Today

6:15am: Wake abruptly, having realized what was bugging me about that request-for-proposal I got yesterday.


6:18am: Lie in bed, figuring out what to do about it and designing the presentation slides to explain it to others.

7:15am: Get up and draw the slides on some scrap paper.

8:50am: Breakfast

9:45am: Get lost on way to doctor appointment.

10:05am: Doctor appointment.

10:50am: Stop for a cupcake. I *need* a cupcake.

11am: Accidentally (ie, due to cupcake stop) miss my team’s daily standup meeting.

11:30am: Realize that *this* meeting can be cancelled. Aha! Reply to email instead.

12noon: Meeting about taxes.

1pm: Meeting about ... I’ve forgotten.

2pm: Training session about how to be a better Product Manager.

3:30pm: Meeting about whether this thing I’m designing will also work for somebody else’s team.

4pm: Meeting about the overlap between that presentation I started this morning and R’s designs.

5pm: Start getting the slides off my scrap paper and into the computer.

6:30pm: Oh, right, I needed to pay those bills. Online bill pay. And did Fry’s actually refund me for that thing I returned? Yes? Okay, good. 

7pm: Inner monologue:

- You said you were going to leave work earlier today.

- Uh-huh.

- So. You going to get out of here and go work on your book?

- I’m tired! I’ve been up since 6:15!


7:10pm: Get up, leave desk, out to car, start driving to library. Inner monologue continues: 

- But if you don’t work on the book tonight, then when are you going to?

- But I’m tired!

- [Pause] Well, what would you rather do instead? Watch TV?

- [Sighs] There’s never anything on....

- You could go to the gym.

- [Disdainful silence]

- Or go home and vacuum. How about vacuuming?

- [More disdainful silence]

- Well, you could read.

- [Inner inner monologue] But you know, lately reading seems so flat compared to writing!

- Well, what are you going to do then? Come on, it’s only 7pm. You know you won’t go to sleep for at least a couple of hours. What would you rather do than write? There must be something.

- [Inspiration!] I could write a blog post to procrastinate!

7:47pm: Finish blog post....

Book #7: Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home, by Lynn Freed

For about a year I have been searching out books about writing: Stephen King’s On Writing, one by Annie Dillard, a couple of workbook-y things that appear to be part of a series, and most recently, Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home by Lynn Freed.
I have no idea who Lynn Freed is. I bought the book because of the picture on the cover: a young woman with neat 1950s hair, wearing a green dress and carrying a typewriter.
A chapter in, I almost gave up on the book. It was all about the writer’s childhood, her reactions to South Africa and her family, ie things guaranteed to bore me. I find that books about place which are written by people with a strong emotional connection to that place almost always do bore me. There’s no element of discovery, only justification of why the writer is writing about this. Ugh.
At any rate, I plowed on. The book was a convenient size for tossing in my backpack and reading in bed. And I still liked the picture on the cover.
Partway in, the author finally got around to talking about writing: the frustration of false starts, the need to bury or immerse oneself in words to make anything work. “Fiction does not come out of ideas....” “I had deafened myself with thinking....” “A wonderful thing happened. I gave up.” “I opened the notebook and wrote ‘Untitled.’ Then I had to lie down on the bed and sleep for the rest of the day.”
And from talking about writing, to talking about travel: “I have always been a natural foreigner.”
And about the course of life: “still I was asking myself the question I had been asking for as long as I can remember: Is this what you want? ... only now did an answer arrive without a hint of prevarication: No.”
And finally, and most important to me currently, about writing programs, about workshops, about MFAs: a long chapter about the misery of teaching in such, about the inherent contradiction between an environment of incremental progress in a group setting and the solitary nature of getting words down on the page. I read this as justification for not studying what I spend time on, both visual and textual, for the arrogance of thinking I can churn out a manuscript in the next few months. I read this as a challenge, or, better-phrased (since my response to challenges is usually to glare and decide not to play) as inspiration.
Those parts of the book, I couldn’t put down.
I only wish those parts of the book composed more than half.
So I am left with a quandary: give it shelf space? Photocopy the chapters that matter to me and sell it off? Reread it again in a year and see what I think?
I still like the photo of the girl in the green dress, staring out so precisely with her typewriter in hand.

Please stop raining. Just for an hour. Please?

I have this nice afternoon to myself and I just want to go drill holes in pieces of plywood as planned - but I figure I shouldn't do that if it would mean letting the powercord for the drill go straggling through a puddle. But I can't glue and nail until I drill! And I can't assemble until I glue and nail! And I can't start using until I assemble! 

Grumble, grumble, grumble. 

Please? I don't think I can take any more hot tea and being productive with a notebook. I spent two hours on that. It was a good, useful two hours. I have an outline that will take me at least twenty pages into my post New Year's project - that's pretty good. Now I want to go make something a little more physical and then I'll get back to the notebook. Really. I will. I promise. Ok, universe? I will. Really. 

Just ... stop ... raining ... ! 

Or ... could it be that the universe is trying to tell me which project to prioritize? Sigh. 

"Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts"

I ran across this article on Friday and saved it as a draft post to write about when the clutter of the week had cleared from my mind at least a little. It’s Saturday night, we’ve got Dartanian playing on the stereo, and I’m holding a truly great cup of decaf coffee, so here goes:

My summary: we* now have more access to more information than ever before. That sounds great, but what no one predicted in the internet’s early years was that more access to information would also lead to taking less of that information in in depth. Interestingly, as we lose the skill of in-depth information processing, we become expert skimmers. This may be good or it may be bad, but it is a distinct and measurable change.

