Why I gave up on "The Expectant Father"

I've read a few books about parenthood now that I have a little one and one thing that bugs me to varying degree about all of them is that they tell me what I'm feeling at any given point. Not that they tell me what I might be feeling or even what I should be feeling, no they all say things like, "Now that your wife is five months pregnant you are experiencing anxiety about such-and-such." My feelings almost never matched up with what the books said they were and it bugged me. Basically, I wanted instruction manuals and what I was getting was "Iron John" disguised as a baby book. "The Expectant Father" struck me at the time when I was just getting fed up with all this touchy feel-y nonsense. So I set it aside and never got around to picking it up again.

Looks like fun!

This is the best thing I've seen on the Internet in quite a while. Via the excellent Boing Boing.

About that last post

The one about my love of bad pop music. At the bottom of the post the keen-eyed observer will notice a stamp from a site called Plinky. Plinky is another micro-blogging site, but with a twist. Every day, the site feeds you a different prompt for you to write about. I decided to give it a try because Maggie Mason, she of Mighty Girl, wrote about it. I will do anything Maggie Mason tells me to do.

I almost decided not to join in, but then I started thinking of these daily prompts as little exercises to get me into that day's writing -- a lot like we used to do in one of my creative writing classes. Doing these helps warm up my fingers, gets them used to the keyboard, and it limbers up my brain. For the week that I've been doing it, I've found it helpful. A second benefit is that will help flesh out this blog, something I've needed help with of late.

I just thought I'd mention it in case you were curious and wanted to check it out. Please disregard its twee name, something of a must for new web sites, it seems.

That is all.

In defense of my vice: bad pop music.

I think my love of pop music is well documented, but less well known is how much I love bad pop music.

Seeking Avril by amy-wong.com

I think that we can all agree that crap pop music has a place in the world, can't we? I mean, it's not entirely despicable that I own Avril Levigne's first album is it? And I love and appreciate what the rest of the world calls "good" music. It's like the difference between a gourmet $15 hamburger and a Quarter Pounder. They're almost not the same thing and sometimes you have a craving for junk that can't be denied. Sometimes you just crave the bubble gum. You know, the more I think about it, the less convinced it's even a vice...

I'll get some sleep soon,right?

Oscar turned nine-months old today! Nine months he's been in our lives. Granted he was in our lives prior to that but, for me at least, in a sort of theoretical way.

I think I've said this before, but it bears repeating: I could not have imagined how much I am loving being a dad. The time I get to spend with Oscar is the best use of my time ever -- possibly excluding the time he was being made.

And that's all I have to say about that.

My muse versus time management

At the request of The Wife, I'm writing today about a piece I read on-line and how it's affected my productivity.

Corey Doctorow, a very good SF writer, posted a column on the Locus Magazine site called "Writing in the Age of Distraction" that I found very helpful. In the four or five months prior to reading it, I hadn't done much writing. As my son's primary care-giver, I never felt like I could devote the chunks of time I felt I needed to get some writing done. Before Oscar came along, writing for four or five hours at a stretch wasn't uncommon. After he was born and before The Wife returned to work, I was still getting regular two-hour writing sessions. Now-a-days, that's a rare luxury.

Doctorow's column is mostly about how to write when all around you are the distractions of the Internet, but it applies to someone with a very limited schedule, too.

The main piece of advice is to set a very regular, short schedule. He says that when he's working he only aims for a page or two a day, often only devoting twenty minutes to it. In that way he can write a novel a year, half-a-dozen columns a month and other various things.

I've taken that advice and I now use the 30-to 45 minutes I get to myself everyday while Melissa is nursing Oscar in the afternoon as writing time. Because I felt like it wasn't enough time to accomplish any writing, I used to just read or even try and catch a nap during that time. Now that I'm using it to write, even if I'm only getting a page a day, I feel amazingly productive. I'm going to be pitching some comics to a publisher soon. I used to wonder where I'd find the time to write any comics if any of those pitches got accepted, now I know where that time will come from.

Doctorow has other advice as well in that article which I am experiencing varying degrees of success following, and I recommend you read it to see for yourself everything he says.

Oh, I obsess over this...