Month: August 2016

Humility is Essential

How many times have you heard someone say “I want to make a difference”? It is obvious that they haven’t thought about what they are saying very much. Everyone alive makes a difference. It is not always a positive difference. It is not always a significant difference to many people, but the very fact that you exist changes the world.

Perhaps a better way to phrase what many who say it may mean is “I want to do something to make the world a better place.” This is better but still too ambiguous for my taste. If you’re going to set your goals high, you need to be more specific about what you intend to do. It is the only way that you are going to accomplish them in any case.

First, you need to identify something that you feel very specifically is wrong with the way things are in the world. Be aware, that everyone may not agree with you. Some people may think the thing you are setting out to change is good the way it is. They will fight you every step of the way.

An example of a good goal might be, “I’m going to reduce the carbon footprint of my home town by 20%.” This might be a perfectly reasonable goal. On the other hand, if there has already been a lot of work done on reducing the carbon footprint in your home town, it might be unreasonable. You need to do your homework before you pick a goal.

Second, you need to figure out exactly what you intend to do to bring about the change. You should measure the way things are now and measure them continuously as you execute your changes. You should be able to tell whether you are changing things for the better, for the worse, or having no effect at all on them. If you don’t have specific plans for improving things and measuring your success, you won’t be able to determine whether or not you have  accomplished anything.

And finally, you need to be able to let others take credit for your hard work. If you can’t do that, you may not be able to accomplish your goal and when it gets right down to it, you weren’t really out to make the world a better place but to feed your ego. This last point is the hardest one for most people to accept. But in the end, it is the most important.

By all means, set your goals high. But do it for noble reasons. And when you succeed, the world will really be a better place and you will have made a difference in a very significant and positive way.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

In Which I Draw a Line in the Sand

Back in July I wrote about how the disk drive on my computer crashed. I replaced the drive and have been slowly restoring the software that I had installed on it before the crash. Today I finally got around to restoring the software that I use to write my book. It took several hours. One package, LaTeX, was so big that I had time to play my guitar while I waited for it to load.

I still have to restore my working files and check to make sure that they still produce the book like it was before the crash. This will mark a significant milestone for me. It will start the clock running again on my project to write a book. I have lost a month so I will push the goal back to the end of March. I’m not sure if that is a realistic goal but it will give me something to measure my progress against.

I wanted to go on record here in my blog about the deadline that I’ve set for myself. That way, I can look back and say that at this stage of the process I was this far along and I estimated that it would take seven more months to complete.

I am concerned about the amount of time that I’ve been able to allocate to work on the book. I am going to try to spend at least an hour a day on it during the week and five or six hours a day on the week end. I suspect that is overly ambitious but it is also what I based the March estimate on.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Recommitment

Every morning I sit and write in an electronic journal for forty minutes or so. I write at least a thousand words. That is my daily quota for my journal. I haven’t set a quota of words for my blog posts. They are as long as they need to be in order to say whatever it is I need to say.

I have been doing a lot of self indulgent navel gazing in this venue of late. Two people whose opinions I value have confirmed this. I’ve been looking at the quality of what I have been writing and it is not what I’d like for it to be.

So, I can either quit writing or I can work harder to make it better and more interesting. Only I can’t really quit so that leaves me only the one option. I will be doing less navel gazing though and I’ll be trying more varied and exploratory things. I also will redouble my effort to read what I write and make sure it says what I really mean for it to say.

Sometimes I ask myself why I waited so late to start writing. If I’d started earlier, I’d be much better at it than I am now. But then I realize, the important thing is not that you started late in life, it’s that you started at all.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Puppy Patience

The little dog sat on my knee with her chin on my hand. She was a patient little puppy. She liked to watch as I pressed the keys on the keyboard. She had no idea why I was doing it but it was enough that I was close to her. Next she started licking my thumbs as they hovered over the space bar. Finally, I had to pick her up and hold her while I wrote.

Through it all she was patient. No cat was going to be any better than her at keeping me company while I wrote. She sat on my shoulder and sniffed my hair. I knew I was going to have to make this one short. Soon she would get bored and let me know by barking at me.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people that you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

neercS eht ghuorhT

She had been sitting in front of the computer for half an hour. The glow of the screen would keep her awake for hours. She hadn’t written a word. Her fingers sat on the home row keys. Mrs. Smith, her high school keyboard teacher would have been proud of her. Except she wasn’t typing. She was sitting there staring at the blank place on the screen where her words should be.

