James Kirk is a slacker!
You would be correct if you thought this about me. Hell, I think this about me! People who just troll around and read blog posts, news items, comments, etc. really have no idea just how hard it is to do all the things one must do in their lives, and still find the time to be creative, witty, do proper research, and get well formed posts published on any sort of regular schedule.
Since my last bout of activity on this site (late April, I believe) I’ve:
- Had a 43rd birthday (4/28/65) YIKES!
- Been evicted from my home thanks to a “lovely” aunt who owned the place. Thanks, AD
- Moved my Mother and I into a new house that was previously occupied by, well, let’s just say that owning large animals, having 6 or 7 people in the house, doing drugs, and NEVER, EVER, EVER cleaning during their entire six month stay, makes for a little bit of work prior to moving in (oh, and this place is owned by my Sister and her husband. She wouldn’t kick her own Mother out, would she
) - Finished all start up paperwork (business plans, executive summaries, funds usage, etc) for TheFightChannel.com and have attended several meetings regarding potential investments
- Updated my resume, since we no longer have operating capital for TFC and one needs some sort of income in order to pay one’s Sister the rent on her house which he just moved into!
- Sent out said resume (hold, let me count) 37 times over the past 6 weeks (to date, I’ve had about half a dozen responses)
- And continually fighting to delete the bs spam crap that I’ve started receiving as a result of the resumes posted to Monster.com, Yahoo! Jobs, and others. (Talk about kicking you when you are down!)
So, what have I discovered thus far about all this “activity”? Well, I’m beginning to think that job searching is very much like mate searching. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re looking for full time or part time, a male or a female (or whether you’re a male or a female). I’ve just come back from a second interview with a local employer. I had to shower and shave and put on some nice clothes. Make that good first impression. Well first impression for my potential boss’s boss, with whom I met.
Say all the right things. Not sure if I did that, however, I didn’t really shy away from values that I believe in regarding specific aspects of the gig. Smile. Show humor where necessary. Empathy when appropriate, etc., etc., etc.
Where I reside now days, in the Verde Valley, in Northern Arizona (central really, like Nor Cal is really central) is clearly not NYC, SF, LA. But we’re not BF either! We have a movie theater, and some restaurants, and just opened a new car wash (because the previous 3 or 4 were just not enough.) And when you want to go out on a date here (assuming you can actually find someone to ask! Really, that is not a joke…) All the same activities need to occur.
One should be clean and shaved (again, male or female!) Say the right things, try and get the core of their values across, and still be funny and poignant if at all possible. Oh, and if you’re going to the interview or a date, remember not to shower with your colgne or perfume. You’re potential employer is likely to wonder what other smells you’re covering up, as will your date. And you’ll never be able to properly taste your wine with that much smell mucking up your olfactories! (Assuming here that we’re referring to the dating process, of course!)
So, finally, I’ve taken 10 minutes to slap something up on the blog. Feels like I got a notice from my WordPress install, “If you don’t publish something within the next 48 hours, your blog will lock down and you’ll lose all access to it!”
Hmmm, now that might be an interesting WP plugin to create…
What does your writing “habit” look like?
So, clearly, I’ve not posted right in line the next day from the previous publication in this series. Woe is me (or as I typed in absent minded fashion, initially, Whoa)!
This has prompted my thought patterns the past couple of days to ask a question of myself, “What is the best posting frequency, FOR ME? I love the Steven King school of blog posting from individuals that have all the time in the world to do nothing but wax poetically on anything and everything that forms in their swirling mass of gray matter. At the same time, I also tend to enjoy the more infrequent, but well thought out, formed, informed, tending to encroach on the journalistic approach to writing a blog post, posts.
You’ll understand that I’m clearly not laying waste to those using the medium to simply off load the data on their internal hard drive. Hell, I’m no different! And if I had the time (that I HAVE TO ASSUME multi-posts per day bloggers must have) to do all that writing, I’d likely be a Steven King Jr. writer as well. If you know me, you know that I talk a LOT when I start talking. And if you’ve ever received an email from me it probably went something like this:
From You: Hey, James. How goes it? Got the info. When is good to sound chat?
My response:
From Me: About twelve pages of rolling, rambling, on going text that tells you in the most minute of details ever single thing that has anything to do with something related to answering your question pertaining to how it might be going for me in that very moment, the next moment and moments yet to come, but that will come because, they have always done so since the bowl of primordial soup was heated up. And now on to answer your “when is good to chat” question
See? You just cannot trust me to simply say, “Going great. How about 2pm tomorrow?” Send!
Which, again, brings me around to wondering what your writing habits look like. And how do your current habits compare to where you’d really like to be in your production?
Starting a new writing discipline
Have you ever just wanted to write? You know what I mean, just begin to write about whatever it is that gets you up in the morning and keeps you up at night? If you have had these types of urges, I’m feeling it with you.
Honestly! I am feeling it. And I’m working on developing the disciplined game plan that will hopefully help me to “make writing a habit”:
- Write one post every morning after completing the reading ritual (you know, getting caught up on everything that has come into the feed reader since the day before)
- Complete whatever the topic of that post is within a 30 minute window (or less, if I feel confident that a good post is in the works)
- Choose to “Save” the post and just put it away for the rest of the day
- As I’m working through the other “real stuff” I have to do at my desk and online, if I have further thoughts/ideas about that morning’s writings, log in, and do some work on it. Things like refining the post’s idea, or if I come across some graphic image that might help dress up the post. Things like that
- Worst case scenario, if I don’t come back to the post at all in a day, sleep on it, and revisit the saved post as the first thing I do when I start writing the next morning
- I believe this will do two things for me, 1) Get me into the flow of yesterday’s writing and more ready to continue with today’s ideas, and 2) Have a last revisit for polishing and tweaks if necessary before actually “Publishing” that post
Now, I do realize that my work will be a “day old”, and I’m alright with that, if this habit gets me to a steady state of writing posts more regularly. And if I’m feeling extraordinarily proficient in a given day and I can write another post after publishing something that seems “urgent”, I’ll do so. Hey, it’s my blog, right?
Most importantly, I hope to get more practice in on the keyboard so that when I do find more time for some of the larger writing projects, I’ll have the habit of writing every day well in place, and will dedicate serious time to those creative projects.
Just for the curious, I’m actually typing the first “draft” of this post on Sunday afternoon just after 4pm, Arizona time. If all goes according to plan, I will publish it early tomorrow morning. (And no, I’m not going to be using the WP “post time stamp” feature, unless I get really proficient and have bunches of postings to get up on the site!)
Hey, one step at a time, Grasshopper!
