You can be an expert with the blogger's secret:
1. Pick a topic.
2. Write about it twice a day.
3. At the end of six months, you will be an expert.
Note well: choose carefully what you want to be an expert about! It's mighty hard to be an expert about more than one thing this way, just because it consumes so much time.
I used to send a lot more postcards, back in the day when I was on airplanes all the time.
Jason Womack sends this out in his newsletter recently, about holiday cards and card writing in general:
Chances are however you celebrate the closing of one year and the opening of another, you will connect with more people in your network during the holiday season.
People wonder how I have time for it all. They ask me, "You REALLY write handwritten cards weekly?" My answer is yes...and I love it.
Here's how I do it:
* I buy a 5-10 cards at a time. I write my return address and put a first class stamp on it, so it's ready to go. I put those cards into an "action" folder that goes into my briefcase.
* Whenever I have some down time like when I'm early to a meeting, sitting at an airport, waiting for a seminar to begin, or on a break while coaching, I simply open that folder. Really, all I need is 4 minutes, and I can get it done quickly and easily!
* For the holidays, I prefer to write a personal note, rather than just sign my name. If you're going to make the effort to reach out, say something!
I learned to write postcards from my grandfather Marshall Kay, a geologist who would send appropriate ones from his field trips. Perhaps the solution is more field trips to exotic locations (or more locations that provide postcards as handy self-promotional materials).
@kwispel This weather sucks... METAR EHAM 050855Z 16005KT 9999 -RADZ FEW018 SCT022 BKN035 13/11 Q1029 NOSIG=
@Squigy Halloween was not so good. I mean, it was raining, all the clubs were busy AND we end up in a bar with the worst waitress in the world.
@zztype Poor kids. 6:30 p.m. Raining quite a bit. Traffic super heavy. Took 90 minutes to get from town to home. Halloween might be a bust this year
@a2weather HALLOWEEN WX (WUND) Chance of rain 30 percent.
@sft it's halloween...it's supposed to be raining
@eponabri Halloween lights up, just before it started to rain
Technorati Tags: nanowrimo
From Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, on shitty first drafts:
Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. People tend to look at successful writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated.
Merlin Mann at 43 Folders on turning procrastination into your shitty first draft:
The trick is to find that very first point when some part of your thinking can be converted from uncaptured brain droppings into notes, doodles, outlines, or any kind of markings on a page — even though it’s clearly not ready to be shaped into a deliverable just yet. Whether it’s your unified field theory of physics or a 50-word blog post about the molé burrito you just ate, it pays to get something down. Anything. In my experience, getting that hand in motion tends to really stimulate creativity. The rough draft process is where procrastination is finally displaced by clarity, focus, and a fuller understanding of the relationships between the things that have been collecting in your brain pan.
Josh DiMauro uses paper to capture his shitty first draft:
That’s why you start with paper.
Because, again, your first draft is going to suck. You want to get it out and down, so that you can move on, and redo it completely later.
And there’s something about paper that makes it a lot easier to do crappy work quickly: it’s just paper. Who cares if your sketch comes out looking like a frog being taken from behind by an e. coli bacterium? You’re going to move on to the next shitty sketch, and to the next, and to the next. And then you’re going to sift through them, and gather up maybe two or three, and dump the rest.
That’s the whole point. It’s just paper, so it doesn’t count.
Now, on to the project that is calling me to do the shitty first drafts of the deliverables before I start to do the work so that I can see what the gap is between current reality and desired reality.
"Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life" (Anne Lamott)
Technorati Tags: anne-lamott, bird-by-bird, lifehacks, paper, hosting
There are a lot of reasons to keep a single blog together - you have a single web presence, everyone can find you in one place, and you can point everyone at one URL and they mostly can see who you are.
That said, there's a lot of reasons to pull your net presence apart into fragment, especially if you have interests that diverge. The network likes to see things that have focus, and if your category list is anything like the category list on this blog (with 1000 posts and easily 100 different clumps of articles that could be extended out into their own) it can be hard to be notable for anything except eclecticism. Pull things apart, and each of the sections get their own chance to grow.