“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” she began to type. It wasn’t what she wanted to say but at least there were words on the page now. She reached up and touched the screen. It gave way beneath her touch like the surface of a pond. Her fingers dipped beneath the surface. They felt dry. She could not see a hole where she had touched the screen.

She stuck her head through the screen. There was a darkened room on the other side of the screen. It looked surprisingly like the one on this side of the screen only everything was mirror image in that world. She looked back and forth to see if anyone was in this strange room.

She felt her shoulders nudge the screen and pop she was on the other side, sitting in the mirror chair, looking at the mirror screen. And yes, the text was backwards but it seemed that this was the way that things ought to be. She had no trouble reading it. It said the same thing that she had just typed while she was on the other side of the screen.

This was ridiculous. She must be imagining it. She touched the screen again. It gave way just like before. Again she stuck her head through the screen and found herself being pulled through it just like before. As she sat there looking at the screen she found herself becoming incredulous. This couldn’t be happening.

She touched the screen a third time. This time it was solid to the touch. Had she really just passed through the screen of her computer? And what if she had? Who was going to believe her? But she knew now what she was going to write about.

“He had been sitting in front of the computer for half an hour. The glow of the screen would keep him awake for hours. He hadn’t written a word. His fingers sat on the home row keys. Mr. Smith, his high school keyboard teacher would have been proud of him. Except he wasn’t typing. He was sitting there staring at the blank place on the screen where his words should be…”

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Thinking About Thinking

The funny thing about thinking is that you have to let go in order to have creative thoughts. Often, you can’t look right at the subject that you want to think about, you have to approach it indirectly. You have to be open to try new things. You have to sit down and start writing down ideas as they come to you. You have to stifle the censor that tries to stop you before you begin.

It sometimes helps to enter ideas into a writer’s almanac and try to break them down into smaller pieces. Sometimes it helps to keep a long list or outline of them. The hierarchical nature of an outline helps impose structure on the project. The important thing is to just start writing without censoring yourself.  You’re going to edit this idea before you publish it.

The maddening thing is that inspiration will often happen at the most inconvenient times. This encourages the project to be viewed in many varied ways. The key here is to take notes when it happens. If you have to leave something out while you are working, make a note to yourself. use square brackets to set the idea off from the rest of the piece [see if you can find someone else that uses this technique]. This makes it easier to search for when you revise the idea later.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

The Ever Expanding Standards of Literacy

Once upon a time the definition of literacy involved both reading and writing, more specifically writing with a quill. To write with a quill, you had to know how to form the end into a fountain pen. This required some skill with what is still known as a pen knife. There were also pencils but writing in pencil was not as permanent as writing in ink.

Then typewriters were invented. Now writers could write faster and more legibly using this remarkable machine. The definition of literacy didn’t change so much as the expectations of your readers were raised such that you were expected to use a typewriter to submit your manuscripts. Thus, the definition of literacy expanded a little bit.

Next came the computer. With a computer you could have assistance with spelling and grammar. You could reach more people, thanks to the web. You could edit text without having to totally retype it. You could easily make multiple copies. It was important to make sure that you made mutiple backups of the files on your computer in multiple places. The definition of literacy expanded to the use of computers to read and write with.

We come to the most recent addition to the attributes of literacy. You must be able to create web sites. You can do that in several different ways. You can do it the old fashion way using HTML and CSS. Or, you can find one of the many web frameworks like Ruby on Rails, or Django, or Grails, or many others. You might try one of the numerous different implementations of Wiki. Or, you might try a content management system like WordPress or Drupal. This has further expanded the expectations of the literate person.

I enjoy writing. I am thankful that I have a computer instead of having to write everything out longhand. I am relatively sure that I wouldn’t have gotten this far in my quest to master the craft of writing. I still have much to learn but I have much better tools with which to work.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important, be kind.

Of Stationary, Ebooks, and Writing Tools

Stationary has always been a weakness of mine. I love having notebooks of various sizes and weights of paper. I love the smell of printer’s ink. I love loose leaf binders and rulers, pens and pencils, and stencils like the flow chart template that used to be popular in college book stores. Do colleges even have book stores any more? I know they do but with so much of our information being delivered online, the advent of the electronic book, and the relentless competitiveness of online commerce, it is hard to believe that the campus book store will survive per se much longer.

