It’s personal. Domination, that is. I want to someone to submit to me because they like and trust me that much, because I as a person inspire submission in them, not because I’m a woman, dominant, and within 50 feet of them.

That’s why I can’t fucking stand bullshit like female supremacy. If you’re only submitting to me because you believe women are superior, then it really doesn’t matter which woman you’re submitting to. Not to mention that in my experience female supremacists also absolutely fucking despise women, but that’s a separate blog post. Even if you don’t abruptly lose all respect for women when one of us disagrees with you, I have zero interest in people who only “respect” me because I have tits. Just fuck off until you learn to relate to me like I’m a human fucking being.

I’m also infuriated by trash like this idiotic article by Ms Alexandra Stevens about the “one true way” to control a submissive man. Most of my complaints about that crap are already covered in my rant about lying liar Elise Sutton, but it never hurts to have another example of how people are willing to lie to submissive men to part them from their money. Guys, if someone is telling you exactly what you want to hear, down to the level of saying that your favourite kink (chastity/tease & denial/orgasm denial in Ms Alexandra Stevens case) is the one true way you should be dominated, they’re fucking lying to you!

Assholes who scam submissive men aside, saying that orgasm denial is the one true way to dominate a guy is just fucking ridiculous. If I were to blindly follow “Alexandra’s” extraordinarily detailed plan for how long I should keep my submissive locked up (no way that could possibly have been written by a male chastity fetishist, nope, totally sounds like an actual woman whose world doesn’t revolve around some guy’s dick), then I’m not in control, “she” is. And again, it’s totally impersonal. Nothing in that entire article is actually about the woman in charge, it’s about how she can service her submissive’s dick. The almost certainly a guy who wrote this doesn’t seem to care at all which woman locks his dick up as long as someone does it.

If I’m interchangeable then it’s not about me and I don’t want to play. If I have to act out a kink I may not have (newsflash, not everyone is into orgasm denial!), then it’s not even slightly about me. If I’m expected to act out this kink down to some random asshole’s specifications about how long I should deny my partner an orgasm, again, it’s not about me! How can it possibly be about me if I don’t get the chance to do things my way? Even people who are really, really interested in chastity have their own desires, there’s no chastity hive mind. If your dom only wants to deny you for a few hours and then have passionate sex, shouldn’t what she wants be more important than what random asshole from the internet says about how long she should deny you?

Wanting domination to be personal is also why desperation is such a turn off for me. If you want to play so badly that you’re willing to do that with literally anyone, then a) it’s not about me, and b) you’re not looking out for your own wellbeing, which is a gigantic problem all on its own. If you just enjoy playing with a variety of different people and feel confident about your ability to stop or redirect a scene that isn’t working for you, that’s totally cool. What I’m talking about is the seriously unsettling “oh god I need someone, anyone, to dominate me” level of desperation. If anyone will do, then you’re both treating me like I’m interchangeable and deliberately ignoring the fact that me being a dom doesn’t mean we have any interests in common. You can see how that’s gross and dehumanizing, right?

And on a slightly different note, I also like my play to be up close and personal. For the longest time I just wasn’t interested in whips because I didn’t want to be across the room from my play partner when I could be right up in his face hearing all the fantastic little noises he makes.

Speaking of play partners, as much as I want our play to be about me, I also want it to be about them. I’m not going to dominate just anybody, I can’t be bothered. It fucking matters to me who you are, what you’re doing with your life, what you want out of this scene, what you have to give and how much you can take. Even outside of wanting to have some sort of connection with the person I’m playing with, it’s just so much more fun to use a smart, capable human being as a toy. I can’t get that hit of “yeah, you could be building a house or writing beautiful music or giving a speech in front of hundreds of people, but instead you’re here getting slapped around because I wanted to play.” That’s an amazing feeling, and it’s one I can only have with someone I can relate to outside of a scene.

