I find myself going to Montreal...

[msagara]

On fairly short notice, for the weekend. For ConCept, which is the 13-14th of November.

I've been thinking a bit about a couple of questions asked elsewhere, vis a vis writing, and will post when I get home; I'm leaving on the overnight train (and mourning the loss of my beloved sections; they've changed their trains, and now offer rooms and deluxe rooms, but no sections!), and will arrive at some very early hour, which is made bearable only by the promised company.

I'm attempting to pack now. I am discovering the writing-avoidance, like packing-avoidance, is built-in. Saw cristalia at work today, where, in discussing the "post a line from a work in progress" meme on LJ, I expressed my utter astonishment at just how many works people have in progress at one time. I was never, ever capable of this; call it over-focus. The most that I will have "in progress" at one time are two projects -- and in that case it's because I've put the one in project on hold to meet a different deadline, which I will meet before returning to the work in progress. I didn't always tend to be quite so focused; there was a time when I could work on both a novel and a short story (but only one of each) at the same time, doing one in the morning and the other in the evening. That would be my definition of multi-tasking; I've never had a dozen projects on the go at the same time.

To everyone who has more than one, how does that work for you?

More later.

Comments

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

truepenny said that at some point she realized she was getting the same kind of satisfaction from writing that she used to get from reading -- I think she said something like it had become her default activity, or default comfort activity, although she phrased it better -- and that made a lot of sense to me, as a necessary part of evolution as a writer, either as the cause or the result of committing yourself to making time for writing.

Like most of the other people commenting, "in progress" just means "neither finished nor abandoned" for me, although things shift their places in queue. I also have things I consider in queue but not in progress, because I haven't written any of them, although I may have a sentence or a paragraph in my head. But generally they're unwritten and still accumulating the necessary critical mass.

[msagara.livejournal.com]

truepenny said that at some point she realized she was getting the same kind of satisfaction from writing that she used to get from reading -- I think she said something like it had become her default activity, or default comfort activity, although she phrased it better -- and that made a lot of sense to me, as a necessary part of evolution as a writer, either as the cause or the result of committing yourself to making time for writing.

Actually, this has never happened to me; it's work. There are times when it's a hypnotic, compulsive, or even joyful work -- but boy, the slogs... the swamps... I would throw away whole books before I'd put up with that much fear and uncertainty in my reading <wry g>. I want to be truepenny.