tychoish, now without a net

With a title like the “Daily Grind,” I suspect you’re expecting a post about how I’m acclimating to my new 9-5 job. Wrong. I think this one is more about publishing schedules in new media, but, it’s probably a lot more connected than I want to think about.

I suppose first off, I should cop to the fact that I am totally guilty–when I know I’m going to be in crunch time–of writing entries in runs of six or so, and then posting them out one by one, so that the blog maintains a daily publication schedule, and I can put energy when it needs to go.

Second off, I should note that I’ve been listening to Jared Axelrod’s’s now daily (or almost compleatly daily, at least of ep ~60-70 where I am now) podcast “The Voice of Free Planet X.” I’ve been listening to VoFPX for a while, and I’ve always liked it (so if you don’t listen to it, you should it’s good stuff), but Jared’s said something interesting recently–by my frame–that I want to reflect upon.

Jared reported having some trouble keeping a weekly posting schedule, because it was something that you could put off if things got tight and still–more or less–keep your schedule. In contrast, you can’t really put off something that is supposed to happen daily more than a few hours or else you don’t meet the deadline. I’d also add that in a lot of cases as creators we say–at least to our selves–if it comes out weekly it has to represent a weeks worth of work, whereas if it comes out daily it represents–in most cases–proportionally less work, and just has to exist.

And the truth about writing, and creating–particularly on the internet–is that success is pretty random. Having a story, or a site, podcast, or a video that “works” and becomes popular is not the effect of some transcendental skill, and even a not incredibly strongly correlation to skill; but rather a function of the quantity of output. You got to keep putting things out, keep making things, and the more you make the more likely something is to really “make it.”

When blogs first started, everyone praised them because they made publishing online really easy. You wrote something and hit post. That was it. For the most part blogs (and other related media) succeed as we hit the post button more. And this corresponds to our reading style. It takes just as long to read a blog post with meticulously crafted prose as it does to read one that was written in the morning on half a cup of coffee. And the chances are, that posting frequently will lead to more success (where success equals audience size) because people will check regularly updated sites more often than sites that update less frequently.

As a result of this I’ve made the observation on a number of occasions, that while a firm and regular posting schedule will cement and stabilize a your audience/readership of plus or minus a few percent, you can’t “jump” levels simply by increasing volume of content generation.

So I guess there are a couple of threads to this argument the “schedules are good for audiences” and the “schedules are good for creation.” Having trounced the former sufficiently, lets move on to the later.

I think clearly we all work at different speeds, and we do different things, I think I do better with this kind of scheduling. It’s helped the blogging, for me, and projects like 365 Tomorrows, and Thing a Week, j.r. blackwell’s photos and so forth, all seem to be creative successes (and I suspect distribution-increasing successes as well.)

It’s just a hair brained idea at the moment, but I think it might be fun to start a project like this for the fiction writing that I’m not doing at the moment. A daily routine would have the effect of a) getting things out there. b) inspiring an increase in productivity, and writerly practice. Also, I think I’m likely as busy at the moment as I’m likely to be at any time in the next couple of years, and I think I feel like I’ve “got” the blogging rhythm down, and it’s time to add a new project. Just a thought, and I’m making no promises, that’s for sure. More musings in the future.

Onward and Upward!

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tagged: academia • interwebs • journal • writing

I said that I’d write a post about headphones, given my latest headphone recovery project. I have a few thoughts about this so here goes…

I think having a good set of reasonably isolating headphones is one of the most important pieces of technology that an aspiring writer should have. Not ear buds, I’m talking big, over the ear headphones that block out most of the background noise. “Active Noise Canceling” isn’t required (though mine have it, I don’t often turn it on). And since you’re likely to wear them a bunch, headphones that are comfortable have reasonably good sound quality.

A good set of headphones is to my mind, crucial for most group living situations, like dorms–particularly where there isn’t shared music interests. Even if music selection isn’t an interest, having headphones allows independent sleeping schedules and at least let me set up a more distraction free writing and studying environment.

It’s kind of like the perfect personal office. And putting the headphones on can act as a personal marker to separate “work” and “play” times (particularly relevant for me as a writer, as “dicking around on wikipedia” and “writing,” are not otherwise substantially contextually discrete activities.) Though I write whilst listening to music (I basically listen to music constantly) I do sometimes just use the headphones as sort of dorky earplugs, I’ll confess: just to get the isolating and ritual effects.

It’s possible to get the headphone effect with “real” isolation, and it’s possible to establish rituals using other objects/habits, but it’s harder. And you can’t really argue with success.

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tagged: anthropology • productivity • writing

I’ve mentioned before that a lot of my neuroses surrounding productivity and creativity get enacted around the organization of my files on the computer, right?

Well they do.

