Writer Annie Bellet, a fellow Codexian, recently offered a useful approach to improving productivity by planning breaks beforehand in her post “The Quest for Productivity.” By planning out work time in alternation with breaks, she finds she’s able to put off distractions and focus on the work at hand long enough to really get something done.

She also mentions writing in groups, a useful approach when it’s practical to increasing a lot of kinds of productivity. Some variations: members of a household scheduling a time to all do cleaning together (we used to do this in a cooperative community I lived in years ago; we called it “chore party”); folding laundry with others; scheduled office organization days for multiple workers to do together; timed write-ins; study groups.

The Digital Book World site recently posted “Ten Bold Predictions for Book Publishing in 2012,” and while I certainly can’t speak with authority on all of the subjects they address, none of their predictions struck me as unlikely.

Significantly, all of their predictions had to do with electronic publishing, except that some of what they said about the publishing industry as a whole would apply to paper books as well as eBooks. They don’t really take a shot at many numbers, although they did predict a new, larger Kindle tablet and name both the size and the price they expected.

I’d be interested to see predictions of impacts on libraries and bookstores and market share predictions for eBooks and for independent authors. Since it’s the season for predictions, though, I probably just have to keep my eyes open and those predictions will appear.

What do you expect to see happening in publishing in 2012? Will things get crazier or settle down a bit?

My young adult novel Family Skulls, about a 16-year-old trying to break a generations-long curse on his rural Vermont family, will be free on Amazon for Kindle at http://www.amazon.com/Family-Skulls-ebook/dp/B00573Y36W until Monday 12/26.

One of the things I enjoyed most about writing this book was conjuring up elements of my Vermont childhood on the page. The story’s hero, 16-year-old Seth Quitman, is much more self-possessed and practical than I was as a teen, but the dirt and gravel roads he bikes down, the house he lives in, and much else are very familiar to me.

I also was very fortunate to get the chance for a cover by artist Dixon Leavitt, who managed to bring all of the key elements of the story (like the warmth and occasional claustrophobia of a close-knit family, menace, mystery, and the vastness and brilliance of a starry sky on a dark night) into his piece. I’ll be posting about the development of that cover in the near future.

The holiday season, at least here in the U.S., is a troubling time for habits. Diets get blown, budgets get overspent, time with family can make for difficult emotional situations, and good habits get disrupted by travel and celebrations. For all the cheer and New Year’s Resolutions, the Thanksgiving to New Year’s period is a dangerous one. With that in mind, here are some articles from the site that may help with some of the tricky parts.

If you’ve been working on building a new, good habit (or on shedding an old, bad habit), you may be interested in reading (or re-reading) “How Long Does It Take to Form a Habit?” The key thing to take away from that article is not the time period, which depends on a lot of things anyway, but how habits are successfully formed: with consistency. If you are wondering whether giving yourself a break from your great new eating plan over the holidays or smoking a couple of cigarettes with your cousins is really such a big deal, the answer seems to be that it’s not the end of the world, but it’s going to be very disruptive and set you back a ways. Exceptions seriously weaken new habit formation.

That’s not to say there’s never a reason to ease up over the holidays, just that if we’re considering it, we should probably try to be extra sure we like the bargain we’re getting. If not, there are options, even if they involve annoying family members and breaking traditions. After all, stodgy family members and unhealthy traditions are not on your side if you’re trying to do something new.

On that topic, if eating is a concern, you may be interested in “How Not to Blow a Diet Over the Holidays” and (if things don’t go well, or if you’re reading this too late to prevent some missteps) “Recovering After a Failure of Willpower.”

If you expect there may be some family friction over the holidays, while those kinds of patterns can be hard to break, there’s some usable advice in the article “How Not to Get Into an Argument.”

Considering a New Year’s Resolution, or a list of them? They’re not always a good idea, and when they are, there are more and less successful ways to go about them: see “Should You Make a New Year’s Resolution?” and “Why New Year’s Is Such a Good Time to Make a Resolution.”