Comments & anecdotes:

On Tuesday evening I met T at our usual coffeeshop. We talked each other through our latest plot developments and T commented that she’d started yet another disconnected piece of writing. “I’m too scattered,” she said. “I spend all day at work jumping around from project to project. I can’t focus.”

I spent two hours at work on Friday working my way through a couple hundred emails. I sorted them into ‘Actions’ I need to take, projects where I’m ‘Waiting’ for someone else to do something, and some I just trashed. A few I filed in ‘Read,’ and spent another two hours attempting to do exactly that while camped out in the massage chair in the lobby. Every time I hit something longer than a single screenful of text, I found myself sighing and flipping back to my Inbox to see if there was anything new.

Friday night I spent two hours with my drafting board, figuring out the proportions for an Ikea hack I’m working on.

Earlier this year I did some reading about the so-called ‘flow state’ of concentration, where you get so involved in something that you lose track of time and become entirely ‘present in the moment.’ You’re not thinking about why you’re doing what you’re doing, or what you need to do next or failed to do yesterday. This is one of my most enjoyable ways to work, whether it’s for my day job or not, and my reliance on it probably explains why I instinctively assume that rewiring my brain for skimming would be a bad change to fall victim to.

Neal Stephenson reportedly claims that all fiction can be written in Emacs; Stephen King says that if you don’t have time to read, then you don’t have time to write. The guru of Getting Things Done exhorts us all to make lists of all the little nagging questions and to-dos, getting them out of your head and freeing up space for the ‘flow state.’

There’s a way that fits together, but right now I’m too scattered to see what it is. If you can see it, maybe you haven’t been skimming.


*We: this isn’t explicitly called out in the article, but in this context ‘we’ can only mean heavily internet-based cultures. These are mostly Western, and in the US I suspect mostly coastal. It would be interesting to see how cellphones compare.... The effect is probably magnified for so-called ‘knowledge workers’ such as yours truly, which makes me wonder whether that job description will in 10 years seem ironic or prophetic.

Gadget love

"I'm going for a walk," I said to C. It was Sunday afternoon, nice weather; our original plans to termite-prep the house had stalled out when the property rental place failed to tell us when the termite-tenting would actually occur.

"Where to?" he asked. Sunday afternoon: there's doubtless some kind of sports on TV, but then, it's a nice day....

"Maybe the Apple store," I said. This of the danger of living in downtown Palo Alto: the ever-seductive Apple store, so shiny, so silver, so ... tempting.

"Hmm," said C. "Think I'll pass."

So I went for a walk. I felt the warm sun on my shoulders; I admired the newly-budding cherry & plum trees that give the neighborhood a sudden, unexpected grace in spring. I watched some bikes speed past, since this was the first day of some kind of major bike race I'd never previously heard of. I bought lemonade from a hopeful kid selling it in front of his mom's store.

And then I got to the Apple store.

I've been eyeing the MacBook Air (3/4" thick! silver! not Windows, so it won't "feel" like work!) since it was launched. I've been telling myself firmly that I'll wait till it hits V2 before I buy one - who wants to be a beta tester for $1800?

But then I saw it. It was sleek and lovely and the rounded edge fit nicely in my hand. It was light enough that I could imagine myself carrying it around in a backpack while I was travelling. I hesitated for maybe 3 minutes before letting my credit card leap eagerly out of my wallet.

I took my new gadget home, installed a bunch of writing software on it, and started playing. And I love it.

What I'm reading

Every so often the topic of books comes up - and someone asks, "so what do you read?"

I pause. I rack my brain frantically for whatever it is I'm reading right now. Then I realize that - wait - no - I can't say that - what I'm reading right now doesn't accurately represent what I really read!

And no matter what I'm reading, that is always the case.

For example, right now I'm reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon; a collection of essays about Canadian summer vacation cottages; an Elizabeth Hardwick lit-crit collection; and a crime-caper novel by Donald Westlake. If there's an obvious common thread, I at least don't see it.

And so I'm experimenting: over on the sidebar of this blog is a new list called "What I'm reading." I've tagged some books I'm reading (and have read) in my De.licio.us account; they auto-post here.

And maybe one day, as the list grows, it might actually become representative.

The Ironic Doppelganger

A couple of weeks back, my guy & I drove out to Half Moon Bay to go to the beach. On our way through town, we spotted a new bookstore, so we wandered in. While browsing for anything new by Michael Faber (I can't decide if The Crimson Petal & the White is a great book, a decadent guilty pleasure, or just a fun ride), I ran across this book.

Note the author's name.

Note that the author lives in the Bay Area, has hair about the color mine gets when I spend a lot of time in the sun, seems to be about my height, and appears to weigh about what I do.

Note that I didn't write this book.

What the . . . ??!!?

When I first picked it up, my stomach turned over. I think my fingers shook a little bit. I looked over my shoulder to see who - or what - was watching me. All those sci-fi & fantasy books I read as a kid, not to mention the time one of my friends asked why I'd been in San Francisco one weekend and not waved back at her but I hadn't actually been there, came bubbling up from the unused, not-looked-at-too-often recesses of my mind.

I have to admit this feels damn weird.

I'm also pondering a new question: when I send my current story out to magazines in October, what name do I send it under?

It's going to be pretty funny if I wind up taking my guy's last name after all - and do it to maintain my own separate identity, rather than to establish new credentials as part of a couple. Just when I was getting comfy with the dictates of feminism. . . .