This will be word vomit 0660 and I\u2019m getting started on it on a Sunday morning at 1150am. Now this is starting to feel good. A part of me is tempted to go downstairs and get some coffee, but I think I\u2019m just going to focus on getting the writing done first. I want to do 3 vomits every morning. This is the second of today\u2019s series. It\u2019s like working out. I\u2019m on my second set. I want to complete 3 sets every day. It\u2019s just the commitment that I\u2019ve made to myself as a writer, and it will allow me to breathe a little easier, knowing that one part of my life is a little less full of shit. Then once I make this a foothold, I can systematically reduce bullshit elsewhere in my life. Having written 1.1 vomits so far, I\u2019m now thinking about how I\u2019d like to work out after this is done. Isn\u2019t it funny how that works? Admiral McRaven talked about this in his commencement speech, when talking about the virtue of making your bed. It\u2019s just one small task that, when completed, gets the ball rolling, and gives you the confidence you need to believe and know that you can do another. And another. I have successfully written a word vomit in the morning without any distractions, without doing anything else (apart from feeding my cats and going to pee). If I can do that, what else can I do? I can write another one? Sure.<\/p>\n
My overthinking drive kicks in at this point and says things like, \u201cwhy don\u2019t you just keep writing? Maybe you could do 40 in a single day!\u201d Slow down, Satan. My record for most word vomits done in a single day, if I remember correctly, is 15. (Which were those again? I\u2019m tempted to go check them out. I shall add a todo.) <\/p>\n
But see, this is the odd way in which my brain tends to work. It races to extremes. It tries to get excited about doing something big, something bold, something all at once. [1] But I\u2019ve been learning over the years that if you want to really do something good, something really big and bold, you\u2019re going to have to do it in bits and pieces day after day after day. This seems boring and disappointing to the monkey-child mind, but it\u2019s actually quite liberating, interesting and exciting to the adult mind. I want to grow up, I want to be a full adult, I want to be mature and respectable as a person so that I can be childlike and irreverent in my work. I keep saying those things because it feels good to say it, but the point is that I need to do the work required in order to achieve it.<\/p>\n
(Here I found myself thinking about something somebody tweeted about the recent archetype of \u2018former teenage rebels in positions of responsibility\u2019 in media, and I was tempted to look it up.)<\/p>\n
What\u2019s next? I guess this vomit is now about the nature of my monkey mind and how it really jumps around, from thing to thing, looking for shiny things, looking for distractions. And I can\u2019t really begrudge it for that, but I have to acknowledge that that\u2019s how it is. Sometimes I wonder what life would be like with a child. I need to wake up to this idea that I DO live with a child \u2013 who lives inside my own brain. Sometimes it throws tantrums. I think we\u2019ve generally improved upon our relationship in the past few years, but I\u2019d like to really take it to the next level. I\u2019d like to have one of those trust-fall type relationships, where we can both really trust teach other to take care of things because life is just so goddamn exhausting when you can\u2019t trust yourself.<\/p>\n
I need to make this a part of my reviews. [todo added]<\/p>\n
How shall we end this? The central point here is akin to what Tim Urban described in Wait But Why\u2019s post about procrastination. It\u2019s all about knowing and understanding the monkey. And being kind to the monkey. Loving the monkey. And yet not entirely indulging the monkey. That\u2019s called being an adult. That\u2019s the textbook definition of growing up. Nobody else can look inside your head and see precisely how crazy your monkey is. I think I have an unusually crazy monkey. My monkey\u2019s like 90th or 95th percentile crazy. But life isn\u2019t a comparative suffering game. And there are benefits to having a crazy monkey once you know how to manage it right. It\u2019s a source of creativity and insight. You just need to keep him from sniffing glue. That\u2019s not too hard, right? That\u2019s not too hard at all.<\/p>\n
\u2013<\/p>\n
[1] “Let\u2019s write 40,000 words in a day.” First of all, is that possible? I know it takes me about 15-20 minutes to do 1,000. So let\u2019s say that\u2019s 3,000\/hr. 10 hours would be 30,000. It would take 14 hours. Yeah, 40,000 is probably possible but I would have to be seriously strategic about it. I would have to have my meals all planned out, I would have to have no distractions, and I would have to have all my cues set up so that I\u2019d be able to to go through them systematically, without wasting time in between thinking things like \u201coh, but what do I write next?\u201d<\/p>\n
Hypothetically then it\u2019s possible to write a novel in a day if you plan everything out just so. But of course it\u2019ll take many more days to do all the editing and so on.<\/p>\n
I wonder now if I\u2019d like to try and finish my word vomit project with a bang, maybe in the last 50,000 stretch. I could live-stream it or something. That actually would be pretty cool. I would probably literally injure my fingers from all that typing though. Which, again, oddly sounds a little fun to me. I\u2019m a weird person that way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This will be word vomit 0660 and I\u2019m getting started on it on a Sunday morning at 1150am. Now this is starting to feel good. A part of me is tempted to go downstairs and get some coffee, but I think I\u2019m just going to focus on getting the writing… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[333],"class_list":["post-10491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-word-vomit","tag-bugs"],"yoast_head":"\n