Regardless, here’s hoping you have a great time winding up the old year and that you start the new one with strong relationships, deeper self-understanding, and joy.
Photo by R. Motti

In a previous post (“Are Libraries Doomed?“), I talked about the forces that I believe are likely to bring libraries as we currently know them to an end. In this post, I’ll talk about the one approach I know of that I hope might save some libraries.

It’s all about the community
One facet of libraries is unlikely to ever become entirely obsolete, and that’s being a center for community activities. Many libraries already offer events like readings, talks, meetings, and play space for children, and this function could be expanded to turn the library into a key event venue, a meeting space, a hangout, and a focal point of local culture. While electronic communication continues to cannibalize face-to-face interaction, some face-to-face interaction is essential to us as human beings, and we’ve lost many places we used to have for doing that. If libraries can expand on their existing roles to become a major force locally as teen center, community center, senior center, performance space, meeting space, event space, workout space, dance space, and more, they could come to mean even more to their local communities than they do today.

Swans becoming monkeys
Unfortunately, there are at least a couple of problems with this approach. The first is that social activity is not what people who run libraries have devoted their lives to. It’s easy to imagine a library as a cultural center, sure, with some social events–but the great strength of libraries and librarians has always been providing materials and resources to the community, not organizing Swing Dance Saturdays or boffer battles or remaking a room into an inviting teen center. Fortunately, a number of librarians have a lot of these skills–and yet sometimes the change in job would be like a swan becoming a monkey. The stereotype is that librarians are obsessed with quiet. Can the average librarian depart so far from that stereotype to embrace pretty much its exact opposite?

The other problem that comes to mind immediately for me is that as wonderful as such a center might be, we–at least we here in America–aren’t generally used to having a community center where we want to go regularly. We would have to be convinced and retrained to stop by just to see who’s around, to check the event schedule regularly, to think of new things to do there, and to go to the library instead of a coffee shop or bar–and instead of just going home to watch TV. Can we make that change?

My prediction: a few libraries will succeed at this brilliantly. Many will try and fail. Many more won’t try and will just fade away. And a few–a very few–will continue to be supported as a sort of quaint curiosity doing what they have always done: making physical media available to people in person.

Photo  by peaceman494

I’m wrapping up my series “Brain Hacks for Writers” at Futurismic (at least for now) with “Better Writing Through Writing About Writing,” an article on some techniques I’ve learned and tested for getting past motivational problems with writing, getting better focus, making writing-related decisions, and so on. I present five written tools writers can use to improve things and some ideas on how best to use them.

Before I start here, I want to make one thing clear: I love libraries. They have been a haven and a treasure trove to me since I was young. Whatever I may say in this post about the future of libraries, please know that it’s not because I want anything bad to happen to them.

Primarily I love libraries because they’re places we’ve created as communities to share the written word. Few things in life, it seems to me, are cooperative, highly useful, and (in a limited sense) free.

If libraries were to end, I also would hate to think of communities losing that anchor of identity, of the waste of beautiful buildings, of paper volumes being shredded or dumped or moldering away, and of librarians (who in my experience are disproportionately great people) cast off into unemployment.

Yet my honest sense is that libraries, by and large, are doomed.

What changed?
Maybe “what’s changed?” is the wrong question: after all, we all know what changed–or to be more accurate, is in the process of changing right now. It’s eBooks. Since before the Sumerians started making marks in clay 5,000 years ago, the written word has been intimately bound with physical objects. As personal computers and later other devices started to become more common, certainly a lot of electronic words sprang into being, but most of us don’t want to use a computer to read: it’s just not physically comfortable, and sometimes it’s not practical. So while magazines and newspapers have been feeling the dark tendrils of obsolescence grope at them for a decade or more, until recently bookstores and libraries were largely unaffected.

In fact libraries expanded to embrace the availability of electronic media, adapting to offer computer terminals, free wi-fi, and online resources.

Now, though, eReaders have begun taking hold. This mundane-looking type of device with its limited features and lack of any sense of glitz has been quietly stealing away reader after reader from physical books (and some other printed media). I was stolen away about a year ago, when a friend bought me a Kindle. I thought I would really miss physical books. I was pretty much wrong.

