Her: “Ulysses.”

Him: “Play Baldur’s Gate”

References:

http://www.baldursgate.com/ipad.en.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)

This is the third year seriously trying to do it. My first year I completed the requisite 50,000 words – but it was awful. I’m not being humble – it was genuinely awful, but it had a quality in its own way, because it served to purge the awful words that were inside me. Cliches, tropes, and otherwise predictable subsets of words.

You want to flush the dirt and awfulness from any channel before you can engage in a deep clean.

Last year NaNoWriMo was interrupted by a flailing of work, I had come to Boston for some time and there was a big push towards that deadline. I bootstrapped the story, and then would sit to pen it every now and then, when I felt the mood. It wasn’t often – I got in about 18 days of writing over the course of the past year, from November 1st, 2011 until October 31st, 2012. The first year when I started writing, the characters and the scenes would write themselves as I went about my day. I would fall asleep dreaming their dreams, I would wake up and know how my characters awoke. Their lives interwove with mine, and when I sat to write, it felt like I was doing little creating, and more simply transcribing that which had already happened. Taking it down like a scribe, a journalist, a historian. It didn’t feel like there was any originality of my own composition, just in the style with which I recorded the composition.

This year, that feeling is back. Characters are expressing their own agency that isn’t revealed to me until I type out the letters. The locales that serve as the stage are alive whether or not I am thinking of them. They run of their own accord with or without me, and when they are in my thoughts, it is as naught more than a clockwork that unfolds to reveal itself to me. I’m allowed to peep into their world and write down what I see. That feeling of peeping into an alternate world transcends deja vu; it’s endemic to my daily quotidian life.

But then I remember that days like today are actually good days. They keep me honest. They help me appreciate small victories. I realize that every other day is actually a great day. Days like today remind me that it’s good to be working with good people on good things.

End the day with good company and any day ends well – even today.

whoa.

i think i just blew my own mind.

(Full disclosure: I cheated the second trip, for one day — just to send an email to L to see if she could please select seats for me on international flights. But no other reading / writing online of any kind.)

I told him that upon returning, I was able to continue with that flow, for the most part.

We should clarify, that by offline we really mean minimal surfing. Not cutting out email, meaningful IM conversations, staying in touch with people, but more the extraneous barrage of content available to an idle mind.

So I thought I would try to write up what I noticed, and the aftermath of this for me. Your own applicability may vary.

• Idle Cycles: Google Reader

For me, anytime I want to take a break, or I find myself with no immediate action to take, I load up Google Reader. I rarely “surf” anymore, and much of my inbound content comes that way. It’s easier to break open greader for a short stint, because you can cut it off at a 5-minute or 10-minute mark abruptly without feeling rude.

The task in the Idle state is perhaps the go-to for me that leads to extraneous information. The first thing when going offline is to reprogram that state. Email is a natural one to shift to, since we find ourselves with an incessant need to check. Few, if any of us, receive emails that are ultra urgent. And I mean even work emails. It’s taken me a long time to realize that (thank you, Big Company), but finally I know that few emails I get are truly both urgent and important. That’s different from the backlog of emails I need to reply to, which is great. But it’s easy to get lost in ambiguous direction.

So then what?

• The List

I come back to the idea of The List. Either you have a list of things that you need to do, and you can start taking tasks off the top. Or you go to the list, and add to it, reorganize it, categorize, whatever. Detailing and maintaining this list will help you start reducing your Idle cycles, and getting more stuff done. For me, this might be anything from moving PDFs of papers I want to read into Dropbox, searching for information about topics I want to learn about and then Instapapering them for later, or even just loading up Instapaper and working through some of the backlog. In some sense, it’s still extraneous information, but for myself I’ve found myself curating Google Reader into Instapaper, and then never actually finding time to follow up. Now I have that time.

The biggest difference in doing this is realizing how much information day-to-day can be completely eschewed. I marked 1000+ Techcrunch articles as read in one fell swoop, and it’s unclear to me if I’ll miss any of them. The part of my brain that whispers that I ought to know everything about everything is hushed into calmness.

There’s probably more, but that’s it for now.

1. Realizing that I use a lot of non-english-dictionary words in the course of general conversation, whether imported or derived from other languages or through liberal expression of poetic license.

2. More frustration than benefit, opposed to on iOS where usually the corrections are welcome.

L
yo yo yo
hello?
are we live

Ryan
yeah

L
hello
hello
can you hear me

Ryan
yup
can you hear me

L
yay

– snippet of an IM transcript.

“You would expect artists and content owners to support SOPA, and you would expect the people who would be caught in legal dragnets to oppose it. The interesting people are the crossovers: The parties who take the “wrong” side of the issue. And indeed, many creators do just that, publicly arguing against SOPA even though it is specifically aimed at protecting their financial interests. But at the risk of being unkind, a lot of people become artists because they aren’t good at things like math and legal analysis. When I want an opinion on the Constitution, or economics, I rarely consult an artist.

Bottom line: The crossovers aren’t persuasive.”

– http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/sopa