Via the always excellent Swiss Miss design blog:
“If you took one-tenth the energy you put into complaining and applied it to solving the problem, you’d be surprised by how well things can work out… Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won’t make us happier.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
Today is the 176th day I’ve got up to write at 5am. I can tell you that it was easier than the 175th because I’ve been awake since 4am trying to work out what to do. And the thing I’ve learnt is that more important than making yourself get up is having something to do the moment you have.
Er. Apart from the bathroom, the fastest shower in history and the mandatory giant mug of tea. I can get to my keyboard by around 5:15am at a push, and I do push, but it has happened that once I’ve got there, I’ve gone um.
Only a few times. But enough to give me the willies. I’ve had days where I’ve done some emails at that time, I’ve even had one day when I watched some TV that I could call research but, come on.
It is hard to get up this early and it is very easy to waste the time when you do. I wrote about this 5am start in my book, The Blank Screen, and it was meant to be an example of how you should search for the extra moments that you are able to write. How you need to find your schedule. I happen to write best this early in the morning, even though that goes against every late-night-jazz bone in my head. So I don’t like getting up, I really don’t like going to bed, and I’m not very keen on how tired I get by the end of the day, but the work I do is better. And, face it, it’s also more. I do more work and it is better. What’s not to love?
Everything.
But that’s about all the book said. I do talk in it about my particularly brutal way of making myself get up but that was as much about habit-forming and self-immolation as it was anything else.
And what I have really learnt since finishing the book is this business that you have to have something to do. Get up at 5am or whenever you like, but do not spend any time at all then planning what to do. Go to the keys and be writing immediately or you won’t do any writing.
It just occurs to me that this is a lot like people who lay out their clothes the night before. I have not once done that. Suddenly I see why they do it. I vow to you that I’m going to do that too, except I know I’m lying and, hey, I do enough with the making myself get up this early, enough already.
Maybe a better example is the type of novelist who ends the day by writing the first line of the next chapter. So in the morning, there’s line 1 already done. I can vividly understand that now.
It’s almost never that I’m lacking for a job to do. There was one time, back around the 150th day, that I’d finished a huge project and genuinely wasn’t sure what to get to next, genuinely wasn’t sure whether I shouldn’t instead breathe out for a bit. But usually there are plates spinning aplenty and it does take some figuring out to decide which is the most urgent or which is the most important. Fine. Just don’t do it at 5am.
Or 4am. I found 4am worse today. The fact that it was 4am was pretty bad all by itself but then I had the sense of pressure that I’d only got an hour before I had to be up and writing… something.
I’ve got meetings and travel I have to do today that are affecting the shape of my day and I have one urgent deadline that you’d think I should be doing right now but it’s a radio review and that means I listen to a play. I’m planning to do that while driving and travelling to these meetings.
I’ve got a lot of chores to do – literal chores around the house but who’s going to do any of those this early? – and I’ve always got lots of financial stuff to avoid.
But then there is the one big editing job that I need to get away today and there is the more creative one that I long to start.
I will get that editing done. I will do that review. I will start that creative project. I know I will because I have the time and I have that time because I made it by getting up at 5am.
But I also have you to talk to and that’s what I knew I’d do. Around 4:15am, I realised that I could do this, that I now had this to tell you about planning ahead, I knew I wanted to talk to you. In all the rush to be productive and edit this, write that, plan the other, we can forget the wanting and it’s important.
So hello. Nice to see you. If it’s 5am where you are, I feel your pain.
And I can help your pain just as much as I can help my own: tonight when I go to bed, I’m going to spend a few moments figuring out the shape of tomorrow. So that I can go straight to the keys at 5am on day 177 and begin writing.
Apparently only available in some parts of Europe – I just checked, the UK is one of the parts – this is a nice deal from Apple. I bought my office iMac through a similar deal last year and it was handy to keep my capital and only pay out a portion each month.
Mind you, it was also nice when the months ended and I could call the iMac my own. Just about the day my ten-months interest-free payment ended, though, Apple brought out a new iMac. It's as if they knew. The cunning rascals.
There are terms and conditions on this deal and you should eye them up carefully. See apple.com/uk/store for details.
But the key points begin with the fact that you can only get the deal on hardware (seemingly you might include some software through the store's attempts to upsell you). Next, it's 0% financing for ten months and this is separate from Apple's longer-term financing deals. I don't know anything about those. But they don't get any of this 0% lark.
