Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
I started reading Kafka's The Trial yesterday, and I was reminded of Jonathan Franzen's Ten Rules for Novelists:
The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
Never use the word then as a conjunction—we have and for this purpose. Substituting then is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many ands on the page.
Write in third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than The Metamorphosis.
You see more sitting still than chasing after.
It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
You have to love before you can be relentless.
I disagree with a lot of this, but #8 jumped out at me. I have ~65k words of an unfinished novel that I want to finish in February. I've been writing it in Google Docs specifically so that I can work on it on my phone on the train. Ideally, I would like to work on it on my laptop with the internet disconnected, to avoid distraction. I understand that you can work on a Google Docs document offline, and the document will sync automatically as soon as you reconnect. My question is, can anyone recommend a piece of software that will prevent my computer from connecting to the internet for a fixed period of time? The workflow I'm envisioning is, I get home from work, sit down at my laptop, disconnect the Internet and set this up such that I can't reconnect for an hour or ninety minutes or whatever. If this piece of software could also block me from opening certain applications (e.g. Steam, VLC) during the period as well, that would be even better.
I use Self-Control, which lets you block websites for a length of time. You can block all websites but allow a whitelist, or block only a few websites. That doesn't prevent all internet connection though, just browser use.
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