One of the best ways to cure writers block is to read extremely good writing.

Now, I’m not talking about reading someone else’s work at then sitting down and doing something just like what that did. No, what I mean is that sometimes you just need a fat burner for the mind.

And for me, nothing works better than reading the best writers I can think of; their skill with words, their creativity, their imagination all reminds me of why I want to write in the first place, what inspired me to want to be a writer when I was young. It was always the best writing that did that for me.

Of course, my standards for what makes up good writing doesn’t always match what they’ll teach you in some pompous creative writing group or college workshop. Perhaps I’ll share those soon.

People ask me how I get time to do the writing I do, where I come by the discipline to get things done, despite how much I tend to take on. Here’s my secret.

The best discipline is discipline.

Now, don’t misunderstand. Don’t read that wrong like faulty laptop memory. I’m not talking about giving oneself a swat on the behind every time you feel like procrastinating.

What I am saying is, nothing kills procrastination like its polar opposite: deciding you’re going to get something done, and just doing it.

There’s no substitute for determination.

Sometimes it is the quirks that make a person memorable, more than their actions. I’ve built a lovely group of characters in my current novel, but not because they are all action heroes and damsels in distress.

No, unlike what bad tv stands for these days, I enjoy the quiet characters who are just leading small, odd lives, full of snappy quirks that make them folks one would automatically remember, just because of their uniqueness.

I’ll share an example: I have a sensible, tough Sheriff who plays a role in my story, but he has secrets. His marriage is being torn apart by his wife’s postpartum depression and resultant infidelity, but he doesn’t want anyone to know.

So do I say all this up-front? No. But as he’s interviewing my main character, he has his six-month-old newborn with him and is bottle-feeding him throughout the interview. To have a lawman talking like a typical tough cop but feeding and burping his child at the same time is loads of fun, to write him as a character.

As I face the prospect of starting my novel over from the first seven pages, one of the challenges I face is deciding how closely I want to follow in the footpath of what I wrote before. With no backup or hardcopy to go buy, trying to reproduce the same beat and rhythm and dialog from memory could be a bit of a challenge, and end up ringing false and hollow in my own ears.

On the other hand, it could come out improved over that lost first draft.

But what I’m tending to lean toward at the moment is to start fresh from where my surviving pages left off, and go forward to create the plot from a new vision. Like a radically different draft of a solid concept, more than a redo of the same previous pages.

I need to decide and get underway soon, though, or I won’t have a completed draft until the next Cyber Monday following Thanksgiving 2009.

I was over 100 pages into my novel, THIRTY MINUTES OR LESS, when tragedy and stupidity combined in a perfect storm and, like a tight corset, squeezed my manuscript back down to about seven pages.

I’ll admit it: I was an idiot.

What did I do? I failed to back up my novel, either on CD-RW, DVD-RW, or even a flash drive. That’s the stupidity part.

The tragedy part was that my hard-drive on my Acer went down like a clown to Chinatown. (In plainer words, it crashed.)

The PC and the drive were both less than 10 months old when this happened. I didn’t back up my novel, or my hard drive, prior to this. The biggest culprit here was arrogance; I thought that with such a great new PC, I’d have plenty of time before I’d have to worry about a crash, so I never set up an archive, nor did I back up anything, unless I had to transport it between home and work PCs.

I lost a ton of stuff, but the piece that hurts most is the 90-some pages of lost manuscript from THIRTY MINUTES OR LESS that I had never backed up. Now I have to fall back on the seven or so pages I had sent to an agent via email, and was still preserved in my online email account.

Consider it a second draft, I guess. But that’s a lot of lost work.

Best advice I can ever give any writer relying on PCs, hard drives and such? Back up your work; often. Invest in both an external hard drive, so you can make a ghost-copy of EVERYTHING on your hard drive, and then re-archive it once a week. (Or use the Carbonite.com service to accomplish the same thing.) And then hedge your bets by saving anything vital to a flash-drive. And maybe even a DVD-RW.

Heck, do it all, including the Carbonite.com solution. If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that you can never be too cautious with your important data.

Usually this is a blog devoted to advice on writing, but tonight I need a space to blow off some steam. For well over a year, I’ve been actively using PayPal for online transactions. It’s an industry-standard for folks who transact on the Web, right?

Well, color me unimpressed and highly disappointed with PayPal in the wake of a recent customer service snafu in which I was the victim. After what I went through today with them, I’d be more likely to endorse the idea of buying auto insurance in Texas when you live in Minnesota, than I would endorse trusting PayPal to handle customer service professionally.

Here’s the deal:

On January 5, I had my wife use my PayPal Debit Card to contribute my share of the T-Mobile bill, which was $50. Should be easy, right? Well, not so fast.

The first time T-Mobile rang the transaction through, on January 5, they did not receive a correct transaction approval code back from PayPal, even though I had $55.00 in my PayPal balance, which should have left me with $5.00 remaining after the T-Mobile payment.

