Changing the world, one word at a time.

This isn’t a shock since I haven’t posted in two weeks and barely in the last month. It’s more accurately “gone” not “going” I suppose.

This blogging drought is largely due to having so many clients at the moment that I have work coming out of my ears. I’m certainly not going to write a bunch of blog entries when I have clients paying me to meet deadlines with high-quality work.

It’s a good problem to have most days. It’s made even better by the fact that I’m working with some great clients who are doing wonderful work. It’s a very creative time for me. And I get paid to do all this. On top of that, it’s spring! How great is that?

At some point, I’m going to pick up the project of the much-needed redesign of my current professional site. Little secret of freelance web designers and writers – our sites rarely ever get touched because we’re building sites for everyone else.

I have some big projects in the pipeline for the summer, so I feel like I’m jumping into a great season in my freelance life. Great projects are coming to me; what a gift! Back in the 8-to-5 world, people often dump thankless projects on you. Mmmmm. That’s fresh air I smell over here; come outside all ye cube-dwellers!

So between family, clients, getting my business more organized, grabbing some time to write stories, and other important, day-to-day stuff, blogging is ranking about 9th. Someday I’ll be one of those people who blog about as naturally as they breathe and crank out insightful posts over morning cereal. I’m not there yet.

I will post from time to time in the lulls in the action that I hope will appear. Someday I hope to be a ‘regular’ at this. There’s so much I want to write about, but slapping up some half-written stuff in a blog doesn’t seem that edifying to the world to me.

In the meantime, my advice: Keep the pen moving; everything else will take care of itself.

[Ed. Note - Sorry for not posting in forever. Clients get priority over blogging, obviously. I'm not going to fight being busy with projects, though!]

Speaking of writers learning about graphic design, here’s a nice resource for learning about typography – “Type 101″ on Fonts.com

I admit that I know enough about typography to be dangerous. However, as I get into it, I find it more and more fascinating. In the competitive world of freelance writing and design, it’s a valuable skill to acquire. As I discovered with search engine optimization, the more I learned, the more I realized I didn’t know. It’s humbling, but constantly learning new things is what makes writing fun.

Most of the time when you submit work for publication in some market, they don’t care one wit about what you think the font should be. They have their own standards, and you should follow them, of course. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered an instance where they didn’t require submissions to be in a generic font like Courier or Times New Roman. I know the former seems antiquated, but it’s the default for many story manuscript submissions.

If you are writing a brochure, web site, or something similar for a client, your suggestions often will be somewhere between useful and essential. If you do any amount of this kind of work, start learning.

Make sure you look under “About Fonts” and “Useful Links” (in the top menu bar at Fonts.com). You’ll find much more information worth reading. I don’t know a thing about the quality of their products and services, but I found the information they provide very helpful. So check it out!

If you’re looking to get published, make sure you’re submitting your work to a reputable market. If someone offers to help you get published, do your homework and make sure you know who you’re dealing with.

All writers should make Preditors and Editors their first stop before submitting anything or making any agreement with a market you’re not sure about. Their web site could be a lot easier to use, but it’s still the best place to go for this critical information.

It’s your work, and you poured your creativity and sweat into it. Protect yourself!

In the midst of the chaos of juggling a million things in the last week, I’ve had one important revelation. My organization system (or general lack thereof) is severely affecting the time I have to meet my writing goals and my personal and work commitments. I meet my deadlines, of course, but I’ve found that’s come at the expense of sleep, personal downtime, and, particularly, my non-work writing.

So I decided to punt everything that wasn’t essential in the last week and focus on developing a better system. The problem was that so much was essential last week that this was really hard, but I finally ‘got it’ that one of the best times to buckle down and get organized is in the middle of a lot of chaos.

Despite some significant deadlines, an emergency trip to the dentist, and a sick kid, I actually got all this other stuff done.

• I deleted over 10,000 e-mail messages. No kidding.
• While I was at it, I got my Inbox down to ZERO. Admittedly, some of that ended up in an Action Items folder of messages I still need to respond to, but my Inbox was no longer a dumping ground for piles of mismatched pieces of information.
• My Inbox has stayed at zero because I’ve been processing that e-mail regularly. Setting my ‘automatically check e-mail’ interval to one hour instead of five minutes has done wonders. It no longer interrupts me and I can process it more efficiently when it comes in.
• I dumped everything I had in my brain for projects, action items, future tasks, anything I’d like to do but haven’t started on, calls I need to make, plans for world peace, and anything else that popped into my head down on to paper. Man, that felt good.
• I stashed little notebooks and notepads all over the house, in my pack, in the car, and anywhere else I might be. A notepad and a writing instrument are never more than 10 feet from me. Whenever I think of it, whatever ‘it’ is, I write it down. If I’m driving, I record it on a pocket recorder. It sounds obsessive, but my mind is so much more relaxed knowing I don’t have to remember something important until I find a place to get it down on.
• I took that entire brain dump and organized it into categories of projects, where ‘projects’ could be work-related, personal, or anything in between.
• I organized a big chunk of my project folders on my hard drive into groupings that made better sense.
• I made a calendar entry to remind myself to review those project and home lists regularly.

