A Writer’s Biography, Volume III, Part 9: Keeping Procrastination and Distractions at Bay

In recent months, some of these entries have gotten slightly more difficult to write. I’m slightly self-conscious about the fiction projects I’m active on, so I’m not quite sure when to share excerpts from them. That might change in the near future, but not just yet.

This week, I had a conversation with one of my students, one who, at times, would prefer to distract themselves¹ rather than get going on their work. At a certain point at the end of the day, I said to them, “You think you know about procrastination? I could teach you doctorates in procrastination.”

I talked about their position, how they needed to keep on top of their work because time can slip away from them. Of course, when you’re in your mid to late teens, your perspective on wasting time changes from when you’ve passed a half century of life.

This made me think of something I wrote a few years back as part of my A Writer’s Biography series, an intermittent series of articles over the years that might end up becoming the basis of my memoir, if I ever get around to it. I wrote about this issue of procrastination years back, but looking back at the initial article, I was thinking I might have a few more things to say about the issue now. So, let’s talk about it.

How I See Procrastination Now Compared to Before

I distinctly remember a moment when I was fourteen years old when I was visiting my relatives at my Grandpa and Grandma Sumner’s place on the north side of La Crosse, Wisconsin. I remember it being evening and I was hanging out with several of my cousins outside staring at the nighttime stars and declaring to one of them (I believe it was my cousin Kathy, hi there.) that I would write four books by the time I turned eighteen.

I did not quite reach that lofty goal by my eighteenth birthday. Now past my fiftieth birthday, I have three completed novels and one poetry collection to my name.

Obviously, procrastination had some effect on my production. I mean, I’m not like Harper Lee, but I’m sure as heck not as prolific as several of my literary idols such as Stephen King or Elmore Leonard. Then again, in the latter two cases, they have or had the advantage of securing enough publishing support to be able to live off their writing earnings full-time, which is a very late 20th century phenomenon, as I’ve recently started to sense.

I am someone who tries to avoid falling into stereotyping and bias, but I cannot help but think my generation, Generation X, born in or around the 1970’s, came of age in a transitional era in our country when it came to both culture and technology. We came of age at a time, the 1980’s and 1990’s, where America was arguably at our peak. We stood triumphant over the world, and all of the ugliness that it took for us to get there was buried in classic Westerns or revisionist cinema such as the Rambo series, which promised its audience there was a way to win the Vietnam War even though the entire premise was ridiculous.

We also certainly came of age at a time when we were at the junction between the late industrial age and the information age. We had video games, CD’s, and computer graphics when previous generations had none of the above. We were among the very last college students not to regularly use email and worry about the cost of long distance calls. Often, rather than depending on our parents getting us desktop computers, we relied on the computer labs in the basements of our college dorms. We generally had no cell phones and no real encounters with the Internet except for the odd places to find in the exotic nooks and crannies there.

Despite this, I certainly had my own distractions. There were video games from the Atari 2600 up to Sid Meier’s Civilization for my desktop computer. There was even the Playstations and XBoxes my wife and I bought for our children that I ended up piloting more than a few times. Then there were the movies, the shows, the World Wide Web.

There were years when I didn’t write a single thing, where the tall tales and ideas simply burbled up and down in my perpetual stew of ideas in my head which gathered stories in my head for as long as I could remember. In all seriousness, I didn’t have the perseverance in my younger days to put something together like those stories, to put them on the page. I started and then stopped, like the more than a dozen or so hand-written pages of a long-forgotten story my father found in my parents’ home and returned to me.

In those years I was a younger man, I called myself a writer but did little to forward that vision. This does not mean I didn’t utilize my writing talents, however. I first turned to journalism to make a living with the skills I had, using it to inform my community about what they needed to know. Over time, when the work was fewer and farther between, I entered the education profession and utilized my writing (and other) skills that way. In both professions, I felt I had value, that I had purpose. Away from all of that, I helped build a family, a home. It was a good life. (It still is now, too.)

Then, fifteen years ago, I began to wonder if I couldn’t do something more, whether I could become something more than what I had tried to be before.

It didn’t start immediately. As I have told several of my students, if you don’t consistently dedicate yourself to your goals, there’s no way you will be able to switch on. It took me a while to decide what I wanted to write about, and then to see who might be interested in helping me bring it to life. I also wanted to share what I came up with, so I started to meet with and network with these people. Some good friendships and good advice came from that networking and writing groups.

