My eldest son has a probably common approach to personal reward.

Do nothing, and reward yourself for it.

Over the past several months I have badgered him about doing work for university. Unlike GSCE or A-levels, the qualifications in the UK learned at college or in school, where the teachers get on your back about getting work done and handing stuff in, a degree is nothing like that. At the age when you go to University, no one expects to have to chase you for anything. If you don’t do the work, then you don’t do it – you don’t get the grades, you don’t get through the year, you fail horribly. The whole business of university study deals with the concept of self-guided study and motivation. They tell you the subject matter and what assignments you will need to complete over the course of the year, and you decide how you’re going to approach fulfilling the expectations – or, better yet, exceed them.

My son appears to do the minimal amount of work and then fills the rest of his time with online games. For him, reward comes as a given, while the work bit can take a hike.

I don’t have a problem with games. I spent a lot of time thinking about, playing and writing them. Nothing would please me more than seeing someone playing a good game and have something to say about it at the end. I like to hear about good games, I like to get involved. However, I also think the best games come out of the experience of filling a moment of time with fun, excitement and discovery. You spend a lot of your time working hard, in some shape or form, so when you sit down to play a game it feels genuinely pleasurable, exciting and fulfilling.

If you play games 95% of the time and work vaguely in the other 5% where’s the reward? How can you glean any real enjoyment from gifting yourself with such a reward if you don’t have a baseline of less enjoyable stuff to work off? Isn’t that like getting hooked on a drug so badly that you take it simply to keep on a level, dragging your arse painfully along the rock-strewn bottom of the ocean. You end up playing a game just because it’s there and you have a lot of time committed to it. That just sounds like a different kind of work adopted to avoid the whole business of doing the first kind. Reward as stifling, eye-watering task.

My son seems to think I’m asking him to work 115% of the time. I asked him to do something for me, and when he repeated it back he added more clauses to the agreement – which, to be frank, pissed me off. I don’t expect him to spend all his time working his butt off – because that takes the ratio off in the other direction. If you spend 95% of your time working and the 5% left playing then you might well appreciate the play, but you probably didn’t do some of that 95% work justice. Work too hard and you end up delivering less. I don’t expect anyone to function like some robot, a manufacturing drone programmed to do nothing but mundane and soul-destroying acts of stuff.

Do 80% work in the time you have outside of meals, sleeping, hygiene and polite conversation, then filled the rest – the 20% – with varied recreation. I mean, don’t sit there doing one thing for the whole 20% – read a book, go for a walk, go out with friends, or whatever.

It doesn’t seem like rocket science to me – then again I’m a fuddy-duddy adult and he’s 20 years my junior…

NOTE: I have no clue what the picture has to do with this article… I just liked it.

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Embarrassingly, I had taken on some of the writing duties, but utterly blanked. In the end, I ripped off a bit of Python and hoped no one would notice. It might have been 20 years since the Pythons performed those sketches, but I’m sure someone in the audience noticed, especially amongst the teachers. Not sure why I fell foul of blank brain on that occasion.

We had performed for Comic Relief the previous year, and did a pantomime at Christmas – performed in the library on that occasion, I think. For Comic Relief, I had played the Pete Cook role in the One-Legged Tarzan sketch, to Ian Berridge’s Dudley Moore unidexter. I have to admit to enjoying that first performance and managed to remember most of my lines. I must have studied them for hours, as elements of that sketch remain burned into my brain to this very day (“I have nothing against your right leg. The trouble is, neither have you.”).

I would like to think my life might have taken a different path if I’d kept to the business of performing. Maybe I would have gotten into the theatre, or television, or something else of that ilk. I pursued a line of study in the Arts, but – then again – I also pursued a relationship at the time as well that took up rather a lot of my time and attention. Having helped to write the first pantomime, I failed to turn up for it due to… other commitments.

In the wake of the 25th anniversary of Comic Relief in mid-March, I came across this poster advertising the performance of the second pantomime, hand drawn by my good self. I have continued to maintain a crafty edge in hand writing stuff like this, with a neat hand-writing style I probably owe to someone else as well.

At school, I never did seem to shine alone – always as a pair or in a crowd. For Comic Relief, I managed to stand on my own two feet (unlike Mr Spiggott) and carried off a decent enough part. However, side-tracked and focussed elsewhere, nothing ever came of it – and there isn’t much point imagined what might have been.

Still, there have been plenty of big name actors who didn’t pursue their dream until their middle age, right?

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After an incredibly productive February, March turned into something of a writing wasteland. Despite best intentions, I managed to write just one thing, right at the beginning of the month, and nothing more.

I’m tempted to dip back into writing exercises to keep me focussed. Turning out a few blog entries like this should, I hope, also provide some measure of creative flexing.

I’m not certain what changed. I managed to create a lot of material at the very start of the year without needing to coerce myself into the process. I might be guilty of baulking under the pressure of genuine deadlines. I had intended, for example, to get the Maelstrom Sci-Fi Toolkit written for the end of February, but that deadline fell firmly by the wayside. I have to get that done, but now that I have let it slip it means I won’t get it out anywhere near the time I had planned.

I also have work to do on the Outlive Outdead Companion project. There, I have completed the initial draft and also had feedback. I now need to act on that feedback to finish the job and turn out the final polished product.

I almost feel that putting a deadline on any of this now will simply make it harder for me to get done. I need to focus much less on the deadline. The focus and energy should go on getting the actual writing done. I fear that might well be the problem. I prevaricate and worry myself about the deadline for so long, I don’t have anything left to get the writing done. I hover around the issue, tidying up the landing area, rather than keeping myself focussed on landing the plane.

Writing isn’t going to get done without me, so I need to forget all the other nonsense and get on with it…

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Despite best intentions to get more content on to this and other iterations of my blogs, I have singularly failed. I can’t claim that one post a month even justifies the existence of more than one blog. Nevertheless, I will push on and see what I can do to make a change and write more.

One challenge I have set myself in the last month is the transition over to a Dvorak keyboard. While it isn’t really clear that the format has any health benefits – like reduced wrist strain – I saw this as a real opportunity to push myself to achieve something a little bit different. I have hopes that switching to the new format will also give me a chance to develop my touch-typing to something beyond the rudimentary. At the moment I can touch-type on the Qwerty keyboard, but I only use two fingers, stabbing away like a madman. I’m typing Qwerty on a Dvorak format keyboard at the moment for speed, as I’m hardly managing 10 words per minute with the new format at the moment. I can sort of manage to get the speed back hitting Qwerty, providing I don’t concentrate on the keys themselves. I have to touch only and devoid all conscious awareness of the keys themselves, otherwise I spoil my aim.

On the positive side, I have managed some feats of touch-typing on the Dvorak without conscious effort, but it definitely falls into the unconsciously incompetent category of getting the job done. I need to push myself, practice more, and try to avoid what I’m doing now.

Biggest fun on this personal project so far – removing all the keys from the keyboard and resetting them to the new format with a screwdriver.

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My wife pointed out that we probably have more pictures of our pets – and especially cats – than we do of family. I suspect she might be right.

She also commented that this might very well have been what happened with the Egyptians. You lead the world in all manner of fields and technologies, building some of the greatest edifice the world will ever see, and in thousands of years they find all these hieroglyphs of cats. “Oh yes,” says history expert, “They loved them cats. Couldn’t get enough them. Cats coming out of their wotsits.”

All they needed to do was take a few more family snaps…

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