When I pulled out Superpatron into its own stream I almost immediately doubled the number of people who could follow it, since it wasn't mixed in with recipes and Ann Arbor news and so on. I'm thinking about more low volume pieces of this blog to pull out into their own worlds, with the first one in mind being a2b3 since that weekly Thursday lunch group already has enough going on in the real world that it doesn't need to be mushed in here.
as seen on the 37 Signals newsletter
"I got a scribbled comment that changed the way I rewrote my fiction once and forever. Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this mot: 'Not bad, but PUFFY. You
need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.'"
As captured on a piece of paper I will be throwing away:
I need to spend less time online and more time on paper. Online time is a huge time sink which saps my energy and gets in the way of being with people.
Of course, the only reason I will be able to retrieve this thought in the future is because it was once typed in online. My papyrophilic self resents the time spent on the interwebs. I suspect it's more a matter of balance than anything else.
Technorati Tags: papyrophilic
One of the tenets of agile project management is a focus on velocity, which means in this context some kind of accurate measurement of how long tasks actually take vs. how long you planned to do them. If you have good estimates from the past as to how many work units you have to do and how long each work unit takes to accomplish, you might just be able to predict when you'll be done.
I did some velocity estimation at the cafe tonight. As an exercise in writing a lot of words in not very much time, I twittered to myself taking notes on some thoughts I was having and wrote them down on paper (mercifully sparing my SMS friends who won't have to pay $0.15 each to get a record of my inner thoughts). At top mocha fueled speed, a quadrille page filled up in 17 minutes, and I time stamped each line. A second pair of pages took 75 minutes (37 min/page) after some of the coffee wore off and with the writing mixed in with conversations.
It was a really weird way to write, almost like instant messaging myself on paper. I love it when the structures of the net infect my paper notebooks, and it was a very productive way to capture a lot of thinking concisely and without getting too distracted. I cheated a couple of times by IM'ing friends (you'll note the previous entry about time tracking) from my mobile device while I was writing - the effect on paper is to have someone else's thoughts in the same format intermingle with yours.
I don't think it would work for me without coffee, not the top speed writing. I was able to keep up without any problems. As a practice of notebook keeping, time stamping your entries is a good standard practice, but I hadn't thought of them as twitters (as opposed to paragraphs) until tonight.
Seen previously: My quadrille notebook looks like Gmail; my writing on paper looks like web pages; my mind is a web browser.
Technorati Tags: agile, projectmanagement, velocity, cariboucoffee, twitter, quadrille, jabber, paper, coffee
Writer Alison Gresik describes Dorothy Bryant's system for writing novels starting with 3x5 cards:
On Monday, my day off, I picked up Dorothy Bryant's book, Writing a Novel and reread the planning chapter. Bryant is the author of The Kin of Ata Are Waiting For You, among many other books, and she has a unpretentious approach to the mechanics of novel writing. Even though I've written short stories before, even a linked collection, I've been somewhat mystified about how to tackle a novel. How much should I map out ahead of time? How do I know when I'm finished planning and can start to write?
Bryant describes a system of planning that uses 3x5 file cards. She writes short notes for settings, character, and plot on these cards, and throws them all into a box. She reads through all the cards each day, and writes more, until she finds she's repeating herself and not coming up with new material. Then she categorizes the cards into piles. Putting all the cards together and shuffling them around shows her where there are holes in her plot or gaps in her character sketches. She writes more cards to fill these gaps, and then she's ready to begin her first draft.
Sounds promising - I have the book on order on interlibrary loan to see it in her own words.
UPDATE:
From the newsletter Holt Uncensored #312 in 2002:
Dear Holt Uncensored:
Could you please let those of us who would like to buy this Dorothy Bryant book about writing a novel where and how we can get it? I just talked with a wonderful woman at Kepler's (they're all wonderful, of course) who found the book and a 510 number of the publisher, but she was afraid it might not be available any longer. Bookpeople and Ingram do not carry it.
Debbie Duncan
Holt responds: "Writing a Novel" is still in print and available from Ata Books, 1928 Stuart St., Berkeley, CA 94703. Pre-paid order by check. $9.95, plus $2 shipping, plus .80 tax if you live in California. If you want ordering information on all of Dorothy Bryant's books, write to the same address. Phone 510 841-9613, FAX 510 548-9846
And the main Dorothy Bryant web site has more details and ordering information.
One of the Very Short Stories published in Wired Magazine.
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