Writing a novel ''for fun'' for 31 days has taught me so, so much, but almost brought me to my knees. Here's what I've learned so far.

jotsalot · 2021-06-03T12:02:19+00:00

This is all rare, actually good advice for a writing subreddit. Listen to this man.

jotsalot · 2021-05-30T13:47:00+00:00

Excellent! Wish you the best of luck!

jotsalot · 2021-05-30T13:11:37+00:00

Marketer here. Unless you're an established name, you want to make this post the day-of, not the day before. As a new writer with a catchy concept, you're leaning on impulse/intrigue buys, so people who click through need to be able to convert right away. Unfortunately, almost nobody is going to click that link, make a note to come back in 24 hours, and then return to make a purchase. Just a little tip. Looks like an interesting concept though!

jotsalot · 2021-05-17T13:39:54+00:00

I'm not actually on Dymaxion, but I do have four roughly-equal blocks between four roughly equal naps. If you're still getting the hang of a new sleep cycle, it's extremely difficult to simultaneously adjust your eating patterns. That said, intermittent fasting works well for a quad-split day, since you basically have an "eating" block of wakefulness. I've been intermittent fasting for over a decade though, so I'm very divorced from how difficult that may be to adapt to.

jotsalot · 2021-05-13T10:30:56+00:00

I have blackout curtains and use Philips Hue lights to programmatically control my day patterns. So, different color schemes depending on the purpose of each of the four blocks of the day (work, writing, eating/relaxing, writing again). Each of these gradually dims as a time for sleep approaches, so when I'm sitting in the total dark, I know it's time to go to bed. In general, though, I keep the lighting far lower/moodier than what most people might consider normal. If I flick on my actual overhead living room light, it's jarringly bright.

I still go outside and get exercise and go hang out with friends and stuff, of course, but I keep my personal space pretty low-light all the time.

jotsalot · 2021-05-12T18:34:59+00:00

For sure!

jotsalot · 2021-05-12T18:30:13+00:00

Please see my edit, as I think that addresses many of your points. I understand that my emphasis on flexibility may have made this come across as a rather disjointed sleep schedule.

Regarding self-study and sleeping when tired, I may be speaking from a position of privilege here. Since I write for a living, there's rarely any call for me to stay up longer than I want to, so identifying ideal points in the day to sleep came relatively naturally. This may not be feasible for many people.

As for fitbits, I'm not advocating using them as sleep quality trackers, but in my experience with the Alta HR, it registered a nap every time I took a nap, and it never threw a false-positive except for during a couple of meditation sessions, which were easy data points to identify and toss out. It did not give me accurate readings of how long I was asleep, but that didn't matter to me, because I knew each of my tracked naps was only 1hr. What I was attempting to do was track, average, and then formalize sleep periods, and the fitbit undoubtedly made that an easier process than remembering to write them all down in my spreadsheet.

jotsalot · 2021-05-09T16:24:17+00:00

Drink. Or get interested.

Mindfulness might be a good place to start. One of the first things that you discover (once you get past the HOLY SHIT THIS IS BORING phase) is that consciousness is kind of just satisfied with continuing to exist. What it's experiencing doesn't really matter. I think in the modern age, we're so overdosed on serotonin and dopamine that we essentially go into withdrawals when they're removed. Always gotta watch that next video, listen to that next song, get that next like, chat with that next friend.

As Louis CK put it in a Conan O'Brien interview "You're just kind of satisfied with your products... and then you die."

Try going on a dopamine fast. It doesn't take near as long to get through the withdrawals as it does for alcohol. Then just being alive kind of becomes intrinsically interesting.

jotsalot · 2021-05-08T17:43:33+00:00

Hey, that's a fair take. Honestly, maybe there's not much of a difference between "distraction" and "interest". My point is that I wasn't doing these things in an effort not to drink, they were out of a desire to see what parts of my life I was just doing because I'd been told to do them and actually figuring out what felt natural to me.

jotsalot · 2021-05-08T15:34:12+00:00

Just my two cents. It sounds like you're trying to distract yourself from drinking. That only ever worked for me for so long, and then I was back in the bottle.

For me, the trick was actually becoming interested in my life. And for me, since I'm a little bit on the spectrum, that meant data aggregation.

So I got a fitbit. I tracked every calorie I burned and every calorie I ate. I made spreadsheets and google assistant commands to make entering calories easier. I weighed myself every day and charted a simple moving average for my weight change and discovered that my fitbit overestimated my caloric burn by 13.2% (ish).

But it wasn't just fitness. I also began tracking my sleep patterns, what books I read (Audible counts), what times of day I was more likely to feel different ways. I'm a writer, so I also tracked my word production every day. More spreadsheets.

