The campaign has been launched! The campaign has been launched! This book is gonna get done, m’dears.

I’ve also been periscoping every day this month for #31DaysOfNarratemes (go ahead and give that hashtag a click when you have a little time) and this afternoon I’ll be wrapping up Propp’s 1st Sphere of narratemes: Introduction.

I was originally worried about going periscope, but that worry has been outweighed by the results! I’m a smashing success? Not in the slightest, but by questing my through December I was able to catch a pretty silly behavior on my part.

Click the hashtag above to catch up and figure out how it saved me from crippling this project, right now I’d like to share the new front and back covers:

That’s all the news, now on to the "research."

“The size of your dreams must always exceed your current capacity to achieve them.” Ellen Johnson Sirleaf 

“Imagine immensities. Pick yourself up from rejection and plow ahead. Don’t compromise. Start now. Start now, every single day."

“Pick your odds, decide what you care about and act accordingly.” Seth Godin

Dr. Gail Matthews, Dominican University CA, discovered people who write down their goals are 42% more likely to achieve those goals.

“When you have to use your energy to put those words down, you are more apt to make them count.” Raymond Chandler

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” E. B. White

“I like things to happen; and if they don’t happen, I like to make them happen.” Winston Churchill

“You don’t have to be great to start, but your have to start to be great.” Zig Ziglar

“Not my circus, not my monkeys.” Polish proverb

“A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.” Ssgt. Chad Sommers

“If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail.” John L. Beckley

“Piss Poor Planning Promotes Piss Poor Performance.” 7Ps, military adage

“ … environments, schedules, and rituals restructure the writing process and amplify performance … These practices encourage a state of flow rather than one of anxiety or boredom … Moreover, in accordance with encoding specificity, each of these aspects of method may trigger retrieval of ideas, facts, plans, and other relevant knowledge associated with the place, time, or frame of mind selected by the writer for the work.” Ronald T. Kellogg

“When we get the environment right, human will do remarkable things.” Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last

“The lack of interruption in trains of thought may be the critical ingredient in an environment that enables creative flow. As long as a writer can tune out background noise, the decibel level per se may be unimportant. For some writers, the dripping of a faucet may be more disruptive than the bustle of a cafe in the heart of a city.” Ronald T. Kellogg

“The diversity of environments chosen by writers, from Proust’s cork-lined rooms to Sarraute’s Parisian cafe, suggests the flexibility of human thought. A person can think in any environment, though some locations become habitual for certain individuals. The key is to find an environment that allows concentrated absorption in the task and maximum exposure to retrieval cues that release relevant knowledge from long-term memory.” Ronald T. Kellogg

“the only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.” William Faulkner

“The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.” Seneca

“Reality is never and nowhere more accessible than in the immediate moment of one’s own life. It’s only there that it can be won or lost.” Franz Kafka

“Life is long if you know how to use it.” Seneca

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it mean at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that are there. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” Steve Jobs

“No activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied.” Seneca

Context switching is further proof that multi-tasking isn’t an actual thing (Gerald Weinberg’s Quality Software Management: Systems Thinking). People may think they can jump quickly between tasks without a loss of quality in their output, but chances are they’ve never done a true comparison study of their work in flow versus their work in a “bouncy castle”.