WRITE TO THE DEATH
The other day while admiring the symmetry in my blog view statistics – and believe it or not, the balance thrills my mildly OCD self more than the values – I shared aloud that my numbers went from 11, to 27, to 38, back to 27, then back to 11!
“11?!” My 11 year-old son barked. “Mom, 11 sucks!” I replied that our lives got busy rolling through my list of excuses. “Mom, you had a fun blog and you had fun with it! But, a fun blog stopped is a FLOP!” After marveling at the thrill of his wordplay, I shook my head at the truths that poured from his mouth.
He was right, I won’t settle for being a FLOP! I missed my nightly creative angst with producing 365 words – usually hitting closer to 700-900 words then trimming the unnecessary words to size. (Mark the day, I admitted that every other word from my fingers is unnecessary!)
I fell out of habit and after missing one, missing the next one became exponentially easier. But lo and behold, the next morning in my emails, the LA Times reported that, of course, there’s an app for that! “Write or Die – Putting the ‘Prod’ in Productivity!”
My hope was that this app comes with a neck shock collar that plugs into your USB port and senses when your keyboard movement stops to zap you back on track! Truthfully it’s not quite that hardcore – unless you want it to be. It emits a peaceful “Please start writing again” or you can set it on Kamikaze setting where it’ll start erasing words if you delay for too long.
While positive reinforcement also exists, the app creator realized that it was the threat of the negative reinforcement from teachers that forced him/her to hit due dates. Well guess what, it works! A British writer, Helen Oyeyemi, just on the press junket for her recent novel “Mr. Fox” praises the app saying, “Sometimes fear is the only motivator!”
At $9.99, the app may be more expensive than most, but it’s cheaper than a creative writing class! I’m still on the fence with buying the app, but it did get me to write!
