanted to take part in some fashion, but November was a hellaciously busy month that only got more complicated as the days ticked on, so I knew I couldn’t really go at it properly. And this alternative worked out great; had this been an actual novel, it would indeed have been incomplete and pretty damned awful.

I confess that I also enjoyed the opportunity to exorcise a few demons. See…I’ve always been just a little creeped out by the concept of “Writing as a Lifestyle.” The Internet is full of people who desperately want you to know how totally, completely, awesomely a Writer they are and (correctly or incorrectly) I tend to react the same way I do when someone seems just a little bit too eager to tell you all about their religion. Or is working suspiciously hard to convince you that they were absolutely nowhere near that motel when the murders were supposed to have happened.

Being a Writer is a simple game: you just sit down and write. And sometimes you go out and buy books about technique, or hang out on blogs and message boards, or attend workshops. But in the end, there’s just that simple division between people who write and people who merely fancy themselves as writers.

The real writers buy the books and attend the workshops and hang out on the message boards because they think it’ll help them with the writing (or they think it’ll help them to get something published). The Lifestyle Writers do it because for whatever reason, they haven’t found that inner drive to start and finish that story they’ve been mulling over for years. They didn’t write 1,000 words of prose today, but they did write 2,000 words of blog comments and message posts…and if the goal is to maintain a self-image instead of actually writing, then that’s just as good.

NaNoWriMo wasn’t set up as a mechanism for helping Lifestyle Writers to continue to aim their energies in the wrong direction, but it’s certainly an easy thing to abuse. Writing is a tough and lonely business and the presence of an Internet resource that can reassure and support you can be incredibly seductive.

(And I certainly don’t put myself above these people. Sometimes I think if it weren’t for deadlines, I wouldn’t do much writing at all. If I could make half as much money just talking about stuff I wanted to write, I’d take the deal in a heartbeat.)

So natcherly, National Terrible Unfinished Novel-Writing Month was a terrific outlet. By the time the month was over, I think I’d covered every terrible trap of Lifestyle Writing that I could think of.

Here’s the sum total of my advice to the guy who was working on his NaTeUnNoWriMo Novel…or anybody else who doesn’t want to accidentally become a Lifestyle Writer:

1) Don’t tell me about your novel until it’s done.

Not even if you’re a good friend of mine. The succinct but clumsy way to put this is “I don’t give a damn about what you intend to write.” So: don’t post a synopsis. Don’t post a fragment of dialogue or a scene setup. When you post three paragraphs from your so-called “novel” you make me think that this is, in fact, all there’ll ever be.

An idea for a story is like an idea for a tunnel from Boston to London. Anyone can create the idea. Creating the actual thing requires time, dedication, effort, perseverance, and a certain constructive amount of insanity. If it’s the 1800′s, an inexhaustible supply of cheap and expendable immigrant labor is also a big plus. These days, we quite appropriately frown on such things.

If writing a novel — anything, actually — were as easy as coming up with the idea, then terrific novels would be piled up and blocking the fire exits in every home and office. The fact that it’s so difficult is actually a safety feature.
I do care about how you’re dealing with the whole process. Tell me you had a good day or a bad day, or even a day when you wished to be reincarnated as any sort of lifeform that was incapable of operating a keyboard. Tell me that you’ve reached a point where you can’t keep making stuff up and you need to go do some actual research. Then blog about what it was like to walk through a real 150-year-old lighthouse.

That’s all great stuff. It’s not that I don’t want to hear about your work, you understand. Somehow, I can’t get enough of Process stories. Movies like Amadeus and Big Night and Unzipped…love ‘em, along with a great many writers’ personal blogs.

All of these things underscore that there are usually many years and many tears between “Dum-dum-dum-DAAAAAH…hey, that’s catchy” and a completed Fifth Symphony.

2) Don’t fetishize your tools.

(Unless paper and pen are actually some sort of sexual turn-on for you. I don’t get it myself, but fine. Just close the door behind you before you dress up your Kensington WAVE wireless keyboard in the little stewardess costume.)

The sort of pen that you must use when writing and the sort of emotions that your notebook of choice engenders…those are dead-boring topics. Honestly, I couldn’t care less.

