a work in progress

panorama of Vancouver/English Bay in summer

Category: Writing

2018, Week 1

I said I’d read and write and move and some of that actually happened!

I was sufficiently annoyed at reading Antifragile that I knew there was zero chance I would finish it (or even continue for the week) so I grabbed John Scalzi’s “The Dispatcher” that was on sale last Monday and read it that day. Very readable 🙂 A bit depressing. But that means I finished a book this week! I also got a copy of “Principles” and haven’t opened it at all! 😀 But based on the point of that one, I suspect it’ll be a much friendlier read once I start.

I’m also re-reading “The Fifth Season” (So! Good!) – do re-reads count? (I guess that’s up to me.) I also realized that I checked the wrong account for Audible and although I thought I’d cancelled it, I do still have a subscription with a. couple of credits. I might cancel it yet, I’m not sure. Really, the only thing I’ve ever enjoyed as audiobooks is Buddhist books, and even those are hit or miss based on narrator. I like my fiction to be in my own head voice, y’know?

This is writing and I’ll post it today (hideously unedited and unreviewed) and reading is covered above. Moving was… mixed this week. I am happy to report that I seem to have found a groove that sees me go swimming twice a week midday and I don’t even whine and complain when it’s time to go. I even found myself wanting to go early one day when I was feeling anxious and restless! And even on the days I feel like just giving up, I still start and then I keep going! This is exciting! My normal distance is 1km and I all too often forget where I’m at while counting. But this past Thursday it was 1.1km. I want to keep the time consistent so if I want to swim further, I’d better speed up.

I haven’t done much else, activity-wise but then it’s only the first week of the year and it was a short one. I still have to finish “American Vandal”, which I’m restricting myself to watching on the Exercycle. That was really hard because I have to find out who drew the dicks* but I am proud that I haven’t broken that rule. I’d have thought it would get me on the bike but so far, no.

On the learning front, I was asked to try to figure out how much of my company’s code shipped last year was open source (compared with closed). This is exciting! I haven’t done much programming in a very long time but I did spend a focused bit of time a couple of years ago and some of the JS/Node neutrons are waking up. It’s a dog’s breakfast at the moment, glued together with text files & bash, but I do have a decent base for something I might use as a jumping off point for learning proper JS dev again – ideally practicing TDD as well. I spent more of my own time than I think my boss would be happy with on this (work-life balance is a Real Thing at Buffer, y’all) but I was enjoying that dopamine hit of solving things. And isn’t the dopamine of learning and accomplishment preferable to constantly refreshing social media or checking mail to see if there’s something new?

Yes. Yes it is.

* this is only for people who’ve seen “American Vandal” or don’t mind partial spoilers (as I say, I haven’t finished it so this doesn’t actually give away any ending) the #1 proof of Dylan’s innocence, in MY mind, is the complete stylistic difference between his everyday (and it does seem to be every day) dick-drawings and the ones on the cars. No. Damn. Way. As mentioned, I don’t know the actual answer, but he really doesn’t seem smart enough to think of disguising his signature style.

Trying something new

For quite some time now, I’ve been telling myself that I want to write more. There’s plenty of research that shows that writing is a great way to get to know yourself better and, in many situations, to feel better. A lot of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is based on getting your thoughts out of your head and out into the real world where you can see how distorted they are.

And I have been writing more! Since December 12th, I’ve been doing the ‘morning pages’ exercise from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and I’ve been finding it to be really helpful for my overall mood and willingness to try new things.

But that’s really only basically stream of consciousness writing, not anything more structured. And it’s just thoughts, not creativity, really (I mean, it COULD be – you can write anything you want in the morning pages, but for me it’s a cross between a ‘brain drain’ (Cameron actually refers to it that way and it’s a good metaphor) and a bit of a journal (which I ALSO want to do more of). It’s not really the type of writing I think I want to try.

So day after day I say to myself “I should sit down and write something.” (THAT sentence shows up in the morning pages pretty regularly). I borrowed “The Writer’s Lab” from the library & it’s due back tomorrow, unused. So I decided to get curious about what was really holding me back.

My first thought was “well, I don’t really have a place to write” Sure, nobody ever does any writing in coffee shops or in bed or at the desk or at one of the THREE computers they own (in fairness, two of them are over five years old).

That was followed by “but I don’t know what tools I should use!” Ah yes… The self-perpetuating variant of yak-shaving that is tool-smithing. Perhaps the greatest method of procrastination ever invented by humans (and one particularly beloved by software developers because we can make new tools to avoid doing what the tool is supposed to make easier).

But there’s a little bit of truth in that last one. I am very much enjoying writing with pen & paper for the morning pages and have developed a bit of a fetish for nice stationary and writing tools. But there are pragmatic reasons to write on a computer, not least of which is the complete illegibility of  my handwriting (not good to start with and completely devastated by a career in software). It’s also pretty much a given that any publication of what I write will be done via computer. Transcribing my own writing doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me, although there are benefits to that type of process. It forces a write/edit/revise cycle that can too easily be short-circuited by ‘live’ writing. But I think it makes sense for me to start out on the computer and go from there.

“Medium” or “WordPress”†? “WriteRoom” or “Sublime”? “Scrivener”? OK, now you’re just fucking around. Pick one and get on with it. Delay any decision you can (a good rule in general, as long as you’re taking into all the factors that make up whether ‘you can’) and start.

So I am. I am making one concession to my poor mind that is afraid of failing/rejection/mockery. I’m going to do all the fiction-type writing on the MacBook Air, using WriteRoom, with wifi turned off. That machine will become THE place to write creatively and that will also lend a bit of ceremony to the act of sitting down to write. Not so much that it’s ‘precious’ but enough to give it a bit of a sense of occasion and to celebrate that I’m trying something new.

† While I was trying to figure out what it was that was stopping me from getting started, I realized something surprising. I was worried about writing on WordPress at this site because I was afraid no one would find and read what I wrote. But I was also worried about writing on Medium because I was afraid that people WOULD find and read what I wrote. Recognizing that last part was the thing that got me moving.

 

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén