Over the last few years, he has been very intentional and consistent with his writing practice. He has established writing goals and worked toward them. More importantly, his goals are well-defined and within his control. Rather than say, “I want to get 5 stories published this year,” he has said, “I want to write 10 stories this year.” The publication part is not up to him, but he has not neglected it either.

He also made goals along the lines of, “I want to send out 10 stories this year.” Again, not counting rejections or acceptances but instead focusing on the submissions, focusing on getting his work in front of others even when it is scary, even when it might be painful.

He has been sowing the seeds of craft, and production, and submission. And this has paid off.

He is now in a season where he can see the fruits of those seeds. Granted, he is a talented writer, and he has spent time developing his craft. But those seeds would be wasted if he wasn’t putting it to use. It likely wouldn’t get much further than his own computer if he wasn’t willing to send it out for rejection.

I, on the other hand, have received no rejection letters in the last year. That is not a point to celebrate because it means either I have not been sending anything out or I haven’t been ambitious enough with my submissions (it’s the former in this case). Instead, I have been sowing other seeds. Seeds that have nothing to do with writing or seeds that have kept me back as a writer. Seeds of doubt, seeds of slumber, seeds of fear.

As writers, as humans really, we are constantly making little decisions, choosing minor angles, that will ultimately determine our path. While we might not see the fruits of those choices for months or years down the road, the fruits will always come. We never know which particular seed will ultimately be productive, but we can move forward confident in the knowledge that some of them will yield fruit.

We don’t choose whether or not to plant seeds, we don’t choose which ones will take root, we only choose which seeds to plant.

I am proud of this friend and happy for him. I’m also glad that he continues to challenge me to do more with my craft. As is often the case, I need to do some closer examination of what my seed pile looks like and what my planting strategy is going to be.

End of analogy.

Fifty, it turns out, is pretty much as arbitrary as you might think. I doesn’t signify anything. And when it comes to posting everyday, fifty is hardly a milestone. If they handed out little plaques for blogging like they do at some companies for years of service, fifty blog posts wouldn’t even get a mention. It would be like giving a plaque for being at the company for nine whole months.

No cake. No speech. No one giving any sort of attention.

Yet here I am going on and on about it. Mostly, that’s because it means something to me. I keep talking about showing up and doing the work, and I would feel pretty crummy if I weren’t making an effort to do that myself.

I could do a lot more, of course, but this isn’t the moment for that line of thinking. This is just the time where I say I’ve done something for fifty straight days even though it wasn’t always easy. Even if it wasn’t always good.

Because it hasn’t all been bad either. That’s the beauty of coming back each day. Some stuff will stick eventually.

I suppose that’s enough back patting for minor achievement. Now to make the next fifty posts better than the previous. Also, I just realized that I haven’t yet copied over the entry I had to post on Facebook because of server issues, which means that my math is screwed up and this is all just a little less relevant. But, like I said, the numbers are all fairly arbitrary, so I doubt it makes much difference. 

Have a good week. 

I am afraid I will lose control.

The magic of hyperlinks (yes, I’m old enough to use that word) is that they make the reading experience an interactive one. You get to choose when and if you will follow a link, when and if you will return. So, by linking to other content, even my own on occasion, I am giving up some of my control. This is new media.

Granted, you can read content however you wish, links or no links, but there is an implicit suggestion in a hyperlink that the author believed the content on the other end of the URL is relevant. So how do I know you’ll come back? I don’t. Not in any guaranteed sense, and I can’t know that you will come back to the same place or with the same interest as when you left. All I can really do is trust that if you follow a link and find value in it, you’ll remember who sent you there. Which brings me to fear number two.

I am afraid I will waste your time.

I don’t want to be the guy constantly recommending stuff you don’t care about. No one likes to watch a movie just because of a friend’s positive review only to hate it. Aside from the bad experience, it makes us feel like the other person doesn’t understand us. The solution to this is two fold.

First, I should be confident that what I am linking to is valuable. If I find it useful, I should assume that some of my readers will too. Second, I should do the work of knowing my audience. This can be as simple as trying to understand the kind of person who will continue reading what I write without sending me hate emails. And it can be more involved, like asking readers for their opinions about my choices. Again, it comes back to trust. Trusting myself to provide relevant information; trusting my audience to visit these sites in good faith. But what if you like the other site too much?

I am afraid I will lose you to someone better.

This is probably the biggest fear, at least for me at the moment, and it comes from a mindset of scarcity. I sometimes worry that you will find the other site I link to so engaging, so useful, that you decide you would rather spend your time there. It’s a strange fear for a writer to have, not wanting to recommend other writers. And it can be a legitimate problem if you view the work as competition, as a zero sum game. If I think I’m losing readers when I point them to someone else’s work, then it is painful to push them away. But what if I see it a different way?

