Monthly Archives: April 2012

Balance

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It’s been a banner week for productivity. The biggest news is that I’m off to a good start on my novel. I’m continuing to take it slow, having adopted one thousand word goal for each day. If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll note this is a markedly less than my earlier goals. You’ll also note my having said I need to mellow out and take it easy during my good periods. A thousand words is easy for me to hit, it leaves me wanting more and it also leaves me with time enough to do some other things. Like post here, goof off on Twitter and read.

On the reading front, I’ve received a couple of books in the mail recently which I’m eager to dive into. With any luck, you’ll actually start seeing reviews here again.

Or course, all work and no play makes Jeff a dull boy, and what better “play” might there be than running a Minecraft server? Well, there are probably a great many things better than having to deal with all the sysadmin stuff I’ve been subjected to, but playing Minecraft with friends is at least an order of magnitude more fun than playing solo.

I think the key phrase for these last couple of weeks is “finding balance.” Honestly, approaching what I have to do with a calm, relaxed mind has been difficult for me, at best. Looking at what needs to be done, taking a deliberate breath and saying “this one and no others,” is almost torturous, but I don’t feel depleted by the end of the day.

I don’t wake up at six feeling like I overslept and wasted precious time. I don’t hit a brick wall at four or five o’clock and feel my brain shut down. Instead, I have a pleasant amount of energy and ambition throughout the day. It’s bizarre, alien and might be precisely what a champion sprinter feels when they start training for their first marathon.

Not Enough Hours in the Day

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My reading list has grown to truly ludicrous portions lately. Like any good bookworm I always have a healthy stack of novels near at hand, and with my somewhat recent acquisition of a Kindle, I now have several dozen ebooks crying out to me. Add in the review requests that are now coming in with a regularity I never would have thought possible, and I have no less than one hundred books I’d either really like to read, really have to read, or both.

So if it isn’t painfully obvious by those three sentences above, I still haven’t struck that life balance I’ve been looking for. Closing in? Certainly! But I’m not where I want or need to be yet. As I mentioned before, I’m trying a more gradual approach to getting back into the swing of things than I have in the past. Prior to this most recent nasty spell, as soon as I made it out of the woods I would throw myself into my work, go from zero to sixty in two days and accomplish tasks at a near-frantic pace. Making up for lost time, hedging against the future, whatever you want to call it, on any given good day, I’m always aware that a bad day (or bad week) is just around the corner.

This time around, I’ve been easing into it, building a routine brick by brick. It’s an agonizing process where I just want to grab my own shoulders, shake myself and start in with the ten and twelve hour days again.

Anyway, the point is that I’ve finally come upon that point on the curve where I feel good about allowing myself a couple hours each day to read. So if you’ve been eagerly awaiting some new book reviews, you should have to wait much longer.

Procrastinating, Yet Oddly Busy

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This last week has left me feeling a strange combination of lazy and productive, a combination I can barely make sense of myself so explaining it to you seems impossible. I guess if you closed your eyes and imagined a large, bearded man making a “GNAAAAAA” sound while pinwheeling his arms, you’d be in the ballpark.

I have a stack of books to read, a short list of sysadminy tasks to get out of the way, some research to do for a novel and a whole lot of little annoyances which I’ve been gleefully ignoring. It’s all the product of procrastination, but putting things off hasn’t been the only thing going on lately.

I replaced my ten year old wireless router with a brand, spanking new one. I finished all the Emacs setup work I mentioned earlier, rewrote in Python a bunch of scripts I formerly wrote in Perl, completed several knitting projects, cleaned my desk and basically just got everything in proper order.

It’s an odd balance that I’m not entirely comfortable with, but whatever. At least you’ve got that bearded guy in your head now, so I can check that off my to-do list.

Tomorrow I’ll be picking up my daughter and hanging out with her for a week, which always makes for an awesome time. We’ve already made a bunch of plans, not the least of which is watching large numbers of Minecraft videos, playing the game and spending as much time outside as the weather will allow.