I spend, probably way too much time thinking and considering the schemes that I name my files, their organization in relation to each other, their internal organization, the way their backed up. And so forth. The good thing is that I’m usually pretty happy with the way things are organized, and I tend to establish pretty flexible systems, but when I’m coming back to a couple projects after some time off or I’m restarting work on a project (at the beginning of a semester, say) I’m prone to clean house–as it were.

As the anxiety surrounding my past couple of months dragged on, and as that was wrapped up in a bunch of concerns about the state of my projects, I rearranged and reorganized things a few times, and for completely different reasons, got a lot of nothing done. Long story short, while I don’t like the way that the files were back in January, I also don’t like the way they are now.

The eternal debate is between putting a bunch of stuff (files/ideas) in a few baskets (folders/files) or putting a lot of little groups of stuff in a lot of baskets (folders/files). The bigger the baskets the more complex naming schemes have to be to keep the piles separate, but the chance that any one thing is in a specific basket is pretty high. So if there’s folders for “archives” “current” and “output,” and you’re looking for an old file that you haven’t touched in a few weeks, it’s probably pretty likely that it’s in the archives folder. And what you’re working on is in current. But if you have a lot of little files, say you’re writing an essay, a knitting pattern, and a play, and all have several files, you need a pretty complex naming scheme to keep things together. And you have to have this scheme in place early, because otherwise, it’s a mess. In contrast, if you have 6 (or three) different folders (with their own subfolders) for different projects it becomes much easier to ignore a file/project if you think “ah, I’m not feeling very dramaturgical today.” So I hope that sets the stage.

Once upon a time, rather than having files and directories like I do now, I would use programs like Voodoopad which is a great piece of software, and I used it quite successfully for a long time. The end result was that I wasn’t really using it like you’re supposed to, and it magnified this problem, because moving pages around in the VP was more difficult than moving the files around. And all the other wiki programs seemed less suitable (I really hate web apps, don’t get me started.) But as I’ve been writing here recently, I think I’m ready for that kind of approach again.

So I think I’ve discovered the best of both worlds: ikiwiki. This is a program that reads files in the format that I like most (plain text, markdown) and then turns it into a blog. It basically works off of a flat file system except(!) it uses a couple of nifty CGI wrappers (on the webserver and as a post-commit hook) to use a versioning system like Subversion or Git, to keep track of everything. Works like a dream, and there are tons of plugins that work pretty well. I have it installed on my own machine, but I expect that once Joe and I get some stuff nailed down, I’ll have a copy of it running here for some community editing and more of my rough thoughts.

Here’s hoping it all works out, I’ll keep you all posted.

Onward and Upward!

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tagged: technology • writing

So I was having a discussion with an old writing friend and we were discussing our futures which are both pretty much in the air.

She consoled by saying something like; “well some time off to get some grounding will probably help you more than sitting in rooms and talking about dead authors,” clearly misremembering that aspirations to publish science fiction aside, I’m a social scientist at heart.

An honest mistake, particularly given context.

I remembered then a similar mistake when people–particularly from a knitting context–are almost always in shock when I report that I am in fact not going to art school nor do I have a particular interest in going.

Both of these, are I think, likely to get a laugh out of people that know me well.

I think that’s what’s most difficult about this whole stage of life where I’m sort of back to square one trying to figure things out is that what I want to do in the short term, and what I want to do in the long term, and what my strongest skills are, are all wildly divergent.

And then I remember that my problem isn’t that I don’t have any options, it’s that I have too many options. Which is hardly a problem at all.

The thing is that does nothing to make it better just a little less scary, so I’ll take it.

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tagged: academia • writing

I’ve probably beaten the discussion about linear and non-linear writing methods, wikis, and the computer programing metaphor to the ground and you’re all probably tragically bored with this, particularly if you’re here for the next crumb of the pattern for the latvian dreaming, but no matter, here we are. I listened to the interview with ward cunningham recently, and I’ve been thinking about these things for a while so it surfaces yet again.

I’ve said a few times that I have a hard time “writing non-linearly,” that I feel as if I’m too story/narrative focused to really be effective in writing stories and essays in a modular or nonlinear sort of way. I’ve also had a hard time working on using wiki-like software as a personal notebook because alone I don’t tend develop ideas and thoughts in the right sort of way to make these systems useful for any meaningful length of time. In fact I think I started this blog (almost a year ago) because I thought that the blog was a format for notebook that mirrored the way that I often thought about things (and indeed my paper notebooks are very blog-like).

