Reading Deprivation Week resistance

[gement]

For those of you who are familiar with The Artist's Way, I don't have to explain Reading Deprivation Week. For the rest of y'all, the idea is to cut out your biggest mind-blanking-time-frittering-filling-yourself-with-the-unimportant activity for a week to find out what ELSE is going on in your brain. Which is, the author theorizes for the majority of people who read books on increasing one's creativite output, reading.

I have previously given up watching tv or playing computer solitaire games (including all other minigames of the Pop Cap/Big Fish varieties (Hi, tithonium and niac! Hi, spaced!)). I have even given up email and LJ for a week.

So these days I consider it a triumph that I'm checking LJ and email within a week, the only other reading I do is the comics page of the paper while I wait for my toast to pop at work, I'm not addicted to any chat interfaces or online games, I'm having trouble getting around to watching seasons of Doctor Who and Torchwood that were HANDED to me as a gift, and I only play minigames when my internet is down and I'm hoping it will come back up in a minute to check my wiki.

What am I doing? I'm thinking about my book. All the time. I mean all the time. I'm checking for new comments again on my wiki, or re-reading my own work obsessively, or I'm replaying scenes in my head. To the exclusion of doing else with my bus ride time or most of my other down cycles.

This is clearly not the best use of my creative time, as I'm not even making up much new stuff these days. Or months, in fact. I would like to be spending that energy viciously editing, or voraciously reading period source material and books on how to write descriptions that don't suck.

Or possibly doing my laundry. That situation's getting a bit urgent. More on that next post.

So how do I do Reading Deprivation Week when what I'm mindlessly reading is my own creative output and taking the book away doesn't help because I have it memorized?

Comments

[grum]

What about asking the stories to help you write their siblings? That you'll write one if they'll wander off for a bit and let you read the background stuff you need to write them well.
Would it help to set a (fairly rigid) time in which to read comments and write responses to them? Does the kibitzing with your readers actually help with the story? (it seems to from my end, but it's poking at with a long stick (just in case there's an anthill under it)

[gement.livejournal.com]

Kibitzing does help, quite a lot. I have trouble setting rigid limits on my computer time of any sort, and worse with my writing, but I keep trying to figure out if there's a way to do it that will stick for me.

Asking the stories to help me write their siblings fits into my mental framework beautifully. I no longer have the mental relationship with Aldo that lets me tell him, "Please don't let me talk to you or Gerard until 5 pm," and have it stick, but that kind of personification works well for me. Thanks!