Researching ways to get things done (or keep New Year’s resolutions) is like scouring the web for distraction-free writing apps when you’re supposed to be writing. Just because its a related task doesn’t make it anything other than procrastination and self-sabotage. I’ve tried Evernote and Day One and Wunderlist and it seems like every other great app that was supposed to fix me. And they’re all great. But I’ve come to the conclusion–and acknowledged the obvious–that no app or process is going make you do something that you’ve been putting off. You have to make you do that.

That said, isn’t there some simple system that will help me keep these goals front and center, something that will help me actively remember the things I want to do without buying into some time consuming “lifehack”? A short while ago, I rediscovered something I read last year on Lifehacker. It’s called Don’t Break the Chain, and it’s something Jerry Seinfeld is famous for on the internet (in addition to being Jerry Seinfeld). It goes like this:

He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

“Don’t break the chain,” he said again for emphasis.

It’s so simple. It doesn’t involve anything really. You can get a big calendar, but you don’t really have to. You just need some way to see your chain. After you do it long enough, your habits will be ingrained and you won’t even need that (but you’ll still have the satisfaction of seeing the ever-growing representation).

Then I realized that I’ve been using this method for a long time without realizing it. I’ve been posting a story on Twitter every day for five years. With the exceptions of my wedding, some international travel etc, I’ve never missed a day.1Even then, the series has never missed a day. During those periods of absence, I wrote the stories in advance and scheduled them to appear daily at midnight And it works. The single most motivating force behind every night’s story is that fact that there is an unbroken chain of stories behind it. I’ve recently begun using DBTC formally to test out some resolutions, and again I’m continually surprised by how effective it can be given that it seems geared for an elementary school child.

I’m not a big wall calendar kind of guy. I really like chains.cc, which is the cleanest most pleasant website for this purpose. The website is free, and you can of course use it on your phone. For a more native phone experience, the Chains.cc app is my favorite out of all of the options on iOS:

• Clean design with different graphics for each chain
• Easy and pleasant to use and navigate
• Can handle multiple chains, with unique graphics and colors for each
• Allow you to mark previous days when you haven’t had a chance to mark them (don’t cheat!). This a must-have feature if you want to use chains to represent bad habits you want to break.
  

Goals.io is a little more cluttered but actually more powerful (and free) alternative. It allows weekly goals in addition to daily ones, as well as one time and progressive/nebulous goals. Unfortunately, it doesn’t let you backdate anything so you can’t migrate chains you’ve been keeping on paper or in other apps. Part of me also thinks this flexibility may add too many dimensions to what is otherwise a system as simple as it gets. That said, I do like the idea of weekly goals. Some goals can’t or shouldn’t be done on an everyday basis.

Analog is good though, so I’ve created a minimalistic letter-sized 2014 DBTC calendar that begs to be marked and can be put in a binder, in your desk, or on your wall.

At the request of Publishing Genius’ Adam Robinson, I wrote a guest post at HTMLGIANT about the fascinating story of Onan:

And Onan knew that the seed would not be his; and it came to pass when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest he should give seed to his brother.

Click the link above to read up on lifestyle and writing advice from the Old Testament.

I’ve been winning some free stuff recently, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I really really like it.

I just won a copy of Joseph Young’s Easter Rabbit from Publishing Genius. Young has made a name for himself as the microfiction guy. His approach is similar to some of the writing I’ve done for Midnight Stories. The contest was to write a story in Young’s style, and I submitted a story from my Twitter feed (more or less) and won, so I suppose that confirms my thoughts on the matter. I’m excited: this is the first book-length collection of micros that I’ll have the pleasure of reading.

I also won a copies of Molly Gaudry’s We Take Me Apart from PANK and the horror anthology Fifty-Two Stitches from Robert Swartwood. On my birthday I won a comic caption contest over at HTMLGiant, and cartoonist Jeffrey Brown sent me a bunch of really cool artwork and stuff.

This is all to say that the internet provides. At this rate, maybe we’ll cancel our cable subscription. Eat it, Time Warner!

