Change in Focus
I've relocated the Southern Athenaeum and will begin posting more there soon. The new blog comes with a bonus Twitter feed. I've rebranded this site, beelers' life, to talk about family, Apple hardware & software, and my own brand of OCD GTD.
Create.
Start.
Stop fiddling. Stop reading the news. Stop surfing and finding the latest cool deals or gadgets.
I’m at my desk with some music streaming through iTunes (Radio Paradise at the moment, but I may switch over to some jazz or classical). That is the only data coming through my wireless network. I’ve quit all of the other applications, the bells and whistles and dings that distract from the work. No e-mail. No instant messages. Safari isn’t running and I’m not obsessively reloading Facebook or checking for the latest news on CNN.
Merlin Mann said his fingers have to be physically moving for 10 or 15 minutes before his brain knows that it’s time to work and there is a lot of truth to that. He said something else pithy that sounded stupid to me at first but is making more and more sense.
“You can’t think your way out of a writing block, but you can write your way out of a thinking block.”
—Merlin Mann, from a talk at MaxFunCon 2009
If I leave it to my brain to get ready to create something, I’ll never create anything. I have to set some goals for myself—good goals that focus on writing—something like sit down and don’t get up until you’ve written so many words, or don’t allow myself to do anything I want to do for a set amount of time; do what I’m doing right now. Shut up. Sit down. Unplug. Write.
I’ve written a bit more than 1,000 words this morning. My fingers are limbering up and so is my mind. I’m having to backspace less often, making less typos as my brain and fingers sync up get into gear.
What is it that causes me not to write?
Another bit of insight from Merlin Mann is that many of us, if not all of us. Are afraid of sucking. “Nobody wants to be seen sucking,” he said. I think that I’ve been afraid to suck. I look at past work and realize I don’t like any of the ideas. I think about what I want to write and see nothing.
Nothing is too strong, but my focus is shifting from dreamy thoughts of writing the next great southern gothic american novel to something more realistic, nonfiction. Maybe one day I’ll move back toward writing some fiction.
Hat tip to maximumfun.org.
Father’s Day always brings mixed emotions to me as a father and as a son. This year, the three children who still live at home made today very special with some gifts that came from their heart.
Meagan and Katheryn both bought project kits so they could create their own handmade picture frames to hold photos they picked out for me. Jordan also created his gifts to me. He painted me an airplane and a baseball player with his #1 on the jersey. After spending so much time at the edge of a baseball diamond with him this summer it was an appropriate memento.
This Father’s Day was more special because I am going to be able to adopt Jordan, Meagan, and Katheryn. They have been my children in my heart for a long time now, but now the circle can be completed. I am thankful this has become possible. We didn’t think we would ever have that option.
One special thing I was able to do for Father’s Day was help Meg mail a gift to Julie’s ex-husband. I helped her burn a special CD, made a special trip to Wal-Mart to buy the proper envelope to keep it safe on it’s journey, took her to the post office to send it away and paid extra for express shipping to try to get her gift to him on time. She was so appreciative of that and I think we bonded just a little bit more on that day. I was happy to help her with that.
As I write this, it is 6:05 p.m. I haven’t heard from my oldest son and I’m starting to think I never will again. I’ve tried to reach him by cell phone and letter since Christmas and have heard nothing back from him. I gave my life to him and asked for little in return, but something seems to have turned him completely against me and that breaks my heart. I’ll keep thinking of him daily, loving him, and hoping that one day his heart with soften toward me.
And along with many sons who have lost their father, Father’s Day is bittersweet. I can reflect on the wonderful times that I was able to spend with my dad, but it also makes me think of all the times I missed with him. He never saw me married. He never saw my successes. He never met his grandchildren. I have to focus on the good or drown in the things we missed together.
But today has been a great day. I have four wonderful children and three of them are beginning their lives again with me. I hope I can give them the opportunities they need to succeed and look forward to watching them grow up and sharing our lives together.
Ever since watching the following TED talk by Seth Godin, I’ve been following his blog. I recommend you do the same if your interested in having good ideas and acting on them. If you do nothing else, take 17 minutes and 23 seconds out of your life to learn how you can begin changing the world:
An observation made while wearing reading glasses
As I’ve gotten older my eyesight has grown weaker. Not too long ago, I bought some reading glasses to help me focus and found they help in more than the intended fashion.
The glasses do a fine job of bringing the work before me into focus, but they perform a second unintended duty of throwing everything around me besides my work out of focus. This not only helps my aging eyes focus on my work, but by casting a haze over what isn’t it in the focal point it helps my mind as well.
I’ve been a longtime user of the Monaco font for my monospaced work (like I use in TextMate to compose these blog posts). While perusing my daily news, I stumbled across this article about programming fonts and found Consolas. It’s a slightly different monospace (I know this will annoy fontheads, but how different can monospace fonts really be?) that is a bit cleaner than Monaco.
Then I got to the writer’s Number 1 choice and will follow his lead by installing Inconsolata. A very tidy monospace that I’ll be updating all of my monospace spaces with (Mail, terminal, and my wonderful TextMate).
That’s all really. Just font talk. Nothing more to see here.
An interesting side to Jack Kerouac:
A New Book Details Jack Kerouac’s Obsession With Fantasy Baseball – NYTimes.com
Almost all his life Jack Kerouac had a hobby that even close friends and fellow Beats like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs never knew about. He obsessively played a fantasy baseball game of his own invention, charting the exploits of made-up players like Wino Love, Warby Pepper, Heinie Twiett, Phegus Cody and Zagg Parker, who toiled on imaginary teams named either for cars the Pittsburgh Plymouths and New York Chevvies, for example or for colors the Boston Grays and Cincinnati Blacks.
Textbooks are on their way out of the schoolhouse door. Books on the shelf are probably not too far behind, but I still love the feel and smell of a good book. The entire article is definitely worth reading.
Jam Side Down: How the Kindle Helps Destroy Textbooks
Keep encyclopedias in mind when you consider the future of textbooks. Like encyclopedias, textbooks will be quickly weakened by digital media and then destroyed altogether by open source content. College textbooks as we now know them will cease to exist K-12 textbooks will take a lot longer, since their purchase is usually mandated by state school boards.
My search for focus continued in DEVONthink Pro today. When I migrated from version 1.x to 2.0beta, I moved from multiple databases to a single database. It turns out that was a mistake for me. I have spent much of this afternoon splitting data back into focused databases. So far, I have four:
- Life
- Reading Library
- Research Library
- Writing
This is a place for receipts, family-related stuff, and other personal information.
Collections of any books I’ve collected over time. Complete books, mostly in PDF format.
Snippets and excerpts of books, articles and Web site. These are generally less than 500 words.
This is for my personal writing. Journals. Article and book drafts.
Several ideas are swirling in my mind recently and I’m struggling to wrestle one down to the ground. I’m beginning to think more about writing non-fiction, but that doesn’t mean the fiction ideas are gone. Still wading through the fog.
I’m not making my Flickr Pro account worth it’s while, yet, but I uploaded a few shots tonight. Enjoy!
Belated link. Sorry!