I admit that I love my Pentel Excalibur pen and my Clairefontaine writing pads, and I’ve probably stated as such here and on my old blog. But I’ve never spent any time pouring out thousands of words on the romance of the subtle dance between the tip of the pen and the surface of the paper or any other such nonsense. I use this pen and this paper because they’re fun to write with and in some valid or delusional way, they help me with the writing. Period. If I can’t find my Excalibur, I’ll grab any halfway-decent gel pen.

Writing tools aren’t there to be romanticized over. They’re to be used. So shut up and write, already.

3) Don’t write about writing. Just write.

(See a recurring theme forming?)

I swear to God…I don’t care where your head was at when you wrote something. Where your head was at will become crystal-clear to me once I read it.

Seriously. Look, my longest relationship was with a fellow writer. We had some absolutely wonderful dates that will probably seem weird to outsiders. We’d meet at the Boston Public Library, sit at opposite sides of one of the big tables in the Periodicals department, and then we’d write for one or two hours in total silence.

She’d be writing on a legal pad, working on a novel. I’d usually have my PowerBook out and would be cranking away on a column or an article. At some point, we’d both look up and realize that neither one of us was still deep in the throes of The Writing Thing. And then we’d pack up and head out for dinner or coffee or something. If we talked about writing at all, it was just in the generic, mutually-supportive areas of “So, Sweetie…how did your day go?”

What I’m getting at is that I saw this woman naked on a regular basis and we still didn’t really want to talk about This Glorious And Frustrating Gift, or about Wrestling With The Muse. And we never discussed Lord Montague’s problems in maintaining the unsteady truce between Whoever and I Don’t Care.

She read my stuff when I finished and published it. The relationship ended before she published any of her novels, so I actually still have no real idea what she was writing.

(I’m sure she’s published by now. I never read a single sentence of her stuff but she had the assets that truly matter: dedication and determination. With those things in your arsenal, your good stuff will find a publisher your awful stuff will become the foundation for something better later on.)

It’s a basic principle. I imagine that it’s the same deal with just about anybody who makes things for a living. The carpenter comes home and drops his toolbelt in the front hallway where he’s not supposed to and he collapses into a chair. He tells his wife all about all the framing he did that day. How hard it was to make these custom windows fit into frames whose proportions were dictated by the local building code. How when he built the wall separating the master bath from the walk-in, he felt like he was just sort of willing the nails to go where wanted them to go and time seemed to stand still.

His wife nods and smiles through the entire story. She isn’t the slightest bit interested. But the woman’s in love, and she likes that the guy had a nice day.

4) There’s nothing special whatsoever about being a writer.

You are not the keeper of special Truths. You are not in special communion with anything. The Universe did not bestow upon you any gifts.

Your purpose on this planet is the same as anybody else’s: you are here to celebrate the Humanity of yourself and others. The Universe did not put you here specifically to craft gems of perfect Truth, Beauty and Wisdom for a dopey society of unsophisticates desperate to be healed by your Art.

Don’t be embarrassed. It’s a pretty common misunderstanding.

Here’s the deal: for whatever reason, you dig writing. If you’re lucky, you got bitten early in life. The act of writing causes lots of happy chemicals to slosh around in your brain and it’s such a pleasant phenomenon that you want to do it again and again. It’s so pleasant, in fact, that even when you write something that sucks in a heroically epic fashion, the experience doesn’t make you want to stop writing. It just makes you want to do better.

And the act of wanting to do better and wanting to give it another go causes you to get better and better at it as time goes by.

This is not the result of being Gifted. Nor of being in communion with your Muse. It’s merely the simple template for getting good at damned-near anything.

I took piano lessons for something like four years before I hit a certain wall. I could read the notes and I could translate those dots and lines into keypresses, but no matter how hard I worked at it, I couldn’t “read music.” Improvising? Oh, that’s rich.

But I had friends who understood the language of music and who seemed to find it effortless. I needed days and days with a piece of sheet music before I could play the song. My pal Don could put it on the stand and play it as effortlessly as if he were just reading a book. Who knows? Maybe he was born with some sort of musical x-factor. But Don’s most important asset was the fact that the pleasure he took in playing the piano was stronger than any challenges he faced.

Not so with young Andy. I got tired of being a sucky piano player and got tired of putting in so much work for nonexistent rewards and so I quit.

