I do seem to run hot and cold when it comes to updating this blog. The good news (as far as I’m concerned) is that I’ve been neglecting my writing-blog-writing because I’ve been doing a lot of plain old fiction writing lately.
I’ve also been very busy sending out a ton of story submissions (the flip side to tons of rejections is tons of new opportunities to submit!) and also putting in a ton of effort refining my workflow.
Some writers just sit down and toss the words out onto the page. I plan a great deal, and assemble mountains of notes and try to sort through them and apply them into suitable little piles relating to the same subject or project. I have this fantastic new tool called Evernote, which is a way of sorting all your notes, including even note-like stuff such as PDFs, sound clips, images and so on. You can apply multiple tags to each “note” so you can look through all your notes with any given tag, and a single note may appear every time you look by the appropriate tag. So I might have a photo of a weird looking goth chick with blue hair, and I could tag it as “image” and “character ideas” and “Hum” (after the name of a story I’m working on) and whichever of these tags I choose, I’ll see this picture. Pretty handy, for sorting through things all different ways, especially once you have thousands of notes.
I’m also increasingly using this great online tool called Dropbox, which gives you a folder on all of your computers which is kept synchronized at all times, so anything you drop into the “My Dropbox” folder on your work PC, for example, is automatically updated in the “My Dropbox” folder on you iPad, your laptop, and your MacPro at home. So great! I used to carry around 2 or 3 little USB thumb drives all the time, and now I’m done with those. Everything I may need during the day, no matter where I am — reference documents, web links, my story projects, software installers, everything! Dropbox is great and includes a free option, for up to 2gb of storage, and a paid option for people who want to store a lot more.
I’ll be back soon with subsequent SF Academy entries, and maybe a bit more about what I’ve been writing lately.
Continuing my efforts to rejuvenate this blog, and get back to writing more about what it was originally intended to be, I’m deleting old posts that were unrelated to the “reading and writing” theme. Ironically one of the most-read posts here pertained to some sports-related controversy from last summer’s track & field world championships, but that’s not really want I want this blog to be about.
So, before I move forward, I’m going to shove a big pile of junk out to the curb where the trash guy can pick it up. Whew, that feels a lot better.
Also, I’m poking around with new blog themes, and yes I realize the blog has a “generic” banner image but I’m not going to choose a definite, permanent banner that’s really my own until I choose a specific blog theme… because the different themes all have different sized spaces for banner images.
Television was originally seen as this great technology to allow people all over to keep informed of world events, and to find all kinds of free entertainment in the home, only to turn into the world’s great motivation-sucking-time-waster. Something similar, and more modern has evolved, a sort of interactive television. I’m talking about the internet.
On one hand, the internet is an incredibly powerful tool. The advent of near-ubiquitous internet connectivity has allowed all kinds of great efficiencies like paying bills or doing research or communicating with friends online. On the other hand, though, it’s a potentially detrimental distraction or time sink. It can be so much fun, you almost don’t realize, or maybe don’t care, how much time you’ve wasted.
I don’t care about the loss in business productivity from all the people browsing fantasy football leagues on espn.com, or gossip on thesuperficial.com about Paris Hilton’s latest pix, or any of the many blogs, forums, facebook profiles, youtubes, tumblrs or tweets. I mean, business owners should care (and any corporate IT manager can tell you most people’s work computers are used a lot more for screwing around than for work), but that’s not what interests me here.
Paris Hilton making an adjustment
I’m talking about people like myself sitting down to the computer for my own reasons, to work on a project that’s important to me. Let’s say I’m trying to work on some music or graphic design for my record label, Hypnos Recordings, or in my downstairs office trying to get some writing or editing done. Often I’ll think “I’ll just do this little bit of research about which street the UN building is on,” or maybe, “It’ll take two seconds to find out how many moons Neptune has,” or perhaps, “I think I’ll check out that little Russian record label and listen to some of their mp3 sample clips.”
The next thing I know ninety minutes have passed and I’m somewhere deep in web-land, nowhere near where I started out.
The internet has really made a million things easier, sometimes to benefit the user, and more often to benefit a business providing web content, deriving profit from the continued attention of your eyeballs. In other words, the web started out as a way of getting interesting information in front of people who wanted it, but it has evolved into mostly just a way of getting you to look at stuff with advertisements embedded in it. Some web sites, such as Amazon.com or Netflix.com or Youtube.com have spent a lot of time and money developing tools that let them say “We see you are interested in this thing you came here for… perhaps you may also be interested in these many other similar things you didn’t know about?”
How many times have you gone to Youtube to look at a clever video link someone sent you, only to end up watching a half-dozen or more other videos you arrived with no intention of watching? There you are an hour later, watching that dumb kid ride his BMX bike into a brick wall, or an old lady smash a folding chair and fall on her ass, or this.