It’s personal. It’s about who I am, who you are, and how we fit together. I want you to bring your whole self to our play and I want you to expect me to bring my whole self. I need you to want more than just any female body. If you can’t connect with your play partner, then why fucking bother?

As usual, this post is inspired by a discussion I found on Fetlife. The gist of the question, for those who don’t do Fetlife, was whether or not other female doms are actually paragons of efficiency and virtue or whether perhaps the questioner’s former s-type might possibly have had unreasonable expectations, and whether other female doms somehow made themselves perfect before they felt ready to dominate someone.

First off, while there are no shortage of shitty doms out there, if you bash your dom/former dom for not being perfect every second of every day, go fuck yourself. Doms are human beings, just like you. We have faults and bad days and make mistakes just like you. If you need your dom to be perfect you don’t actually want a relationship, you want someone to act out a fantasy for you.

On the late and lamented The Black Leather Belt blog, Lily Lloyd said something very smart about how needing your dom to be perfect is about fear of surrender and wanting submission to be easy and risk free and not wanting to face the fact that your dom is human and will make mistakes sometimes. That, uh, sounded a lot smarter when she originally said it. I think her point about wanting submission to be risk free, even as clumsily as I’ve restated it here, is really important though. I get that it’s scary to make yourself that vulnerable to someone. I certainly couldn’t do it. But you can’t blame other people for your fear of taking that risk, and you can’t make it their job to somehow magically make submission risk free. That’s simply impossible, so suck it up or admit you’d rather stick to fantasizing.

Back at the topic of when you’re ready to dominate someone, you’re never going to feel perfectly ready. As a bunch of commenters in the Fetlife thread already said, there’s always going to be something you could be better at. None of us are ever going to be perfect, and if we wait until we are we’ll never get to have any fun.

That’s not to say that there’s no bar to clear whatsoever, though. While I very strongly believe that people are allowed to identify however they want, once you get involved with another person you have a responsibility to at least try to do right by them. Shit happens to everyone but you have to try. Like in any relationship you need to have something to give (that is, not be in a constant state of crisis where you only barely have enough energy to keep your own life going), half-decent communication skills, and reasonable expectations, and particular to d/s relationships you need to be willing to take responsibility for getting your partner back on an even keel if a scene goes wrong.

Some people will say it’s not fair to blame only the dom when a scene goes wrong and that the s-type is just as much at fault if they failed to communicate (because that’s always effortless and not terrifying when you’re in a bad headspace), but a) that’s blatant douchebaggery and b) I’m not even talking about blame. Taking responsibility for helping your partner is something you do because they need it, not because you screwed up. Honestly, what kind of person would only help their s-type if they were certain it was their fault things went wrong? If your s-type really does have shitty communication skills it’s probably wise to step back from pursuing a d/s relationship with them, but dammit you help people who need it even if there was no way you could have kept things from going wrong.

Note that none of that involves being debt free and having your dream job and an awesome house with a fully stocked playroom and a signed note from a therapist saying you’re officially ready to ride this ride. You’ve just got to be a grownup and willing to try, which, coincidentally, is exactly the same thing I’d expect from an s-type. Like I keep yelling, doms are not that special.

As long as you’ve got a handle on the first two levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you officially have my blessing to look for a d/s relationship. You know, if for some reason you care what some asshole on the internet thinks 🙂 But in general, no one’s going to hunt you down and give you permission to call yourself a dom and find a d/s relationship. You’re never going to get a certificate in the mail saying you’re ready. You’ve just got to give it a shot and try to learn from your mistakes, just like everyone else.

It’s been very dry in my part of the world, to the point where it seemed like most of the province was on fire. We’ve finally gotten some serious rain today and it’s awesome! There’s even been some thunder, which we almost never get on the island.

