Peer Pressure Prevails

For someone who does not like joining, I seem to end up in a lot of things I would not do on my own.

I suppose it must peer pressure.

I find that I have agreed to attempt both NaPoWriMo (a poem posted each day in April) as well as Camp NaNoWriMo, a novel in April.

What was I thinking? Certainly not that I could do it. There is nothing in my history to make me believe that. But my friends asked me to lend them support and I understand how valuable that can be. I surely don’t have much else to offer them.

So check in here for poems and progress reports.

Assuming I make any.

Turning 65

I am all ready to be 65. I've often wondered why, of all the birthdays that are considered "big ones", no one seems to complain about the 65th.

I think I understand now.

Never mind that the ferry system grants discounts when you are 65. Never mind that in the eyes of restaurants everywhere you are well-and-truly a "senior". The big thing is getting on Medicare.

You see, I'm in that sector of the populace that actually will see improved benefits and a vast reduction in expenses once Medicare kicks in. I pay a small fortune for terrible medical coverage: it doesn't pay anything until I'm broke and in the hospital. That's pretty bad compared to Medicare. There's too many things to detail here, but I now know why few Boomers really complain about the 65th.

I'm looking forward to it.

And it's not as if I could successfully pretend that I'm much younger...

I forgot to blog

I know. It happens to us all at some time or another. In the rush to keep living, I have I suppose that's fair, since I seldom read blogs either.
I'd sure like to know the answer to one question: why does anyone read a person's blog? Really. It's probably just me, but the things I have read are seldom worth the time it takes to read them. Certainly, that is true of what I have previously posted. I don't even read my own blog.
I do, however, make my living as a writer. Or did, until recently. (That's a whole other story). That means that I know how to write and do not consider it a trivial thing. Maybe that's the problem. Is blogging really writing? Or is it a form of diary one has no intention of keeping secret?
I don't really write in a diary, either. Except as a cathartic, I don't see the point. I have the diaries my grandmother and my mother kept, back in the days when a person bought a hardbound book for the year and wrote actual entries for each day. Most of the ones my grandmother wrote consist of "tired today" and little else. Some few are very sad. No happy entries. I guess I never gave much thought to whether or not she was happy while I knew her. Now that she's gone, there's not much I can do.

My mother's diaries are a bit happier, but I never knew her as she died when I was age two.
Is that what I leave for others to read when I'm gone? This blog? Man, how depressing is that?

A New Plan

I often have the feeling that the day has fled past with little to show for the hours.

I would have said that there is no good that can come from that feeling, but it turns out that is not the case. I'm a list-maker by nature. I like to know that I haven't missed anything. There is also the satisfaction that comes from checking a box on a line item. At the end of the day, those checked boxes let me feel as if I have accomplished something.

My new plan involves making a list of the major areas in which I spend my time. For me, that is:

• Writing (game articles, second book in the Shrine trilogy, short stories)



• At home tasks (transcriptions, cleaning, groceries, etc.)



• Work tasks (THWmodule, DocBook, etc.)

I found a good mind-mapping package called MindNode. The company offers a free version and I used it to brainstorm a table-full of things I do in an ideal day.

This was all inspired by an article on incorporating OPML into a writer's work flow, if you can imagine that. Investigation into workflow as a concept led me to discover that I don't have a very good idea of how I spend my time when I'm not at work.

That's not good, in my opinion.

So I selected two writing projects. I broke the home tasks into Chores and Errands, the difference being whether or not the task is at home or away. And I added a section for Trivia: things such as email and reading. (No, neither of these is really trivial, but they don't contribute much to my sense of accomplishment and are therefore put in this category.)

Using MindNode, I learned that I can better organize my day. Here's what I do each morning:

• In NoteBook, I copy yesterday's organizing page to a new page and date it for today.



• I delete any unique tasks that were checked off yesterday and clear the checks from any recurring tasks.



• I clear the copied journal entries at the bottom of the page, making ready for today's entries.



• I make sure that I have launched my daily tools:



• 
  
  
  
  • MindNode for brainstorming
  
  
  
  • Scrivener from Literature and Latte for serious texts.
  
  
  
  • EagleFiler from C-Command sort, store, and tag my files by project.
  
  
  
  • Notebook, which is already running.
  
  
  
  • EverNote to capture snippets of text and other off-topic ideas as they occur during the day.
  
  
  
  

To make all this work for me, I also had to be a bit clearer about my disk organization. Over the last few months, I have started a number of projects (visit Barbara Sher's Scanner Tribe if you want to understand why) and had let them grow in an uncontrolled manner. That had to be fixed.

Because I have two computers, I also run DropBox. I confirmed that the key applications all work with DropBox. Each project has a folder in DropBox, and all the files (mind maps, outlines, drafts, notes, and snippets) all land in the appropriate folder.

Don't misunderstand me. My days are not "organized". I still flit from thing to thing as the mood/need takes me. But when I sit down a moment, I can bring my notebook page to the front and get reminders about what else there is to be done.

If I think of something new, it gets a line item on the notebook page. If I decide it will be a project (i.e. it has 3 steps or more), it gets a project folder, a page in the notebook all of its own, a tag in EagleFiler, and a section in EverNote.

Now, at the end of the day, I am rewarded with the feeling that I've accomplished something. It's all right there: notes, checked boxes, drafts, sketches. Everything.

Very satisfying.