Podcasts, Projects, Transcript
[Transcript] ISBW S17 Ep4: Real Talk, or HOW badly does the truth hurt?
by
I’m excited to be able to offer transcriptions of I Should Be Writing again! I’m starting with the new season’s livestreams and catching up as I can. If you want to help this endeavor, supporting the Patreon, the Ko-Fi, or the Jemi would be a great help.
Real Talk
I Should Be Writing S17 Ep4
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
writing, people, problem, kimmy, good, listening, bullet journal, talking, book, podcast, couple, discord, thinking, bad, project, work, find, prompt, gothic, suburban
SPEAKER
Mur Lafferty
Mur 0:32
This is I should be writing… you know, I meant to write down what episodes we’re doing. I thought I was on top of that. Clearly I’m not. Want to say 554, but I do know it’s season 17, episode 3. So, ha! Eat that! Yeah, that’s my defiance for the day. Chat started early. So welcome everyone. Hey Kaykimmie. Starburutopia has subscribed. Thank you very much. Been subscribed for six months. Wow, that’s awesome. Thank you. And we got Kaykimmie and Suburbangothic and Underpope and Smar. Good to see you all. Underpope’s enjoying the UFOs. Yes 173. Tashatrisby, Todd, good to see you all. Hope things are going okay. I’ve been working on my novella. And that’s going fairly well. A couple of changes, I get stressed doing the streams. And I realized the live writes, I mean it’s a good stress but it is work and stress and something that then I’m thinking if I can remove something from my life, it might be good to de-stress and I realized the live write ins, streaming them live was stressing me out. And the idea of moving them to discord and just doing a group video or audio call where we’re all there and doing accountability and stuff will be better. And so I’m going to be moving that to the discord. I’ll probably be writing here today since it’s already scheduled, but after that it’ll be on the discord.
Mur 2:40
If you want to join the discord, you can do so at patreon. I removed the $1 level but I’m thinking of adding it back on, just in case people just want access to the discord because people are finding it really useful. My chat box is strange. Okay. That’s a little better. Okay. Hey Fyrerider. Good to see you. Kaykimmie likes the plan. I have to show something off because after having problems so much with the streaming lately, I have worked out a couple of kinks yesterday, and I’m very happy. So if anybody has news, even if the news is just ‘I got rejected’, I believe Underpope submitted last week for the first time? Or got first rejection? I don’t care because I programmed this. Oh good, it works. Yay. That is our celebration if anybody gets a submission or rejection or acceptance. Of course we’re going to celebrate for acceptances. But I try to celebrate every aspect because every aspect means you’re a working writer. I’ll say it till I’m blue in the face. I’m not gonna get blue in the face because I hydrated. It’s funny, the stream labs, automatic. For those of you listening later, the stream labs bots sends a comment to chat every once in a while, suggesting people, if you’re feeling low, make sure you’ve hydrated and eaten and slept and are taking care of yourself. And actually, I’m personally, having trouble with that.
Mur 4:46
But I have to interrupt myself because Underpope did say first rejection and two more since then, and finished third draft of werecockroach novella last night. That calls for a celebration. So yeah, unfortunately, I’m having that problem right now. I’m having the feeling low and not energetic problem. And on one hand I know I can look at… the state of the world is terrible. It’s improving, but it’s still bad. And there’s also a pandemic going on, but other people are managing to cope. And it’s not like I’m sitting around, really upset about these specific things. And I realized I was kind of getting low. I mentioned this earlier but I was hoping I was crawling out of it but I don’t think I am. And it’s partially because I had an uncomfortable discussion yesterday. Can’t hear you over the applause sound effect. Okay, see the problem with that, Sario, is that I can’t hear the applause at all. And I know I don’t have headphones on right now, but when I have headphones on, I can’t hear the applause. I can only hear it when I playback the recording. I don’t know how to get myself to hear it so I can tweak the levels. So sorry about that. I will work on that. And LIBurwell got the Christmas postcard this week, on the day you went for COVID test negative, good job. Not good job but congratulations. So anyway, you know, sometimes you’re hard on yourself and you think I’m a major loser, I’m awful, I’m terrible. And you know objectively, you’re probably wrong. But you know you have flaws. I’m not going to go into details, but I’d been nursing a couple of insecurities, for a while. A long while. And yesterday it was brought up to me that what I’m insecure about has some validity. And that, that hurt. On one hand it was brought up in a way that I didn’t appreciate. So I resented that. But despite that, they weren’t wrong in what they were criticizing me for. And that has brought me down.
