Month: March 2026

Some Ideas to Beat Procrastination

March 29, 2026 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

You may also call it Writer’s Block.

Write ideas, sentences, words, images, etc. on note cards. Small space and limited commitment. Bar is lowered. Easier to begin.
Sit down at your writing desk, get everything ready to go and then offer yourself a real choice: Write or don’t write. No guilt if you choose “don’t write.” It’s a free choice with no shame attached to either option. There will legitimately be times when “don’t write” feels right, and there will also be many times in which “write” feels right. Don’t fight yourself. Writing creatively is fun. Let it be fun and not an obligation.
Identify the negative thoughts that are the real cause of the procrastination. Here are some of mine: “What if I write something crappy?” and, “I’m just wasting my time. No one will want to read this,” and “I’m too old to be successful,” and “I’ll be bored.” Evaluate–really evaluate–these thoughts. Do they make sense? Redefine things like “success” and “failure.” Make success the accumulation of words (like scoring points in a basketball game). Failure, then, becomes zero points/no words. No more fear of writing something bad; good/bad are irrelevant to success. Or take “I’m just wasting my time,” and consider what “wasting time” really means. Isn’t stewing about not writing and sitting around looking at distractions the real waste of time? How would you like the next five minutes to go: adding words to a piece of writing or scrolling on your phone/stress eating/reading blog posts about procrastination? Which is truly “wasteful” and which isn’t?
Test these negative thoughts by beginning to write and see what really happens. Consider it an experiment. Think you’ll be bored? Experiment by writing for five minutes and check to see if you really were bored. If you are, then try the experiment again but write about something else. If you aren’t, well then that is proof your negative self-talk is false. Keep these experiments short. Do them for five minutes. Keep doing them to see what factors impact your feelings and experiences. Change methods and behaviors to achieve greater impact. Make the whole thing into a kind of game or research study on yourself.
Embrace your slowness. Slowness can be playful. It can be dreamy. Sometimes you need a dreamy, slow writing session that meanders. It still counts. In fact, stop counting. The writing still happens even if we don’t measure it. Which means it doesn’t help to treat writing like a job. It’s supposed to be fun (even if it is your job). Let your body, your mood, your mind, your whole self have fun and play. Even if you only have ten minutes to write, embrace slowness. Maybe you only get ten words in those ten minutes, but those are ten wonderful words that didn’t exist before. Savor them, enjoy the experience of writing them. You won’t always be this slow, so there’s no use beating yourself up about it.
Don’t ever beat yourself up AFTER you’ve written (or before or during or…). That kind of negativity will linger. It’ll infect your next attempts. Here are the ways I beat myself up after a session: “That was crap,” or “Only one hundred words. Pathetic,” or “You’ll never finish, so why bother?” This is that negative self-talk again. Turn it around, stop it before it starts. Remember, success isn’t good/bad but words. Words written means success. Even if it’s only a few. By any measure of logic, even if someone only wrote one word per day, they’d still finish at some point. The only failure is to give up. So, “You’ll never finish,” is nonsense. Utter nonsense. If you’re writing–even one word–you will eventually finish. “Crap” is irrelevant. The measure of success is words. Instead of beating yourself up, celebrate. Even if you only wrote one word. Even if you sat at your desk and decided you didn’t want to write that day. Celebrate. Feel good about how honest you are with yourself and how you don’t want to make your writing into drudgery. You love to write too much to make it something that sucks the joy from your life. Celebrate every word you write. Not with a big party or anything, but internally. Allow yourself to be happy for who you are and what you’re doing. Even those ten words are an accomplishment.
If you journal, use it for material. Maybe not word for word (especially if you write fiction), but use it for ideas. I’m often stopped/blocked because I think I don’t have any ideas. But I’ve been writing three pages in my notebook every day for years. That’s hundreds of pages of ideas, ready for the taking. Instead of putting pressure on yourself to invent the next scene on the spot, dip into the journal and read for a bit. Find a word or phrase that sticks, that excites, that surprises, that is usable for something and put it into your story/poem/essay/whatever. You don’t have to start from scratch.
Make a list (and keep adding to it as needed) of all the things that excite you about your current project. Start your writing session by rereading and adding to this list before you do anything else. Let the items on this list remind you of why you’re doing this in the first place. Anyone can read or add an item to a list. If this is all you do in your writing session, celebrate. You’re getting closer to discovering all the things that inspire you. That will keep the fuel going throughout the process.
Switch up the tools. If you’ve been writing on a computer, switch to writing by hand in a notebook or legal pad. Switch to those note cards mentioned in Item #1. If you’ve been writing longhand, go to the computer or a typewriter. Try dictation for a bit, just to see. Try sketching out ideas or using word webs to make things more “pictorial.” Use prompting tools like RPG random tables, story dice, prompt generators online, or flip open a dictionary, pick a word at random and then see how you might incorporate that word into your next paragraph or scene. Do a writing exercise without any expectation that it needs to go into your WIP.
Read a book. Consider it R&D. Reading is just as important to a writer as writing, so you’re not really wasting time, are you? Tell yourself you’ll try again tomorrow (or whenever you have another chunk of time for writing), and that in the meantime, the reading you’re doing is helpful and productive. It’s refilling the well, feeding the muse, adding more words to your word hoard. Reading is a metaphor machine, an incubator, a compost heap. No shame in reading. Never ever. It’s the twin of writing, the other side of the coin. If words won’t flow out, flip the coin over and let some words flow in. And then celebrate your success! You are doing the very thing a writer needs to do. Reading is fun, after all, and so is writing.
“Lightly, child, lightly.” “Don’t go about it in a serious way.” Play, play, play, play, play. If you’re playing, you’re living.

