For many years, I’ve taken shameful (or shameless) advantage of Top Shelf’s annual $3 web sale of comics and graphic novels from their catalog. Not everything is $3, of course – but a large number of selected items from their catalog are remarkably discounted, with some inventory they’ve never been able to shift cut down to $1.
I scanned the list yesterday and started filling out my mental list of stuff I wanted: Eddie Campbell’s omnibus volume of the Alec stories and a Jeffrey Brown collection, and a few others.
But I caught myself. I didn’t feel that little thrizzle I used to feel when anticipating the comics I wanted to buy. Sad to say, I felt a little hollow in there. I also felt a little sad knowing I didn’t really need any of them.
Beyond the financial calculation, I’d also computed the space, time, and interest calculations.
Space: I’m already maxed out on my bookshelf space and have dozens of great comics and graphic novels I haven’t processed yet.
Time: I’ve had some of those books for literally years, yet I haven’t read them. So what makes me think that I would treat new books brought into the fold any differently?
Interest: I’m certainly curious about these books, but the visceral interest just isn’t there. I’m simply more interested in other things now.
I think the time for profligate reading is behind me. At least for now. I feel more drive and interest in solidifying my career (as a contractor, I always work on shaky ground), spending more time with family and friends, and generally being more active. In some ways, I’m reading as much as ever, but the time I can devote to reading is shrinking and I am finding it easier to shrug off some items that I previously considered necessities.
Getting out of one’s comfort zone by trying some new behavior or activity is the modern panacea for self-improvement. I’ve certainly adopted it in the last few years by taking on leadership roles, trying new activities, and taking on bigger responsibilities – all while feeling anxious and ill-prepared. Moving out of my comfort zone by doing these new things stretched me and expanded my sense of what I could do. I’m glad I did them.
A slightly different aspect of expanding the comfort zone is not doing things that previously brought pleasure. Addicts of all stripes know that abstaining is an active struggle; it’s the struggle that moves you out of the comfort zone.
My struggle this year in deciding what comics to buy at the Top Shelf sale turned into a non-struggle. I found it sad, necessary, and surprisingly easy to set aside my desire for a yearly jolt of color and novelty. I wondered what I would replace that activity with. Which is when I started writing this post.
In the late ’90s, I decided I wanted to take piano lessons. By chance, a flyer at the Regulator Bookshop let me know about Mara Gibson, a Duke PhD student in composing, who taught piano on the side. I worked with her, I think, for about 2 years before she left Durham to finish her PhD. A few memories I have from that period:
Those big dogs!
Chatting about art, the art instinct, the artist’s life, etc.
I found that when I practiced every day, even if just for 15 minutes, my playing got better. Weird.
Mara held an annual recital for her students at the back of Boyce Piano Emporium on 15-501. Her students all sat up at the front of the room, with the invited audience sitting behind us.
I didn’t realize up till then that she mostly taught kids from elementary age up through high school, with only seven or eight adult students. Mara had sequenced us so that I sat next to a junior high kid, I think, who was playing before me. He said, “That seat is for Mara’s students” and I said, yes, I know, I’m one of her students.
The younger students started by playing their recital pieces. After the last little person played their song, Mara called my name and I could hear the titters and amused murmurs from the audience as I lumbered up to the piano to announce my recital piece. You could hear them thinking, who the hell is this?
“Hi,” I said, “my name is Mike Brown and I started taking lessons with Mara about eight months ago. I’ll be playing three short pieces by Dmitry Kabalevsky. And,” I paused, looking around the room at the kids and parents, “I believe I’m the first person playing today who is over 6 feet tall.” That got a nice laugh and Liz said later it definitely broke the tension.
I think it was on the first or second piece, I burbled something and got a bit lost. So I stopped, smiled, excused myself, took a breath, and started in on it again. The pieces took less than 2 or 3 minutes to play, and it all went fine.
Many parents came up afterward to congratulate me and expressed their wonder and admiration at my performing a recital piece in front of a room full of people. I thanked them and then waved my hand at the kids – who had just done the same thing that I did. The parents seemed to think that performing was something children naturally did, whereas an adult putting himself in a position where one could fail (or succeed!) publicly was something they couldn’t conceive of doing.
Mara eventually left Duke to finish her PhD. Since 2004, she has been on the faculty of the Conservatory of Music and Dance, University of Missouri-Kansas City, and is now at Louisiana State University. She leads the life of a busy artist, academic, and mother, and I’m so happy to see her making so many big contributions to her art and her community.
Mara has also started selling some of her compositions digitally on Bandcamp. You can listen to the full pieces and then purchase and download them to your computer. It is so cool to have a Mara Gibson playlist on my iPhone.
[O Fortune, changing and unstable, your tribunal and judges are also unstable. You prepare huge gifts for him who you would tickle with favors as he arrives at the top of your wheel. But your gifts are unsure, and finally everything is reversed: you raise up a poor man from his filth and the insufferable bullshitter then becomes a consul.]”
Without the topic of school to provide a throughline or readymade theme for the blog – which was the reason for its birth, after all – the content of my posts has scattered itself across self-help, tech, and cultural themes, though there has been silliness too. Mustn’t forget silliness.
I tend to find the longform deepdish essays more satisfying to write; they also sometimes require longer gestation periods or hours of intense focus. I always enjoyed Montaigne’s brief essays in his first book and that served as a sort of model when I started blogging in the mid-aughts. Although it is telling that his longer essays in Book 3 tend to be both the most conversational and the ones I and others enjoy re-reading the most.