Mur 7:56
And I know when you give someone advice, especially if you’re a parent you’ll know what I’m talking about, you give somebody advice and you say, you should do this instead of that, because I have had experience. And I can tell you what happens when you do the second thing, and not the first thing. And the kid’s like okay yeah, and what they’re thinking is, it’ll be different for me. I know cuz I was a kid once. And you know sometimes people just have to screw up to get that experience. I had a friend who had, she had cancer. Sorry, I got lost in thought. She had cancer and a couple of years after she went into remission, she was just talking about something like something that I would consider very stressful, and not like it bothered her. And I said, why aren’t you more upset about this? And she’s like well I’ve had cancer. And you know, everything seems to pale next to that. And I have a friend who’s had, you know, nearly died kind of diseases, and they have the same outlook. It’s like nothing you throw against me is worse than that time I almost died in the hospital. And I’ve wanted that kind of mentality, without having to go through the cancer. And what I’m saying is when I’ve known that I had a problem being disorganized, I guess I secretly thought that I was still handling it. But now that it’s been pointed out to me, I am in a halfway tired, depressed, I’m a loser, I don’t want to do anything, and halfway to this is the kick in the pants I needed to get things in order.
Mur 10:05
And so, even though I resented a couple of things that they said because they were unfair, but the core of the problem was truth. It was. So I’m having to nurse my hurt feelings and also the absolute real fear that I am not good at organizing. I’m not good at prioritizing. I’m not good at figuring out how my day should be structured. I know I mentioned it earlier in the stream but sometimes my family gets worried about me because I’ve added the streaming thing to my schedule and that seems to stress me out they think. But I love it because the schedule forces me to podcast twice a week. May not be the best podcast, but I’m doing it. I’m gonna catch up with chat briefly. Kaykimmy last time I was feeling like I couldn’t accomplish anything ever but I powered through and submitted the listings that were due instead of giving up. That is amazing. Congratulations. I’mma do yay again because I love this button. I gotta fix that audio, sorry about that. I’m hoping that I can take this fear and worry and channel it into something good. It really has to do with prioritization. I think that’s all I have to say on that subject. If anybody has any follow up questions, let me know. I know I’m being vague, because I’m just not comfortable talking in more detail. My friend gave me a somewhat similar talk, ascerbic but not cruel and I’m having similar contrasting emotions. I am sorry Pinballprincess. I understand I actually had a meeting with a friend this morning who I usually talk to. And he pointed out that one of my solutions to my disorganization problem… I’ve said it many times, like, I just need to get this fixed. I need to do this one thing and then things will turn around. He’s like, you say that every time. And you’re not doing it. And that made me feel really bad because I didn’t know what to do to fix it.
Mur 12:57
It will make more sense if I give more information. It’s hopefully a kick in the pants but getting myself together is so hard. I understand, I really do. Part of this has to do with my writing schedule and how it’s all over the place. And I keep thinking if I could just get up and write first thing in the morning, then I can get my writing done and then do the other things. But I don’t. I keep thinking I need to clear my head and clear my to do list before I start the writing, which, as you can probably foresee, that’s not a good thing to do because the other stuff may take the whole day. And that’s not prioritizing the writing. Hey Helljack, thanks for the follow. Good to see you. When we talked about the fact that my plan to work right first thing in the morning wasn’t working, I really felt lost. And he was suggesting maybe get a different place to write which, right now it’s really hard to do. I can’t go to a coffee shop. And I’ve got a big house but it’s cluttered. And I have ergonomics to think about too. I’m getting older. And if the chair and the desk isn’t right, it’s not good. I can write on the couch and then regret it a great deal later. Kaykimmy says I’m finding that I need to reframe my perspective of goals as a continuing process rather than once I accomplish this, I’m done. Yeah. I thought about that yesterday, how I just made three big writing goals for the year. And I might be scaling that down. Two of them were project based. And the third one was just: get my act together to really cement a writing schedule. And that, unfortunately, I’m not sure that fits in with the whole goal setting mindset because it’s… Why can’t I remember? The first one is specific I think. I mean it’s actionable, but it’s hard to measure. And it’s hard to know when you’re done. How do you know when you’ve actually succeeded in making something a habit?
