I’m crunched for time on a deadline right now, but it’s been a while since I posted, so I’ll take the lazy way out and post someone else’s clever stuff.

This piece on “How to Write a Book” was forwarded to me by my eagle-eyed and all-knowing pal Magda, from www.yankeepotroast.org, a site that bills itself as “The Journal of Literary Satire: Hastily Written and Slopilly [sic] Edited.”

1. Do absolutely nothing until you can see the whites of your deadline’s eyes.
2. If you’ve got cowriters, try to disagree as much as possible. If you’re of the same opinion regarding a section of text, bicker about dinner choices.
3. Criticize what little progress you’ve achieved and doubt what little talent you possess.
4. Do not write any new words when there are still old words that have only been rewritten twelve times. No sentence is complete until it’s lost all traces of your original thought.
5. Complain about the pressure of a looming deadline to everyone you know. This will ameliorate the jealousy and bitterness felt by friends without book deals. It will also put an end to social invitations that may hamper your writing progress, as your former friends will now hate you.
6. Stop sleeping. Complain about how tired you are too.
7. Never have a mental breakdown before 11 p.m.
8. Do not postpone other projects so that you can focus on the current one. It’s better to spread yourself so thin that you produce an evenly distributed amount of complete crap.
9. If you’ve gotten this far without a single technical foul-up, now’s a good time to download something viral.
10. Make a schedule for yourself, but do not even remotely follow it. Instead, continually do some mental math that divides your remaining pages by the rapidly dwindling number of hours.
11. The best writing is that which is compiled from dozens of different documents, including things you’ve e-mailed or text-messaged to yourself. Try to create separate documents on as many different computers as are available. Some things will be irrevocably lost, and hours will be spent cursing. Learn a lesson about orderliness, but do not act upon such knowledge.
12. Some terribly constructed sentences always make good low-hanging fruit for your cowriters to edit, thus protecting your awful idea from their meddling.
13. Were you napping? Stop that. It’s 11 o’clock already. Start freaking out, hard.
14. If you’ve worked hard three days in a row, take a hard-earned day off. And it looks like snow tomorrow, so you might as well take the whole weekend. But a day off from writing is not a day off from complaining!
15. If you haven’t drastically gained or lost weight, you’re just not writing well.
16. Assume your sources are reputable. When some accidental research reveals the source that serves as foundation for your work to be as reliable as grandma’s memory, briefly consider the amount of work it will take to correct things at this late hour, then fuck it and move on.
17. Pick up any book on your bookshelf, skim a few pages, and admit that it’s a terrible book… but better than anything you’ll ever write. Cry.
18. If one of your cowriters is something of an optimist, shit in his hat.
19. If you’re not panicking, call your agent and request they he or she panics. You’ll have no problem panicking afterward.
20. Call your mom.
21. Your time is more valuable than your money. Spend as much cash as you’ve got in your pockets.

Yep. That’s about right.

Yesterday was, that is. (Today bids fair to be nothing but work, work, work to finish my book on Sea Mammals.)

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend whom I hadn’t seen for a while. She’s a writer (plays and short fiction) and was curious about my experiences at the Taos workshop. During our conversation, I mentioned an idea for a new book–or at least a premise that might be nurtured into an idea–that I’ve been mulling for the past few weeks.

Now, I’m not by any means going to abandon my large and messy time-travel trilogy, but I’ve been thinking about writing a shorter, simpler, stand-alone novel to put some of the plotting insights from Taos into immediate practice. And I’d outline this one first, rather than writing a flabby, unstructured, overlong novel and retrostructuring it. Anyway, I mentioned this germ of an idea to my friend. Just now she called me about an article she’s reading that is directly connected with the premise; it could offer some good plot possibilities. So I have a starting point: Get article. Read article. See what happens.

In an embarrassment of riches, I had another idea, or set of interconnected ideas, completely unexpectedly, while I was washing my hands in the evening. These ideas were for BS, the first time-travel novel. They concerned some fairly sweeping changes that would make that book a lot stranger, but better. They would also go a long way to solving a couple of its biggest problems. I immediately scribbled them down on my whiteboard, happy to have experienced my first out-of-the-blue breakthrough in a while. (Thanks, subconscious mind!)

And then we watched Children of Men. But even that couldn’t buzzkill my day.

Yesterday I was talking with a friend about the perennially vexing fact that knowledge does not equal power–specifically, the yawning gulf between wanting/intending/knowing how to do something and actually getting started on it. I seem unable to motivate myself to get back onto a good, regular writing schedule (talking about my work writing here), even though I consider myself lucky to have all the writing work I can handle and a great relationship with a good publisher and blahblahblah.

She told me that she’d recently read an article about some new brain-chemistry research on motivation and the neurotransmitter (if that’s what it is) dopamine. D is part of the pleasure-related brain activity that also involves serotonin. My friend was fuzzy–and possibly not entirely accurate–on the details; I’d look it up but I’m insufficiently motivated right now. Anyway, the gist is that there’s growing evidence that dopamine is linked to motivation.  If you don’t have enough pleasure in your life, your brain becomes a restless, unfocused, distraction-seeking hamster, and you wind up frittering away time and energy browsing the Internet, watching The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy during the middle of the afternoon, thinking that you should go to the gym but never going,  performing unnecessary housecleaning, and generally having no motivation or energy for the tasks that your brain knows are important but does not think are pleasurable.

The fix? Fun.

So far as my friend knew, this doesn’t amount to permission to give yourself over to absolute pleasure (which is exhausting in itself and can end badly, as we all learned from Dr. Furter). It means that if you build genuinely pleasurable moments into every day rather than telling yourself you can’t or shouldn’t go to a movie or read a new book in the bathtub or hang out with friends until you’re caught up with work, your dopamine levels will be stable and you’ll have more energy.

No doubt anyone who reads this is duh-ing about now. Yeah, this is Common Sense 101, but I don’t always live by it. Last year I passed through a particularly horrible stretch of work life–brought on by over-committing and procrastinating–during which I wrote 17 books in 7 months. No kidding. Of course, many of them were short, and for series with which I was familiar, but still, it was the hardest I’ve ever worked. The Season of Many Books, as we called it, was exhilarating to pull off, but it involved long days every day, no time to interact with Zach, almost no days off, and lots of  turned-down invitations and canceled social plans. During that time I got into an all-work-or-no-work mindset, but my goal is a sane schedule, one in which I work for 5 or 6 hours every day, not zero hours for seven days and then 14 anxiety-fueled hours for three.

So the dopamine-motivation hook got me thinking about my daily work life and some strategies to try. Of course, if I were really motivated, I’d be working on  the business plan for my new self-help book-seminar-infomercial-empire: Dopavate Yourself Now!