I know there’s debate over whether eBooks can replace physical books. People make good points like the physical experience of reading a book or the ability to hand a physical copy of a book to a friend. It’s certainly true that there are some nice things about physical books. Not the trees mowed down to produce them or the excruciating returns procedures the publishing industry is locked into or the storage space requirements, but certainly the satisfaction of having a physical object that represents a wonderful experience, the ability to leave books lying around for children to stumble upon, the ability to pass along stories ideas by handing something to someone.

Yet having looked at the issue in great detail, I have to conclude that eBooks are going to almost completely replace physical books within the decade. You may disagree with me, but if you care about libraries, you may want to pretend for the moment that you grant the point and explore with me what this might mean, since if I’m right, libraries may have to change now if they are going to have any chance of surviving.

As with physical books, so with libraries
Although libraries were created to store and share physical books, they’ve adapted beautifully to new media. First reel-to-reel audio and films, then cassette tapes and video tapes, then CDs and DVDs became staple items at libraries. Libraries often provide free access to the Web and have a library Web site where you can look up books. The old card catalogs have turned into searchable databases. Microfilm and microfiche have yielded to digital storage.

Yet libraries are still tied to a physical experience in a specific place. The entire reason municipal libraries are funded in the first place is to benefit local citizens. While it’s true that you can get digital media from libraries–as with some eBook borrowing programs–you can also get digital media from a lot of other sources, and you don’t have to go to the physical library to get these in most cases anyway. Vermont librarian Kata Welch recently commented, ” If people want e-books, libraries will find a way to supply them and meet their patrons’ needs.” I think she’s right that libraries are more than able to accomplish this–but I don’t think libraries can survive this way.

After all, what’s the use of a physical building when you’re sharing materials that can be easily shared with someone at any other location? And what’s the use of a small local library online if there are thousands of other small local libraries online? If libraries take this approach of still being a source for sharing written and other media, but in electronic rather than physical form, then first they’ll be forced out of buildings and onto the Web, then they’ll inevitably join forces with other libraries because the economies of scale are so significant, and eventually the services will be so widespread that any sense of locality will be utterly lost–if the approach even survives at all. Given all the free material (books, stories, blogs, and so on) that’s available for eReaders and how easy and sometimes inexpensive it is to buy eBooks, I’m not convinced that many people will continue to rely on borrowing books at all, regardless of form.

But libraries are more than books!
It’s true, libraries are more than books. The problem is that sharing media–books, films, audio recordings, magazines, etc.–is the essential, core service that libraries provide. If libraries are no longer mainly about providing that service, can municipalities continue to justify paying as much as they do for them? How many people would use them? Enough to justify the space and expense?

I think there’s one way many libraries might be able to survive, but it would take a lot of effort and change and still wouldn’t succeed everywhere. I’ll talk about that in my follow-up post in the next day or two.

Photo by aaron.michels

My flash fiction collection, Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories, is part of an Amazon Kindle promotion and is free just until December 15th: here’s the link.

“It’s not easy to inject an entire world into one scene, but Reid does that time and time again. The characters, whether they live in one sentence or 20, are real people.”
– David Kopaska-Merkel in his review of Bam! on Dreams & Nightmares

“172 fantasy and science fiction, flash stories … each of them short enough to read in a few minutes, each of them rich, well crafted, meaningful.”
– Deborah Walker in her review of Bam! on Skull Salad Reviews

“thanks to this author’s unfettered imagination, quirky sense of humor, and great touch with twist endings, these short stories provide entertaining and often intriguing micro reading experiences. Highly recommended!”

“Bam! is like a magic pocket that is way bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. You reach in and never know what you’re going to pull out.”

“These stories were funny, memorable, meaningful. Dark chocolate, flashes.”

“Some absolute gems hide in here, such as the ingenious and infinitely anthologize-able ‘The Last Log Entries at the Philadelphia Office of the Centers for Happiness Control.'”

