Immediate Gratification or Long-Term Satisfaction?

The Writing Game

One of the things I admire in a person is if they can be upbeat even when they are down. I don’t know if that’s a thing or not, but I admire it and try to practice it in my own daily life.

I’ve been a whirling, churning writing machine the last few weeks. Yesterday, I wrote three stories, which were published here at Medium. A fourth story is waiting in the wings for a publication I’ve never written for before, and a fifth got halfway written and not finished. It’s still in an open document. I thought to myself, “If it’s still there in the morning, I’ll see about finishing it.”

What could have happened that it wouldn’t be here? The power could go out, or Daisy Mae might have gotten up to some hijinks overnight. She’s our youngest cat and has elected to live in the study, though recently, I saw her making rapid forays out into the hall and then into the hallway closet.

She doesn’t stay long. It’s just long enough to peer down the hallway and hide. If Stanley, our boy cat, sees this, he will come tearing down the hallway, scattering rugs as he moves 35 mph to try to disembowel Daisy Mae. In any case, the story is still here, so I’ll spend a bit of time on it.

What’s interesting about this outpouring of useful material (publishable at Medium rather than random rantings on paper that serve only to vent my spleen) is that there is so much of it. My brain is firing on all pins right now. I’ve got a condition of incredible productiveness going on. Either that or a tinge of bipolar. It runs in my family.

Maybe I shouldn’t talk about it in case I jinx the whole thing.

Or just be thankful. I do wonder if all this activity is momentary or if it might be a change in how I am writing.

In the back of my mind, I’ve got a book, actually, three books, that I need to spend more time on. I really should. I promised folks I’d be published by the end of summer.

I don’t want to give up the immediate rewards of writing pieces at Medium for the long term or even never rewards of writing books. It was going to be one book, but I kept blathering on and finding more to say that it grew into a three-book series.

Get the Job. Keep the Job. Get Another Job. It’s for young people and basically is built on the principles of my own years of working. Be polite, ask nicely, and show up for work on time. Of course, there’s a lot more to it, but in a nutshell, that will do nicely.

So, immediate gratification versus long-term satisfaction.

Although come to think of it, I could do both. I could spend several hours on one and then the same on the other each day. All I have is time these days, seeing as how I’m retired. What did I do back when I was working? Sometimes, I’d write in my head, no matter what I was doing at work. It did not interfere with my job; at least, I said it did not. I didn’t do it all the time.

There’s actually a funny story when my supervisor and I were at work, plugging away at whatever we were each doing. I had this thought pop into my head that solved the six-month-old problem of having written myself into a corner with no way out for the novel I had been working on. I ran into her office, hollering, “I know what to do now!” I explained my joy, which was totally out of keeping with anything we were doing at work.

She gave me a funny sideways look and mildly shook her head. Maybe you had to be there. The novel was eventually submitted to seven publishers and rejected each time, but it was the very first book I ever wrote. Right now, I think it might be under the bed. And no, it is not worth dusting off because it did suck. But it was my first. It took me three years to write, including that six-month time off spent being written into the corner of the room.

I guess I just need to get used to the idea of writing long and short nowadays.

“Book is finished” in Morse Code: -… — — — — -.- / .. … / ..-. .. -. .. … …. . -..

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