Elizabeth Bear wrote a fantastic newsletter about creativity and bad habits last week. You can read it online, if you’re not a subscriber, but subscriptions are a magical thing. The really useful take-away, meditating on the internet and productivity and the psychology of creativity: Measuring one’s self against the internet rarely turns out well. Unless you’re reading dub one-star reviews of your favorite book to make yourself feel better about the dumb one-star reviews of your own book, because obviously some people failed reading comprehension and don’t know it. (This works until you start getting angry on behalf of Watership Down, because it deserves so much better than “There are no boating accidents in this novel, if I could give it zero stars I would.**) The thing is, a thousand good words a day is a pretty good rate. But it’s hard to remember that when everybody around you is engaged in wordcount escalation, or the deadlines and the sewer bill are looming. And the worse we feel about our work, the more likely we are to avoid it. Or to throw ourselves into it in long, compulsive bursts that don’t actually increase your productivity: they just exhaust us and don’t leave

There are things you want to sit every new writer down and tell them, right at the start. Things you’d like them to understand, because they’re things you didn’t understand back when you were starting out and they would have been useful to know. Or things you don’t understand now, even though you’ve been at this for a while, and it would be nice to spare them that particular slice of pain. You want to tell them its going to take work, and when they nod like they understand, you want to grab them by the arm and really make them comprehend what you’re saying. “No,” you want to hiss at them, “it’s going to take work. You think you know what you’re getting into, but your head is full of dreams and lies and myths that are fucking with you. It’s going to take so much more work than you’re thinking, and none of it is as fun as you’re thinking.” You wan to tell them that it starts hard and gets harder. You want to tell them it will take time. No, more time than you’re thinking. No, more time than that. You want to tell them they’re going

Hardworking. Prolific. Savvy. Surprising. Great. I figure I can lay claim to maybe one of these words, if I’m on-point with my writing, on any given day. More often I aim simply aiming for one, and falling frustratingly short. But as of today they’re taped to the wall, beside my projects list. A reminder of what I’m striving for with this whole writing thing. Not necessarily in the work, but in terms of what I’d like to think when I look back over my career. They’re not set in stone yet. I’m going to live with them for a few days, stare at them the same way I stare at the active projects list. Ponder whether each word is right, and change it as needed. Savvy was originally smart, for instance, when I wrote the first draft of the list in my notebook. Smart didn’t cut it as a long-term ambition. Savvy worked better, captured that feeling of knowledge put into practice rather than hoarded for its own sake. You can be savvy about your career. You can be savvy about the genre you’re writing in. You can be savvy about craft, in general. I want that. Just like I