–Amazon.com reviews

“Reid’s smart humor and eye for irony are sure to attract plenty of readers, and keep them perusing the collection at their leisure.  The wit he employs in the stories is perfect for setting up the most poignant of stories … because just as you begin to anticipate more humor, the weight of what is being said sort of sneaks up on you.  It makes for a great read.”
– Shelly Bryant, reviewing Bam! at SlothJockey.com

I’m big on using writing as a tool for mindfulness and self-understanding: I do a lot of sitting down to write out what my thoughts and experiences have been on certain problem topics (whatever I’m working on in my life at that point in time) and using tools I’ve acquired, like idea repair and identifying mental schemas to figure out what’s going right, what’s going wrong, and what I can do to improve things. Yesterday, in the middle of this process, I suddenly became distracted.

And now for something completely different …
I was writing about a situation that had been frustrating me and had gotten to the point of saying “OK, I don’t know what’s going on there, but it sure is frustrating.” Sometimes I stop at that point if I don’t have any further insights. In this case, I hadn’t really thought the thing through very well, so I didn’t know whether or not I had further insights. Before I could figure that out, I found myself thinking about some entertaining distractions on the Internet, a new little project I could start, and wanting to check my e-mail. Since I was fortunately already trying to pay attention to my thoughts, I pulled myself up short. What was going on with me? I was doing meaningful self-examination, and then suddenly I want to go see what’s on YouTube? Was I trying to distract myself from something?

Having that thought, I was immediately inclined to drop the subject. It was as though I had walked up to a door and found a sign on it saying “Go away! We don’t want any!” Since this was happening (metaphorically) in my own brain, that seemed like a red flag to me–and also, I just like being contrary. So I opened the door and looked around. When I did, I came face to face with the overcommitment problem I’d been mulling over recently and one of the hidden ways it has been affecting me.

Schema avoidance
So what had happened was that the thinking I was doing led me to make a connection between some of my behaviors and overcommitment, but as soon as I got close to that connection, I automatically started distracting myself. There’s a name for this phenomenon. In schema therapy, it’s a “schema coping style” called “schema avoidance.”

Avoidance takes any number of forms: it can be television, surfing the Web, extreme sports, reading, going out with friends, eating, drug abuse, drinking, or anything else that can keep a person’s attention well enough to block some other thought or feeling. It can even be something constructive, like doing the dishes or working out.

Unfortunately, coping styles (like avoidance) don’t tell us much about what the underlying problem is. The fact that I was avoiding something only told me that there was something wrong, not what kind of thing it was.

It’s worth thinking how much this has to do with procrastination. In our culture, we tend to think of work as being something we would naturally want to avoid, but there’s nothing inherently painful about work, and often other problems–like fear of failure, perfectionism, or negativity–cause us to want to distract ourselves from working.

Opening the door marked “do not enter”
So learning about ourselves when we notice we’re being avoidant means facing the avoidance and consciously choosing to stay on task, to keep thinking or talking or feeling or investigating whatever it was that set us off. If I go to open my mail and suddenly have the idea that it would be fun to go out ice skating or that it’s time to watch a new DVD, then there’s a good chance that there’s something about the mail that triggers one of my mental schemas. If at that point I want to grow as a person and get past my current life obstacles, then the thing for me to do is to go to the mail, open it, and be observant of and gentle with myself as I face whatever it is I don’t want to face.

Being observant is necessary if I’m going to understand myself better in order to change things. Being gentle is necessary because we’ve developed these schemas and coping styles for a reason: somewhere earlier in life, something along these lines was painful enough to force a schema to develop around it. If we want to unravel mental schemas that keep us from living a good life, we need to care for whatever part of us the schema is there to protect.

Got courage?
I understand this talk of being gentle with ourselves may be offputting to some readers, so I’d like to characterize it in another way: facing those things that disturb us even though doing so makes us uncomfortable and vulnerable requires focus, self-knowledge, and above all, courage. So if the thought of facing everything that makes you feel uncomfortable or bad in the world gives you a sudden urge to see what’s on TV, I don’t blame you–but I also wish you good luck pushing the avoidance aside and courageously moving forward.

Photo by rishibando