Mur 15:50
I know it’s longer than 21 days. 21 days is like the favorite number people use but it can take up to three months. So while I feel better and more positive about that one goal I’m not quite sure how to format it. But that’s why I’m paying for this class so hopefully somebody can help me out there. I specifically want to, I want to show up. You know, I’m just starting to come to the thing of, once you get experience in something, the hardest part is showing up. The hardest part of exercising is actually putting on the clothes and going to the gym or getting the weights or going outside or whatever. The hardest thing about writing is sitting in the chair, pulling up the word processor and not looking at anything else. That’s the hardest part for me. And really, it’s all about showing up. Whenever I was hating running last summer, I would be really just dying in the heat, and then I’d be thinking, I’ve already succeeded because I showed up. I just got to make it home before I faint. I don’t think it matters even what time of day I do it, if I just show up. However, because Twitch has been so good for me in making my podcasting regular, I’m wondering if, forcing that schedule on the writing would help. But I don’t know how to force it without, you know, making it a live stream which will stress me out so that’s oh so hard. Jackeli or lee or Burwell, I’m not quite sure, but comment in the chat is make sure you’ve got a good chair working from home was painful till they let us go in and get our work chairs. I did invest in a new chair. I was excited, I got a advance check and bought myself a really good chair. I got it on refurb. It was much cheaper than it should have been. And I bought myself a streaming PC. Or rather I bought the innards so that my husband could have a fun project over the holidays. So I do have a good chair, so I’m glad for that.
Mur 18:38
Sario says I’ve tried quite a few organization methods. Some several times and nothing seems to stick for more than a couple of months or less. Yeah, I’m having that problem right now. I read or listen to self help books, usually about structure and organization. And I listen to it and it sounds like a good idea and they sound like things I can do. Usually I buy the audio book so I can listen in the car. But I realized, I’m seeing this, I think I’m approaching it more like just reading a book. And not like what it is, which is, it’s a textbook. This requires studying and really trying to absorb because it seems that a lot of people right now are referencing the book, Atomic Habits, I believe by James Clear, I think he wrote it. And I had it on audiobook and I’ve listened to it before. And I was listening to it again and I’m thinking this is really good stuff, but what’s gonna make me retain it. And I realized not listening when I’m driving or cooking or cleaning or something, is step one because I need to sit down and make notes and make plans with this advice. It’s not just listen and get ideas and fix your life. I think it takes more work than that. Maintaining structure when you’re predisposed to spontaneity and exploration is extra difficult, it seems. Yes it is. This is where the self loathing comes in, because I’ve been working from home, more or less, for 20 years. Part of that time was having a baby. Part of that time was one year where I worked at lulu.com. And then they laid me off.
Mur 20:42
But the fact that I haven’t fixed it by now is really disheartening. It’s very depressing and it also makes me sad that I can’t help you because I feel like I’m such a mess. I want to be able to say that a lot of people have this problem, hut here’s how I fixed it, and maybe it’ll give you an idea of how you can fix it. I’m not there yet. And I know this is kind of a downer of an episode and I’m sorry but it’s what’s on my mind. I’m really trying to just fix this scheduling problem that’s really hurting my career. Honestly, that’s what it’s doing. And hopefully that realization will push me to actually move and do things. SuburbanGothic says I like Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. I don’t know if I have seen that one. Kaykimmy says my problem as soon as I decide a trick or method works my brain goes, oh no you can’t trick me and it stops working. Yeah, we got the whole don’t reward yourself with work. Sometimes for me it’s like, you know, screw you, I’m gonna have the cake anyway. I’m an adult. You can’t stop me and I’m like okay well that didn’t work. Sheryl also, saying it does the exact same thing. So SuburbanGothic says hearing your problems is helpful and relatable so don’t feel bad. Thank you. I do appreciate that. Tasha says I seem to collect self help books but actually listening and finishing them is a whole other story. I always say I’ll get to them. That someday doesn’t seem to come. Yeah, me too. A lot of times, and this is so irresponsible, I have purchased many books in ebook or hardcover, or physical book I mean, and audio book at the same time because sometimes I’ll be listening to the audio book and be done or, you know, in a place with my family and they don’t want to listen to it, and because it’s you know the middle of an audio book, or I’ll have come home and I’m not in the car anymore whatever. And I think I really want to keep reading this so I’m going to buy the other version of the book. And then sometimes when I have a physical or ebook version I’m like I’m not retaining this I really need to be listening to it and I’ll go out and buy the audio book. I have so many hacks that don’t work, but it’s good for other authors. That’s what I tell myself.
