General update

My to do list today is 45 items long. It’s 10AM and I still have 33 items to go.

I’ve been using the Forest app for the past week to cut down on my phone time, and especially my twitter time. It’s a fun take on the Pomodoro technique that basically lets you set a timer to plan trees in your forest. The tree grows when you finish your timer without touching your phone (you can have the phone play music or a podcast while your tree is growing, you just can’t fiddle with your phone). You can also accept calls while the tree is growing, but you can’t make calls/text/check apps etc. It’s a good gamification of the Pomodoro technique, and a beautiful app.
I’ve finished rewriting chapter 2 and am back to rewriting large swaths of chapter 7. Forcing myself to cut ruthlessly cut things down.
Reading John Scalzi’s “The Human Division” and thoroughly enjoying it. Also indulging in M.C. Beaton’s “Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House,” because I can.
Started working on my 2018 resolutions. It’s the fourth year that I’m doing
My (mechanical) keyboard is creaking. It’s time to swap out the keycaps and lubricate the switches a bit.
Cutting down on Apple technology podcasts. Getting a bit fed up with them and more interested in podcasts with more interesting content than “guess how much I love my iPhone X”.
That being said, I upgraded to an iPhone 8 (not a Plus or a X on purpose), and I’m OK with it. Still frustrated that it doesn’t have a headphone jack.
Ran a game of Parsley that I wrote for a group of friends using Discord, and it was a roaring success. Planning on running another game like that soon.

Evening light

Tel Aviv view of Jaffa.

Man on motorcycle sketch

Two minute sketch of a man about to mount his motorcycle, Jaffa flea market. Moleskine and brush pen.

Christmas tree in Tel Aviv

Sort of…

Nahalat Binyamin market, Tel Aviv.

Good morning!

Quick sketch after breakfast at Birenbaum cafe in Tel Aviv. Brush pen on Moleskine pocket sketchbook.

Getting out of a writing slump

I haven’t written pretty much anything (beyond daily journaling) for almost a month and a half. Some of it was traveling — I spent most of November abroad — some of it was just loss of momentum.

Today for the first time in a long while I just sat down and wrote. I started working on a new short story, part of what I hope will be a collection of short stories, and the words just flowed. 646 of them. The story is far from finished, but I have a good foundation for it. And then I sat down and finished rewriting my novel’s second chapter.

Now, I’ve been dragging my feet with this chapter from the moment I realized that I would have to rewrite it after I had seemingly finished editing it. It’s depressing to have to go back and scrap so much of what you have already written, and I was letting that feeling get in the way of my overall progress.

The good news is that I seem to have come up with at least one strategy to get over my editing and rewriting slump and that is to write something fresh. Once I start writing, it’s much easier to get myself editing, and I’m more motivated to push through to the end.

So even though I need to focus on finishing one work, and not jump from one piece to the next, it is sometimes useful to take a break and indulge in working on a new idea, if only to stop languishing on an old one.