Creating something every day for 365 days: the writing
Remember these?
Here’s one thing I figured out to do with them:
A lovely little package!
From the back:
Oooh, let’s open it!
Ta-da! Lichtenbergianism Precept Cards!
One side has the Precept and the logo, and the other side…
…has the And so… section from each chapter in Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy.
They’re kind of a pain in the butt to make, but if you’d like a set, let me know.
For those of you who are just joining us, the Lichtenbergian Society is the group of men who are my soul brothers in creative procrastination. Every year we have an Annual Meeting around the fire in the labyrinth, and part of the ritual is that we propose our Efforts for the coming year, which our Recording Secretary duly engrosses in the journal.
The other part of that process, of course, is to have this year’s Efforts read back to us and to confess our success or failure. Cras melior est is the appropriate liturgical response to any failure.
Since the Annual Meeting is this Friday, it’s time to prepare my soul for the ordeal. Let’s see how I did in 2016.
Here’s the original post, if you’re interested.
I wanted to finish Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy this year. Somehow that did not happen. Something to do with procrastination, I think.
On the plus side, I’ve made headway in my own head towards thinking about getting the thing actually published. Part of that effort towards world domination was establishing Lichtenbergianism.com, which is not nothing.
But actually finishing the book? No.
If my goal was to expand my burner theme camp to include a 50-foot square arena for “yelling at the hippies,” well… cras melior est. We didn’t have enough campers at Euphoria in May, and for Alchemy, we didn’t have enough space.
But there in the last paragraph of last year’s post, look:
I also want to continue working with Flashpoint Artists Initiative, the nonprofit which runs Euphoria/Alchemy, as a small-time volunteer on various projects.
Ha. I was certainly accomplishing that goal, doing my usual webmaster volunteering for the art fundraiser and even going so far as to volunteer to be Co-Lead for Placement, right up until the morning that I woke up one morning to the email saying that I was THE LEAD FOR PLACEMENT, KENNETH.
So if my goal was to remain a “small-time volunteer,” I failed miserably. You can read about it here.
My goal was to work with Kim Ramey as she established a public art studio for the homeless/underserved population here in Newnan.
Cras melior est. I lent a sympathetic ear to Kim Ramey and offered what I hope was helpful advice, but mostly I was missing in action. However, she has forged ahead and this past month the studio (behind Bridging the Gap) passed its inspection and will soon be open for business. I hope I can get my act together enough to volunteer down there and create a space for writing and publishing.
This was my Undefined Universe Project, in which I decided not to work on music which had not been specifically commissioned for a performance. As I said in the post,
So my goal is to allow the Universe to send me a project which is attached to actual production.
Cras melior est, although that’s on the Universe, right? I did decide to pick back up on SUN TRUE FIRE on Retreat (here and here), but otherwise the Universe certainly gave me the finger. Oh well. It’s not as if I haven’t been busy or creative in other ways. Which is the point of TASK AVOIDANCE in the first place, right?
Onward to 2017!
Astoundingly, I have not been blogging about this year’s production of A Christmas Carol, my musical retelling of Dickens’ classic.
To be honest, it’s been a scary rehearsal process, starting with the first night of auditions. Why? Because instead of the 20 or so adults I needed to perform the roles and sing my not-very-easy songs, I got eight little girls and a handful of teens and adults, most of whom had not done theatre in a while. And on top of that, several of the adults dropped out the first week of rehearsal; I’m sure they were daunted by the prospect (as you will see). I’d hate to think they thought it was not going to work.
Usually in community theatre when one does not have the cast one needs after auditions, one gets on the phone and recruits people. But I was not in the mood, and on top of that I was up to my earballs in designing the nation’s largest regional burn at the time, if you will recall.
And so I made a fateful decision: we would use the performers we had and screw all those people who didn’t bother to come to auditions. This meant, of course, re-envisioning the entire piece.
Oy.
I decided to invent a frame story—I know, I know, but hear me out—about Natalie Fairgood, a spoiled, horrible little rich girl, who was born on Christmas Day and resents it because she feels as if she never gets enough presents. That’s why, she says, she celebrates the week after. This year she’s having a sleepover with all her friends, but she’s been forced to invite the daughter of her mother’s personal assistant, Jessica.
When the show opens, Natalie’s grandfather shows Jessica into Natalie’s bedroom and chats with her a moment before leaving her to wait for the other girls, who are somewhere in the huge house. When they enter, Natalie immediately begins taunting Jessica, ending in a meltdown because Jessica is holding one of her dolls.
Grandfather intervenes, and when he offers them storytime to chill them out, Natalie demands a ghost story.
“I have just the story,” he says. “I read it every year, and I’m reading it now. I’ll read it to you.” They all sit, attentively, and he begins: “Marley was dead…”
Figures emerge from the shadows and begin to narrate as well, and soon we are back in Scrooge’s tale.
As the show progresses, the girls go from being passive listeners to Grandfather’s reading to observing the action directly. Soon they are taking part in the story, using toys and costume pieces from Natalie’s shelves as they become guests at Fezziwig’s party to shoppers on the street to Young Cratchits.
By the time we reach the Finale, they are fully empowered to join Grandfather in telling the story themselves, and that’s the point: we celebrate the power of story, how we listen to stories, become part of them, and in turn pass them on to the next listeners. Hearing a story changes us. Telling a story changes us.
And by the end, both Scrooge and Natalie have changed. And so have we.
Script now available upon request.
No, I haven’t written any more on Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy, and no, I haven’t done any more work on the book proposal. But I did establish a new front in my battle for world domination.