Mur 23:28
Todd says it’s not a downer episode. It’s you being honest with us about where you are, what you’re going through. That’s cooll. Thank you Todd, I really appreciate that. Underpope says ood to hear others work through these things. I’m older than Mur and I personally don’t have any of my stuff together either. I’m sorry about that but I understand. It’s encouraging to know we’re not alone. Thank you Kaykimmy. Thank you guys. It really means a lot to me because sometimes I’m like I should be helping you guys. And sometimes it’s just kind of more like a struggle than a help. Had to wait 10 minutes before I could talk. Howdy Mur. Howdy, folks. Thank you HellJack I’m still messing with the bots. I need to write that down. Fix 10 minute bot thing. I don’t know why I turn that on. I remember I had a reason. I don’t know what it was. Sorry about that, HellJack. I’ll fix that. I have Six Wakes in paper, ebook and audio. Thank you. Oh Underpope, you can swear in the chat, I don’t mind. I just promised this podcast will be clean, so when I send it to the feed, it’s going to be clean. But you can say whatever you want in the chat, you know, within reason. I’m not talking about like saying hateful things just bad words don’t bother me. 17 years ago I promised to make this podcast clean. I’m 17 years old or I don’t have a toddler anymore in the car and I don’t care as much. But some people do, so I’m still clean. Probably spam bots messing with your crap. No, I think I actually did turn on when I was trying to, I was trying to turn off the moderation for all caps, and a couple of things. And so I thought maybe if I make it so the only people who follow me can chat, then that will cut down on any people coming in and doing a racist and running away or something. But I think that 10 minute thing, I don’t remember what that was for. I probably had a reason. I don’t know. Still, it’s good to see you. I’m glad you’re here. So, for me the next several days is going to be trying to make the best use of my time as I possibly can. And I might go back to my… You know the only thing that has worked for me, and it’s a bit too chaotic which is possibly why I like it, is my random number generator approach to my to do list. Sometimes I’ll be looking in the list is long, because right now the list is long. There’s a lot of, you know it’s all admin and phone calls and fix this on Patreon and stuff. It’s just a lot of little things, and I look at it and I know, even though they don’t take a lot of time or even work, it is mental effort to switch gears. Okay I did that thing, now I got to do something else and then I got to do something else. But the random number generator concept, it takes the decision away. And I’m like, oh I rolled a nine, I got to do number nine on my list. W0hat is that? Oh that’s finish off my email. Okay.
Mur 27:22
HellJack, I’m glad I’m finally awake and aware to catch one of your live feeds. Me too. We’re talking motivation, kind of. Talking about how a fear that I’d had about myself and my own disorganization was validated by an outside person yesterday. And while it upset me and hurt my feelings, there was truth to it and I can’t deny that. And I’m trying to figure out, okay, I really have to get my stuff together. How? The problem, if you if you haven’t heard my number generator plan is, I just write up my entire list and I assign each one a number. Pretty easy and then I roll a die or have a computer roll a die or tell Siri to choose a random number, and then I do that thing. It doesn’t quite work with big projects. Because it’s like if I’m in a, okay, I can clean, I can make phone calls, I’m in the like, little errand frame of mind. I just don’t know where to start, it helps. But if I’m in that frame of mind and I roll the die and it comes up like read all the stories for escape pod or do my writing for the day, that probably won’t work. Hey Friggsdaughter. Good to see you. Then we’re back to prioritizing, because I have to be the one to prioritize. But I’m hoping that the validation I had yesterday, the negative validation is good enough to keep me going. It was good enough this morning. If you are a Patreon supporter, I’ve been making a couple of changes to the discord, including, I’ve made a workshop space for us when we do the kick in the pants thing. That’s going to start on Monday. On Sunday I’m going to send out a prompt to everybody at that level and above. I hope you only spend 30 minutes on the prompt, because I changed my mind about, I was going to send a prompt and then 30 minutes later the workshop starts. But if it’s during a weekday, you may be able to like pop in and out of a talk or a call or something but you may not be able to like focus entirely on writing. So I’m giving a day for the writing but please only saying take 30 minutes to do it. And then there’s a place in the discord to do a discussion about those prompts. And I set that up and I set up a live writing thing. That’s going to be where I’m going after today, but also if you find yourself wanting to do a live write with people, you know you can fire up sprint bot or sprinto, or writer bot. Those are the two bots in the discord, and or you can go to the voice chat, which should be working. And you can write in there. You don’t need me. I may have some structured ones, some scheduled ones but y’all can go ahead. If you have any problems with it let me know.