Reading is idling, an act of rebellion

March 28, 2026 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

I teach English as an act of rebellion. Against the deification of STEM. Against utilitarianism. Against consumerism. Against Capitalism.

It is not “useful” to read novels or poems or stories or even (most of the time) essays and other nonfiction:

“Reading is not profitable; it doesn’t teach you any transferable skills or offer any networking opportunities. On the contrary, it is an antisocial activity in the most concrete sense: To do it you have to be alone, or else pretend you’re alone by tuning out other people. Reading teaches you to be more interested in what’s going on inside your head than in the real world.”

(Adam Kirsch, “Reading Is a Vice”)

I am against those who want to sell you things and control your attention for money and power. Reading books is one of the ways we say, “I’m not going to optimize. I’m going to be slow and self-serving. I’m going to value my pleasure over your profit.”

Yes, there is a publishing market, but it’s more than just New York publishers or Amazon. Those of us who read books buy them used, we trade, we go to the library. We buy from small presses, independent presses, self-publishers. It’s a business, sure, but readers have a way of circumventing the business and consumerism if we want. We have all the old books to read, if we want. One could spend a lifetime only reading the old books.

There is homework–math problems, history notes, science reading–but then there is reading a chapter from a novel. There is reading a poem and writing one of your own. In the most narrow sense, if one does these at home as assigned by a teacher, then they are homework. But reading a novel is a pleasurable act. Reading poetry is leisure. We bristle when something is assigned; we suddenly don’t want to do it. But if we take a few moments to reconsider, we realize that reading is not work. Fiction, stories, language, poetry: these are a chance to be alone, to get inside one’s own head, to fight back against the world. All it takes is a shift in mindset to discover that this “homework” is really an idle pleasure.

Reading is idling, the opposite of work.

Which means, every chance a student has to read a book, she gets to break free from a work-obsessed, profit-obsessed, productivity-obsessed, speed-obsessed world.

I’m not interested in “21st century skills,” a buzz word for managers and corporations. I’m not in the classroom to teach students how to prompt machines. I’m there to read books, to share the stories and language I think are beautiful, good, and true. I’m there to point to things I like and let students discover and point to things they like. We spend our time reading books, talking about books, writing about and in response to books. I can’t think of a better act of rebellion against the machine-driven, inhumane world that would reduce our lives to money and influence.

Sometimes students don’t see the “point” in all this reading. But that’s because there really isn’t one. Not in the utilitarian sense. Not in a “How will this help me when I’m an engineer or a doctor?” sense. It won’t help you in engineering and doctoring. It will only make life better, make you escape the confines of defining yourself purely as “engineer” or “doctor,” make you pay attention to your own mind and what’s going on inside besides worrying about which rung of the ladder next needs to be climbed.

That can be an uncomfortable place to sit for some students. To do a thing for pleasure–in school!–is incomprehensible. Even we English teachers have to church up what we do with standards and data and metrics and all the rest of it.

But really, what we do–what I hope to do–is share a space with young people so they have time and materials to read. My little rebellion. My first principle of idling. My useless, antisocial, indulgent vice.