Writing and programming were different stories. I’d get home from school and get right behind the keyboard to work on one or the other. I still have the first short story I ever wrote for fun, way back in seventh or eigth grade. Yup, it sucked. But I enjoyed writing it so much that I’ve written something damned-near every day since.

Don and I weren’t more Gifted than anybody else. We just worked harder. God couldn’t care less if neither of us ever sat down at our respective keyboards ever again.

You are not special. Get over yourself. Put down the glass of Absinthe (unless your sole purpose in drinking it is to get bombed). Take off that brown velvet suit, stop sniffing that lily and just freaking write already. Writing is not your curse and it is not your salvation. It’s something you do for fun or satisfaction or money or ideally all three.

5) You are a writer because you write. Not because you’re a member of any sort of writing community.

Message boards don’t count. Dinners, blogs, workshops, writers’ groups…it’s nice to get out and socialize but when you’re taking part in a long message thread on the differences between Midnight Blue ink and Midnight Aurora Blue ink and how well they interact with an iridium fountain pen, you’re not making yourself into a writer. Doing actual writing is the only thing that counts.

And of course, that’s terrific news. You don’t need to get certification or permission from anybody. Just go right ahead and do it. When you finish your novel and send it to publishers and agents, it’ll be on precisely the same footing as the novel written by someone who received his or her postgraduate degree from the most competitive and prized creative fellowship program in the country.

Because agents, publishers, and editors are no more impressed by Writerly trappings than I am. In the end, it comes down to the words and only the words. So the sooner you squirt them out of your head and into a more reliable medium, the better.

* * *

Yes, yes. I appreciate the irony. I’m writing a long blog post in which I complain about writers who write about writing. So look…don’t even start.

Naturally, if any of you have ever blogged about the sumptuous romance of a Moleskine notebook, I’m not talking about you. The ones who truly annoy me are those drippy blowhards who obviously lost sight of the true target long ago.

In creating the lovable character of National Terrible Unfinished Novel Writing Month Guy (international licensing rights still available at attractive terms; please enquire), I certainly wasn’t singling out anyone in particular for abuse.

Nor did I need to, when Lynn Johnston has crafted the perfect Titanically-Boring Self-Satisfied Writeur — or to put it more simply: the perfect artistic ass — in the form of first-time novelist Michael Patterson.

Up until recently, her staff would write and post monthly “letters” written by the strip’s characters. Paragraph after paragraph, Mike’s letters have been textbook examples of There But For The Grace Of God.

I call your attention to May’s insights into Michael’s method:

My head is firmly wedged inside novel number two. It feels good to be back within the comfortable confines of a world of my own creation. I’m in control. Every character, every event, every turn of phrase is generated by “the gift”. Sometimes, I can’t quite access the magic that drives the urge to write and at other times, it takes over. Again, I’ve been swept back into the past. It’s 1874, I’m 23. Having fought with my father for the last time, I signed on to a windjammer – one of the large cargo sailing vessels that carried goods between South America and the Southern United States. Having no skills other than short order cooks (learned in my parents’ dockside restaurant in Galveston), I was put to work in the kitchen of the S.M.S. Princess Aleksandra Janiak, a worn, iron-hulled “maiden” that ferried everything from sugarcane to guano across the Caribbean Seas.

October 2006 is a bit of a pip, as well:

I fall into and out of this story as if I were falling into and out of sleep. It’s taking a toll on all of us, since I have to be here for Deanna and be a daddy to my kids. If I had the luxury of moving to some isolated place I could just let this story take over my mind. I could wrestle with the characters, be the characters, think like they do and say what each one would say – and not feel guilty for losing Michael Patterson for as long as it takes to remove this saga from my soul.

So what I’m getting at here is that your goal in life should be to be ever vigilant against the threat of every becoming even 1/10th the insufferable drip that Mr. Patterson seems to be.

On the subject of National Novel-Writing Month itself: again, I’m sincere when I say that it’s a great thing. I do think that writing is really nothing particularly special and the only thing stopping you from being an Author is the simple act of sitting down and writing something. If NaNoWriMo does nothing else, it encourages a lot of people to stop thinking about it and to actually give it a go. So it’s a hugely good thing.