Finally, in 2019, my first book, The Holy Fool came out. I had no idea what I was doing, and I don’t claim to know everything about what I’m doing now. I know a little bit more, now.

I would love to tell you I never let myself distracted anymore, that I’m just a writing machine. That wouldn’t be totally accurate. I’ve written at least 200,000 words a year for the past four years. I’ve only kept track of my word counts with a good amount of accuracy ever since 2018, but I’m guessing when I got started back into writing earlier in the decade, I was only writing around 50,000-120,000 words per year – pretty pitiful compared to my current output. Setting word count and project goals at the beginning of the year has helped me to achieve something more than I ever expected out of myself.

I think my current attitude about how much time I have left is symbolized by me checking out Bowker Publishing Services. They’re the people where you can buy ISBN numbers from, the numbers used to identify books.

I’m beginning to wonder if 10 or 20 ISBN numbers are going to be enough for everything else I’m planning to write. Probably not more than 20. Well, I’ll make them good ones, then.

-30-

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Prose Night at The Writing Life, 9 August 2025: Why do I continue to write

A couple of days ago, I decided to put together a video with which I intended to both ask and offer some help to fellow writers as well. Promotion and marketing have been mysteries for me, although I’m making much more of an effort to do this than I ever had before.

So, I shot the video. I’m getting a bit more confident with editing skills and putting videos together. For example, as part of these experiences, I learned Instagram doesn’t use its algorithm to recommend videos, so stay away from those. Meanwhile, I learned Substack helps you generate shorter clips of videos to use as promo clips. So I can use the promo clips on Insta while referring the Insta viewers back to Substack for thew full video.

Well, the video is below. And it wound up being almost more of a soliloquy and reflection than a request to my audience.

I can’t approach writing as just another job. It’s something far more important to me, my identity. I want to tell the stories that are important to me, and if they aren’t as obviously commercial-ready as other authors, then so be it.

The irony is it was me getting interested in fan-fiction – an absolutely non-commercial enterprise – that got be reinvigorated in the process of fiction writing again. I think it’s about time for me to do another one of my An Author’s Biography pieces about the influence that experience has had on my work.

Until then, take care, everyone.

A Writer’s Biography, Volume 2, Part 10: The Ghosts of Writing Projects Past

Prose Night at the Writing Life, 9 November 2024

[These are a lot of headlines lol]

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: For new visitors or subscribers to this Substack, this Prose Night entry is another in a continuing series I have been writing ever since beginning to blog on WordPress several years previously, which I’ve called A Writer’s Biography. These essays have been looks back at my life through the lens of writing and my experiences of writing. My original intent is to try and provide some advice or inspiration to writers in similar situations to myself, although I realize this project has turned into something resembling a memoir (which I haven’t started to tackle as an actual serious project).

I’ve separated these into three “volumes:” Volume I, detailing my early childhood and first experiences with reading and writing; Volume II, detailing my experiences with writing as a young man and during the “quiet times” of my writing, and Volume III, where I discuss how things are in middle age and resuming my life as a writer. Since this story covers some projects and times when I was not an active of a writer, or at least a lot more inconsistent, I decided to make this a Volume II story. All you paid subscribers can check out all the Writer’s Biography posts in my archives.]

And if you can’t spare cash for a subscription, you might give this a shot if you want to support my site on an at-will basis.

Buy Me a Coffee – Venmo

I wonder what Stephen King’s morgue looks like.

This probably requires a bit of explanation, since I think just made up a term¹. ut in the very perfunctory research I did on a small portion of the interwebs, my instinct is I’ve repurposed an old one.

The common word for what I’m thinking of is what are called trunk stories. As in, you stash them in a trunk, not likely ever to be looked at again². However, I decided to use a term from my previous life as a journalist.

Of course, everyone has heard the term morgue used before to describe a place to store bodies. But in the old time newspaper business, a morgue is the place where a newspaper kept news clippings from old stories, usually from its own publication but sometimes from others, especially for important stories of nationwide, statewide, and especially local importance. These were usually organized in microfilm storage if a newspaper was very sophisticated, or it might have simply been a group of filing cabinets holding manila folders of cut-out newsprint stories, photocopies of the same, or some combination of the time. Some of them were organized according to their publication date, or more often by subject matter.