What if I believe instead that cooperation is more powerful than competition? It’s the old struggle between trying to get more of the pie for myself versus trying to make the pie itself bigger. While I will acknowledge that we all have limited time and attention, I don’t believe that it is so scarce that I can’t recommend you to work that I found particularly powerful or useful. Especially if you find their content so engaging that it makes you even more interested in what I was discussing in the first place. Plus, there is actually great value in being a good recommender (more often we probably use the word curator, but I like recommender in this case). If you appreciate what I link to, I now have increased my value through my suggestion.

In the end, I should really be thinking less about how the link serves me. Whether I should point you to other content or not should be decided solely on one question. Will it benefit you, the reader?

So, this is something for me to improve on. Both the finding of excellent content and the sharing of said content without worrying about what I have to gain or lose from the suggestion. If you’re wondering why there are no links to other content in this post, I assure you that is mostly coincidence and a result of time shortage more than fear.

Has someone made a recommendation you appreciated recently? Do you feel more or less likely to listen to that person again in the future?

Typing

When I first started to learn to type in junior high, I had already had a limited exposure to computers and keyboards. I was a decent hunter-pecker. I appreciated the idea of touch typing though. I remember showing off my skill one day to my dad. I’m pretty sure I was typing the classic sentence about the fox and dog, and I showed him (proudly) how I could type the entire thing, every letter in the alphabet, without looking down at the keys. He said that was pretty good, and then said, “What about this? What if you look at the keys?” And he typed the sentence much faster while looking down, not quite hunting and pecking but somewhere in between.

I was thinking about this as I struggled through typing in the Dvorak layout this week. I feel like I’m actually starting to get the key placement down, but I keep wanting my fingers to have the muscle memory to go as fast as my Qwerty speed. Most of the advice I’ve read on learning to type suggests that slow is better. Accuracy should be the first goal and speed will come later. This is really what I’ve struggled with, not the new layout, not the unfamiliar arrangement or letter combinations, it’s the idea that I can’t be as fast as I am used to. This is not a new problem for me.

Roller Skating

Some of you will remember roller rinks. Some of you may even still have one nearby; although, I haven’t been to one in years (decades?). When I was growing up, there was a roller rink not too far from us, and we frequented it pretty regularly. At some point in my learning to skate, I encountered a problem. The skating area was not an infinite straight line; it was an oval. In order to continue skating for any length, I had to learn how to go around a curve.

I worked out my own technique that allowed me to use a walking/shuffling motion to get around the curve, but that isn’t the best way to do it. There is a better method that  involves picking up one foot and crossing it over the other and some repetition. Or something like that. I never actually learned how to do it. It was too slow. The actual motion wasn’t slow, but learning it was. I had several different people offer to teach me, but I never pursued it for long. That learning was getting in the way of my skating.

So, I remained stunted in my skating skills. When it came to racing, I actually did alright for a while because I was able to catch kids on the straightaways. But as we got older, those with decent technique left me behind. Also, rollerblades.

Swimming

I had a similar issue with swimming. I don’t actually recall learning how to swim when I was a kid, but I know I was never taught “proper” technique, not the strokes of competitive swimmers. And that was fine. I powered my way through the bad form. For the most part, I didn’t really know any better until Melanie (who grew up in the world of competitive swimming) offered to teach me how to swim laps for real. Or maybe I talked her into teaching me. Either way, we were in grad school, and as an educated man in his late twenties, I quickly learned that I didn’t know how to swim.

I didn’t have breath control. I didn’t know how to coordinate my arms and my torso. I didn’t know how to kick correctly. I couldn’t even float.

As we worked through the various issues I was having, I started to progress some, to find my way a little more gracefully through the water. But I was still never patient enough. Rather than do the drills that would make proper form a habit, I wanted to do faster laps. I wanted get tangibly better, so I would allow my technique to fall by the wayside when I was trying to speed up. And that’s unfortunate because the practice falls into that repetitive, meditative exercise I alluded to yesterday. But you can’t get there if you’re worried about drowning. And by focusing on speed, on being better already, I never really moved past the uncomfortable stage.

I won’t say that I have given up on swimming, but I think it’s safe to conclude that I won’t have a triumphant return to skates anytime soon. And I still can’t float.

Writing

When it comes to writing, it can be difficult to know how to slow down, to build the proper technique. I mean, we know how to put words together into sentences, together into paragraphs. We know how writing works, right? While I think that it is true for the most part, I also believe we can find value in taking a step back from our larger ideas and focus on smaller chunks. We can improve our form by working on sentences removed from anything larger. We can build our technique by creating scenes or images that are not meant to be just one piece in a story or essay.

Sure, it’s slow. Sure, it feels wasteful. “What do you mean, write something without any intention of using it?” Through this practice, though, we can become better writers without the stress or baggage of wondering whether or not it’s good enough to go in our project. And we can hold onto it if we like it, waiting for a later time to use it.