Last and maybe a killer point: you have to spend over aproximately £450. But then this is the Apple Store, you can do it. The iPad Air that I raved about here the other day starts from £399 but I would (and did) spend more by getting one with greater capacity. The new iPad mini with Retina display starts at £319 but bung in more capacity or a Smart Cover and you're away
Why 44%? It’s a funny discount to have but it’s a discount and it’s big, so as long as you are very speedy, go take a look:
https://deals.macupdate.com/affil/14840
Keyboard Maestro lets you automate huge long sequences of things that you do on your Mac all the time. I’d tell you more but I’ve never used it. Not even with all the recommendations I’ve heard and the fact that I used to be addicted to a thing called QuickKeys that did much the same thing. But with this sale, it costs £12.20 and it’s worth the punt.
So I’ve just bought it on this offer and I’ll let you know what I think of it in action. However, I found out about this from an email which insists the offer is valid for today only. When you go through the checkout it suggests there are (currently) six days remaining on the offer so either something’s wrong or, more likely, I’ve misunderstood something. Go take a look at it today, just in case.
Interesting interview with Phil Libin, Evernote’s CEO, on AllThingsD:
http://allthingsd.com/20131201/seven-questions-for-evernote-ceo-phil-libin/
I have some niggles with Evernote yet it’s so very good so much of the time that I am a fan. Not sure I’d buy an Evernote-branded wallet – they do now exist and this interview is in part about such things – but next time I’m looking for a scanner, the odds are it will be the one mentioned in here.
That is, if it’s available in the UK by whenever that is. Currently Evernote Market, as their new shop is called, is US-only.
But Evernote itself is available everywhere and there’s a lot in this interview about its aims and uses.
This is so new it isn’t here yet. But Tim Stringer of technicallysimple.com is launching a Learn OmniFocus project which will be a mix of videos and tutorials about this software. I’m actually in two minds about this because I’m the type that prefers to learn on the job, to find out how to do things because I need to do them. And it works: I now feel I know OmniFocus very well. But partly because the promise of video tutorials is a good one and partly because I want you to know I’m not the only nut for OmniFocus software, I wanted to show you this link: http://technicallysimple.com/announcements/coming-soon-learn-omnifocus/
That’s an announcement about the new programme and it includes a sign-up form. I’ve signed up.
But it’s an interesting time to be doing this. I’ve mentioned OmniFocus before and doubtlessly will again but there are three versions of it and at this specific moment they are in a bit of flux. The iPhone one was only recently updated so that’s done, if you like, but the iPad and the Mac have a ways to go.
Less so the iPad one. That is by far the best version of OmniFocus and if you can buy only one, that’s the one to only buy. Except the iPhone version was dramatically improved by its being updated for iOS 7 and you have to expect that the iPad one will get the same or a better update too.
The Mac one is harder to explain. OmniFocus has been on the Mac for years and it shows. It just feels old. Looks old. And it is comparatively hard to use: it’s very powerful and I’m glad I got into it right alongside the iPhone and iPad ones, but it’s unquestionably harder to learn. So early this year I was very glad to sign up for the beta test of OmniFocus 2 for Mac and eventually along came a beta version. I liked it very much. Found lots of problems, as you’d expect and presume from a beta, reported them all back, saw at least most of them fixed. And then it stopped. I assumed the firm was done with the beta testing and the final product would be out presently.
No.
What really happened is that Apple had unveiled its drastically reworked iOS 7and The Omni Group paused the Mac development and instead focused on getting a new iPhone app out in time for, and to exploit the features of, iOS 7. They did it, they did it well, and the very first thing I did after updating my iPhone to iOS 7 was to buy the new OmniFocus.
But it was a purchase. It wasn’t a free update. And I am fine with that, I am more than fine with that because OmniFocus has saved, my bacon, kept my sanity and even – yes – lifted my heart. Of course I’ll buy the new one.
Except, the way the Apple App Store works, there can’t be any free or reduced upgrades for even new users. If you bought OmniFocus for iPad today and a new one came out tomorrow, you wouldn’t be happy. I think you’d be happier than you expected because the iPad one is so good. But you wouldn’t be happiest.
So reluctantly, I’m saying hold off buying the iPad one for just a while yet if you can.
The Mac version is different: so long as you buy it directly from the company, The Omni Group, instead of via Apple’s Mac App Store, you’ll be fine: buy version 1 now, get version 2 free (I believe) when it comes out – whenever it comes out. The Omni Group store is here: https://store.omnigroup.com
But there wouldn’t be a need for OmniFocus 2 for Mac if the first one weren’t hard to use so it’s tricky to recommend you buy something that’s difficult, that you may get very frustrated by and which will be replaced at some unknown but soon time.