I love the sound of the rain, but we don’t get much of it out here during the summer. If you’re missing the rain too, here are some rain sound generators:

simplyrain is one of the simplest. It automatically starts playing, so you don’t have to do anything to it if you don’t want to, but you can adjust the volume, rain intensity, and the amount of thunder. It allows you to set a sleep timer too.

raining.fm is also really simple, works pretty much the same way as simplyrain.

naturesoundsfor.me lets you create your own customized ambient soundtrack with beach sounds, creeks, different types of rain, birdsong, frogs, and more. It allows you to download your creation  too.

soundrown lets you mix and max a bunch of different soundscapes including rain, coffee shop, birdsong, fire, and more. Very simple controls,

rainycafe gives you only two soundscapes which you can toggle off and on and adjust the volume of independently.

All of these do pretty much the same thing, it’s really just a matter of which rain sound you like better.

And here are some rain themed songs to celebrate finally getting some rain!

Hey I’m a 90s kid, I’ll always have this weird fondness for Guns N’ Roses.

At this point I feel like I should prove I’ve listened to anything produced after 2000.

This one’s a little bit of a stretch for the rain theme, but hey the word rain is in there a couple of times.

Hey readers, what are your favourite rain songs?

Lately I’ve been playing a ton of Don’t Starve and Don’t Starve Together (the multiplayer version). If you like open world, no hand-holding survival games, check it out. You will die over and over again and you’ll keep wanting to give it just one more try. To quote one of the reviews:

You will die.

Spiders will murder you.
Hounds will murder you.
Bunnymen will murder you.
Trees will murder you.
Tentacles will murder you.
Shadows will murder you.
Giants will murder you.
Penguins will obliterate you.
Bees will f**king destroy you.

And that’s only if you don’t starve first.

On the less frustrating side, the art is adorable. All of the creatures that will try (and usually succeed) to murder you are really cute.

Another game you should try if you like dying repeatedly is Dungeons of Dredmor. It’s basically an old-school roguelike with nice graphics, friendly controls, and a sense of humour. You’ll die a lot, but the little obituaries the game gives you are so good you can’t even really be mad about it. Plus you can worship Inconsequentia, Goddess of Pointless Sidequests and sacrifice lutefisk to the Lutefisk God. Dungeons of Dredmor is also quite a good deal these days because it came out in 2011.

A friend also introduced me to Space Team a little while ago, that game is amazing at parties. It’s a cooperative multiplayer mobile game where you yell incomprehensible technobabble at each other – everyone gets a set of controls on their screen and a console where you get instructions, but the instruction you get might not apply to the controls on your screen. That’s where the yelling comes in 🙂 If you like Space Team, there’s a kickstarter to support the developer to release more games. It can be a bit of a pain to get everyone’s devices connected, but it’s well worth the hassle.

On the book side of things, Richard Morgan’s A Land Fit For Heroes trilogy is a) awesome, and b) complete, for those of you who hate waiting for the next book in a series to come out. A land fit for heroes is a noir fantasy, which totally works for me but may not be everyone’s cup of tea. The characters are interestingly flawed, the world building is fantastic (I find books that let things be mysterious much more interesting than books that insist on spoonfeeding you every little detail), and if you’re going to read it I recommend getting all three books at once because you will want to know what happens next right now.

The Belle Jar is great and I won’t stop swearing either. If you’re seriously going to clutch your fucking pearls about the way I talk on my own goddamn blog, stop, click the magical red ex in the corner of your browser, and never come back.

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about how maybe we shouldn’t shit on young doms just because they’re young, and in the comments we had quite an interesting discussion about what the definition of dominant actually is.

My personal definition of dominant is “has dominant desires”, the exact wording of which I stole directly from Ranai’s comment. For me the term dominant is just a convenient shorthand that I use to describe who I am (someone who likes being in charge) and what I want (someone who will go along with what I want most of the time). Like Simina said in another comment, “Dominant is not a title.” She also made an excellent point when she said “I want to know, if a dominant person isn’t allowed to call themselves dom without all this magical experience and training and what not, what the hell are they supposed to call themselves to express their identity?”