Also, reading. Reading is very important for improving your writing, but it isn’t always fast either.

Once again, this is in the easier said than done category. I’m going to do some thinking about how best to do this myself, in a way that I can be held accountable. For now, here’s a short list of other activities where my inability to go slow ultimately hindered my growth.

• Playing guitar
• Soccer
• Spanish
• French
• Woodworking
• Drawing
• Playing the drums
• Playing the piano
• Photography
• And so on

I am struck by his acceptance of this repetition. I can’t decide yet if it’s just that everything is so new to him. Part of his activity is experimentation. He doesn’t have enough experience to know yet if this time will be different, if this time, the stuffed animal he throws in the air will just keep floating, like a bubble cast about on the breeze, rather than fall back to the ground as it has every other time he has tossed it. I know this is part of his process, but at times I think he also finds comfort in the iteration.

There is something serene about performing the same task over and over, without any immediate goal or intention. Like a zen garden. Some people find housework relaxing. Or mowing. That’s not my jam exactly, but I can see how they get there. Woodworking is probably more in my wheelhouse. Whittling. Taking an object and honing it, running it over with a knife or some other tool through a multitude of strokes. I think writing can be like that on occasion as well.

Not so much the idea generation and certainly not the editing, but the craft, the word play, when the sentences seem to meld together on their own and I cannot take much credit for the final product, those moments have a quality to them. Not a mindlessness exactly, but a disconnection. A feeling of letting the words pass over me or through me.

I like to believe this is Theo at play, exploring the new and embracing the familiar. I like to believe this is me at play too.

So, maybe I shouldn’t say I learn too much. I consume too much. The facts and ideas that enter my brain aren’t necessarily learned. Often, they pique my interest for a moment, but then they are lost when the next compelling thought comes around. This is especially problematic with podcasts. The audio just keeps coming at you. And while I could try pressing pause, that’s not my usual strategy. I’m consuming, but I’m not leaving enough time for digestion. I’m not allowing enough to soak in. And this isn’t just an issue with the ideas of others.

I don’t leave enough time to reflect on what I have running around in my own brain.  I try to make note of ideas when I have them. I try to record somewhere the incongruity or juxtaposition that grabbed my attention, even if just for a moment. But I am not dwelling on them. I am not mulling them.

This is a problem.

Creativity requires downtime. Space. Stillness. Like the reflection in a puddle. So much can be seen in a smooth surface of water if there isn’t constant agitation.

But when we are constantly feeding the machine with inputs, we don’t allow for the processing. We don’t give our minds the opportunity to make strange connections, to find commonalities in unusual places. These connections, these spaces are the source of creativity. They allow us to say something different rather than just list the interesting facts we heard or read somewhere else.

Writing itself can be a great way to explore these intersections. We can think through our ideas on paper, or on the screen, in an attempt to determine if there is any validity to them. Sometimes the great insight we had turns out to be just a mundane observation. Or our analogy falls apart under closer scrutiny. At other times, we are able to really delve into an idea and explore its depths. But we can’t do that if we are too busy reading someone else’s ideas or listening to them talk. To explore our ideas through writing, we have to leave space and time to foster this inquiry.

On the other end of the spectrum, we never look outside ourselves for ideas or inspiration. We are completely introspective and have no space for outside opinions to shape our own. This has it’s own set of issues, of course. Generally, we want to strike some sort of balance between the two.

Hopefully that has happened here, but I am open to criticism.

I was recently thinking about this idea when I heard the phrase, “Thanks for everything.” Maybe I heard myself saying it. It is one I use too often. I say too often because what does it really mean?

Thanks for all the goodness in my life? Thanks for everything you’ve ever done for me? Thanks for all the kind acts I can’t bother to list right now? I know I appreciate you, but I can’t remember the specific reason, so thanks?

Granted, this is being a bit facetious. We know that isn’t how we mean it, and they know that isn’t how we mean it. Typically, I say it because I’m trying to convey my inability to describe how thankful I am, that there are just too many kindnesses to cover in a short “thanks”. Maybe instead of falling back on this generalization, though, I could explore some more appropriate way to express my appreciation.

What would that look like?

I’m not entirely sure, but I’m guessing it would take some work, perhaps a little more forethought. Usually I find myself falling back on “thanks for everything” when someone who has been helpful is leaving (or I’m leaving them). I feel like I can’t communicate my gratitude in the quick goodbye that is coming. But those goodbyes rarely come as a surprise.

Maybe I could write a little note with more detail about how much I appreciate this person, then pass it off to them during the goodbye, like the inconspicuous exchange of a tip I always admire in the movies (personally, I never pull it off).

