The lure of fiction seems like it should be hard to resist. But. I manage to resist it constantly.
I think it might be the lack of feedback from trying to write fiction.
For non-fiction, I have contracts and schedules. I have feedback from technical reviewers (i.e., “beta readers”.) For fiction, I have a head full of ideas that don’t let me sleep at night.
What am I doing with those ideas? Am I finishing a book that’s 80% complete?
No.
I’m researching technical topics for another non-fiction book.
And editing another non-fiction book. (Something happened and it got 2x as long as the contract said. Some cutting must be done.)
Why?
I wish I knew. I do know that I often spent a lot of time writing when my day job was particularly frustrating and tedious. After retiring, I don’t seem to suffer from “Tedious Work Life.”
Maybe I need a more tedious fiction title to escape from.
Other Poor Excuses
I think I’ve got an ideal, portable writing setup:
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An iPad
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A logi bluetooth keyboard with a little clip that supports the iPad
The internal battery life on the iPad is only a few hours, but it charges quickly. I think the boat’s solar panels can keep it running. (I’m about to find out.)
My current setup involves a little too much “hunch-over”. Raising the iPad up to eye height is something I need to investigate. For example, the Hoverbar Duo seems useful and portable.
I’m still struggling with making use of Scrivener through iCloud. I think it worked the last time I looked at it, but I’m not confident. I need to setup a sandbox project to see how well it works before moving my novels around.
This blog, for example, lives entirely in Dropbox, and can be edited from anywhere. I have a lot of confidence because it’s more-or-less purely text files. I have tooling on one computer to transform the source Markdown files into HTML. If I was smarter, I’d install Pelican on the hosting server and run the page generation up there.
And, yes, these are feeble excuses. It helps to see them in the clear light created when they written down. It’s difficult to fix something without seeing how it’s broken.