This is golden, I just don’t have time to write it:

Victorian-age retelling of Homer’s Odyssey using a cat as the protagonist, who is accidentally left to make the long journey home alone after falling out of his spinster’s carriage. Magical cat powers and epic animal battles optional (but encouraged).

You’re welcome.

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When it comes to getting information from people, we use email. If you need to organize a lot of it (as if, say, you ran a lit mag) and you have money or the right friends, you might get your hands on a submission system to compile and organize all that good information. Or you might be out of luck. Dale Wisely over at Right Hand Pointing mentioned this really interesting idea to me the other day: use a combination of Google Apps’ forms and spreadsheets to put it all together in one easy to use location. This idea may seem obvious to those who regularly use Google Apps or surveys to collect data, but I was shocked at how clean this functionality is.

You can see it in action at Nanoism’s December Serial Contest and year-round at the short-form poetry journal Four and Twenty (the form is here).

Some disclaimers: This idea accepts plain text only (no boldface or italics) and organizes everything into a spreadsheet. This is not the best way to read large blocks of text but it works for poetry, flash, or any kind of micro. Acceptances/rejections still require a manual email, so if you run something like elimae and you’re firing off responses in three hours flat, you’d probably waste more time copy-and-pasting email addresses than it’s worth. But say you run a quarterly mag or a one-time deal where you’re sitting on pieces for a while and it’s easy to loseWeight Exercise track of them—this is a nice way to keep ’em all in one place. Not just one folder, like with email filters, but literally one document. It’s also handy for doing your own Duotrope-style stats. Sure, you can do this all by hand in excel (or you could code your own system), but this definitely has its uses.

If nothing else, say you’re trying to collect addresses or contact info for writers to include in an anthology. You could send a big email (BCC’d, of course) and manually amass the responses. Or you could use Google Forms to collect the responses into a spreadsheet for you (which is what @nick did for Twitter Wit).

Robert Swartwood is a man after my own heart: a lover of the incredibly short-form. Earlier this year he coined the term “Hint Fiction” to mean “a story of 25 words or less that suggests a larger, more complex story.” Then he got a book deal from W.W. Norton to edit an anthology. Boom, like lightning.

When I first read about hint fiction (and some of its examples), I already had a very similar take on my ideal nano story. I completely agree with the definition quoted above as a basis for good short stuff (and I work from a very similar angle in choosing stories for Nanoism). But for some reason, in my experience (and especially in reading submissions for his original contest), many hint/nano stories are a not standalone stories at all but rather some kind of movie tag-line/newspaper headline that alludes to a story. They’re much more compelling if you imagine the guy from the movie previews reading them (though, really, wouldn’t that be true for everything?). If you read one of the various “six word story” outlets, you’ll see an even more extreme version of what I mean.  Entertaining—yes. Standalone—yes. Story? Debatable.

I’m not the kind of person who says a story can’t be short, obviously. But in my reading, it should have some self contained action. The beginning, middle, end definition is not particularly useful. Nor is the conflict, climax, resolution triad. In nanofiction, these elements are often implied in a word or phrase (hinted at, so to speak).  Given the length, it’s unavoidable. For “story”-judgment, I tend to ascribe to the idea of “change.” There must be some fundamental change for the character, however slight, from onset to ending. And to really hit home, the greater story must be hinted at. Leaving it out for the reader to make up is not hinting—it’s omission, and they are not the same thing.

One person killing another person with nothing else is not a story (but it is by far the most common theme I see). The author needs to give the reader some help in deciphering a greater narrative arc. There is a level of necessary vagueness to the form, but just tossing a scene out in 25 words does not a story make. All scene and no story is not good. All plot and no scene is also not good—it’s not supposed to be a synopsis, after all. You need both.

Submissions to the Hint Fiction anthology are open until the end of the month. While Mr Swartwood has already received over a 1000 entries and will publish probably no more than 150, perhaps your submission could net you $25 delicious dollars and an excuse to say, “Oh, why yes, I was published by Norton.”