Maybe I could skip the “everything” and mention a few specifics I am especially thankful for. Wouldn’t it be better to say, “Thanks for bringing the spinach dip and playing with the dog,” even if the person also brought chips and helped wash dishes? Are they going to be offended that you didn’t provide a complete list of their good deeds? Or are they more likely to appreciate that you noticed some of their contributions?

The problem with the “everything” is that you could say it to “everyone”. It is so general that it means nothing. By making your thanks specific, you make it personal. Maybe you don’t cover it all, but you do make it clear that this thank you is for them.

By trying to ensure that we leave nothing out, the catch-all “thanks for everything” mostly ensures that we leave nothing in. At least nothing memorable.

I could be nit-picking my gratitude, of course. Certainly a vague thank you is better than none at all. It feels like something worth experimenting with anyway.

What do you think? What kind of thank you is your default? What kind do you prefer from others? Is this a case for generalization over specificity?

The host might not be fake. The guests might not be fake, but the entire setup is quite forced and restricted. There is a set amount of time that needs to be filled with quality material: a few laughs, perhaps an anecdote that makes us a bit emotional, a self-deprecating moment.

And this is all generally planned out. Not scripted necessarily, but planned. There are multiple takes and bits, and when it is all done well, we don’t notice the piecing together.

I am not suggesting this is wrong, or that it’s misleading, at least not anymore than any other bit of “production.” But I find it all a little boring, a little too predictable.

Even with a host like Jimmy Fallon, a multi-faceted and talented comedian who earned his keep at Saturday Night Live, the format forces everything to the center. The people in charge of the Tonight Show are betting on safe, not bold, not risky. And maybe they’re right–the show has certainly lasted long enough to quiet critics.

Most of my Tonight Show viewing comes from the occasional YouTube clip. And I participate like a typical viewer. I laugh at the stories. I let the entertainers entertain. I go along with the whole charade.

But I don’t usually find it compelling until the masks are lowered, until something real happens. That rarely makes it on air, but thanks to the Internet, we sometimes get a peak at what happens when the plan breaks down. And thanks to the Internet, I can come across this video of Jimmy Fallon and Bradley Cooper experiencing a real moment. 

For minutes, they are unable to stop laughing, unable to keep their masks on. In part because they have to leave some ridiculous hats on. I won’t recommend that you watch the whole thing (it’s ten minutes long), but I’ll admit that I couldn’t pull myself away.

We find joy in these moments all the time, in watching bloopers and gaffs, in seeing SNL cast members struggle to not break character. In part, it is hard not to see someone else genuinely laughing without our mirror neurons firing, allowing us to experience a small part of the gaiety. Mostly, though, I think we are thrilled by the unexpected glimpse at sincerity.

We crave authenticity. Too often those moments are relegated to gag reels or Internet clips when maybe they should be the regularly scheduled programming.

I would do well to remember that in my own writing, and in my own life.

What are some of your favorite moments of authenticity? What actors do you enjoy watching break character?

For Theo, almost all words are exciting and fresh. I can see the pleasure on his face as he sounds out a combination for the first time, the thrill of changing it into something else entirely or discovering that night doesn’t just rhyme with flight but also bite and kite.

It’s like he’s tasting a new food, trying out how a word feels in his mouth, deciding if it is pleasant or unpleasant.

I miss that discovery, the experience of a previously unknown sound or mashing together of syllables. It’s one reason I’m drawn to writing. But too often I manage to get stuck in my head, stuck on trying to explain an idea or convey complexity. I would do well to remember Theo’s fascination, his delight at saying Bartleby for the first time. Those surprises are still there if we make a point to look for them. As with so many lessons from Theo, this one is a reminder to not discount the power of play.

What words make you smile? Can you remember any that made an impact the first time you heard them?

Here are a few favorites off the top of my head: pulchritude, indigent, frivolous, parsnip, ogle.

If you’re like most people, Wednesdays are a tough day to get through. You’ve moved past the transition of Monday and the momentum building of Tuesday. You know that on Thursday, it feels like you’ve started moving downhill and Friday can just be the finishing touch to the week. But there’s Wednesday in the middle. A bland hump. A hurdle.

I’m not really a big fan when I stop to think about it. But when I don’t stop to think about it, when I recognize that each day can function on its own terms, Wednesday can be just another day for doing the work. I also realize that I have to keep watch for this mindset in other areas. The middle of the month, for example, or the middle of the year can feel like the doldrums. Or maybe it’s your Saturn return or a middle of the life crisis. To head in the opposite direction, the middle of the day, the middle of the hour. If you start to look for those moments, you might realize every minute can function as a midpoint to “get through.”

Better probably to see them as opportunities instead of obstacles. Unless, of course, it’s just one of those days. Sometimes, they come and we have to let them.

What are your tough days? Tough times? Tough months?