That said…

I’m just a bit put off by this idea of trying to do 50,000 words in 30 days, and having these online thermometers that advertise your progress. There’s the risk that the writing will be an exercise in just hitting the numbers instead of an opportunity to take actual pleasure in the writing.

I also wonder if there are folks doing NaNoWriMo who just want to be able to say they’ve done it.

Serious runners probably feel the same way about these “anybody can train to run a marathon in just one year” books. It seems like a fine way to get people to start running, reach the given goal, and then hang their Finisher’s Medal on their bathroom mirror and never run another mile in their lives again.

Plus: after one year’s worth of training you can indeed can complete a 26.2 mile marathon. But you won’t do it particularly well. Wouldn’t it be better to buy a book that encourages you to run the best 5K you can, and shares so much of the pleasures of running that it becomes the key to a whole lifelong commitment?

So I dunno. I think I’d be more excited about a writing event with a less-catchy hook: National “Just Write Something” Month. One month is plenty of time to write a short story. You have more than enough time to think carefully about what you want to write and to make good choices as you go. You’ll almost certainly finish it quickly enough that you can get cracking on the second draft.

By the end of NaJuWriSoMo, you’d have a nifty, polished work. It just seems like a much more satisfying experience than collapsing across the finish line after having hobbled through the final nine miles at sub-walking pace, and then spending the next week recovering on the sofa and contemplating black toenails.

Well, I don’t intend to be the screen door on anybody’s submarine. Congratulations to anyone who took part in NaNoWriMo, whether you finished or not.

When you do decide to create your own WordPress theme from the ground up, this tutorial is absolutely fab. If it were a book, I’d buy it.

Actually, it explains the strength of printed books over webpages, in certain situations. Writing a theme is somewhere in the same category as writing an entire piece of software. It’s not a simple trick or tip that you can skim through and then use. You need to sit, read, focus, think, and assimilate.

That doesn’t really work so good when the medium forces you to sift the actual content from amongst all the crap that competes for attention on a webpage, makes you click a link to move from page to page and article to article.

If I ever threw out my copy of Danny Goodman‘s seminal “Complete HyperCard Handbook,” then I’m a damned fool. I don’t do a whole lot of HyperCard development these days (seeing as we’re nearing the tenth anniversary of HC’s death, and the fourth anniversary of Apple finally getting around to burying the body). But my copy was a wonderful artifact of an important time in my life. It was probably identical to every other copy of this book ever sold: dog-eared, scuffed to hell, tape keeping the spine together, fingerprints and food stains on every other page…in short, it was a book that bore the proud battle scars of an awesomely useful reference that got used every day and which was read everywhere. I remember taking it with me to my summer job every day. I read it on the bus over, I read it during my lunch break, and I read it on the bus back home.

Natcherly, this was mostly due to Danny’s God-given gifts. The HyperCard Bible is still a standard of excellence that few tech books have attained since. It took you from the fundamentals all the way through advanced techniques, and did so in a way that was always clear and enjoyable to read.

Mad props to Danny, as always. The point is that I don’t know if I and other HyperCard developers would have gained such a broad, deep and holistic understanding of such a beefy topic if we could only consume the knowledge in isolated, individually-wrapped bites…and had to dodge animated offers to punch monkeys and slap sumo wrestlers while doing so.

The true sign that I’ve reached the end game (as well as the low reserves of my mental faculties) is when I must resort to lab rat methods of motivation.

Witness (metaphorically only, unless you’re that kind person who sent me the vintage moose head and the 802.11g antenna that appears to be sticking up behind its left ear is transmitting video from an embedded camera) the small dish to the left of my keyboard. This morning, it contained eight peanut M&M’s. It now contains three. Each candy represents a specific item on today’s punchlist that must be completed before I’m allowed to close my eyes and adopt any posture that invites or even risks sleep.

Yes, I both need a tangible reward for each goal met, as well as a visible indicator of progress and a clear marker of when it’s time to walk away from the keyboard and follow the orange pixies into their magic gumdrop forest.

It is very appropriate that I’ll be boarding a plane and fleeing this whole half of the USA on the day I submit the last bits of this book. I think I’m going to desperately need to spend 48 hours forgetting everything about my office and cocooning myself in a world apart where there’s a king-sized bed, maid service, and cheerful Texans eager to ply me with barbecue.