I can understand people being pissy when some yahoo shows up and calls themselves Master WolfDragon when they actually have no experience, but Master actually is a title, and it’s one that has a lot of meaning for people, particularly in the leather community. Dominant, on the other hand, just means that you like calling the shots. And if you do just like calling the shots what the fuck are you supposed to call yourself if not dominant? We spend an enormous amount of time talking about how important it is to be honest about what you want and what you have to give, and now some asshole is saying I should lie about what I want because I don’t fit their personal definition of dominant? How does that help anyone?

Also, being dominant most certainly does not mean that I slavishly follow some asshole’s personal definition of what is domly and what is not. I don’t give a shit if you think having penetrative sex is undomly, they’re my nerve endings and I’ll stimulate them how I like. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again “Am I seriously supposed to prove how dominant I am by doing what I’m told?” If you think the only way to be dominant is to follow your personal rules, I think you’ve profoundly misunderstood what being dominant actually means. If you want someone to do what you tell them the person you are looking for is a submissive. As I am neither submissive at all nor your submissive in particular, you can fuck right off if you think you get to tell me what to call myself.

What does it even matter if someone doesn’t meet your personal standards of domliness? The only person whose opinion of someone’s domliness actually matters is that person’s submissive, just like the only person whose opinion on whether I’m a good spouse is my husband. If you’re not part of the relationship, your opinion is irrelevant. Dominance is such a personal thing to me that I can’t imagine why the opinion of someone who’s not involved would matter in the slightest.

One of the reasons I define dominant the way I do is because I personally experience dominance as a facet of my identity. I like being in charge, I like ridiculous action movies, and I like nerding out about code. Nobody gets to tell me whether I actually like being in charge or whether I actually like action movies, and the idea that anyone could is completely ridiculous (well, at least until we have the technology to read people’s minds, but I expect that to take a while 🙂 ) It’s totally reasonable to decide I’m not experienced enough for you or not old enough for you or not mature enough or whatever, but nobody, nobody gets to tell me who I am. You cannot possibly know me better than I know myself and it’s unbelievably rude to think you can.

Thinking of dominance as identity also helps explain why I’m so utterly baffled by people who think there’s some kind of dominant hierarchy. Me being dominant is only about who I am, it really has no bearing on whether you over there are dominant, submissive, or a rutabaga. It doesn’t matter how skilled or experienced you are compared to me, you bloody well get to define yourself however you want.

We do need at least a broad definition of dominant and submissive so we can have a conversation about those topics, but I think “has dominant desires” and “has submissive desires” is plenty, and as a bonus defining it that way allows us not to be total fucking dickweasels about other people’s identities.

If you want to call yourself dominant, go to town! If that’s the best description of who you are and what you want, then you’re morally in the right using it and the dicks who say otherwise can fuck off until they come up with a good reason dominant people shouldn’t call themselves dominant and an alternative word that clearly describes who people with dominant desires are and what they want. I’ll just hold my breath until that happens 😉

Or, if you’re not ready reading Emily Nagoski’s awesome blog The Dirty Normal, you should go fix that 🙂 In particular, she has a really interesting post about Flibanserin and the way the FDA was pressured to approve it even though “the drug increases “sexually satisfying events” by one per month over placebo, and roughly 13% of women who take it experience side effects like somnolence, dizziness, and nausea.” Ooooh, sexy sexy nausea.

But more seriously, it’s really sad that even the American Sexual Health Association and the American Reproductive Health Professionals, both of whom really ought to know what they’re talking about, thought that the best option to help women who were desperately unhappy about their “lack” (it’s not necessarily a lack, but I’ll get to that) of sexual desire was a drug that only works a little bit better than a placebo and has some shitty side effects.