You might be best off buying the iPhone version and just enjoying that for now. But oh, the iPad one is a treat to use.
…an iPad Air.
I used to think I relied on my old, original iPad but it was a toy compared to the new iPad Air. Mind you, I did give my old one to my mother about two months before the new model came out so I had a lot of time to notice how much I was missing having one. Actually, my OmniFocus work fell off badly: if you don’t know OmniFocus, I should tell you that it’s a kind of bionic To Do manager that pretty much completely runs my life. If you are now intrigued by OmniFocus, I have to warn you that it only runs on Apple gear. It’s also comparatively expensive – well, it’s expensive when you compare it to all the free To Do apps; it is not in the slightest bit expensive when you contrast it to how much use it has been for me.
One of the things it does is let you focus only on what has to be done right now and what can be done right now. It does that by hiding away everything else but that only works, that can only be allowed to work, if you periodically review everything on your list. There’s a thing called Review. It’s not wonderful on the Mac version of OmniFocus, it doesn’t exist at all on the iPhone version, but it is gorgeousness incarnate on the iPad one. So good that you are fooled into thinking it’s an easy thing to look at all your tasks and then as you go through everything, it’s so remarkably easy to see what you’ve got to do that you tend to just go get it done. I timed myself once for The Blank Screen book, just finding out how long a typical review took me and I was astonished that it was two hours.
In those two hours, I reviewed about fifty different projects with a total of, I don’t know, a couple of hundred tasks. I found I’d already done a lot of them – I want to say thirty, I’m not sure now – and as I went through them all and saw ones like “Email Bert to ask for your spanner back” I’d email Bert to ask for my spanner back. By the end of the two hours, I’d marked off many more tasks as done. And most importantly of all, I knew where I was with every project.
And could immediately forget it all. Forget it, knowing that it was all in hand and that it was all in OmniFocus. Knowing that if it wasn’t something that would come up in the next couple of days, I would at least see it during the next review. I could concentrate on now. The fact that you can park the thinking and churning and worrying about things you can’t do yet and instead put all that engine effort into what you can, it’s life-changing.
Except it fell over completely when I gave away my iPad.
So the first thing I installed on my new iPad Air last month was OmniFocus. I swear to you that I breathed out. And I thought that would be something to tell you, I thought that would be enough to tell you, all by itself.
Except you may already know that iPad Airs have a ten-hour battery life. What I did not expect is that I would use up that battery life almost every day. The ten hours is true, actually the ten hours is conservative, but I use the iPad so much that I have had to charge it up again nearly every night. Don’t take that as a criticism of the battery, take it as a gulping assessment of how very, very much I use this machine.
Most of what you may have read on The Blank Screen blog was written on that iPad Air. I’ve written thousands of words on it in just the three or four weeks I’ve had it.
And yesterday, Angela needed my bag as a prop for a play and that meant I couldn’t carry my iPad around with me all day. (As sturdy as it is, it’s also so light you can’t believe it’s strong so I’m looking for a case but haven’t found one I like yet.) I swear to you I got itchy.
And that’s when I realised I am now life-support-dependent on my iPad Air.
Have a look at them yourself. If you happened to choose to go through this Amazon link and then bought an iPad Air or maybe a car, I’d see some cash coming my way. But check it out on Apple’s own store instead: they have a lot more detail and some particularly well-made videos about the product.
Go to a real-life Apple Store too: just walk in and pick one of these up. I was working in Paris the day they came out and I tried one in a store there but wasn’t all that impressed with the apparent lightness. I was by the speed and the gorgeous display. Now that I have one, I’m very impressed with the display, the speed and the lightness too. Maybe I was wearing thick gloves that first time. I don’t kow.
Tomorrow is the first of December and at some point during the day, I will email a report of all I've done throughout November. Nobody has asked me to do this, nobody is waiting for it, nobody will do anything with the report. But it helps me enormously to write it down and to have someone to send it to.
Earlier this year I earned a place on Room 204, a programme run by Writing West Midlands for up to 15 writers who are of a certain standard, who are based in the area, and who need something for their careers. It's a very deliberately formless kind of year that you get with this scheme: it's not like there are lessons or there are, I don't know, tests. Instead, you get a year connected to this group and can make of it what you need.
I've made a lot of it. It's done a huge amount for me, it's given me a new career in presenting and two of my books this year came out of chats I had with them.
