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| Nov Jan |
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Today I confronted the sheer vastness of the topic I have chosen to write my book about. I indulged my vertigo for about 15 minutes. Then I borrowed a page from some of the people I'm writing about.
A while back, the team at OSAF, in an effort to wrestle the schedule of their project to the ground, temporarily moved their planning process off the wiki and onto a whiteboard. They broke their project down into roughly equal chunks of work and wrote the name of each chunk on a simple yellow sticky note. Instantly, the outlines of a schedule became easier to discern.
Stickies (a k a "Post-It" notes)! I'd seen play- and screen-writing friends do the same for their projects. I'm a devotee of outlining software, and I'm using a venerable outliner to organize my research. But I needed a different approach to get beyond the sense of "Oh crap, how do I find a way out of this swamp and onto that mountain range?" Somehow, laying all the pieces out in an open-ended, non-hierarchical way on a two-dimensional plane just helped: Something about being able to take in all the pieces in a map-like overview rather than peering in through the keyhole of screen real estate.
My stickies are now marshalled out on a 3' x 4' foamcore board and looming over my desk. Over the next few months I will add to them, rearrange and reorganize them, then remove them from the board one by one as they pass from concept into actual pieces of writing.
One day the board will be empty. And I'll be done with a first draft.
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Over the years I have accumulated a large collection of cassette tapes. Typically, I'd own LPs (later, CDs) but I'd transfer them to cassette to listen to them in the car. You could fit two LPs on one C-90, so it was efficient, and everyone knows that music and driving go together like, say, cinnamon and sugar. (Convenience of this sort is, of course, on the wane as the world of "digital rights management" tries to lock down everything it can.)
This was my mode for many years; I still remember debating whether it was worth dubbing my multi-LP set of Laurie Anderson's "United States" to listen to during the cross-country drive in 1986 as I moved my life from Boston to San Francisco. I knew I'd made the right choice somewhere on I-80 on the long, slow climb up from the plains on the Nebraska/Wyoming border. Anderson's voice intoned its futuristic alienations and fragile hopes as I hung suspended between two coasts and two lives, and the wind began roaring down from the mountains, buffeting my old car back toward the past. (I also listened to a lot of Buddy Holly -- alienation only gets you so far.)
I'll keep those tapes, and a handful of others. But I've got hundreds more that just duplicate music I have in other, better formats. So what does one do with several hundred old cassette tapes? They were once reasonably high quality blanks; it seems criminal to toss them in landfill. I'd welcome any ideas.
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