The reason it’s so sad is that what we call a lack of sexual desire, particularly in women (I don’t know of any research specifically about trans women, but I bet this applies to you too), is often just responsive desire. To paraphrase it quickly (although the link is really interesting and goes into much more detail), there’s this assumption we have, at least in western culture, that the normal way to be is first you feel sexual desire, then you go have sex. But for roughly 30-60% of women and 5-20% of men, it’s the other way around – they don’t usually want sex just out of the blue, they start wanting it after foreplay has started. These folks don’t have “low” desire. They don’t suffer from any ailment, they don’t long to initiate but feel like they’re not allowed to. Their bodies just need some more compelling reason than “That’s an attractive person right there,” to want sex.

If all your life you’ve been told that spontaneous desire (sexual desire without an obvious trigger) is the way you’re supposed to feel desire, of course you’d feel broken and wrong and bad if you only experience responsive desire. And the more you feel broken and wrong and bad, the more even considering thinking about having sex becomes a minefield that you’d just as soon avoid entirely and things spiral downward from there.

In case things weren’t complicated enough already, AFAB (assigned female at birth) people don’t always orgasm reliably and aren’t always fulfilled by the sex acts that society says are the only “real” sex (ie penetration). To quote Emily again “only about a quarter to a third of women are [able to orgasm from vaginal penetration]. Another third of women are sometimes orgasmic from penetration, and the remaining third of women are never or almost never orgasmic from penile-vaginal penetration.” I know orgasm is far from the only reason people have sex, but personally if I’m going to go to the trouble of having sex I damn well want an orgasm. I’m also one of the lucky ones who does orgasm reliably, which does colour my views on that.

The one thing I really wanted to talk about is how responsive desire exists, is totally normal, and is only different from, not less than, spontaneous desire. You can stop reading now and that’s totally cool 🙂 But if you’re still here, let’s talk about how responsive desire might affect female doms.

There’s this stereotype that doms are always supposed to be the ones to initiate sex, but it seems unlikely that absolutely all female doms are part of the roughly 40-70% of women who experience spontaneous desire some or all of the time. It can also be complicated for submissive people, particularly submissive men, to initiate sex in a way that doesn’t feel pushy or demanding to the dominant woman.

Fortunately, I think kink itself might be a hack for that problem. Basically, getting aroused enough to want to initiate sex takes a combination of turning on the ons and turning off the offs. You can rev the engine as much as you want, but if you don’t release the brakes you’re not going anywhere. In a happy healthy d/s relationship, the trust that your partner will do what you tell them to do could help turn off the offs and the act of them submitting to you could help turn on the ons. Then again, any healthy relationship, kinky or not, where you feel safe and trusting is going to be good for your sex life in general, so does adding kink fundamentally change anything? I have no idea, but I think it’s an interesting question.

Another thing that might help is for the submissive man to learn to seduce his partner. There’s a fine line between seduction and manipulation, but if you know your partner well and know what turns her on, it’s possible to present yourself in a context that makes the answer to “would you like to come have your way with me?” “why yes, yes I would.” It’s about setting up a situation where she feels relaxed and sexy and playful, not about sugar-coating plain old pushiness.

Also, if we’re talking about kink and differing types of desire, we pretty much have to talk about chastity, if only to yell about how it’s not a silver fucking bullet! Just because you’re not having sex doesn’t mean you’re not still trying to make the world revolve around your dick. If you and your partner enjoy chastity play for its own sake and are really good at communicating your needs, then you absolutely might be able to use chastity as a way to do fun sexy things without pressuring the responsive partner to have sex they’re not necessarily into. But on the other hand if your partner just wants a goddamn break from the pressure to sexually service you, then a chastity device is going to backfire horribly. By the same token, if your dom thinks using a chastity device means they don’t have to give a shit about your sexual needs, they’re probably a bad partner for you and a jerk besides.

Responsive desire exists and is totally normal, but may be even more complicated for dominant women than it is for everyone else given the way our culture says spontaneous desire is the one true way (fuck the one true way).

As much as I bitch about stupid bullshit I’ve found on Fetlife, sometimes you find sparks of brilliance there too. This quote from ShaktiSama (the thread it’s from is mostly shitty, but if you want to see some asshole ask whether dominant women are actually dominant then knock yourself out) is so great I built an entire post around it.

