I was busy most of the day. In the morning I took Jackie to her (last!) physical therapy appointment, and in the afternoon I had my usual Thursday visit with some former co-workers. But in the early evening (after fourth dog walk) I sat down and wrote a few hundred words. I’ve also updated the progress tracker in the sidebar. (And, if you’re reading it, wrote this brief post on my day’s progress.)
Three things I should do soon (they’re on my schedule for “before November 1st”): Write a logline, short synopsis, and long synopsis for the story. I don’t know that I need to do all three, but I should definitely do some thinking about what the story is about before I spend much more time writing.
Probably just the sort of thinking to do tomorrow while walking the dog.
I’ve started generating prose for my NaNo 2.0 story, despite the fact that starting early is supposed to be against the rules.
I figure it’s okay because I’m not really trying to write the story yet. I’m just capturing some text to use to validate things like the NaNo 2.0 progress bar, which should now be visible in my sidebar, below my short profile, and above the form for subscribing to my newsletter.
I’m not sure the progress bar is working yet. It looks kind of minimal, but maybe that’s just because I haven’t written much yet. By the time NaNo 2.0 goes live on November 1st, it should be clear that it’s working.
Besides writing, I’m making notes about how the story is supposed to go. I don’t really have an outline yet, but I’m capturing internal details about the story world as I figure them out.
And I’m figuring it out while I’m walking. Mostly while I’m walking the dog.
I’ve always done some of my best thinking about stories while walking. The past three years or so, I’ve done less such thinking, for two reasons: The dog, and podcasts.
Ashley, especially as a younger dog, was kind of hard to walk. She was a little too likely to lunge growling and snarling at people. (Too often she acts like she’s a very good dog until she jumps on someone, so people want to meet her, and then get booped in the nose with Ashley’s snout.) So I’ve really had to be very alert to people coming within reach, to make sure nothing bad happened.
That made it harder to think about other stuff while I was walking Ashley.
I’ve also been listening to podcasts, which I rather enjoy, but which also lead to less thinking about stories while I’m walking.
So, between Ashley behaving much better these days, and cutting back on podcast listening, my walks are turning back into an excellent opportunity for plotting.
In my experience cats are much better than dogs at realizing when you’re sick and need some rest and comfort. So I’m a bit surprised that Ashley is doing such a good job of it today.
Some time ago I made a mistake. Ashley was out on the patio, and didn’t want to come in, but I needed to leave. So I bribed her back in with a treat. This turned her into a monster. Knowing that she could get a treat for coming back in, she started resisting ever coming back in without a treat.
Breaking her of that behavior by just not giving her treats to come back in would probably have worked eventually, but it seemed like a lot of difficult work.
So I came up with an alternative that has worked pretty well.
What I do now is never bribe her back in with a treat, but if she comes in when I tell her to—if she does what I want without resistance—once a day I’ll reward her with a Greenie (one of her favorite treats). (My wife does the same, so Ashley gets two Greenies most days.)
This puts us very much on the right side of behavioral conditioning. Since it’s an intermittent reward, it’s powerfully effective. And as long as we’re pretty good about only giving her the treat when she does exactly the right thing, she’ll start doing exactly the right thing every time, in hopes of getting the rare reward.
As I say, it has worked pretty well. There are a couple of things that aren’t quite perfect.
First, since she has learned that what she needs to do is go out and come back in again, she has started asking to be let out and then coming right back in again, hoping for a treat. We can deal with that simply by not giving her a treat when that’s what she’s done.
Second, and this is more a source of amusement than an actual problem, when the weather is bad and she doesn’t want to go out, she’ll go to the door, wait for me to open it, refuse to go out, wait for me to close the door, and then sit down to get her treat. I can totally understand her logic here: Isn’t just not going out the same as going out and coming right back in again?
She’s a good dog.
Anyway, shared in case other people are trying to cure their dog of demanding a bribe to do the right thing. Wait for your dog to “do the right thing” on its own, then give it a treat very occasionally. The dog will catch on pretty quickly.