The end result? I’ve been frighteningly efficient the last couple of days. My mind feels a lot more relaxed. I had a really good Monday. You can’t beat that.

I even made some progress on a novel I’ve been working on. I got with it enough to do some research that’s been blocking me there for a long time.

If you’ve read time management books, you may already know the method I’m playing around with. Getting Things Done (GTD) is a method developed by David Allen that is by far the best approach I’ve come across. I’ve had to tweak it some to meet my style, but so far, it’s been a real load off my mind to follow it.

To borrow some more David Allen, the process of dumping the contents of your brain on to paper serves to offload your “psychic RAM”. Again, it felt great because instead of having to lug all that around in my head, it was down somewhere where I could locate it later.

This strikes me as an approach that fits naturally with how writers work. We carry around a ridiculous amount of stuff in our heads from bits of dialogue to plot ideas to nice phrases to solutions to sticky problems that have been plaguing us for weeks. Getting it down is a huge relief.

Working out the discrete steps required to keep a project moving along has been extremely helpful as well. Instead of “Create this web site” – which you can’t do without performing dozens of steps – I started figuring out very specifically what those steps were, especially those I need to do next. Instead of seeing a project with a hundred steps and a fuzzy sense of where to go next, I had the next actions right there ready to be tackled.

I don’t know what would happen if you locked David Allen and Anne Lamott in a room together, but GTD seems a lot like Bird by Bird to me. You write about only that little slice of the world that you can see through your one-inch picture frame; you complete that one small task on a big project. That’s how you complete a novel, a web site, or whatever else you’re working on.

Related Sites: 43 Folders | Lifehacker

I have no clue where this came from other than I saw it in a church newsletter. Apparently it was either written by A. Nonymous or Source Unknown.

Regardless, I got a big kick out of it. This’ll hit very close to home for technical writers, especially.

A priest and a pastor from the local parishes were standing by the side of the road holding up a sign that read, “The End is Near! Turn yourself around now before it’s too late!” They held up the sign to each passing car.

“Leave us alone you religious nuts!” yelled the first driver as he sped by. From around the curve they heard screeching tires and a big splash.

“Do you think,” said one clergy to the other, “we should just put up a sign that says ‘Bridge Out’ instead?”

I should say what I actually found while on the Poetry Foundation’s web site. (See previous post.)

Go read “I’m Glad I’m Me” by Phil Bolsta. It’s from Kids Pick the Funniest Poems. It completely made my day!

I’ve felt pretty stuck the last few days. It’s been a big week of transitions with my wife’s work, our son’s preschool and therapies, and several changes in our normal routine. It’s disorienting, and all this and my normal work schedule has left me feeling low on creative energy.

We’re programmed to react to these perceived shortfalls in accomplishments in a given week by working harder to catch up. I clued in enough today to try something a little different. I took a few minutes and browsed through my writing-oriented bookmarks in my browser to see if I could find something to wake up my creative spirit.

The Poetry Foundation’s web site is the Grand Central Station of poetry. Poetry helps me relax and regroup. I love the immediacy of it. I love discovering new poets. I love reading something that makes me say “Yes!” I love reading poetry from writers who speak their own unfiltered truth.

The Poetry Foundation is to me about discovery. The ‘Poetry Tool’ (approximately the middle of the page) lets you look for poems for specific reasons or for no reason at all. It’s a perfect way to re-center yourself after a rough week.

Don’t forget to check out their wealth of articles, audio resources, and podcasts. Just remember to come up for air and do some writing of your own, too!

March 4th is National Grammar Day! It’s so great that it even has its own web site. Not surprisingly, it’s NationalGrammarDay.com. I just discovered this site and haven’t had a chance to look at it much, but it’s chock-full of grammar goodness and Internet resources. Go check it out.

It wouldn’t be National Grammar Day without a little wisdom from Grammar Girl. Go read her Top Ten Grammar Myths transcript in honor of this day.