A lot of dominant women love powerful men …

The reason is simple: the more power you bring to the power exchange, the better fed we are as the receivers of your power. Yes, sue me–I’m greedy. I want the surrender of a king. The devotion of a prince. The broken weeping of an ogre.

When you put it like that, is it any sort of surprise that dominant women can be attracted to powerful men without wanting to submit to them? Even some dominant men talk about how much of a charge they get out of a strong woman choosing to submit to them, why wouldn’t dominant women feel the same way? Seriously, it feels amazing when someone you think is awesome chooses to submit to you.

It’s also pretty great when people hold up their end of the power exchange. I can’t have a power exchange if you don’t bring any to exchange any more than I can have a potluck if you don’t bring a dish to share.That absolutely does not mean you have to be the kind of jerkwad who keeps going on and on about how “alpha” he is, it just means that you need to have some sense of your own worth. Guys, there’s nothing more attractive than a submissive man who knows he doesn’t have to submit to you but chooses to do so because he thinks you’re great. I want to feel your submission as an act of will, not just have it tossed in my general direction.

I think this is related to Ferns’ concept of organic power in that while I want to feel like the balance of power between us is tilted in my favour, I also need to feel that my submissive does have his own power and can resist if he needs to. I can’t have any fun putting someone on their knees if they just throw themselves there, after all. There needs to be sort of a metaphorical counterweight on the other end of the power exchange for it to work for me.

Personally, I also enjoy the role reversal of someone powerful choosing to submit. You’d expect a powerful man to be in charge which makes it that much more fun for me if we switch things up. I just really love the perversity, for lack of a better word, of taking a strong, intelligent human being who’s good at all kinds of stuff and just ignoring all that and treating them like a toy. I guess I have to respect you to want to go to the trouble of disrespecting you 🙂

The more power you bring to the exchange, the more satisfying it is for me. There’s nothing submissive about it and if you can’t see that, you’re just too dumb to be looking for dominant women.

I have some truly horrifying news for the snivelling manchildren of the world: women do not exist to entertain you. In other news, there is basically always something to get angry about on Kinky & Popular. Specifically the comments on this writing titled “None of your fucking business.”

For people who don’t do Fetlife, this woman had the apparently ridiculous idea that she had the right to exist in public without some asshole hassling her, and when said asshole deliberately made her uncomfortable (spare me the bullshit about teh poor socially awkward mans. Actual socially awkward people are horrified by the idea of making someone uncomfortable and would’ve apologized profusely and then probably run away to have a serious bout of self-loathing in private), she told him that her name was “None of your fucking business.”

Cue the snivelling manchildren in the comments clutching their pearls about how meeeeeean that woman was and how creepypants was just trying to be nice and make conversation and why do women have to be such bitches about existing in public without being harassed and the human race is totally going to die out if creepy sacks of shit can’t badger strange women for no good reason (no, thinking someone has nice tits is not a good reason).

First of all, the idea that some asshole who wasn’t even there knows how to handle a situation better than the woman who actually experienced it is some serious bullshit. If you weren’t there, you don’t know what sort of subtle or not remotely subtle signals she was getting that made her think that the man harassing her was not safe to talk to. By saying that she should have handled it differently, you woman hating sacks of shit are saying that women can’t be trusted to make even the smallest decisions about how to respond to people harassing us. And then you worthless wastes of space turn around and blame us for being raped. How exactly are we simultaneously too stupid to tell a nice guy from a creepy motherfucker and at the same time psychically able to tell people would commit rape from people who wouldn’t?

I have another horrifying revelation for the misogynistic assclowns of the world: women have different experiences from men. What looks and feels harmless to you is fucking scary to us. Sure, you wouldn’t be scared if a man who was your size or smaller came up and asked “What’s your name, sweetheart?” Now imagine you’re an average sized woman, with an average woman’s upper body strength talking to someone a foot taller than you with 40 pounds of muscle on you. Would you feel safe knowing that he either doesn’t care that he’s making you uncomfortable or is actively enjoying it? Would you feel safe knowing that if he wants to hurt you or drag you away there’s nothing you can do to stop him?

