Eventually, this will even out, I hope.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
The Internet experiment, continued
Notes from an Internet vampire (well, almost an Internet vampire, though the sun doesn't go down at 5 p.m., thank God):
I feel much more focused, but . . . boring. I have no conversation outside the manuscript. This may be all right, though, since the primary recipients of said conversations are the cats.
I miss reading blogs during the day!
If the FedEx or UPS guy comes by to drop off a book or ms. for review, I greet him like a long-lost brother.
Here is the good part. Today's total: 1800 words. They aren't all good words, and I have a lot to go, but they're still words.
Eventually, this will even out, I hope.
Eventually, this will even out, I hope.
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5 comments:
Hoooray for writing!
You know, I always leave the library and go back to my dept. to eat lunch, where I glom on to whatever poor soul grad student I can find and talk their ear off for a half hour or an hour. The human contact really helps me stay sane all afternoon.
You might try calling someone on a lunch break or afternoon break, to counteract the boring/bored feeling. Maybe you need a writing buddy to check in with about your progress? Or just someone who understands the situation.
Yeah. It was great being abroad with no access to the Internet except in cafes. It was like ... returning to the 80s or something. Saner. Much.
Still I actually had a fight with a friend over the Internet, about blogs, even being abroad in cafes and such, and it made me consider giving up the blog: the cyberworld can be great but awful, sustaining but destructive.
That's a good idea, sisyphus. My campus is pretty far away, so one of the rewards I've promised myself when this is done is that I'm driving to campus to talk to people, including my patient grad students.
It's funny, but even though I wasn't talking to many people during the day before, reading blogs during the day gave me the sense that I was, in fact, talking to people (which is true, but just in writing instead of in speech).
zero, I wonder what the whole blog culture would be like if we could only access the Internet as you did, in cafes. It must be tough to fight with a friend over the Internet, especially when you can't respond when you want to. That trip to the ocean, short as it was, felt very cleansing in terms of weaning me away from all its jittery demands for attention.
Oy, the internet is what's keeping me from writing, too. I might, might, might follow suit. Another idea I've tried is using a kitchen timer to take short breaks. Hm, I should try that too...
Congratulations on 1800 words!
Kiita, thanks for the congrats. That's a good idea about the timer; I've been using Eggtimer to take breaks, but I'd gotten to the point where Bad Internet Self would just ignore Conscientious Timer Self. The drastic nature of the "No Internet" rule helped me to get a grip on that.
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