In Today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* A Book Recommendation
* Musings About Writing
* Of Interest
Quote of the Day
“We all have our time machines, don’t we. Those that take us back are memories … And those that carry us forward are dreams.” HG Wells
A Book Recommendation
I strongly recommend The Symbols We Carry: Finding Strength and Steadiness in the Lessons Life Leaves Behind.
This book is “a deeply personal exploration of resilience, connection, and the unexpected reminders that help us keep moving forward when life becomes difficult.” See the cover and read the description.
The author also is the son of a gunfighter, Sergeant Major Lonnie Martin, my closest Marine Corps buddy from back in the day.
All proceeds from the book support Symbolisms for Resilience, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to reminding people that they are not alone. Please tell all your friends.
The book is only $25.49 (includes shipping) for a signed paperback. I just bought a copy.
Musings About Writing
I tend to psychoanalyze everything that goes on in my head and everything that comes out of it. I constantly question myself and my own thoughts. Not so much the What as the Why. All of that goes on anytime I’m awake, even when I’m in the middle of writing a short story, a novel, or a bit of nonfiction.
So my waking life is riddled with mental distractions. On the other hand, I seem to have a built-in retraction mechanism, so the distractions enable me to get a lot more done. If my thought process was set with a musical theme, the music would be mostly a series of comical “boings,” some major and some minor, some louder and some quieter.
Back when I was posting a new edition of TNDJ pretty much every day, anytime a new idea for a post popped into my head, I usually detoured out of whatever I was writing, wrote the new idea or the whole post right then, then went back to whatever I was working on.
I loved the challenge of posting every day, partly because it enabled me to write a lot more than I was writing in only my fiction. The longer I can stay busy as a writer of either fiction or nonfiction every day, the better I like it.
As I’ve said many times before, writers write. And of course, WHAT you write doesn’t matter so much as THAT you write. So the distraction-retraction thing is a good problem to have.
Writing is what we aspire to do, and it’s what we do, and it’s even who we are. Writers are on duty 24/7/365. When we aren’t writing we’re wishing we were writing or thinking about writing or sleeping.
And who knows what goes on while we’re sleeping? Maybe even dreams are only a mechanism to divert us from the fact that we’re actually hard at work, composing a story or working through a scene of our novel in some dark corner off to the side.
If only someone would invent a word processor keyboard we could access with our brain while we’re sleeping, and when we wake up and get our coffee and open our ‘real’ computer word processor, everything we’d written overnight would be there.
How cool would that be? How prolific could we be then?
Anyway, we’re pretty fortunate, really. Not all practitioners in all professions can say they actually are what they do.
I think that’s one reason I came up with Chopped Livah. The topics over there are so involved and so detailed and so down in the weeds that they play into all of the above. Even as I’m writing something for CL, I continually—sometimes even consciously—remind myself to dig deeper and include more about the topic.
And of course that becomes a problem because so many of the topics overlap each other. So even while I’m focusing down tightly on one topic, that focus itself often causes another topic to spring to mind and my distraction-retraction mechanism boings into action.
To be sure I don’t lose the pop-up topic, I open another Notepad document and write a little or a lot about that topic—whatever I have at the moment—before I return to the first Notepad document to continue laying out my thoughts on the original topic.
But writing the second topic often causes another topic to spring to mind: Like the topic of “Working on More Than One Topic or Project at a Time.” (See? There’s another one.)
Or something might pop up that I think will be fun to share with TNDJ readers, like this Musings topic, so I come over here to write something like this. And if anyone happened to saunter by and ask why, I’d revert to a five year old boy, shrug, and say “I dunno.”
So anyway, eventually I have several Notepad documents open and sometimes I’m switching from one to another to another, adding bits and pieces here and there as they occur to me.
Plus I have a few other documents open and waiting in the wings (“in the wings” is the taskbar at the bottom of the screen) because they contain little bits and pieces that I scribbled down at some other time and want to be sure to include in the appropriate CL or TNDJ topic as I’m writing it:
IF I remember I have that bit or piece in another document (and which documents it’s in) while I’m writing that topic. And if not, with any luck at all, my brain will boing again and remind me of it during one of many cycling sessions.
Sigh. But at least I’ve remembered (so far) to click Save As when I start a new document and then Save after I glance at it and take from it what I need before I return to the earlier document or begin yet another one.
But as I said earlier, all of that is a good problem to have, at least for me. I’m not complaining, just explaining. All of that going on means I’m writing pretty much the whole time I’m in the Hovel. (Now I need to work on that composing while asleep thing.)
Well, not the ‘whole’ time I’m in the Hovel. But these days when I take a break to play a game of Spider or to carry my empty coffee mugs up to the house or check the mail or visit the grocery or whatever else, it isn’t out of boredom for lack of anything else to do. These days I’m actually taking a break because I need a break.
Anyway, the initial purpose of this post was to pass along to you that I’m not writing any fiction at the moment. Then all that ‘why not?’ stuff above sprang to mind and I wrote that instead.
And while I’m on that topic, the Why Not? is that I chose to set fiction aside for the time being. Probably only until I can get my head uncluttered enough to get at least two posts ahead for Chopped Livah. That’s the plan. Of course, there are the boings to consider.
Plus I always want to write a little something for TNDJ as it occurs to me so the Journal doesn’t devolve into only a Monday post for Bradbury and whatever else I can think of in the moment.
Anyway, now, since I started Chopped Livah, I’m actually putting new words on the page for probably 7 to 10 hours a day instead of the 4 to 6 hours per day I was doing before.
And to me, that is Heaven itself. Or maybe magic. Which brings to mind another thought: To me, even the physical act of typing itself is magic.
Writing and bringing characters and a world and a story to life is certainly magic, but here I’m talking about the actual physical act of typing, of striking a series of keys and watching alpha characters and digits appear elsewhere, either on paper or on a screen.
Typing was magical to me even before dedicated word processors with their tiny 4- or 6-line screens and then computers with much larger screens. It was magical that pressing a key on a typewriter keyboard would cause a little rod to swing up—or later, a little “letter ball” to pivot around and jump—and strike a ribbon and place a letter or number on a sheet of paper. I mean, how ridiculously cool is that?
I could easily see the mechanical process back then, but it was still magical, and it’s even more magical now. Now I press various keys and different letters and number apparently ‘fly’ through thin air and appear on a screen inches or even feet away from the keyboard.
Are we spoiled, or what?
I can almost hear the minuscule sound of the letters and bits of punctuation hitting the screen, squealing their way through whatever kind of plastic that is, and imbedding themselves on the virtual page. It’s nothing short of wondrous.
But back to writing.
In a way, I’m involved again with my own Bradbury Challenge too, albeit with nonfiction articles instead of short stories. I predict that this coming week, while I’m striving to get a little “ahead” on articles for Chopped Livah, I’ll probably write at least 10,000 words of nonfiction and maybe twice that.
If I could sustain that for a year, that alone would be well over half a million words, not counting whatever fiction I write.
Oh, but anyway, I set fiction aside, remember?
Yeah, but ideas pop up from those worlds too, don’t they? And if one does, what’s another open document on the desktop among friends?
Of Interest
Note: I’ve provided both of the following articles from LitHub in PDF (but LitHub provided them free) so you won’t have to put up with all the annoying pop-up ads. Clicking either link will cause the article to download without so much as a by-your-leave.