Since they weren’t paid, T-Mobile (without asking me, mind you, which is RUDE) rang the transaction through a second time. This time, they received the appropriate approval code, got paid their $50, and moved on, happily.

But my PayPal troubles were only beginning. You see, PayPal took out $50.00 from my balance on the first T-Mobile transaction, as a “pending” transaction, even though the wrong approval code was sent and T-Mobile was never paid. That left me with an available balance of $5.00.

Then, when T-Mobile attempted to receive payment a second time, the next day, PayPal paid T-Mobile $50, but took my balance from $5.00 to minus-$45, and initiated a wire transfer from my checking account for the remaining $45… even though the first transaction never went through.

I found out about this the next day, and after checking my PayPal backup funding source – my checking account – and realizing I didn’t have sufficient funds to cover the $45 charge that PayPal was sending my way. Keep in mind that the first $50 charge was NEVER paid out and the balance should have been available.

So, basically, PayPal was set to cause me an overdraft fee on my checking account. Like any good but upset consumer, I called PayPal up to get them to correct their mistake.

My request was simple: Either cancel the $45.00 transfer-in from my bank that never should have been issued, or pay me for the overdraft fee their mistake was going to cause. And it was a PayPal mistake, because T-Mobile never received the first $50 payment because of the approval-code error; they should only have been paid once and my account should never have gone below zero to initiate a back-up funding transfer in the first place.

I mean, I gave them TWO options to make things right. Either cancel the funds transfer that was going to cause me an overdraft, or pay for the overdraft fee their error had caused. Seems pretty simple, right? If you can’t do one, do the other.

Except here was my experience with PayPal customer service: my first time calling in, I was disconnected in the middle of the call. My second time calling in, I was told I’d dialed the wrong extension and I’d have to be transferred to “the correct department.”

Then, instead of getting the correct department, I was connected to a so-called “supervisor.” Well, that’s something, right? I mean, they have more leeway and are TRAINED to keep customers happy, right?

Not at PayPal. Instead, contradicting his own reps who I’d spoken to before, this “supervisor” made the wild claim that T-Mobile was lying – that they’d been paid the first time, but inexplicably CANCELED the transaction, only to run it again.

He then asserted, “We gave T-Mobile a valid approval code both times, they were paid both times, and so this is not a PayPal error.”

Pardon the impure language, but bullshit.

If T-Mobile had received payment the first time, they’d have had no reason whatsoever to cancel that transaction, nor would they have had reason to immediately initiate a second transaction the next day. This supervisor’s excuse simply doesn’t pass the logic test, nor the smell test.

What it boils down to is this: this PayPal “supervisor” simply didn’t want to pay for my overdraft fee, even though it was PayPal’s fault, so he lied his ass off, to cover his ass. It’s a weak, pathetic, feeble attempt to twist the facts, a terrible way to treat a customer, and an example of corporate arrogance and greed.

If PayPal were a company of principle, they would fire this supervisor for terrible customer service, or at least demote him and start him over like a new employee who needs to learn how to treat customers.

I told the so-called PayPal “supervisor” several times I felt he was being deceptive on the facts to avoid responsibility, and what I was asking for to make the situation right was not unreasonable, but he simply refused to budge, even though customer service reps prior to him had confirmed that T-Mobile was telling the truth.

So, I ended the call my telling the supervisor my planned response to his horrible customer service; I will be reporting this incident to every Better Business Bureau I can think of, and I may even report it to the Attorney General’s office.

This blog entry is the first step. Let the notice go forth: PayPal has HORRIBLE customer service and will lie, misrepresent and deceive to avoid taking responsibility for their own idiotic mistakes. Consumers beware! PayPal does NOT deal honestly with its customers.

I believe it was Stephen King who first popularized the convention of using recognizable, real name-brand items in his fiction work. Rather than hide behind euphemisms and half-camouflaged descriptions, King made a habit out of calling a Coke a Coke, a Ford Mustang a Ford Mustang, a Price Pfister faucet a Price Pfister faucet and a glass of Tang a glass of Tang.

On one level, it works; Coca-Cola, for example, immediately paints a complete picture in the reader’s mind without a long description of a mundane item, and sets the fiction tale in a more-immediately-recognizable word that mirrors our own.

One rarely, for example, looks at a can of Coca-Cola and thinks about “a popular cola beverage in an instantly-recognizable red, silver and white can that shone with the sweat of a cold can on a hot day in the scorching noon sun.”

No, more common is when one looks at a person and thinks about “how Gina rolled the cold, damp metal of the Coke can across her steaming forehead, seeking relief from the scorching noon sun.”

See how much more natural that sounds? In the former, too much emphasis is put on the can, whereas by describing it as a Coke can, the focus can be placed properly on the character holding it.

Yet does using brand names make one a bit lazier as a writer, or simply more focused? It’s a debate that may never be settled completely to the agreement of all writers.