But god forbid you should think about what it’s like to be a woman. That might cause you to question the apparently sacred belief that women exist to make you pathetic sacks of shit feel special. Somehow, I make it through my day without expecting men to stop whatever it is they’re doing and stroke my ego. Somehow, I make it through my day without assuming that men owe me their attention for absolutely nothing in return. If you can’t do the same, then I am a better, stronger, more worthwhile person than you are. Shape up, shitstain. If you think you’re better than me because you’re a man, BE BETTER. Grow a sense of self-worth that doesn’t rely on me patting you on the head like a puppy and telling you you’re the bestest guy in the whole world. Be interesting enough that I would ever choose to talk to of my own free will. Make my life better, not worse if you’re going to interact with me. Stop acting like a fucking two year old and assuming the world revolves around you. Grow the fuck up and learn to deal with women who are *gasp* be better than you at something.

Or at least be honest and admit that you are less than me and always will be.

A while ago I read a post by Chuck Wendig titled In which I emit a lot of grr-talk about your writing career that really inspired me, but ironically I’m only just now getting around to writing about it. The gist of the post, so that this one will still make sense if the link ever breaks, is that there is no magic wand anyone can wave that will make you a writer. You have to do the work. And it is work, sometimes really hard work, but no one can do it for you. And as an aside, I strongly recommend not reading the comments on that particular post. At the end of the series of tweets he storified, Chuck acknowledged that thanks to being a white guy things were easier for him than they otherwise would have been and a whole lot of commenters shit their pants over that.

But before I get too far into my post, I want to throw a quick disclaimer in here. That post is only helpful (which Mr Wendig himself freely admits in his other post, The flipside of my writing tirade), if you’re in a space where a kick in the pants will do you any good. Sometimes you’re not writing (or anything else-ing) because you really for really real can’t. If that’s you, neither Chuck’s grr-talk nor my post apply to you, and you should maybe go read the flipside post instead and definitely do something nice for yourself if you’re able.

To quote Chuck from a reply he made to a comment on his flipside post:

[…] being me, I get a lot of writers who want to talk to me at cons and email me and tell me how much they want to be a writer but then lament how they’re not writing, and you hit a point where it’s like, I can’t help them unless they write. I can’t make it all better. I can’t fix it. You wanna write, you gotta write. *shrug*

That’s basically the message I took away from the grr-talk post: if you want to do the thing, whatever your thing is, you need to sit down and do it. Technically Chuck’s posts were about writing, but really they apply to anything you keep saying you want to do but aren’t doing. For me, I’d been telling myself for a long time that I wanted to actually read the programming books I’d been collecting, and up my game as a programmer, and learn some math just to see if I’m smart enough, and work on personal projects, and, and, and… and none of that was actually getting done. Now, part of that was because things had gotten pretty bad at my previous job and getting through the day without flipping a table and storming out was eating up pretty much all of my energy, but even before things started really sucking I wasn’t getting the stuff done that I wanted to.

Thanks to a combination of happening to have read Chuck’s post at just the right time, happening to have changed jobs and gotten my work/life balance back, and happening to have gotten sick of my own complaining about how I wasn’t getting stuff done, I started making some real progress. I certainly haven’t gotten to everything on my list yet, but I’m actually doing stuff!

So, uh, I guess my big productivity tip is to get tired of your own whining and then get a much better job so you feel able to do things besides pour wine into your face when you go home. That’s totally within everyone’s reach, right? That’s probably where some more of Chuck’s advice comes in. Sometimes things suck, sometimes you really are very very busy and it’s really, really hard to find a spare 20 minutes to write. But if you want to be a writer, or if you just want to get that coverletter done so you can escape your miserable job, you have to make time. It sucks but there’s no way around it.

