Monday Cup Of Links #37 - Twitter Hack, Hindoos in America, Ghosts Writing, Finishing Projects
Sour on NaNoWriMo and similar goalsetting
Happy Monday!
I spent the last week listening to the audiobook of Jon Acuff’s Finish like I said I would last Monday. It’s a great book, and I highly recommend it. The book’s thesis is that when perfectionism kicks in, it warps your mind’s logic into convincing you to not do anything and dooms you into inaction. Hence, the way to actually getting things done is to trick your mind into snapping out of perfectionism.
I realized that my bottlenecks are when I do NaNoWriMo style wordcount goals. It’s easy to feel down when I skip a day or so for various reasons, and it’s harder then to get back on the horse, because I’m that much behind on my monthly goal. So I might as well not write. And even if I do succeed at my goal, I end up not wanting to continue after, because heck, I’ve accomplished a goal.
Instead, I realized what works for me is to write for 2-3 pomodoro sprints a day. That’s about an hour and a half, which is perfectly manageable. Even if I don’t write that many words a day, it keeps the novel accessible and the steady progress makes sure I’m not intimidated by the thought of the novel.
So now, that’s what I’m trying. I’m a little over 30k words done with my novel, and it seems like I’m halfway through. 800 words a day for 40 not-necessarily-consecutive days is probably going to get my first draft done. That seems pretty doable; I manage to do a little more than that on a usual writing day.
Let’s see how that goes. Now onto our links!
Subscriber to this list, Vishal Ganesan, has started an Instagram called Hindoo History.He has been trawling through newspaper archives from all of America over the past century or so, and finds a lot of interesting insights into how Hindus and the Indian diaspora have been perceived in America through the centuries. I’m excited about this project, especially since my planned second book is set in 1910-1918 in the Bay Area.
I read this interesting piece by Joy Lanzendorfer about a writer who wrote through an Ouija board in the early 20th century. Ghost Writer - The Story Of Patience Worth, the Posthumous Author is an interesting read, but for me, raises many more questions than it answers. Did no one dig into her story much? Why not?
ICYMI: Partying Against Propaganda - the latest extract from my novel-in-progress, India House. This is basically the turning point of my novel, where the characters change from a ragtag bunch of students to being considered a serious threat to the British empire. Do read, this was a lot of fun to write, channeling my inner Indian Association event organizer.
As you all might be aware, Twitter got hacked. It seems an insidious inside job. But it’s also troubling that there’s at least a few Twitter employees with access to everyone’s Twitter accounts, which they can tweet from while bypassing any two-factor authentication the user might have set up. This long post tries to cover the coverage of the act, and asks the questions nobody is asking about what happened, and what it means. It is at once fascinating and scary.
Model Questions vs Actor Questions. This is an interesting post that provides some insight on how to think about questions to ask when starting something so you can do so more productively, and in a more action-oriented way.
GIF of the week: Ping ball stabilization. Wow.