Tempus Fugit

[piyadassi]

You guys, I am so dang sick of always crying about how much I don't get done.  You are probably sick of it too.

So I decided to use Sister Mary Lazarus (my calendar, my muse, she who raps my knuckles when I'm goofing off) not only to write down what I'm supposed to do, but also to record what I actually did.

Comments

[takodahaka]

Firstly, I totally applaud you for getting down to the nitty-gritty and scheduling! I haven't quite gotten to that point of anal retentiveness but I certainly appreciate the decision enough to applaud you heartily for it. Being a shipping coordinator requires everything to have a papertrail and everything to have a schedule. To paraphase the harpy in The Last Unicorn, we are related in our planning compulsion, you and I. But, I am still an apprentice at it whilst you are a journeyman, if not a master

[piyadassi]

Okay, see, that's what I need to do. I do spontaneous sit-down reading too, but it's always web pages on my phone. (Forum posts or news articles or something.) Maybe I ought to get an app so I could read actual books on this puppy, cuz goodness knows it's glued to my hip 24/7 anyway.

I do kind of want to see those Chinese customs forms sometime, BTW. They sound like the stuff of Kafka's nightmares.

Oh, and thx e-mail, BTW - I can't wait to get into it! This is the beauty of the thing: writing for you is reading for somebody else, so the circle of literary virtue can continue uninterrupted!

[conductor37]

Quick thought on the reading - you might not be reading because you currently don't have anything you really want to read. When there's a lot of more practical (or easier, like websurfing) stuff to do, unless you have a book you're really looking forward to cracking open, it's hard to just pick up a book and start in.

Hm, recommendations. The Alienist by Caleb Carr; The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson; Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand. I read all three of these in one sitting (and I have almost no interest in horse racing or jockeys or the horse racing business and yet I read Seabiscuit in one long evening) and all were chock full of fascinating period/setting information as well as having great stories. Moreover, I always needed to know what happened next, which might compell you to pause the cat videos and pick them up.

[piyadassi]

Y'know, I think you're on to something there. These days my list is usually subdivided into:

1. Books I'm reading for work (like reading The Scarlet Letter along with a tutoring student)
2. Books I have to read for basic genre literacy (because it's hard to sell yourself as a credible fantasy-Western writer if you haven't gotten around to "The Gunslinger")
3. Books I read for research (for the aforementioned writing)
4. Books from people I like who really need the PR (not that I'm some kind of marketing heavyweight, but it's hard to friends with struggling/desperate writers and not read their magnum opus when it finally makes it to print)

It'd be good if some "books for the hell of it" worked their way into that list. (Thx recs, by the way - I'd never heard of The Alienist before, but this looks especially superb!)

[conductor37]

The Alienist does bog a little in the middle with psychological babble, but it's totally worth it to skim it over to the next good part. However, on subsequent reads you don't notice the babble at all.