…to my buddy Jaysen Lesage and his wife Jen on their new son, Connor Michael.
Nice work, guys!
Author: Writer guy
Multi-tasking
There was a time when I believed that doing two or three things at once made me more productive. Life was good. Things were happening.
Then I wrote a novel and started wondering why relatively small steps took such herculean investments of energy–and worse yet, took such a long time. At the risk of sounding sexist, I’m going out on a limb here and speculate that men are relatively poor multi-taskers; we work best when we focus exclusively on a solitary task for a long period. Or at least limit our efforts it to a few areas over the course of a day. Perhaps women can multi-task more effectively, but I think almost everyone deals with the problem of scattered focus and its bastard step-child, the unfinished never ending project. Or Chia-Pain, as I call him.
When it comes to patience for an open project, I learned quite a lot from my landlord. My apartment is in a house, probably by far the oldest in my town, and everything is custom built. At one time it was a mansion, with all the trimmings: a dumbwaiter, a creepy safe in the basement the size of a Packard, a massive double wide front door with sweeping arches. Then it got older, and it got converted. Walls and doors appeared, replacing open landings. Paint cracked. Siding rusted. A few years before I moved in, the roof leaked so bad my kitchen flooded.
The big challenge for my landlord is this: in a house of such scale and age, there is always something breaking. The challenge is prioritizing what to fix now and what to table for later. Or what can be tabled. And sometimes he has to just rip off the Band-Aid, let the blood flow and gut something to the studs.
But more often, he has to be content with fixing part of the problem. What matters is that he made the situation a little better, and over time this will result in big improvements. The secret is remembering those gains when things get frustrating. Like when my landlord ripped the sewer line out in the middle of winter, which meant cutting off the water and damning me to an undisclosed location for the past few days. Which is why the updates are slow in coming lately.
Anyway, here’s a great article on multitasking that got me thinking about the importance of staying on point:
In play
If there were grades for fortune tellers, I would usually net a D. Perhaps a few of my forecasts do land close to the money. But generally my predictions are off-target far more than they are correct. And that’s acceptable, since only a fool or a maniac claims he knows everything headed his way.
However, when it comes to the agent who is reconsidering The Last Track, there are signs I could be on the right course. I mentioned in an earlier post that I would not comment until February 1. This decision–which rests on a very long consideration of the holiday schedule, their probable workload and some inside information about the publishing culture–looks almost prescient now.
Based on my hunch, I sent them a note on Tuesday. In short, I wished them a happy holiday, thanked them for their time again, and then asked if they had all the materials they needed for a decision.
About five minutes later this response arrived:
“Still working through a few manuscripts from December. Hope to get to yours soon!”
Soon is a relative term, but I believe a definitive answer will arrive before my February 13th birthday.
A sweat sock and some manure
Anne Rice, the most political “non-political” Christian/Pornography/Vampire writer of our day.
Did I mention she has 100 million in print?