I love the internet. I adore it madly and unashamedly. How could I not?
All the mostly-accurate secondary source knowledge you could ever want, for free at your fingertips; all the fanfic and fanart about all the most obscure fandoms, even that one show from the seventies; all the political discussion you could ever want, and those debates you wish you didn’t have to go into, because c’mon people, it’s 2012; all the most depressing and most inspiring things you can imagine (which is, of course, the first rule).
And when you’ve had one of THOSE days at work, 24 hours video feeds of kittens playing in their pen at a shelter, and the infamous Tumblr of pictures of Tom Selleck with waterfalls and sandwiches. Guys, it has a theme song!
I love the internet like I do chocolate. That is, in a fairly uncontrollable manner. If I want to make sure I don’t eat a bar of chocolate an hour before dinner, I have to not have any in the house, and if I want to write, I have to disable the wifi on my laptop, or go somewhere that has no wifi. I can and I do write at home sometimes, but these sessions are invariably short and end up interrupted by email or twitter. So I go and write at the coffee shop, but I really wish I didn’t have to.
John Scalzi wrote a book on writing titled ‘You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop’. I haven’t read it yet, but I do believe he has a point. Coffee shop writing doesn’t strike me as a way to build a career; though it definitely works for some people (Connie Willis mentioned it). I should be able to write in my house, because I have a story to tell and I want to tell it – but my house is full of shiny things and I have all the willpower of a tadpole.
So I’ll be working on writing at home more often, and I’ll be getting Scalzi’s writing book. I love his fiction as well as the title of this one, and I don’t think I can go wrong with taking advice from the President of the Science-fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.