What I’d like to add, though, is that it’s okay to not want to do the thing. Sometimes, at least for me, procrastination is a sign that I don’t actually want to do the thing, I just know that I’m supposed to want to. To keep running with the writing example, just because you were the kid who rocked every writing assignment they were given and people liked the stories you did write when you were inspired to write them doesn’t mean you have to want to be a professional writer. Maybe you hate the idea of this thing you love becoming a chore, maybe you don’t want to have to run your career like a small business, maybe having a stable source of income (and health insurance!) is really important to you. You’re allowed to not want the thing everyone says you should want, you’re allowed to try it out and decide it’s not for you, you’re allowed to love it for a while and then change your mind, you’re allowed to change your priorities.

Of course, sometimes procrastination is just procrastination. I’ve read some really interesting articles about how people procrastinate when the fear of trying and failing is worse than not trying at all, and that fits me to a tee. I’ve by no means mastered that particular issue, but there are a couple of things that have helped.

First, you’ve got to set goals you’re actually in control of. For me, that’s stuff like ‘I’m going to work on project x for half an hour’ instead of ‘I’m going to finish feature y in project x.’ The problem with ‘finish feature y’ is that I get really anxious about whether I actually can finish feature y or if I’ll spend four hours fighting with a nasty bug and what that means for my identity as the smart one if I can’t get it done in the time I have and then I don’t get anything done at all. But if my goal is just to work on project x for half an hour, that’s something I know I can succeed at and that lets me sidestep the whole ‘oh god what if I’m not smart enough’ thing.

Second, it can be really handy to get into the habit of asking yourself if the thing you’re doing right now is what you really want to be doing. Not in a ‘stick to beat yourself with’ way, but in the sense that if you’re going to screw around on the internet, you should at least do something you enjoy. I have a terrible habit of aimlessly scrolling through tumblr while hours go by and then all of a sudden it’s dinner time and not only did I not get anything accomplished, but I didn’t even have fun. That just feels shitty, so I’ve been trying to play games I actually enjoy or read stories I actually like if I’m going to screw around on the internets.

Third, reasonable goals, like Chuck said. This ties in really closely with my next point, which is about habits versus motivation. Basically, getting shit done is more about building the habit of doing a little at a time than about waiting for the magical day when you’ll be super motivated and get everything done in one marathon burst of effort. To get stuff done a little at a time, you need a schedule you can keep up in the long run, which means you need to work at a pace that won’t burn you out and leaves room for fun in your life. For my life and my schedule, I try to give myself no more than three goals for personal stuff to get done on a weekday after I get home, and most of those goals are things that don’t take very long, like ‘spend half an hour reading that dry technical book.’ You might be way better at time management than I am and can do five things after you get home, or maybe you have kids and pets and have to do your own cooking and cleaning and maybe you can only do one thing every couple of days.

Finally, and this is something you’ll hear from basically every productivity expert, it’s more important to have habits than motivation. Motivation comes and goes, you’re just not going to be on fire about working on your thing every single day. As much as I love my field and love learning, I’m not exactly counting the minutes until I get to go home and read dry technical books. Waiting until you are on fire about it means you’re going to spend an awful lot of hours waiting around when you could be getting shit done, feeling good about making progress, and then doing something fun without feeling guilty about how you’re not doing the thing.

Speaking of getting things done a little at a time, according to wordpress in the roughly three years this blog has been going I’ve written about 129,000 words. According to this article at Writers Digest, that’s a longish novel. Sure, it took me three years to write that many words, but that was three years of roughly one post a week, averaging 675 words. Of course, writing a coherent novel is way more work than a series of largely unrelated blog posts (yay for not worrying about plot holes!), but that’s a lot of words for not a lot of effort every week.

Readers, if any of you have productivity tips (especially about procrastination!), I’d love to hear about them. Think of it as your good deed for the day 🙂