Mur 30:46
But that’s where the discord is right now. Fyrerider wants me to hydrate and Todd says I’m looking forward to the kick in the pants thing. I think it will be fun. Me to. Collectoniann: would it help to break those big ones down into smaller ones? Like instead of read all the stories, do read story one,read story two. Yeah, maybe. That might work. I don’t know. Sometimes if I have a big job I like to focus entirely on it. Taking breaks often derails me, but I’m willing to try anything right now. Fyrerider says it will be interesting to see if a prompt works for writing short stories for me, I’ve written and it was terrible. I’ve written one and it was terrible. My mind is bad at those. Hello dog. Dog just barged in here. Comes in, sniffs me and then she leaves. She’s established that I’m here. And now she’s gone. Oh, thank you. Well hopefully Fyrerider, I mean part of what is supposed to encourage you is the time constraint. When the time constraint limits you, your brain is going, oh god, I gotta come up with an idea. How about that thing? And then it may be good, it may be bad but that’s why 30 minutes is important. I don’t want you to sit there and think about the prompt for a good 15 minutes and then write 2000 words. It’s like you get the prompt, you start writing. Tasha says, I totally get the mental battle with getting yourself together, getting organized, attempting different ways to encourage force trick yourself into improving that area and all that. I was actually contemplating earlier this week if I should try to get back on ADD or anxiety meds because I think I was more responsible when I was on them. But then sometimes I think, am I using that as an excuse? Should I just attempt at this adulting thing a little bit harder first like everyone else? I don’t think you’re like everyone else. Not everyone else is good at this adulting thing. Just people are better at hiding it maybe. I don’t know. My ADD meds are kind of hit and miss sometimes. I tried to write down. I try to do the time log, and write down when I do what so I could see where things get unhinged. And I started with 10:42, pay this bill. And then instead of actually doing that, I wrote it down, let’s see, get distracted by writing spreadsheet, get distracted by escape pod stuff. Then I paid the bill. And then I had to set up Venmo to pay another bill. My goal was to pay two people which was like one thing on my to do list and then I did seven things, six things. Two of them were paying the bills. It’s just even trying to log time, it just fell apart immediately.
Mur 34:05
I don’t know. I need to watch the… Dang it I can’t remember. Hopefully I put it in a recent show notes. There’s an ADD, ADHD, podcast, video on YouTube. And it’s just listening to this woman talk about her own life helps me and sometimes she works. Unfortunately she did do a I love the bullet journal, kind of episode where I’m just like, yeah, bullet journals, don’t work for me. I want them to. I try to make them. They don’t. It just still turns into a big, big mess of a list. Just scribbles. If I tried timebox time boxing suggests Sario. I’ve been considering trying it. Is that the Pomodoro method or is that something different? I’ve done the Pomodoro method and where that falls apart is the breaks. Because I use the breaks, I say I use the brakes as if it’s a conscious decision, but it turns out that I use the breaks to get distracted by something. And you’re supposed to do 25 minutes of work, which is fine, I can do that. And then five minutes off and then 25 more minutes. It’s that five minutes that kills me. I can’t. I just get distracted and go off and do something else. As Ursula says about BuJo it’s a cult. I know Ursula’s feelings on bullet journals, I do. And some people get a lot more detailed with theirs, than I do. Some people are more artistic than I am. That’s also true. Kaykimmy says I’ve also been listening to I have ADHD podcast that someone here recommended. That’s been pretty helpful. Thank you, I will write that down. Is a bullet journal basically a journal about organization? Yeah, kind of. It was written by a guy who had ADHD I discovered. You work out your monthly, you look at your month and then you look at your weeks and then you look at your days and if days don’t, if stuff doesn’t happen, you migrate them, which means you, there’s a little key involved where you put a thing next to it and it goes to the next day and then that becomes your priority for the next day. Where it really gets useful is it leans heavily on an index. So, you use the bullet journal for anything. Absolutely anything. Your free writing journal you’re, what really got me was medication list. Because I never remember, if I remember the names of what I’m on, I don’t remember the dosage, ever. But I wrote it down in my bullet journal and I took it with me to the doctor when they asked what I’m taking, I look at the index and find the exact page where my meds are and I go and look for the meds. That was awesome. The index really does help. But as the bullet journal goes on, it becomes more and more just, here’s another page where I write a frantic to do list and lots of scribbles.
Mur 37:47
And I have bought journals that are already laid out to be proper bullet journals. You don’t have to do anything except for fill it in and I still can’t stick to that. Okay Sario says kind of similar, but you plan blocks of your day for certain tasks like 8am to 10am-work on project A. 10am to 10:30 email etc. I have not tried that. That sounds possible. That does sound possible. I will look up timeboxing. Thank you for the suggestion. I will let people know what I think of the disorganized mind which is the ADD book I’m reading right now. Sorry I’m writing show notes as I’m going on. So as we say in the south, I had to come to Jesus talk and trying to change my ways. Is there anything anybody else wants to talk about or ask questions. I’m here. Kevin actually just wrote an article on open source dot com about time boxing. Okay, cool. I should probably also listen to productivity alchemy. Don’t tell Kevin. Kevin, if you’re in this in the chat then don’t tell yourself. Anybody think that having multiple ongoing projects is a good idea, or is it just how I avoid the hard parts? I am not great with more than one project. I mean, right now I’m struggling with getting a regular writing schedule so like getting a regular writing schedule with two projects is just too big of a change for me. So I can’t conceive it right now. It sounds like what you might be doing Fyrerider, is you might be switching gears when stuff gets hard, which is definitely not what you’re supposed to do. I know I’ve said there’s no absolutes, if you can finish things that way if that works for you, great. But oftentimes people use it as an excuse. You know it’s that you’ve been dating for six months and you’re not excited anymore but you see somebody hot down the street and they excite you. So maybe you should break up with your six month partner and go off after that hot person. Even though you know in six months you will be as bored then as you are now and maybe you should look at what’s going on now and make that better. Think that metaphor works. Essentially, once the shiny wears off whatever made you excited about the book, you think it sucks and it doesn’t. It very likely does not. It hasn’t changed is what I’m trying to say. Your view of it possibly has changed and you think it’s bad or it’s too hard or whatever, but it hasn’t changed. Just your perception. If it is a good story, if it started out as a good story, it will probably end as a good story because you actually put in the work to end it.
