We Don't Need No Stinking Reward!

Rewards? There were supposed to be rewards?  Dammit. Now you tell me.

I'm only half joking. Culturally, there's that whole protestant work ethic at play that says the work itself is the reward. Or should be. Granted. I'm not protestant. And it dismays me, when I look around, to notice that I haven't actually allowed myself few meaningful rewards for meeting my goals.

It is true that I really enjoy writing - even when I'm angsting over how much I suck at it. Ask my CPs about that one. I can feel them rolling their eyes at me from here. The reward in the DOING for me is that writing was one of those things I'd always done. It hadn't occurred to me that it would ever be anything more than me telling myself fun stories. Getting to tell my fun stories to other people and actually get paid for it just tickles the heck out of me.

That said, material rewards are tough for me. Living on a boat means having to find somewhere to store said material reward. Preferably someplace where it won't be damaged by moisture or mildew or cats sharpening their claws on it. That means rewards, for me, have to be less tangible.

So I travel.

After my first book was published I got to go to LA to RT. I got to go to NYC for the first time. Now that I've turned in another book, I'm going to a writer's retreat for a week.

I love going places I've never been. I love exploring and trying things I haven't tried. I guess that my reward is experience.

Leggo my Lego...

by Allison Pang

I'm a Lego-phile.

I wasn't always. We had them as kids...or really, my brother did. If I was lucky I got to dip into the bucket of loose pieces, but I never got a Lego kit of my own. Guess my parents figured it was a "boy thing" and never the twain shall meet.

And then I stopped caring and grew up or something.

Until a few years ago when I was buying Legos for my son and I realized they'd gone much farther than the basic castle/underwater/space kits of my youth.

Like...I knew there were Star Wars kits - I'd bought a few and helped my son put them together, but for whatever reason, the extended universe ships didn't really do much for me.

Until The Avengers came out and I realized they had Legos for them. And I went out and bought every

Avengers kit I could find.

Because I had to have Lego Loki. And Thor. And Captain America. And Hawkeye. And Black Widow. And Hulk.

*cough*

And you had to buy *all* the kits to get all the minifigs...and yeah. I have a problem.

A problem compounded a short while later when The Lord of the Rings kits came out. And then The Hobbit.

And I bought all of *those.* I'm awash in Lego elves and dwarves and orcs. And Gollum.

But here's the thing. Legos are mega expensive and putting them together can be time consuming, particularly the big ones. (Built the Millennium Falcon over Christmas and that one took way more time than I expected.) So I started only building them at writing milestones...or at periods of extremely high stress. (I'm not sure why - but something about using my hands in a productive way tends to calm me down. Plus when I'm done, I've got some really killer things to look at. Lately, I've been stressed out a lot.)

(And yes, I have all the Lego XBox games. Sue me. Lego Avengers comes out in October. I weep for it.)

Lots more pictures of the LotR sets here...

As writing rewards go, I guess it's a silly hobby, but that didn't stop me from picking up the Iron Man 3 sets this past weekend. Because, you know.

Lego Pepper Potts.

And I'd finished going through base edits of the newest manuscript.

But these are small rewards. The one I'm really waiting for is the Death Star.

But at $400 and nearly 4000 pieces it's a commitment I can't make just yet. Here's hoping I sell something worthy of it in the near future.