I have been surprised at my assiduity in writing Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy.
Here you can see that I have all that I need:
- computer
- coffee
- reference works1
- Assistive Feline™
- new agey Pandora station (not shown)
Thus girded, I have written and written and written. If I have a goal of 25,000 words total, I am 370 words short of being halfway there.
I know this because Scrivener, the authoring software I’m using, allows me to track my progress. I’ve set a putative deadline of April 12, 2016, which is totally arbitrary of course, but the fun thing is that if I click the little “calculate session goal from deadline” thingie, then I only have to write like 130 words a day. Pfft. After allowing myself to revel in the idea that this is a really doable goal even for a Lichtenbergian, I turned it off and went back to a still-modest 500 words/day.
Still, today I knocked out more than 800 words, and that’s not bad at all. I may be up to 1,000 by the end of the day, should I decide to keep writing rather than making cookies for Fuzzy Labyrinth holiday sales. Or reading more on The Gift, an influential piece of work on my thoughts about creativity.
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1 I begin to realize the daunting task ahead of me in obtaining permission, even in a research setting, to use other people’s work in mine, particularly Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s aphorisms as translated by R. J. Hollingdale.