After Alex goes back to her mother’s place the week after, I’ll be diving into my novel. I managed to shoulder past the agonies I wrote about last week and have the beginning in sight. That, more than anything, should give me a sense of accomplishment, I suppose. I guess we’ll see when my fingers actually start hitting the keys, ’cause until then it’s only so much talk and optimism.

In the Beginning…

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I always struggle with beginnings. Whether I’m writing a short story, attempting a novel, dropping an entry into my too-neglected journal or posting something here, how to begin is the question to answer at the starting gate, but getting it out there seems to take more effort than the rest of the race. I’ve likened my mental landscape to an old, sprawling mystery house with untold numbers of doors. It’s true, of course. But it’s also true that sometimes the doors are locked.

When I approach any story, I tend to come in at a high altitude. Like a plane making its way above and around a sprawling city, I take in the grid below me, absorb the sprawl as a whole, then prepare my descent. That stratospheric view is great for picking up the broad strokes, getting the lay of the land and understanding the “edges” of the tale, but it’s lousy for the details. To get there, you need to find the way in. Planes need airports and runways, writers need their once-upon-a-times.

Now granted, I haven’t taken my writing seriously until recently, but not once in my life have I found the runway on the first flyby. Or the second. Or the fifth. Middle and end? That stuff feels a lot more natural. If the story is going well and I’ve captured the flapping threads of the narrative I’m weaving, the middle just flows and the ending follows just as predictably as winter follows autumn.

Falling back to my oft-leaned-upon house metaphor, I’ve been stumbling in the hall outside a particular room for weeks. There’s a story inside I know is good. It’s making hideous sounds behind a dozen locked doors and the hold it has on my attention is maddening. Worse are the locks to which I haven’t found the keys.

So, dear readers, anyone know how to jimmy one of these things?

Birthday and Bustling

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I’m thirty-five years old today and I can’t say I’m terribly bothered by it. Thirty was tough when it came and went, but aside from the giddy knowledge that I can now run for President, thirty-five has been marked by nary an emotion. Another day, another pile of things to do and another opportunity to do something fun, exciting, challenging or inspiring. Or something.

My roughly-week-long effort of banging Emacs and org-mode into shape has paid off. Between my memory, manuals, tutorials and David Allen’s book Getting Things Done, I’ve managed to get my life into some sort of order. Instead of an amorphous blob of stuff to do lingering in my mind (my Put Off List), I have lists of actions I can take, all organized in such a way that I…

  1. Don’t have to think about anything more than once.
  2. Don’t have to even see the things I can’t do anything about right there and then.
  3. Never, ever, ever have to rely on my brain to remember something. Ever.

It’s all very cool if you’re into that sort of thing. I’m just happy that this kind of system lends itself very well to the idea of breaking things down into bite-sized chunks–clear action steps which are quantifiable, visible and give you an instant feeling of being productive when you get them done.

I might write a post getting into the nitty gritty of my setup, but suffice it to say it involved a lot of writing this sort of thing…

(setq org-capture-templates
 (quote (("t" "todo" entry (file "~/Documents/Emacs/org/newgtd.org")
 "* TODO %^{Description} %^G\n%?")
 ("a" "appointment" entry (file "~/Documents/Emacs/org/calendar.org")
 "* APPOINTMENT %^{Description} %^T\n%?")
 ("s" "scheduled todo" entry (file "~/Documents/Emacs/org/newgtd.org")
 "* TODO %^{Description} %^G\nSCHEDULED: %^t\n%?")
 ("k" "tickle" entry (file "~/Documents/Emacs/org/calendar.org")
 "* %^{Description} %^t\n%?")
 ("n" "note" entry (file "~/Documents/Emacs/org/journal.org")
 "* %? :NOTE: \n"))))

I’m still testing and tweaking my setup, but I’m sure you can understand from the above why that might be something of a project.

On a totally different front, I have an official review policy now. You can find it on my Book Reviews page. I finally got around to this because I’m receiving at least one review request per week, which is surprising and awesome.

Anyway, now that things are less chaotic, I’m feeling better and I seem to have gotten everything organized and on track, I should be posting here more often. Sorry for the ebb, here’s to the flow.