Something I’ve tried recently is using an old laptop as my writing computer, an old IBM ThinkPad. I don’t particularly like the keyboard, and I hate the lower-resolution screen which makes it hard to fit a whole page on the screen at once. But this machine has no wireless, and it’s nowhere near an ethernet plug, so it’s effectively just a word processor. I’d rather write on a newer computer with a nicer monitor and a keyboard with better touch, and yet I get a lot more accomplished on this IBM because I have no distractions. I just sit down with this thing on my lap and I listen to the music playing from the other side of the room, and I write just like I used to write in the years before the internet came along.
The IBM ThinkPad -- it sucks so much, it's wonderful!
At first I hated this old machine, but then I remembered its very limitations are why I chose it. I’m getting a lot more done, this past few months since I started using it. I’ve often thought of getting an old OS7-era Mac laptop for this purpose, but what I have is working well enough for my needs. I wouldn’t want this to be my only computer, or even my main computer, but again, in this case the limitations constitute the whole point.
Today I stumbled upon a blog entry by someone using an old Mac in a similar way.
Mac Color Classic setup (see SystemFolder blog link below)
My first response upon reading this blog entry, unavoidably despite my own success using an old, “crippled” machine, was to focus on all the things the machine couldn’t do. Gahhh, what about USB?! Again, that’s the point, taking away options and especially removing the temptation of the internet, in the name of a more direct approach to creativity.
I wouldn’t go so far as an old typewriter, as the word processor’s ability to save and edit without having to re-type revised drafts in their entirety is something I really couldn’t do without. I’m a fast typist but who wants to waste that much time?
Another option I stumbled upon, via the same fantastic tumblr/blog incidentally, Minimal Mac, is this simple application that allows a user to voluntarily lock themselves out of any internet connection for a pre-determined period of time.
To me, this seems like it could allow the best of all worlds. I could use my preferred machine, with the best possible monitor and keyboard, and whatever software I choose, without any temptation (during a set writing period or other creative “window”) to screw around online. I wonder if others have had the same amount of frustration at their own time-wasting, or if most people just don’t mind hours spent on wikipedia or amazon. Maybe everyone has a lot more discipline and self-control than I do, but having looked over a few shoulders in my day, I’d say not.
Probably 99.99995% of new blogs never make it fast the initial few posts, I’m sure. I never quite established the habit of visiting here every day, and sort of forgot about it, but I’m going to take another stab at posting here.
The purpose of this blog, as I said at the beginning, is to talk a bit about my own recent writing and reading (and I include audiobook listening when I say “reading”).
So, to quickly catch up from where I left off, halfway through Eye in the Sky…
The second half of that early Philip K. Dick novel was slightly better than the first. As I haven’t read a Dick novel since probably the late 80s, this has got me thinking, “Is he just one of those writers that’s better in theory than in reality?” I mean, his concepts are interesting, but the writing…
On the other hand, this is an early book of his, certainly not considered one of his better works. So I’ll just set it aside, and certainly NOT be in a hurry to read Dr. Futurity or Solar Lottery any time soon.
At some point, I’ll give another look at one of the books from his last decade.
I’ll keep this short, and try to make shorter, less ambitious posts in the future (at least until I establish a routine of posting here) so I’ll be more likely to keep posting regularly. I’m sure this blog’s many readers are saying in unison, “Sounds great, Griffin!”
Launching a new blog is the easiest thing in the world.
When you first start up a new blog, nobody knows about it but you. Then maybe a friend or two might see it, but nobody who doesn’t already know you. No pressure, since there’s no real “audience” yet. By the time anybody makes their way over here to read this thing, this first blog post will likely be buried under a number of more substantial and more recent posts.
I blogged for a while before, on Myspace, and what started off a fun and very personal blog space, ended up having hundreds of followers and dozens of people leaving comments. I was blogging about 10 times per week, writing about music and my social life and fortune cookies and restaurant reviews, all kinds of stuff. I have no idea if this blog will attract many viewers, but that’s not the important thing.
I also spend a bit of time in an online community called the Hypnos Forum, related to the ambient/electronic record label I founded over a decade ago. There are lots of cool and intelligent people there, but most of the discussion is on music and technology, and subjects related to books and words and thoughts seem not to generate much attraction. I just wanted a place to write about some things that have become increasingly important to me, especially as I’ve become more serious and dedicated about writing fiction.
It’s my plan to post here about a variety of subjects, but mostly observations about writing my own words, and reading the words of others. I’ll probably kick things off with a series of quick mini-review posts about some of the things I’ve read lately, and then start explaining more about why I’m writing this blog and what I hope to achieve with it.
So then, I’d say “thanks for reading,” but nobody’s reading yet. Like I said… easiest thing in the world!
GriffinWords 