Mur 41:22
Distracted boyfriend meme. Exactly. Thank you SnarkyMoon. Friggsdaughter says I’m trying the multiple projects right now. Because both have different voices that works for me. I’ve got both projects up in my face, thanks to the spreadsheet tracker I bought early January. Again, your mileage may vary. SuburbanGothic says I like having multiple projects if they’re in different categories, like one writing, one art. KayKimmy says you’ve said that editing and posting podcast feels like having to do it twice, I think. How do you get past that I should be done already feeling to post them anyway? Well, see you’re here and you get this podcast when it’s live, but I usually do them in batches. And sometimes I do the batches late like last Tuesday still isn’t out. Actually no, it did come out. I scheduled it. Good for me. But I haven’t touched this past Tuesday’s episode yet. And that becomes like a, I think I need to sit down and batch, do all this work. I need to do all of the editing of the video and editing of the audio and posting it, do all of that at once. But it’s hard. I don’t do a lot of editing. If something absolutely wretched happens, Matt or I go on a coughing spree, or we end up going down a road we didn’t want to, I make a note and I edit out that spot. But I don’t do a lot of editing because I know that adding that listening part to my day, I know that extra step would make me balk more and make it even later. I’m not proud of that, but I’ve done it long enough to know how my mind works. And I’m thinking, I’m just gonna pretend I’m Terry Gross and whatever happens on the show, is what you get. Belatedly join the waking world says Ceit. Good to see you Ceit. SuburbanGothic says done is better than perfect. Exactly. I do have it on my list though to upgrade a couple of things that are done. I went on the Done is better than perfect plan with my Patreon video a couple of years ago. And I look like hell and the lighting is hell, and I just wanted to get a thank you up for Patreon. So done was better than perfect, but now that I have a lighting setup, and a good camera, and I actually know to put some makeup on my face, or else I look like a ghost. I can make a better video for Patreon and so that’s on my list to do.
Mur 44:24
Collectonian listened to the turn it off episode and you mentioned writing while waiting in the car at the vets and I had to laugh because I’ve done that with my last two vet appointments too. Yeah, and I’m probably gonna have to go back to the vet. My dog tore a toenail. We thought we were done with that. She has some sort of genetic thing where her nails are brittle and splinter very easily. And it took the doctor a while to figure out how to treat it. And then of course, it took even more time once we got the medication to make her grow healthy nails. But we had to wait for the nails to grow in. So even after we were doing the treatment we still had to deal with broken nails, and it was awful. And things were good for a long time and now she’s broken another one. I don’t know why I went on that tangent. I’m sorry. Pets, you know? KayKimmy says I think for me that stage is giving me time to overthink whether it’s even good enough to post. Exactly. Yes, I have that problem. I’m like, I feel okay when I’m doing it. I feel okay when I’m talking in front of the mic and once I start listening to it I’m like, who wants to listen to this drivel. I’m going to edit the whole thing. I’m going to cut the whole thing and put out like a two second podcast. Hey guys, you should be writing and then run. So yeah, I sometimes do judge things harshly. On an editing level it’s actually pretty interesting though. We don’t think about the normal flow of conversation. And sometimes I think that tangent I went on was either boring, in hindsight, or irrelevant or talking about something I’m not sure I’m comfortable talking about so I maybe should delete it. And I find where the conversation point starts, but it’s hard to find where it ends. And this happens a lot with ditch diggers. Later on we may reference the thing that I wanted to cut out. So it’s really hard to edit a conversation like that, because conversations flow into one another. And if you just lift one of those pieces out that could mess up the later one. That’s another reason why I don’t do a lot of editing because I don’t know where sometimes. Poor pup I hope it gets better. Yeah, she’ll be okay. She’s very tough. She seems to find, if she does feel pain she seems to find it annoying, rather than pathetic.
