New post on Mrshawking.com -- "What if the Colonel did black ops?"

New post on Mrshawking.com!

"What if the Colonel did black ops?"

As I mentioned in the entry on Early Installment Weirdness, it is common for your conception of who a character is and what they’re like to change the more you work with them. While a fair bit of this happened with the more central characters, particularly Mrs. Hawking herself, you know which person ended up changing the most in my mind? Everyone’s favorite Ghost Character, her late husband Colonel Reginald Prescott Hawking.



As the Batman influence became more and more prominent, it became clear that Mrs. Hawking actually had LOTS of strong feelings and motivations, which no matter how much she kept bottling them always threatened to burst out. Maybe it’s a weakness on my part, but I found it much more satisfying to actively, obviously explore her inner life. And by that same token, it became much more interesting to me to make the Colonel a more complex, human figure.

Read the rest of the entry on Mrshawking.com!

My productivity process

I had a conversation with john_in_boston recently over stuff to do in order to stay productive, and it got my thinking about all the ways I trick my lazy, lazy brain into doing things besides wandering off into useless atrophy.

Write everything down. Everything I want to do. Everything I have to do. When I need to do it. I carry a lined notebook for this. I'm so distractable by things like stories and cute dresses and pretty boys that if I don't, I WILL FORGET EVERYTHING.

Categorize. I separate the things I have to do into categories. Each category gets a page in the lined notebook. Usually they're fairly broad, like "Errands and Chores" for work and life stuff, "Projects" for creative work. Sometimes I have sub-lists-- like, say, stuff for the next Mrs. Hawking production. I mark them off when they're done. I like using highlighters for this.

Set daily intentions. When getting down to work, I made a list of all the things I specifically want to do that day. That includes routine things-- make sure I do my workout, use my acne medication, post today's Hipster Feminist tweet --as well as specific one-time activities. "Cook those pork chops in the fridge." "Finish scene I started last night." Also pieces of specific projects. "Write 1 scene piece for Base Instruments."

Chunk things into smaller sections. I find breaking things into smaller individual tasks to be ENORMOUSLY helpful for getting down to work. I not only classified Base Instruments into scenes, I broke each scene into discrete sections. It's much easier to approach "Try to write 1 scene piece each day" because it's a much more manageable amount of work, so it gets done on a regular basis.

Schedule everything. I use my calendar obsessively. If something is written down on my calendar for a specific time, it is much easier to get my brain prepared to work on it by that time. It makes me get off my ass, and helps me never be late. I hate being late.

Keep a record of what I did. This is what my accomplishment chart is for. I enjoy marking down all the cool things I did enough that it incentivizes doing them. It makes me feel happy and proud. I only include "cool" things on my chart, things that make me happy to have done, because I feel kind of lame giving myself credit for chore things that I feel like are kind of the bare minimum for function. But it might help other people to include anything they struggle to get done. I add another layer to this with my writing chart, which specifically helps me write something every day, because of how much I enjoy marking down the stuff I do.