OSR Arrietty

March 27, 2026 / JennyDetroit / 0 Comments

Last summer, we watched the fifteenth anniversary screening of The Secret World of Arrietty, Studio Ghibli’s adaptation of Mary Norton’s novel The Borrowers, a film I’ve seen twice already, and one that was incredible to see on the big screen. What stood out to me during this screening was how very OSR-ish the film is in its presentation of Arrietty’s world and adventures.

She’s a dungeon crawler. A problem-solver. The world is big and full of dangers and she’s just an ordinary borrower, looking for treasure, watching out for traps, avoiding giants and monstrous cats.

The spaces under the floorboards, the heights of the kitchen countertop: Arrietty and her father have to make their way through these environments using their tools and their wits, and the creativity of their solutions reminds me a lot of how players have to navigate the “dungeons” and fictional worlds of an old-school RPG. The answers aren’t in “stats” or magic spells but in one’s inventory and the creative use of the fictional environment. It’s about clever solutions to problems that don’t have one “correct” answer.

And most of all, it’s about the bigness of an environment that encompasses merely a country house and the fields and gardens that surround it. Arrietty’s world is huge to HER, and that’s all that matters. Her adventure doesn’t have to span continents or involve saving the world. It’s the opposite of “epic.”

And yet it has incredibly amounts of tension and high stakes because the world matters to Arrietty. She’s fighting for her home and her family. The stakes aren’t “big” but they are deeply personal.

This is a good reminder for OSR-style gaming. The stakes don’t have to be earth-shattering, but they have to matter to the lives of the characters. Saving one’s village from destruction can be enough to drive an entire campaign. Finding a way to survive against giants in your midst can be enough to tell a wondrous tale.

And the characters don’t have to wield great magic or be mighty warriors. They can survive on courage and cleverness and kindness too.

The other movies we watched with the kids this summer were Labyrinth, a film close to my heart, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, my favorite of the Potter films. Both of these movies also speak to the OSR sensibility, to the idea that growth comes from in-world experiences (Harry learning the Patronus charm) and magic items (the Marauder’s Map) and that “dungeon crawling” is more about “player skill” than what’s on the character sheet (after all, Sarah is merely a human from our world, and yet she solves the puzzle of the Labyrinth and gets her brother back).

Think of how Sarah works her way through the Labyrinth using problem solving and non-combat skills. She can’t rely on a Strength stat or a special power to get her through doors and around obstacles. She has to use her own wits, her own ability to form relationships with the denizens of the Labyrinth.

We also played Mausritter, an OSR game that uses rules similar to Into the Odd and Cairn. My kids had to use clever ideas and the physical tools available to them in the environment or their traveling packs to solve problems and get past the Ded Ratz gang. They rolled dice occasionally, but they soon figured out that making those rolls meant a pretty high chance of failure. Wits and creativity mattered much more to their success than straight-up fighting (just like it did for Arrietty and Sarah and Harry Potter).

I also ran a one-shot of Cairn 2e, and the same OSR principles applied. We only played one session, but already, per the rules of the game, I could see ways in which the characters’ interaction with the world, their in-game choices and actions, changed them. Using experience points and other metrics to advance characters is totally fine (and many games I love use those procedures), but there was something really bold and exciting in the way Cairn 2e eschews XP or levels for advancement and embraces a fiction-first process: Characters grow and change based on what they do in their adventures, the alliances they form, the daring-do they perform, the knowledge or items they discover, the people and creatures they interact with along the way, just as Arrietty, Sarah, and Harry grow and change because of what they do in their adventures. No “levels” or “XP.” Just choices.

I think what I love most about OSR-style gaming is the way that it makes me feel like I’m a slightly more capable version of myself, going on adventures in a dangerous but living world, and that my choices impact that world; my ideas can lead to clever escapes, daring adventures, and meaningful outcomes. Things are smaller-scale, but they’re not without thrills or real danger. Sarah in Labyrinth isn’t saving the world, she’s saving her brother. She isn’t traveling over vast continents, she finding her way through the maze. Harry Potter saves more than one life in his adventures in the third movie, but he does it within the confines of Hogwarts.

I’m not against grand, sweeping epics, or stories with world-saving stakes. But there’s something to be said for the smaller-scale drama, for the tension and excitement of navigating the space beneath the floor boards.

Many children’s adventure films understand this kind of drama and adventure. In some ways, they are closer to the OSR spirit than adult adventure films. And if nothing else, they’re a great place to gather ideas for OSR gaming.