Mur 47:19
Shayle’s going off to make a phone call. Good to see you. Thanks for dropping by. Who wanted who to talk to subconscious? Sorry, I missed that. Oh SuburbanGothic with the done is better than perfect, right. Couple of people are saying tell that to my subconscious please. Sario says I do that with a lot of text posts. Write them, then reread them and then delete them as terrible. Yeah, I’ve done that with blogging to. Ceit says, have you ever felt like something you wrote doesn’t sound like yourself? I don’t think so. I think it’s really hard to identify your own style. Or maybe I’m just projecting and saying, I find it hard. It’s like hearing your own accent. Other people can tell it’s there, entirely, but you don’t because that’s the way you talk. That’s the proper way to talk. Everybody else is weird. So, you write the proper way, or the invisible way. The Midwestern way. If you’re international, the joke is that the Midwestern US accent, English accent is quite bland and unaccented and news reporters often adopt it. But even then it’s an accent, it’s just different than most. But, figuring out your own style is difficult, so I can’t identify mine so I can’t tell you when I leave it. Tasha wants to make an Anonymous meeting somewhere for the done is better than perfect people. Many people are recovering perfectionists. Yeah. HellJack says this has been good but I need to get back to work. Hope y’all have a groovy day. Thank you for dropping by HellJack. Sorry again about putting you in timeout for 10 minutes. I’m going to try to fix that. Yes, already put that down. But, good to see you. Can I ask why you asked that Ceit? Are you trying to go beyond your own style or are you curious just for curious sake or what? One thing that I find amusing is when people reach a level of skill so high that they can pretend to be bad. Like singing poorly, and acting poorly. John Scalzi got a Hugo nomination for writing, horrible, horrible purple fantasy prose. And it was trying to be a parody of terrible fantasy books. But even though it was awful, it was still really good. But also, if you’re going for humor you… That’s the problem with people saying movies are so bad, they’re good. There has to be something in there that makes it funny, you can’t just be bad.
Mur 51:11
Ceit says I guess what I mean is like comparing what I wrote two years ago to something I wrote last week and feeling like the older me was better. I worry my voice has eroded. That’s interesting. I think you might need to get some outside eyes on that because while I usually am not as disappointed in my older stuff as I think I will be, I have confidence that my writing has improved under time. I can’t point as to where it has improved. But I do think it has improved instead of gotten worse so I don’t know. It’s possible that you have distance from the old stuff and you haven’t developed distance from the new stuff. So the old stuff, you can look at objectively and think hey that’s pretty good. And the new stuff is still a lot of anxiety and worry and oh God, what if I just totally screwed this one up. Phasedout says I’ve been told that I surprise people by expressing myself identically irrespective of the medium used to convey, be it text, blog, voice, video, or in person. Interesting. Yeah, a lot of people write differently than they speak. A lot of people are surprised when they meet Chuck Wendig and he just doesn’t begin to spew forth vulgarities. Eye of Argorn bad? No, that’s actually bad. It is bad. I don’t know. I tried to do that thing at a con once. I didn’t quite get it. I don’t know. If you’re not familiar, there’s a piece of terrible fantasy that’s so bad that it became a thing to try to read it at cons to a group of people and when you laugh, you have to pass it to somebody else. Hey Tish, good to see you. Glad you could make it. Tish is in the house people. SuburbanGothic, oh my God, I wish. One of the things that helped me was a book called The Anxiety Toolkit. Maybe that would resonate with you. Oh, it’s still talking about the anonymous. Oh, thanks for following Retisilience? Restillience. Rest is silence. I don’t know. Thank you for following. Twitch names are hard. I’m going for RestIsSilence. Tell me if I’m wrong, but thanks for following.
Mur 54:00
So we do have a group of perfectionist anonymous forming in the chat. So hope you guys managed to buy some good coffee and support each other at your meetings. But yeah, I’ve never really been a huge perfectionist. Which is weird because I got a lot of pressure as a kid. I don’t know. But I have had lots of pressure to do well. And I think oftentimes I will anxiety myself into doing poorly. I think I’ve mentioned this before but I have a completely bizarre anxiety that I’m going to forget the names of people I’m interviewing or people who are interviewing me. Even if they’re right in front of me. I worry I will either forget or mispronounced their name. And it’s gotten so bad that I believe worrying has replaced the actual brain power that I could use to remember names. So I really am worrying myself into the problem that I didn’t have before I started worrying. I have caused problems for myself by being insecure and indecisive. That’s what’s unable to make a decision is. Indecisive. So, it’s rough. And when you realize you do that, it’s like yelling at somebody to stop apologizing. Their first thought is, oh I’m sorry I apologize all the time. I don’t know. Just very frustrating when you realize you’re your own worst enemy. But I think what I’m learning today, thanks to you guys, is talking about it helps. And realizing you’re not alone helps. And one of these days. I think I want to write a LARP to be confident. It’s like how to LARP a confident person. Because half of this confidence stuff is what you show, not necessarily what you feel. It’s like bravery is not the act is not the absence of fear it’s doing something despite the fear. So confidence may not be what you feel inside, but what you project on the outside. I need to put that against like a soaring eagle and do a motivational poster on that. I’m proud of that one. Yeah, I just accept the fact that I’ll never remember people’s names. Put that way up front and tell people that.. Yeah, we’ve talked about Ursula a couple of times. Ursula has faced blindness. And in Helsinki she went to Hugo one night, got up on stage in front of everybody, did the best award speech in the history of the world. And then the next day she was walking around with her hat on. She’s got like a, not a cowboy hat, more of an Australian bush hat kind of thing. And she was startled, time and again that people recognized her to say congratulations on winning because she was wearing a hat so she was in disguise. Because for her, that kind of thing helps disguise people in her face blindness. I found that interesting that she was really surprised people could recognize her. And all she changed was a hat.
