The New Regime

The New Regime is going great. Since establishing it, there have been only two days where I have failed to write 800 words. But I wrote so much on the other days that I'm still ahead of schedule. Last Saturday I came back from my morning's writing with 1,387 new words under my belt and declared that I wanted to start playing World of Warcraft again. Just so I'd have a way to reward myself for days like that. So I did, and the really fun part is, we got Carter an account as well. So now I spend a fair amount of time wandering Azeroth with my son. It's awesome. We're like best buddies now—we've really bonded even closer in this last week.

So the writing:

89,641 / 120,000 (74.7%)

[Oops, I guess I already wrote about returning to WoW. Oh, well.]

How to treat your customers... and their kids

A couple weeks ago, my son dreamed up what an Apple smartphone might look like. (He was inspired by a billboard in O'Hare Airport advertising some Windows smartphone.) He drew a cool picture, and we put it in the mail to Apple. It was almost certainly less than two weeks ago that it went in the mail.

Today he got a letter back:

Re: Submission of an Idea to Apple Computer, Inc.

Dear Carter:

Thank you for your letter to Apple about your idea for a smartphone.

We're glad you are interested in Apple and our products and wanted to send us your ideas. We value innovation and creativity. And while we cannot review new product ideas sent to us from outside the company, we appreciate your wanting to share your ideas with us.

We encourage you to keep generating new ideas for yourself, your family and friends, your interests and studies or schoolwork. We know you'll be successful!

Very truly yours,

APPLE COMPUTER, INC.

(signed)
Mark Aaker
Senior Counsel
Apple Law Department


That, my friends, is class.

Writing This Week

Last night I sat down and figured out how much I have to write every day between now and Christmas in order to get the book done. It came out to 800 words. So I set myself a reasonable target for the remaining days of this week, and then the New Regime begins: 800 words per day, no matter what. That means finding the discipline that has so far evaded me in this novel, to actually write in the evening and late at night, if I don't hit my target in the morning. That's been the main reason I haven't finished the book yet: school started up in September, my wife started working in a church on Sunday mornings, and I could no longer write every morning. But I didn't make up the time later in the day. So now I have to do that, always.

Yesterday morning I had written almost 400 words. So I figured out I had to write 800 words a day, and then I proceeded to write 800 more words last night. Then at Starbucks this morning I managed to crank out almost 1,400. I'm blowing my target out of the water. So I came home from Starbucks this morning and announced, "I think I need to resubscribe to World of Warcraft, in order to have a way to reward myself for days like today." It's been kind of a running joke at my office that I needed to restart my subscription if I wanted to get this novel finished, because it was such an effective motivator for the last book.

Well, today I finally did it. What's more, I set my son up with a guest pass, so we played together. Quite a lot, today, actually: we started new characters and got up to 7th level. He had so much fun, and it rekindled a lot of my early excitement about the game. Good father-son bonding.

More milestones: last night I broke 80,000 words, and this morning I passed page 200 in my Word document.

81,904 / 120,000 (68.3%)