Getting the Message and Getting it Out

Mom Cat (Goddess, the Universe and Everything) does not expect the kitten to get the message all in one lick.

The Universe has a sense of humor–I’m sure that God(dess) does not play dice, but I’m not so sure about poker. But then again, synchronicity is a comic concept.

Yesterday I wrote about “a lick and a promise” being part of the system that gets things done, but I left out one sense of “lick.” That message was delivered to me in my morning reading, which today was from The Comic Toolbox: How to be Funny even if You are Not by John Vorhaus:

“When you’re concentrating on the task at hand, the outside world truly does not exist. You get in a lick of good work, pat yourself on the back for that lick of good work, then, taking the win, press on to the next piece of work, better equipped than ever to win. ” (p.18)

Gee, I just said that yesterday, and here it is again. Vorhous’s basis for the right mindset for writing comedy is that nine of ten jokes will fail, so it’s important to write a lot, turning the editor off, and then having written, turn the editor back on and find the good stuff. Allowing yourself to write “through the mud” ( I think I stole that from Anne Lamott) gives you the freedom to fail your way to a successful piece.

Every person who has writer’s block has lost the focus of the task at hand. The task at hand is not to imagine oneself as the famous writer on the stage with no-doubt inspiring things to say. The task at hand is to write the joke, the scene, the sales letter, the email, the query letter. The task is to write something now, today, quickly.

One.
Lick.
At.
A.
Time.

What the Ultimate Blog Challenge has done for me this past month is to give me a a few of one-lick tasks I could do every day:
1. Write a blog post.
2. Post the link on Facebook. (My Facebook posts to twitter, so I didn’t tweet.)
3. Click on two other posts.
4. Read and comment.

At most, this has taken an hour a day, broken into little licks of work. Whether I took an hour at a stretch and did all four tasks, or whether I did each one at a different time through the day, they were all done.

Now I have 31 new posts, all with pictures, because I like them better that way, and I have comments, because others were playing the same game as me. Now I can begin to build an online “colleague-ship” and maybe an actual relationship with some of the bloggers who write to the same sorts of topics I like. I have not yet learned how to find these folks, but UBC brought them to me.  The Universe and synchronicity at work.

I have had only a single day that I could not think of something to write, and doing the commenting first took care of that. My plan for tomorrow is to find a link I didn’t comment on during the month, assuming that I can get Facebook to let me look back on the timeline, and make a comment there.

I’m finally doing what the internet marketers have been telling me to do since there were people teaching internet marketing. But I have learned how to do it with the UBC system in place, one lick at a time.