But this isn't about me, it's about you. And I want you to have the thing that I got from Room 204 which particularly helped me, which I think may particularly help you.
It's this. Right at the end of my first meeting with the Room 204 folk, we talked about the rest of the year and it was mentioned that if a month goes by without us happening to work on something together, I should just keep them up to date with what I've been doing.
That's quite clear, quite easy, and I deliberately took it the wrong way. There hasn't been a month, I don't think there's been a week, that I haven't been doing something with Room 204, for them, or ignited by their work, but still at the end of every month, I tell them what I've been doing.
I also tell them now that there's no need for them to read the emails. I'm sending it to you, I say, but I'm writing it for me.
Because simply writing down in a clear, coherent and sometimes very long email what I've done in the month makes me realise what I've done in the month. Written these articles, been published here, pitched that, got filmed for this, sometimes it's a giant list of things. There's no question but that it reads like I'm boasting.
But that's fantastic. What have I got to boast about? Apparently, monthly, quite a bit. It's nice to safely boast to good people because it's great and unusual and wild to realise that you have something you could boast about.
Only, if I have – so far – sent each of those monthly report emails off with a certain satisfaction – that is only one of the three huge, huge benefits to me of doing them.
The second is that I look at the email as I'm compiling it and I remember what I've done. You do this, I know you do: you finish something and you're off away on to the next. We don't look back much, do we? Being a productive kind of person means always rushing on to the next thing, getting stuff done and out, getting on with what we so long to get on with.
Stopping to look back across the last month is a waste of time but it is an extremely useful waste of time. I'll start to write to Room 204 that it wasn't a good month because my mind will be on the failures, the rejections, the various and many problems that come up. But then I'll write something like “Made chair of the West Midlands Screenwriters' Forum” and think, okay, that wasn't bad. Unexpected. And I thnk it'll be a lot of work, but it wasn't bad. And then I'll remember that a pitch worked out. I'll remember that this is the month I finally got paid for that thing I did.
By the end of the email, I've changed my mind about the month. I'm feeling vastly better. So far, anyway. Some months are better than others but I've still yet to have a really bad one. I'll let you know how that goes.
So there's the little bit of boasting, just enough to feel a teeny bit good, and then there's the other psychological thing of changing my mind about how it had been a bad month.
The third thing is that I can't do this monthly email in one go: I forget too much, far too much, of what I've been doing. So as I do things, I add a swift line to an OmniFocus To Do task. Just jot down two words, enough to remind me, anything.
And that always prompts me to find something else to add to the list. All the way through the month, this drive to have something else to add is with me. I wince to tell you this but I have made calls solely so that I could say something like “Pitched to British Council” on my monthly list.
And, sometimes or even quite often, that call works out.
So tomorrow I will be writing my unasked-for, unneeded yet boastingly boosting and useful monthly report about myself and my work to Room 204.
Give it a go, would you? It will help you too.
This is cross-posted from my personal Self Distract blog. Each week I cover what we write and what we write with, when we get around to writing. It's sometimes about productivity but it's also about drama and the issues of writing. You can read it every Friday here. This one is also specifically about Doctor Who and you can read a collection of Self Distract Doctor Who blogs plus new journalism including a detailed interview with the Restoration Team and the history of Who in Radio Times in my book, Self Distract.
Here be spoilers. Well, there be spoilers: down there, a lot of spoilers a bit of the way down the screen. If you haven't seen the 50th anniversary special of Doctor Who, please do. Go watch it. It's very good.
All I ever want from a story is to be caught up in it to the exclusion of anything else. That's all. Analysis and whathaveyou, that can come later if it must. Just scoop me up, please. And Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor did exactly that. Job done.
Only, I'm surprised that it did because at its core is something that goes against a thing. I was going to say it goes against a drama principle of mine, but nuts to drama principles: if it works, that's your principle right there. But we tend to have issues that colour our writing, things that we come back to because we're trying to find them in ourselves, beacuse we're trying to mine them for others or maybe just because we're good at them.
And I have one thing that is guaranteed to appeal to me, utterly certain to get me obsessed, and which you break at your peril. Yet Doctor Who broke it and worked. I don't know how. Let me tell you that right up front, if you can call this the front when I've already rambled on at you a ways. I want to explore this and see if I can figure it out because it matters to me.
Here's what it is. If you wanted to get all academic about it, drama is about obstacles. I seriously do not know why you would want to get academic if that means boiling down the richness of drama into a checklist with only one thing to check, but it's not unreasonable to say drama equals obstacles. Fine. Someone is faced with something, that is or at least that can be drama.