My fetish for writing tools extends to computer programs as well. I have a huge collection of different text editors, word processors, outliners, mind mappers, and other programs for capturing ideas on a computer. Just this weekend, I installed a program called Instiki that allows me to easily create my own private Wikipedia-like hyper-linked collection of notes.

I still like the feel of physical books but I have to admit that I can store a whole lot more books on my iPad than I can in all the bookshelves in my two bedroom apartment. And so the trade-off has begun. I only buy my favorite author’s books in paper editions. The rest I buy ebook editions of. I sometimes buy the ebook edition of books that I also own the print editions of. That way I can carry it with me where ever I go without hauling around all that extra mass.

Physical books don’t take batteries. They survive power outages. That may be solved in the near future as we keep producing batteries with longer and longer lives. We may eventually build an ebook that can derive power from the environment without having to be explicitly charged.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

I Learn Something About Myself Every Day

Sometimes when you are presented with a situation where you cannot get everything done in the amount of time at your disposal you have to make some hard choices. You have to weigh the relative importance of each of the tasks and choose which ones get done now and which ones will wait.

I have averaged well over thirteen thousand steps a day for over seven weeks now. I found myself looking at the clock at ten thirty with only twenty five hundred steps on my Fitbit for today. I walked for as much of the next hour as I could manage. I had to do several things that required me to stand still for a minute and I’m not sure my Fitbit was registering all of my steps. At the end of the hour I had managed to get in just over sixty one hundred steps.

That was less than half of the thirteen thousand steps that I wanted to get done today. But I wasn’t going to make it to thirteen thousand steps in half an hour. I could stop and write my blog post. By so doing, I would keep my commitment to myself to blog daily and, if I finished writing before midnight, I could finish off the day with however many steps I could squeeze in to the time left.

This style of thinking is relatively new to me. I’ve always been dogmatic and absolute in my planning. I think this is a very useful way of addressing an issue like this. I will walk extra steps for a couple of days and get my average back above thirteen thousand steps per day. That is much more productive than giving up and declaring defeat.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

This is How It Starts

There is a plaza paved with cobblestones down a side street in the old town. There is a large building on the west side of the plaza so that it is shady in the afternoon. There is a sidewalk cafe in the plaza with wrought iron chairs, and tables with red checkered table cloths. Each table has a bud vase with a different kind of flower in it.

On this particular day, a certain young man was sitting at a table close to the door. He was nursing his second glass of wine and writing in his notebook. He wrote with a beautiful maroon glass fountain pen. He was frustrated. He had been sitting there for two hours trying to write something interesting, something that would justify the trouble of coming here and sitting in this quaint place that practically oozed atmosphere.

He wasn’t sure why but he looked up and there she was. She was absolutely radiant in a white blouse and khaki Bermuda shorts. There eyes met and she smiled. “Do you speak English?” she asked with standard British received pronunciation.

“I do,” he replied. “How may I help you?”

“I’m afraid I’ve gotten lost. Could you tell me the way to the train station?”

“I can but must you leave immediately?”

“Our train leaves at four.”

“Have something cool to drink and then I’ll take you there on my scooter. It is only two thirty and the train station is less than ten minutes from here by scooter and only twenty minutes or so on foot.” He gestured toward the other chair across the table from him.

“I can’t be long. My mother will be worried. I am a little thirsty though. Do they have any soft drinks?” She sat in the chair that he had indicated.

“I think they have some kind of lemonade or something like that. Rudy!” The waiter came immediately upon hearing his name.

“Yes, Mr. Howard?”

“Would bring the lady a lemonade, please?”

“Certainly! I’ll be right back with it.” He disappeared back through the door to the kitchen as quickly as he had appeared.

“My name is Howard Sutter. I am studying literature at the university here in town. What’s your name?”

“I’m Alice. You are very kind to help me.”

“Perhaps. I just don’t want you to run into some of the meaner sorts that sometimes hang out in this part of town.” Rudy returned with the lemonade. It was in a crystal glass with ice and an assortment of fruits hanging from the rim.

“Thank you!” Alice  said to Rudy.

There will be more to this story. But that is where we pause for now. Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.