Monthly Archives for March 2017

On A Writer’s Workflow

I woke this morning thinking about my workflow. Oh, wipe that pitying expression off your face—yes, you; you in the back. I know what you’re thinking—I’m one life short of a life.

But you would be wrong. I am currently writing a novel and The Workflow is everything. The Workflow giveth and The Workflow taketh away. The Workflow makes me lie down in green pastures and The Workflow leads me beside quiet waters. And Lo, though I stumble through the valley of the shadow of The Endless Novel, I shall not fear because I have The Fucking Workflow.

So yeah, it’s that important, and as a result I find myself regularly thinking about it. Sometimes it has to fixed because of updates to the constituent apps that comprise it. Sometimes it needs to be improved (Paste app, meet Ulysses, my writing app—I know you two are really going to get on!) And sometimes it simply needs to be revisited because my book on an essential level is the workflow in the same way we are what we eat.

The workflow is so critical to what I do that I have three Field Notes ‘Pitch Black’ notebooks filled with entries dedicated to it. But let’s pause here because the notebooks are also part of the workflow—the headwaters as it were. Field Notes ‘Pitch Black’ is the notebook of the gods—durable and with a light gray dot-graph pattern on its pages, making it perfect for capturing ideas and, if need be, visualizing them. I go through the notebooks at the rate of six a month. I write in them with two Uni Kuru Toga .05 mechanical pencils—the plastic model when out and about and the gunmetal Roulette version when I’m at my desk. The Kuru Togas are self-sharpening with use which, of course, makes them mechanical pencils of the gods. And lastly on-the-fly rethinking is made possible with a white Staedtler Mars Plastic eraser that doesn’t shed and folds into it own protective housing—making it, yes, the eraser of the gods.

I’ve geeked out on the above details to illustrate how much thought goes into a great workflow. The notebook/pencil/eraser combination above is not expensive—far from it. But they’ve been meticulously chosen to work well with each other—so well (and this is the most important thing, this is everything), they completely disappear as tools. When I have an idea, I capture it. The end. The Field Notes ‘Pitch Black’, the Uni Kuru Toga and the Staedtler eraser are utterly transparent to me. The work simply—wait for it—flows through them.

But as is the case with anything in life that is seemingly effortless, a lot of work went into achieving the lack of friction. The approximate $22.00 investment represented by my notebook, pencil and eraser ($26.00 if you throw in some additional leads for the pencil) is paltry. The availability of all three is wide—five minutes on Amazon and you’re all set. But getting there—ferreting out those three models and field-testing each one and then experimenting with combining notebooks with pencils and determining the best eraser for the finalists was a bitch; a genuine pain-in-the-ass.

But it was worth it in the end. Now when I’m capturing an idea, I’m thinking only about the idea and not worrying about the pencil smudging on the notebook paper, the lead breaking or that I can’t cleanly erase something. Transparency. It’s the same reason I’ve always used Apple products—they’re designed to be tools to an end and not an end (and thus stumbling block) in themselves.

And yes, you can kill creativity by overthinking things, but the selective overthinking of the critical channelling of creativity—The Workflow, Praise Be it—only pays dividends down the road.

Here endeth the sermon. If I’m so inclined, I may in the future describe the software side.

On Sinister Spring

In cybernetics, the term valley of the uncanny is used to describe the unease we feel when confronted by current proof-of-concept androids. No matter how meticulously they’re designed, no matter how many separate servo-controlled facial movements they’re capable of, we sense there’s something wrong. Not a doll but also not living: instead, something not-quite-human and, well, disquieting.

That’s the way I feel about late winter, 2017. I live in Greater Washington, DC, and since mid-February something that’s not-quite-spring has been creeping across the winter landscape. And while I’ve taken advantage of the phenomenon by having a beer outside with my sleeves rolled up to better feel the warm breeze, I feel the aforementioned disquiet.

This is not spring, no matter how much it looks like it. To accept its invitation requires me to first cross the valley of the uncanny—which I can’t, no matter how hard I try.

To be clear, we’re not talking here about the simply unseasonable. No, this is full-bore fake spring made a little sinister by the occasional snow shower that dusts the fully blooming ornamental trees in my neighborhood. The massive weeping cherry in my front yard is covered in pink blossoms. The day lilies are already six inches tall, the rose bushes are filling-in with new leaves, the tulip tree next door has flowered, the forsythia in the backyard is golden-yellow and the tulips are well above ground.

Only the dogwoods remain suspicious and resolutely tight-budded—which describes my own reaction to this mutant period. I woke this morning thinking that this must be what it feels like to live in a simulation: the details are all there, but the context is off (a glitch in the Matrix?) and the whole thing feels academic rather than emotional.

Case in point: There are no song birds—like me, they have resisted the temptation to treat this seeming season as the real thing. And, I think, for good reason. Whatever this flowering, grass-growing, shirt-sleeve interlude is, it sure as hell is not spring and, like the Trump Administration, I refuse to normalize it. Sinister Spring deserves its own kind of resistance.

On Third Acts: A Sniffling Consideration

The final scene of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid takes place in a Bolivian stable surrounded by dozens of soldiers ready to shoot Butch and Sundance on sight:

Sundance Kid: “It’s your great ideas that got us into this mess. I never want to hear another one of your great ideas. Ever!”

Butch Cassidy: “Australia. I thought that secretly you wanted to know so I told you.”

Sundance Kid: “That’s your great idea?”

Butch Cassidy: “The latest in a long line. We get out of here alive, we go to Australia. Goodbye, Bolivia. Hello to Australia.”

And then just before they run out of the stable to certain death:

Butch Cassidy: “Hey, wait a minute. You didn’t see Lefors out there, did you?”

Sundance Kid: “Lefors? No.”

Butch Cassidy: “Oh, good. For a moment there I thought we were in trouble.”

Among other things, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid is about the relentless march of time—bicycles replacing horses, bank security improving, law enforcement getting more sophisticated. And it’s also about optimism when surrounded not by Bolivian soldiers, but by time closing in : Australia—hell, yeah!

Then there’s that last moment—the end comes when you’re not expecting it, from an unforeseen direction and despite all of your planning . . .

I woke up this morning thinking about this because I’m in the middle of a new round of king-hell bronchitis—the fourth bout this year. And the bronchitis is an uncomfortable subset of a larger run of less-than-optimum health that’s extended over the past 12 months or so.

This is new territory for me. My health throughout my life has been robust. (I’ve always wanted to say that in context.) And further, I recognize that most of the problems have been bits of me beginning to wear out. I am, after all, officially A Man Of A Certain Age.

But if not Peter Pan, I’ve got a lot of Butch Cassidy in that stable in me as I confront these shifting circumstances: Australia—hell, yeah! The recent string of health glitches have reminded me that, like it or not, it’s finally here—My Third Fucking Act. And the question now becomes what to do with what’s unavoidably become a finite resource—time. What precisely is my bespoke version of Australia? And further, how can I ensure that it’ll fully be Hell, yeah!

This situation is complicated by the other lesson of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid—it’s never Lefors who gets you, it’s the Bolivian Army. As I’m busy constructing My Private Australia, chances are good that a battalion of something dreadful will unexpectedly surround me.

The answer, of course, is the point of William Goldman’s screenplay—it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive. (Which, for the record, was said by Robert Louis Stevenson and not Buddha, thank you very much.)

And, yes, this is not a new problem—merely a problem that’s new to me. I’ll have a mope, cough my way through my work day, kill a couple boxes of Kleenex, have precisely one Laphroaig too many tonight and then, tomorrow, begin to fill a new notebook with ideas about My Third Fucking Act. I think I’m gonna need a big production number there.