But I wanted to cover new ground in this entry. I’ve been turning over a couple of new ideas in the past few days. First is the notion of “refactoring” in agile/extreme programing. Basically, this is the notion that when writing code, if you’re not writing linearly, it’s important to go through the code and “refactor” or reevaluate older code to make it more efficient and work better as the larger program changes and develops. Cunningham said (and it’s true) that once you’ve written it once, going back and moving chunks (scenes/objects) around so that they make more sense. I’ve always thought about editing in terms of passes, and because I’ve never really written modularly, I don’t really edit modularly (which is, near as I can tell the only way to do it.)¹

The second concept, this comes from wiki “theory” for lack of a better term is the notion that nonlinear documents (like wikis) grow and develop structure as they need it. Cunningham, on the podcast said, “wikis always seem to be as big as they need to be,”² and while I don’t know nearly enough about chaos theory to be fully articulate about this, I think that this is a very bottom-up or “chaotic” system that asserts itself over the larger document is pretty powerful and useful, if you’re not fighting it. In my experience wiki’s that I’ve tried to build have all fallen down as I’ve tried to create structure before creating content, or anticipate my organizational thinking ahead of time. The lesson? Let organizational systems develop organically, even if you don’t trust this, and adjust later rather than forcing a system that probably will cause collapse which is in the end more work for less payoff than the first option.

I think both of these lessons (refactor early and often, let nonlinear documents structure themselves) are ones that I can take to both my writing and digital note taking projects in the future. Maybe these were things that you all had figured out already, alas, maybe this is why this is my blog and not yours!

Just saying.

Onward and Upward!

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tagged: productivity • writing

I didn’t sleep well, but I used the extra little awakeness to write emails, which I’ve been avoiding, but need to be written. I’m coping, and I’m all sorts of cranky–some of which comes out in this entry–but these things pass as well. I’m doing well enough to avoid laundry, so that’s a good sign.

Anyway, so I’ve been browsing about on ravelry and live journal recently for lack of other procrastinating to do (like the past week or so) and I’ve begun to develop a new “type” of internet citizen. A type particularly prevalent on LJ and the rav’:

The Overwhelmingly Creative:

These are, generally older (I’ve never seen an overwhelmingly creativity person under 35, I think younger people can blame most of these characteristics on too much neural plasticity, or something), folks who dabble in a lot of creative endeavors, but don’t have a lot of output. They talk about how creative and/or artistic they are in their profiles or other “about me,” spaces, but the cursory glimpse of their journals/portfolio doesn’t reveal a particularly unusual amount (or kind) of production. They often discuss their aptitude or success at a wide range of wildly dissimilar crafts/activities (eg. metalsmithing, painting, tai chi, felting, dog grooming, and collage). Again, allow me to stress the overprotection, the dabbling, and the poor/unrealistic self concept.

And generally I could care less. I think Marilyn, bless her heart (heh), would call these folks “knitdweebs,” and thats part of the issue, but I think there’s more.

So this “type” fabrication is mostly in jest, but it has brought up a number of more serious concerns:

• Craft, largely because of it’s association with women, is devalued, and crafters as a result. Also the latest commercial revival hasn’t helped: Stitch and Bitch, and the Discovery Channel daytime programing all reinscribe craft on women-ness and while this is sells product, recruits new knitters, and is empowering and feels great, I’m not sure that it’s the best thing to elevate the craft.
  • More knitter’s doesn’t equal more power/respect for the craft of knitting. Arguably, a smaller proportion of the population knits today than did 40 or 80 years ago, so I don’t think making knitting “bigger” is the same as getting power/respect. Not that it’s a bad thing that new people knit and that the craft grows, but that if you want to talk about changing the craft in any meaningful way, you have to do more.

• I do a lot of things that others consider to be creative: I write, I knit and spin, I dance, etc. People sometimes, particularly in knitting contexts, ask if I’m (was, trying to be) in graduate school for art, right after they’re awed by the creativity of my sweaters, or something. Which always strikes me as weird. I mean, I love the compliment, but I think is misguided. Creativity is a situational response to constraint, not some characteralogical feature. I do all of the “creative” things I do because I enjoy the technical experience and exercise of knitting and spinning and dancing (I write because I have something that I want to say.)

  Creativity happens when I (or anyone) has to figure out how to convey a series of fictional events in a coherant manner, or when you have to figure out how to fit a sweater over a shoulder without puckering or stretching and still maintaining the pattern. Hell, creativity is figuring out how to efficiently get from South St. Louis City to an inner suburb in the north/west county (Creve Coeur) allowing for the fact that the city has no really good North-South roads, and the major East-West artery closed for most of the next decade for construction. We all do this, the same as anyone else. Our choices about what we spend our time doing, is largely unrelated as far as I’m concerned.

I wonder and worry that there might be trouble in these thoughts notions. That my dismissal of creativity might be connected to the fact that I participate in largely feminized crafts (spinning, knitting), or otherwise undervalued genres (folk/morris dance, science fiction.) ‘Cold be. I hope not, but the thought has crossed my mind.

Thoughts?

Onward and Upward!

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tagged: knitting • writing