But for me, it's really only drama when the thing they face is their own fault. Having something done to you, that's awful. It's powerful. Having something done to you and it is entirely your own fault, though, that's wonderful. It's not that I'm especially in to my characters being punished for something and it's only a little bit that I am in to the genuine meaning of tragedy: a tale that ends badly because of something within the lead character. It's specifically the point that if this terrible thing is your own fault, you could have prevented it – and now there is absolutely not one single thing you can do to put it right. You can't undo the past. This is the real reason I am forever coming back to the issue of time in my writing: the regret, the permanent regret for things lost and things done badly. You can't rewrite history, not one line.
Except in Doctor Who. This is where the spoilers start.
The day in The Day of the Doctor is the one where the fella ended the Time War. This was a huge and so far never seen portion of Doctor Who history: immediately before we saw Christopher Eccleston's Doctor, there was this war, right. War between the Daleks and the Time Lords. And it was ended by the Doctor. We slowly came to learn that though he ended it – so far, so Doctor-heroic-like – there was something of a cost. The war was ended only by the complete and total destruction of both sides. Time Lords and Daleks, all killed. All killed by the Doctor.
Cor.
The Day of the Doctor undoes this and if you'd told me that before I saw it, I'd have thought again about going to the cinema. I read an interview with Steven Moffat on DigitalSpy this week that ran in part:
It was about a year ago. I remember thinking, 'What occasion in the Doctor's life is the most important?' Well, it's the day he blew up Gallfirey. Then I tried to imagine what writing that scene would be like and I thought, 'There's kids on Gallifrey and he's going to push the button? He wouldn't!' I don't care what's at stake, he's not going to do it. So that was the story – of course he never did that, he couldn't. He's the Doctor – he's the man who doesn't do that. He's defined by the fact that he doesn't do that. Whatever the cost, he will find another way. So it had to be the story of what really happened, that he's forgotten.
I see his point and he wrote it superbly in the show, but I'm mithered. I detest beyond measure the way that a soap, for instance, will get a character into a dramatic situation and then pull back at the last moment to say it's all right, really. It wasn't him. It isn't her. They're dreaming, whatever. Go away. I'm never watching again. So having this thing in Doctor Who that we know was big and then showing us it being even bigger but then taking it away, it shouldn't have worked for me.
I think it's that bit about 'I don't care what's at stake'. For me, the drama was in how there were these stakes that required him to do this. Now, actually, I have to play this both sides because a huge amount of the drama – can you quantify drama like this? a good 43% was angst, 12% personal torture and so on – was to do with how he had no choice. But if the Doctor has no choice, that is big and huge and enormous but it isn't the same as him having a choice and making the decision anyway. If the Doctor presses the big red button, everyone dies on Gallifrey. If he doesn't press it, everyone dies on Gallifrey anyway because the Daleks are attacking very thoroughly.
There is the fact that they're attacking because presumably they're seriously hacked off at the Doctor so nearly efficiently destroying all their plans, ever, so the whole attack is his fault. I'll have that.
So with this storm of issues going on, it does all come down to the small moment, the huge yet tiny moment where he has to do this or not do it. The fact that he does speaks to me about the stakes of the story but it also completely engages me in this Doctor character. The fact that he doesn't do it, that takes most things away. It reduces the stakes, because somehow he's now got a choice, and that reduces the character for me.
Except, maybe it worked for me, worked in this one story, because Moffat could undo the destruction of Gallifrey, he could rewrite one very big line of history, yet do it in such a way that the Doctor was left with the same burden we thought he had.
Doctor Who often reunites various different Doctors and there is always the issue of why a later one doesn't remember all this from when he was the earlier guy. The Day of the Doctor makes many little nods to this and does explicitly state that the Doctors' time streams are out of sync and that neither David Tennant's Tenth Doctor nor John Hurt's Nth Doctor can possibly retain the memory of what has happened. It's plot convenience and it's what has always happened before, but this time the lack of memory means that John Hurt's Doctor and David Tennant's and up to a point Matt Smith's one all believe they destroyed Gallifrey. They carry that burden for four hundred years.
Four hundred years. That's enough carrying of blame and regret and fault even for me.
Good people doing bad things. That's what chimes with me. Making irrevocable choices. That's me. But I thought it was a rule, an inviolate rule of drama that you do not ever undo a character's bad choices, you do not give them a reprieve, you do not give them an escape. The drama is in living with the things you cannot live with. And The Day of the Doctor says bollocks, William.
Quite right too.