Friday, June 17, 2005

Motivation

Want to motivate yourself to finish writing your book? Try dangling a carrot.

Back in 2002/2003 I wouldn't let myself see Lord of the Rings (Two Towers) at the movies until I'd finished my novel. The film came out in December, and I had to wait until March. That's three whole months until I allowed myself to see the thing!

In 2004 I repeated the dose with the third film in the series. This time I got to see it in February.

I just bought myself a copy of GTA San Andreas for the PC, a game I have been looking forward to for the past 12 months. The packet is sitting in my line of sight, right above my monitor, but I won't open it until I've handed Hal 2 in to my publisher.

It doesn't matter what the carrot is. Use it.

Simon Haynes is the author of the Hal Spacejock and Hal Junior series (Amazon / Smashwords / other formats)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I thought you were a flight simmer? GTA and fly games seem worlds apart.

Simon Haynes said...

They are indeed. They're different sorts of fun, though. For example, flying Perth to Melbourne in a virtual 737 takes 4 hours, but I can do a quick mission in GTA in a spare fifteen minutes or so. GTA SA has too much bad language & adult content for me, though, and I'm not enjoying it as much as the earlier games. Every other word starts with F, and while that might be realistic I don't have to like it. I don't think there's any place for strong language on TV either, but I'm probably just old fashioned (at the ripe old age of 38.)