Usually, this area was used by reporters to gather background information on their stories. It was a fast way of finding this information, especially in the pre-Internet era when not every newspaper archive was digitized and itemized.

In some cases, there was such a thing as a digital morgue, a location where past stories could be indexed and referred to in new reporting. Sometimes, a morgue could also refer to a place where you put stories intended for future use. One important circumstance was when you composed a story to be run in the event someone famous dies, such as big time political leaders or entertainers.

From my perspective, I like the idea of an old morgue of half-started stories and ideas from my past experiences. For me, I have both a physical and digital morgue, or perhaps a hybrid one.

Most of the physical representations of my work are tucked into not a trunk or trunks but (appropriate for the 21st century) some plastic totes in my storage building. I haven’t had the chance to look at those yet. Those include some of my writing from even my high school years, stuff I haven’t seen in a decade or so.

My electronic morgue, however, has some writing of a somewhat more recent nature. This included several pieces of writing which I started and stopped over the course of at least one or two decades.

Those were the fallow years, when I plied my trade as first a journalist and then as a teacher but I went years without even sitting in front of a desktop or laptop on my own volition without being paid, without having anything to do with telling a community what happened at its latest city council meeting or teaching a kid how to write with some semblance of skill. Sure, I called myself a writer. But I went years in those days without writing a word.

However, over the course of several years, I’ve had the chance to write more nonfiction essays online and fiction. I got serious about my writing in 2010 or so when I started realizing I wasn’t getting any younger and I wasn’t interested in wasting more time on personal activities (gaming, distractions, etc.) that weren’t adding anything to my existence. Now, this was a long process, but within a few years I felt like I wasn’t fooling myself when I called myself a writer³.

This process was helped by finally having a book I had been contemplating for nearly a decade published around 2019 and then moving on to the first book in a series in 2023. But in the years in between thinking about being a writer and actually kicking myself in the tail to write… there was a lot of false starts and stillborn projects.

This week, with the recent unpleasantness, I was tempted to look back on some of my past work. Back years ago, I was of the opinion politics was a fun form of entertainment, and some (but not all) of my fiction experiments took place in the political world. By 2016, however, politics ceased being fun for me and merely became a duty whenever the elections came around.

Oh brothers, sisters, and all the good people in between, you would not believe the fairy tales I started and abandoned in the 20 years since I’m writing this blog today.

There was a novel about a third party candidate for president in the years before I realized our current presidential election process never let third party candidates win, just due to the structure of the American election system.

There was a story about a double agent for the Chinese government I wouldn’t even know what to do with.

There were two full novels I wrote in my twenties – one I tried to sell unsuccessfully and wouldn’t try to sell again (or would I say just screw it and publish it online for the heck of it?) and the other I wrote for National Novel Writers Month back in the days it was a reputable organization but I’m not sure there is a salvageable novel there.

Then there was a novel based… sort of based in the home of my youth, something of a murder mystery (a half-baked one) based around the idea of gradual regional environmental collapse. I have often joked about me not being much of an Iowa writer other than my poetry, but this story was set right in the heart of what was my home. I took a look at the synopsis I’d written and the dozen pages I’d put together… and it’s not horrific? It might be salvageable, whenever I get around to picking over what is there? Why not – I think the environmental theme might be especially prescient given the current status of my home state.

There are at least two or three attempts at a novel coming from my observations of the American political scene in recent years and re imagining a reaction to this scene from a very dark place from my subconsciousness. All this got abandoned over the past several years, in starts and stops, in some cases well before the recent unpleasantness. And I know I don’t want to tackle the issue in exactly the same way.

So, I took a look at those scraps of writings… and I thought of another novel, one I had read in college, Parable of the Sower, which made me a lifelong fan of Octavia Butler (one of the titans of 20th century sci-fi writers, right along with Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein, and Herbert – and I’ll jump up on a table and argue it to anyone who doesn’t recognize her).

I thought of how one idea might change everything in society, and how it seemed unrealistic and relevant all at once, and it might be something true to how my mother Suzanne raised me to believe in humanity. And now I’m staring at the screen and looking at the name of a totally new project with a brand new title, and the ideas are starting to bubble up.

The moral of the story, people, is never throw away art. You never know what it will lead to.

On that note, I would love to take a look through Stephen King’s writing morgue. I bet he has a lot of great ideas I could use (crediting him, of course. He’s still the King, as always).