Fooled by Randomness (#SFWApro)

That was the title of a book by Nicholas Taleeb from maybe a decade ago. The gist of it was that we heavily underestimate the role luck and randomness play in success, but he had a lot of other points too. One of them was that because of randomness, we’re better off checking our weight, our 401(k) or whatever only ever month or so rather than daily. Because it’s inevitable there will be stock fluctuations or days when we pig out and gain weight, so if we check daily, even if we’re doing well, we’ll end up getting depressed. If we’re doing things right and we look only every month, we’re much less likely to get bad news.
Which to some extent is true of thinking about my writing week. If I have one crappy day when I can’t focus, I can still have an excellent productive week. So I shouldn’t kick myself until Friday rolls around.
That said, my Demand Media work has been consistently frustrating. I’m way slower than I was before the long hiatus, and I finally figured out why. For some reason I’m really obsessing over the fine details of the articles and trying to resolve every last question before I submit. And that leads to double-checking more and more web pages to find those last little details.
It’s not worth it. Don’t get me wrong, I want it to be accurate but the articles are supposed to be closer to a good basic intro than a final definitive statement. I’ve got to realign toward the basic.
Otherwise, the week went well. I made it about 12,000 words into Southern Discomfort, and even the new scenes look good. I am troubled though that Maria isn’t under enough stress. As the central character she needs to be under plenty of pressure and I don’t think she is. Though that said, the situation in town is certainly grimmer and more ominous than the previous draft, so that’s a plus.
I did plenty of work on the time-travel book, resubmitted three different short stories and got off another article query. So all things considered, a good week. Oh, and I’m now on the writer guest list for next January’s Illogicon. It’s the first time I’ve been a guest in about two decades.