Mur 58:36
I just realized Superman would totally be able to keep his secret identity with Ursula around, or at least for her anyway. Friggsdaughter says in a self defense class I was in there was fake it till you make it with the self confidence. Yeah. Ceit says I also like the point that bravery is literally impossible without being afraid. That’s true, you can’t overcome something that’s not there. Tish says same here. I don’t remember names plus i usually butcher their names. I don’t know which is worse. Yeah, been there. I think it’s good to just apologize, ask for the proper pronunciation. Tasha says I agree with that what you project on the outside comment. I’m sure we all know people where we get surprised by finding out they were more scared or less confident about something than what we perceived. Yeah, I do find it interesting that a lot of people fear public speaking. Like 4% of people fear public speaking more than death. And because I have so many fears it’s odd that such a common one doesn’t really apply. And I don’t know if it’s the years in front of the podcast mic or what but I’m usually okay if I have to talk in front of people. Talking one on one is a lot harder because when you’re in front of people and say, well if this goes south, I can just get off stage, but that’s harder to do in a one on one or two on one conversation. KayKimmy wants me to hydrate. So what we have gotten out of today, I hope, is project confidence, even if you don’t have it. Get whatever motivation that can possibly work for you and hope that you teach yourself it before someone else points it out to you that what you’re afraid of is true. That made sense in my head I’m not sure if it made sense when I put it outside. A lot of times we know ourselves better than other people and while we may not be at the level that our mean inner selves will make it out to be, there’s possibly a nugget of truth to it. So that’s my takeaway for this podcast.
Mur 61:25
Jalapeno bomber it’s pretty interesting that one of Superman’s creators was partially blind. I didn’t know that. I don’t know enough of the superhero history. Although I did read It’s A Bird a long time ago. I’d like to reread that. I don’t know how the guy got away with it but a guy got hired to write a Superman comic, but again we’re talking about getting in your head and messing yourself up. He worried about it so much that he couldn’t do it and so he ended up writing a comic about writing a Superman comic. And it’s really good. It goes into the history of Superman, it goes into a little bit of his own history and the art is amazing so it’s worth it, but I still don’t know how he was able to do that when, you know, DC wanted an actual story. I don’t know, it worked. It was good. I recommend it. I’ll even put that in the show notes. I think I’m going to go offline now, take a little break and then I’ll be back for the last livestream for a write in. As I said before, it’s going to be moving to the discord. Did I write that down? I think I wrote that down. No, I started to write that down. I’m going to bring back the $1 Discord level. So people can join the Patreon. The time for the writing is… Sorry, my computer is wrong. It’s either at two or three. Where is it? It’s at two. So it’s soon. 2pm Eastern Standard. Hope that works for you Fyrerider. If not, we’ll meet in discord someday. You can email me at mightymur at gmail.com. See the blog and show notes at murverse dot com. And you can see this show live on Tuesdays and Thursdays on twitch.tv slash mightymur. If you want to join the Patreon or the discord I mentioned, you need to support via Patreon, even just at the $1 level is all it needs. And I write books too. They have been published and some of them have gotten some pretty good attention, so you can check those out. I wrote the novelization for Solo. I wrote Six Wakes, which is a science fiction locked room murder mystery with clones. And I have a middle grade book about Minecraft out there so all of that and more, you can find at murverse dot com. So, take care, wear your mask. Be careful, and you should be writing.
Remember you can support the show at patreon.com/mightymur, jemi.app/mightymur, or ko-fi.com/mightymur.
I Should Be Writing’s theme music provided by John Anealio. You can find more about him at johnanealio.com.
Art by Numbersninja and transcription by FyreRider.
ISBW S17 Ep4: Real Talk by Mur Lafferty
is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