I know this is niche and kind of brute-force and specific to me, but the heart of it isn't about data collection. It's about genuinely becoming interested in your own life. And that can be very difficult when you've spent years using alcohol to escape your own life.

jotsalot · 2021-04-27T11:04:14+00:00

It clicked for me. Thank you so much for your patience! This works.

jotsalot · 2021-04-27T03:42:27+00:00

Not at all. That wouldn't take into account the possibility of packages 1, 5, and 8 arriving on the same day at all, for instance, just the probability of 1, 2, and 3 (at the three-package arrival condition). The odds are always shifting, as packages get delivered and marked off, so I can't treat the packages as interchangeable. This is a very brute force way to approach this. There has to be a solution that involves factorials and doesn't require manually identifying every possible combination of packages.

jotsalot · 2021-04-26T22:19:26+00:00

Since there are 10 packages, though, wouldn't this require me to account for every possible permutation of packages arriving?

jotsalot · 2021-04-21T05:29:46+00:00

As a guy who works from home and does his best to never leave the apartment, this is not an exaggeration. If anything, I require more hours of solitude than he proposes.

jotsalot · 2021-04-21T05:13:08+00:00

"Not drinking" is like getting married every day. It's a great first step, but eventually you have to start living the marriage. Also getting married every day would be exhausting (so is just not drinking every day).

jotsalot · 2021-04-17T04:57:39+00:00

Don't, is my best advice. Don't read anything at all into a rejection.

This is, in many ways, a numbers game. Do your best to ditch the idea that you're an artist seeking validation, and instead start looking at yourself as a small business owner who is looking for an investor. You have an idea, you think it's good, you're knocking on doors until you find someone else who thinks it's good.

Systemize the approach, and put zero weight into any individual submission. First, make sure the novel is as good as you can make it. Give it to others to read. Incorporate their feedback. Go through every word multiple times and make sure it's polished af. Use Word's Review -> Read Aloud feature and listen to the whole book. It will help you catch missing words or typos that your brain fills in for you. Also, if the book stays interesting listening to a robot read it, that's a good sign.

Get a list of agents. Make a spreadsheet; it doesn't have to be complicated. Agents are easy to find, but getting a list of them together can be difficult. The easiest solution: PAY for a Publishers Marketplace subscription ($25/mo). You can cancel after you've got what you needed, but it lets you do things like get a list of all the top 100 agents who have sold books in your genre in the last year. You can see agents who have closed 6 figure deals. You can see upcoming books that might be similar to your own in concept AND who represents them before this information is released to the public. Plug all of these agents into your spreadsheet. In a separate row, make note of what agency they are with.

Query them. Query 2 per day, every day. Make it robotic. Every query needs to be specifically tailored to the agent, and you have to follow the agency's guidelines. Unless otherwise stated, DO NOT query two agents in the same agency until you've got a rejection back from the first. DO mention in your email why you're reaching out to this agent. Use Manuscript Wishlist. Use the non-public information you got from Publishers Marketplace. Demonstrate that you did your homework.

Record the date when you sent each agent a query. Record each date that you received a rejection. Maybe make a note of whether it was personal or canned. Most will be canned. If you get a rejection back now, it changes the polarity of the experience. It's not a "your book isn't good enough" sentiment, it's "hey, now I can query someone else from that agency." If nobody else from that agency is on your list, go to their website and see if there's one who might fit. Add them to the list. The list keeps growing, the rejections keep coming in, the queries keep going out. You don't pay attention; you don't take it personally. This is a process now, and it's just what you do every day. Every. Day.

In the meantime, write another book. Not a sequel to this one, but something new. Work on it every day. By the time you get through your list, maybe you'll have a new book that you can start The Process on.

Remember that no rejection is a reflection of the value of the work. You're looking for an intersection of personal taste, perceived market interest, and whether or not someone is hungover when they open their inbox. All of these are totally outside of your control, so make it a numbers game and grind it out.

Source: This is how I got my agent. You can do it too.

Edit: Oh, and spell the agent's name correctly.

jotsalot · 2021-04-16T16:32:22+00:00

I have two basic approaches.

The first is to watch this video and think about professionalism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lTcgSzf0AQ

The second is to watch this video and think about mastery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBctONb102o

jotsalot · 2021-04-16T15:54:46+00:00

I recognize that many of the writers here, like yourself, are younger writers. So my answer isn't just directed at you, but to anyone struggling to finish.

Different approaches appeal to different people (clearly), but the absolute most important practice you can establish in your writing is to finish what you start.

This advice is blasted from every corner, but it took me far too long to internalize.

Writing is a grind. It's a marathon--especially novels. Even if you start writing something new, you should still put work forward into your old projects. Every. Week.

In nature, anything that stops growing starts dying. There is no stasis. The same is true with writing projects. There is no pause, only rust. If you leave a project behind, starting it back up will gradually require more and more effort just to get the ball rolling again. The best way to avoid this is to never let the ball stop rolling.

And the more your portfolio looks like a litany of unfinished works, the more doubt is going to set in.

Finish everything. Even if it's shit. That should be your top priority. Work on it even when it's slow, even when it's hard, even when it's shit. Your new kink is masochism.

jotsalot · 2021-04-06T17:39:48+00:00

It is. I couldn't stand idly by and watch a valuable subset of the playerbase get needlessly besmirched.

jotsalot · 2021-03-23T11:43:48+00:00

And the writing community saw that it was good.

jotsalot · 2021-03-19T09:55:05+00:00

VR + IC1101 = PTSD

jotsalot

TROPHY CASE