Shameless self-promotion – you can also read my Guide to Improving Your Writing and Grammar on my main site!

Celebrate with Grammatical Turkey Chili or a Grammartini! Just don’t take a red pen to the grocery store and edit their signs. You may get arrested.

Theodor Seuss Geisel – better known to the world as Dr. Seuss – was born March 2, 1904. To say that Geisel has had a powerful influence on generations of children – many of us now adults – is a vast understatement.

For me, and I imagine for many parents, it’s wonderful to be able to read to my son the same Dr. Seuss books I loved as a child. He loves them so much that I have a handful of them memorized so I can tell him those stories when we don’t have the books with us. Having his lyric words in my head whenever I need them has been a gift to me, too. I catch myself reciting them even without my son around and feel better for it.

Of my 34 years on this earth, I’ve spent about 21 of them in school of some sort. My favorite teacher was my high school English instructor, Dr. Jon Miller. At our Christmas semi-formal dances he read the Grinch. I first heard him read it 18 years ago, and I still remember it like it was yesterday. Imagine all these high school kids in ties, slacks, and dresses sitting around in a big circle for storytime.

He does a reading of the Grinch for the alumni every holiday, and we’ve taken our son the past two years to hear him. That’s been real gift to us. I hope when he retires, probably sometime in the next few years, that he realizes what a profound effect he’s had on now two generations of people.

If you’ve read out the Dr. Seuss collection at your library or bookstore and are looking for some books from another author to try out, your first stop should be Sandra Boynton. Her books are absolutely brilliant. Don’t just take my word for it. My son is serious about having Dr. Seuss and Sandra Boynton books with us everywhere we go. That should tell you something right there. His favorite right now is Barnyard Dance. If you have kids, run don’t walk and go get some of her books.

I was throwing around in my head the idea of a short story about people who were born on days or at times that are in some way rare.

The ‘Leap Day Conundrum’ – for lack of a better term – is something people born on February 29th deal with. It’s not that big of a deal really in a practical sense. Depending on where in the world you live, your legal birthday is either the 28th or March 1st on the other years. I doubt people born on Leap Day think much about it except when people act like they had a revelation and ask if you realized you were a Leap Baby. I guess it would put a damper on things when you turned 21 if the bartender decided to turn you down on the 28th.

Perhaps you could develop an interesting story around several people together who were born at unusual times: Leap Day, twins born across the daylight savings time ‘fall back’ hour, or the first baby born in 2000 being the more obvious ones. You could pick some that are less obvious: born on the first day of Hanukkah when it falls in November, on Easter when it falls on the spring equinox, or when Passover and Easter fall on the same day, to bring about some good religious themes. You could also work in people born on infamous days in history: September 11, the invasion of Pearl Harbor, and so on.

Since it only comes every four years (though not always, as you’ll see), let’s go over some fun calendar facts, just because we can.

• Leap years occur every four years except when the year is evenly divisible by 100 (e.g., 1700, 1800, 1900). However, there’s an exception to that rule, too. If the year is divisible by 400, the rule of 100s doesn’t apply. As a result, 2000 was a leap year.
• It is possible to go eight years between leap years. The last time this occurred was between 1896 and 1904. It will occur again between 2096 and 2104.
• Why do we have leap years in the first place? The actual solar year (how long it takes the Earth to go around the sun) is approximately 365 1/4 days, meaning that we get a quarter of a day behind every year. So, leap years help us catch up.
• Why do we skip leap year every 100 years but add it back in every 400? The keyword above is approximately a quarter of a day behind each year. Currently, the solar year is about 11 minutes short of 365 1/4 days. This means we have to throw in another fudge factor every 100 years by taking out a leap year and every 400 years by adding it back in.
• Even all that fudging doesn’t completely solve the problem. There’s enough error left to compound over a long period of time that it’s estimated that in the year 4909 we’ll be a full day off even with all the leap years between now and then. People way too concerned about this are asking for the year 4000 to be designated as a leap year even though it’s divisible by 400. A logical, wait-and-see approach may be merited, both because the solar year will ever so slightly change over time as the orbital speed of the earth slows and the years get a smidge longer and, well, because no one alive right now should really care enough to act on it.

Why do I know all this? Beats me. Sometimes random knowledge interests you at some point and then sticks in your brain.

What does this have to do with writing? Well, they made a movie out of Groundhog Day, and other movies since have been based on the idea. Could be fertile ground here for something!

If you write a novel set at some turn of a century, you can thank me later for helping you know whether that year was a leap year.

I also think it was part of the solution of an Encyclopedia Brown story I read once.