Procrastination Irony

They say that writers are the best procrastinators on the planet.  Who says?  I think it was an author doing a guest blog for Powell's.  Or maybe the quote was that writers have elevated procrastination to an art from.  Either way, it certainly seems to be true.

There are always things that I've hated doing.  Applying for jobs is one of those things.  You can never just send the same thing out, and many places use application forms instead, and it's just a royal pain in general.  Plus, it's usually--for me at least--a futile effort, so it's hard to work up any enthusiasm for the amount of work that needs to be done for no reward.  And I do mean no reward, since some places don't even send out an acknowledgement of your application.

Doing the dishes is another thing I procrastinate doing.  Now it's never really been my thing, but most of my life I've had a dishwasher.  Then we moved into this dump (sorry Richard and Sarah, but it kinda is).  I mostly don't mind not having the dishwasher (too much), but we don't have a garbage disposal either (welcome to Europe) and that sucks, especially when you need to peel a dozen hard-boiled eggs for your partner's egg mayo sandwich filler for the week.  Picking the fragments of 12 eggshells out of the sink is a whole new form of torture.

I also procrastinate on exercise until it's too late to do it.  Or I hurt too much.  Or something.  My reading list often serves as an excellent excuse to avoid a lot of things, and exercise is high on that list (it's my small penis truck: I've read more than you have, so in some vague way I'm superior to you.  somehow).

But writing.  Ahh, that's the easiest one of all to avoid, because I do it on the computer, so I can get sidetracked by Kingdom of Loathing, or GemCraft (no link because you don't need that kind of torment in your life), or my blog (the irony here being that I'm avoiding writing by writing), or "research."  Research--and legitimate research, I might add--derailed my writing last night.  Talking to Kristan for over two hours certainly didn't help, but after we stopped, I still had time to crank out my required amount of words,* or close to it, before Adam came home.  Except I needed to do some research.

This was, as I've already stressed, real research.  Nothing big, nothing major, but I needed a first name that could be either German or Scandinavian.  Didn't matter which Scandinavian--any or all would be fine--but it had to be used in at least one of those countries as well as Germany, and preferably not be completely unheard of in English.  That wasn't too difficult; I found a website that lists not only every name ever used in a Scandinavian country ever, but it also listed frequency of usage by men and women per country.  I settled on Frieda--I had a "Teacher Frieda" when I was in kindergarten (she was a war bride originally from Germany, and was completely awesome), and depending on the spelling, it met all my requirements nicely.

The bigger problem was finding a Scandinavian surname.  An uncommon one.  If I wanted a common one, I could have gone with Janssen or something (Scandinavian surnames are not rocket science, as they're mostly patronymic).  No, I needed an uncommon last name, because I needed a branch of a family tree that was presumed to have died out.  Unsurprisingly, finding uncommon names is far harder than finding common names.  And when you do find names considered to be uncommon, you have to question how uncommon they are, since you found them somewhere.  Sheesh.  Oh, and something that could be mistaken for German by someone who doesn't much know about language (or even someone who does), yeah, that'd be good too.  Eventually, I found a name, futzed with the spelling (Germanicized it off the transliterated pronunciation guide provided with my chosen name), and called it good.

Too bad all that took me about 40 minutes.  Still, I went out to meet Adam--an interesting feat these days, as the towpath along the canal is pitch black at 10:10pm--and managed to get myself to write even while he was home.  I usually start writing around 7 or 8pm, when I can't realistically justify putting it off any longer, and that gives me enough time to bang out about 1000 words.  They're not great, but right now, my goal is to get the bare bones, the framework of the story out there.  I can always go back and edit the everloving crap out of it (and I will do, many many times), but to edit you first need something to edit.

And because people have asked me how long a book is, or how many pages I've written, and so on, I shall provide a list of wordcounts for comparisons.  Authors and publishers think in terms of wordcount, not pages, because you can format a book to make it as many or few pages as you like.  That said, when you ask the internet how to format a book for publication and what publishers ask for, you'll get a million different responses, including the notion that authors think in pagecount, and only want estimated word counts with the assumption that the formatting is 250 words per page (this seems to be wildly outdated, however).

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone: 76,944 (as provided by Scholastic Inc.)

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: 257,045 (as provided by Scholastic Inc.)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Approximately 144,000 (as posted on someone's blog)

The Hobbit: 95,022 (off of a blog that discusses word count, particularly for beginning writers)

Twilight:  118,501 (same blog)

War and Peace:  561, 304 (same blog)

That said, I'm not sure how accurate wordcounts are, because both OpenOffice and Word don't seem to count words with dashes attached to them, and that may go for other punctuation as well.  I haven't fully explored this, but as I use a lot of dashes in my writing, it has reduced my wordcount somewhat.  Right now, I don't worry about that, though.**  My only concern is keeping the finished (read: ready for submission) product to 100k or less.  More than that, and it's going to be a tough sell.  And since I figure I'm at best 1/3 of the way finished (probably closer to 1/4), I'm a bit iffy on the word count.  Here's hoping all my editing will cut stuff down.

I've written just shy of 24k words, or 33.5 pages of single-spaced, left/right justified, 12 point, Ariel font, on US standard letter (8.5in x 11in), with .79 inch margins all the way around.  I use Ariel because I prefer sans-serif fonts*** (I'm lazy on this blog, so it's the default serif font Times), 12 point because that's standard, US letter because I think that may be the default setting for OpenOffice, and I think the .79 inch margins came from a previous formatting thing--OO seems to use previous settings for new docs (which may also be why the page format is US letter and not A-4).  I keep it single spaced because when you need to scroll through a long document, double spacing is a royal pain, and it's justified (aligned) on both sides because I think left-side only is ugly.  I will reformat drastically when it comes time to submit.

*It's now 1000 per day, because 500 was way too easy and the story wasn't progressing, because I can write 500 words describing a blank wall if I don't know where I'm going and don't want to think.  I had to write more yesterday though, because I didn't write on Monday.  I made up most of it on Tuesday with 1700 words, meaning I only needed 300 extra yesterday.  I hit my mark, too.  Eventually.

**Most British universities work off of wordcount as well--I had to write 4000 word papers at Leicester, and my Master's dissertation (thesis in the US, but long-ass paper anywhere) had to be between 12k and 15k.

***  Thank you Wikipedia for clearly and concisely showing the difference.