As I posted the other day, I bought the domain name for Lichtenbergianism.com and started a trial website at Squarespace. Within 24 hours I had ponied up for a business website; within 48 I had a new email address and a MailChimp account. Soon I shall have a new Twitter account.
(The MailChimp account means you can sign up to have a digest email of the week’s blog posts sent to you every Saturday, i.e., you can procrastinate about learning how to make procrastination work for you!)
Now if I only had actual content for the website. Hey, I’m working on it—every day is a glorious flood of SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION as I figure out what it is I have to offer and how to put that before the public.
I have done a thing.
Why have I done this thing? Because if I am seeking world domination, I have to have a platform. Yes, I already have this platform, but I want to keep my private thoughts on a separate plane from my benevolent despot thoughts.
Here is the problem, though: WHAT THE HECK AM I SUPPOSED TO PUT ON THIS NEW PLATFORM? Talk about an ABORTIVE ATTEMPT. Just jump in there, man, and don’t count the cost.
As has been often noted, it’s not the jump that kills you, it’s the SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION.
So let’s think this thing through.
You should tell me what to put on the new site in comments. We’ll call it focus group testing.
In other news, I have done some serious work on getting the book proposal done. Next up: get serious about finding an agent/publisher.
I’ve been reading The Fire Starter Sessions, by Danielle LaPorte, as one of the potential competitors for Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy. It’s not really a competitor, but it is a very good “get off your butt and do what you love” kind of guide, so I’ve been reading it and journalling answers to the worksheet questions at the end of each chapter.
The worksheet for this last chapter, “The metrics of ease,” though, has me flummoxed. Here are the questions:
Well.
I’m kind of reading this book to get a grip on how much I really want to be some kind of workshop leader/TED Talk sort of thing, and so this chapter stopped me cold.
What exactly needs to get done in my life and livelihood? Empty the dishwasher, walk the dog, clean the litter box, cook some meals. Honestly, that’s about it. The rest of it—blogging, composing, writing, volunteering, Camping with the Hippies™—is completely optional. If I stopped tomorrow,1 it would not make a sound in the forest.2
So then the rest of the questions become moot, don’t they? Do they? Should I forget that I literally have no obligations other than to wear pants and not smell in public and pretend that she’s asking about what I wish I were doing? (Or do I?)
Understand that I am not indulging in self-pity. I am honestly at a loss as to how I should answer that first question in terms of planning my third career.
More work is required.
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1 I am not stopping tomorrow.
2 For those who are just joining us, I am retired, in the sense of “Governor Nathan Deal moved the Governor’s Honors Program from the Department of Education where it had been for literally 50 years to his own Office of Student Achievement and didn’t care to move the director of the program with it.”
I’m using a piece of software called Scrivener to write Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy, and a very good piece of software it is, too.
One of the many tools it offers is the ability to project word count goals and to see how you’re doing in the current session. If you tie your session goals to your putative finish date, it will tell you how many words you need to rip out in that session in order to stay on track.
Because of one Camping With the Hippies™ or another, I’ve been a bit slack in writing:
::sigh::
7,500 words for today in order to “finish” by tomorrow. That’s okay. I have to reset my total word count goal upwards anyway: each chapter is working out to be around 2,000 words, and that’s before I go back and work in charming illustrative anecdotes from all the Lichtenbergians.
N.B.: I could too do it, if I wanted to. So there.
Today in our continuing book study of The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published [EGGYBP], we look at the pitch.
There are two kind of pitches: 1) the elevator pitch, which is over by the time the elevator gets to the next floor, and 2) your long-form pitch. [p.70]
I keep trying to come up with a snappy elevator pitch:
Perhaps, as the authors1 also suggest, my subtitle is the elevator pitch: “procrastination as a creative strategy, or how I stopped worrying and learned to love doing it wrong.”
The long-form pitch is no less simple. It’s supposed to be a paragraph or two, but still under a minute.
How about:
In 2007 a small group of creative amateurs founded a society dedicated to celebrating their procrastination and found, to their amazement, that their productivity improved. Now they share the secret of their success with nine “precepts,” ways to re-organize your thinking about how you create and why. Sometimes counter-intuitive and usually amusing, their strategies distill some of the most obvious secrets of the creative process to free you from your own mindblocks.
Hm. How about:
Sure, you can buy a book to help you cure your procrastination, but why would you? Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy frees you from the worry and the guilt—and shows you how to use your bad habits to become more productive in your creative life. No matter whether you’re a writer, an artist, a composer, a programmer, a gardener, or any other creative type, the Nine Precepts of Lichtenbergianism will give you ways to rethink your creative habits and give yourself permission to succeed—by failing!
That’s better, and more in sync with the tone of the book.
Tomorrow is better! That’s the motto of the Lichtenbergian Society, a group of creative men who bonded over their shared tendency to procrastinate and found that they became more productive because of it. Now Lichtenbergian chair Dale Lyles shows you how you, too, can stop worrying about your bad habits and learn to love your own creative process. Whether you’re a frustrated writer, artist, composer, gardener, or programmer, you’ll find new ways to think about how you create and why, from Task Avoidance to Successive Approximation to Ritual to Abandonment—if you give yourself permission to fail, you give yourself permission to create. It’s that simple!
One more:
Are you a creative genius? No, only Mozart is a creative genius, and you are not him. But you are creative—yes, you are, admit it—and you want to overcome your fears and your bad habits so that you can write that novel/paint that painting/compose that song/program that app. Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy gives you nine Precepts, ways to restructure your thinking about how you create and why so that you can just get to work and create the work of your dreams. But not today. Tomorrow is better.
And I’m spent.
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1 I keep saying “the authors” because it’s easier than typing out their names: Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry.