I start a post with the intent to keep it brief, but I too often fall in love with the sound of my writing voice, and – as if I were having a conversation with myself – think about this or that idea which simply must be mentioned. I need to curb that tendency though; in technical writing, the worst thing you can do is to dump every thing you know into the documentation. It shows a lack of discrimination in understanding what to include and what to leave out. This makes the reader’s experience less pleasant and their job even harder.
For the longform essays, I try to follow the advice of academic writing coaches and start a post by writing a key sentence for each paragraph. When I see the thread of the argument, I can thicken the blessay with more detail and supporting evidence. Having decided what I will include, I am more likely to stay on track and let go of ideas or witticisms that don’t fit.
I try to. More often, I simply start typing and ramble away, generating huge rafts of text that need to be considered, pruned, tossed out, refined, etc. Whichever method I use depends on my mood, time, energy, and so on. I am consistent in my inconstancy.
I find that writing about my personal systems for organization or productivity or techie stuff are usually fun and easy to write. They can be long, though. When I write about things that are a little more personal and ruminative — such as my information packrat nature or what I find inspiring and why — I touch more chords with my reader(s). In the end, I write about whatever I want to spend time thinking about and playing with. I find that I’m not reading as much as I used to , but I’m writing more, and I think that’s a fair tradeoff.
One of my goals for the blog reboot was to burn through a lot of ideas that had piled up during the years when I was not blogging regularly. Then, after I’d gone through those, my plan was to see what was left for me to write about. But as I predicted in my first post, the more I write, the more I find to write about. I do sometimes raid the old list, but I as often pluck new ideas to think about as well.
Of course, the real topic of a personal blog is me, my life, my interests, and my exploration of my thoughts. And journaling the process of “learning as I go.” These posts are cups drawn from a well that, so far, thankfully, seems bottomless.
I started out writing my blog posts every morning for about 15-30 minutes, but now I may write throughout the day or write three on a Sunday night or tinker with a post or posts throughout the week.
In fact, this series on what I’ve learned from my recent blogging experience started as a brain dump of disconnected bits (and may read that way, I don’t know). I’ve tinkered with various bits of it over the course of a week, a la Mark Forster’s continuous revision idea, adding sentences, fleshing out fragments, moving paragraphs around.
I seem to have two speeds when it comes to posting: the quick hit-and-run post with a link to something interesting, or a more in-depth musing that benefits from my walking around it every couple of days and judging how it looks from all angles.
What is also happening is that I find myself thinking about writing posts all the time. When something crosses my path, I wonder if it will make good blog fodder (blodder?). Newspaper columnists face the same situation; the column becomes a hungry beast that demands incessant feeding and attention.
My tools adapt themselves to the kind of writing I'm doing that day or week. I discovered I'm fine composing my quicker posts with the WordPress editor. Longer posts tend to start out in nvALT and may move to Microsoft Word, if I want to use the tools there. (I also keep a long list of ideas in nvALT and add to it all the time.)
I thought at one time I'd buy MarsEdit or some other desktop app to write my posts off-line, but I find that it's not really necessary. I build my posts up in layers, so the tool I use is independent of the writing/gestation process. I work on the words in several passes, move the text to WordPress, layer in the links in another, and then use the Zemanta plugin to suggest images or to spur my quest to find better ones. I don't always use the same tool for the initial drafts.
Before I publish, I preview the post and read it again in the browser; I regularly find formatting, typo, and phrasing problems that way.
This process is not bulletproof, of course. I would like a more scheduled, routine time to write and edit my posts, rather than the pockets of time I spend on it throughout the week. My drafting process feels too haphazard and too subject to disruption.
I'm at that point on the mastery curve where I've plateaued. The big a-HA! discoveries of technique and content came in the first 2 or 3 weeks, and I'm now trying to establish a regular writing routine, an assembly line that can crank out widgets in the shape of blog posts. The a-has are rather slower in coming and I need to be content waiting for the idea or insight that kicks me up to the next level.
I started the Monday-Friday blogging cycle on July 30 and am surprised to find myself still here and churning out posts. My goal was to do 50 posts -- 10 weeks of posting -- and I passed the 5-week mark on August 31. So -- to echo this blog's subtitle -- what have I been learning as I go? The next series of blog posts explores my typically blathering answers.
Epic or epigrammatic?
Andy Ihnatko said on a recent Ihnatko Almanac podcast that he yearns to do brief blog posts, a la John Gruber's Daring Fireball blog (my own model would be Michael Leddy's Orange Crate Art). But whenever he starts writing, the post grows to 800 words and it's not a brief 2-sentence comment that concisely distills his feelings on an issue -- no, it's a full-out deepdish essay that could be a chapter in a book. For Andy, Twitter is the microblog he prefers because it enforces a length restriction.
The desire for concision vs completeness is true for me. My gambit of setting a timer to write for 15 minutes worked for a week, and then not at all. When it alarms, I simply shut it off, continue writing, and maybe take a break later, if I think about it. I'm a natural longform blogger, I suppose. My posts on Doctor Who and being an information packrat were intended to be single posts with only a few sentences on my opinions. But the opinions quickly got out of hand.
I have, therefore, gotten a bit better at noticing when I will need to break a post into parts and adjusting the writing accordingly. If the goal is to post 5 days/week, then I break the long ones into multiple parts, artfully round off each part so it stands as a whole (I hope), and so meet my self-imposed quota.
This post, for example, started as a bulleted list of random sentences and ideas, which I shaped into four organized thematic sections, added links and more contextual "thickener," as it were, and the draft mysteriously embiggened itself to 1200+ words. I was about to hit the Publish button on this monster when I thought, "Wait a second -- I could get four days of posts out of this!"
And on such expedient decisions are great works of art made.
