I Came, I Saw, I Suffered Immensely
Okay, so I wrote this post called Freelance Writing: What I Did Right , about the things that worked for me in 2010 as a newly self-employed (p/t) writer. And I wrote it from the heart, as honestly as I could, in an attempt to avoid sounding smug. It’s up to you to decide if I succeeded or not.
But let’s face it, this is the fun part: listing the ways I screwed up.
Let’s not dawdle: we’ve got a Mike to laugh at. (more…)
So, Mike, how goes it?
What? Who…who are you?
I’m your imaginary audience!
Uh, I already have an imaginary audience. That’s the fuel that powers my ego. That’s the crutch that props up my personal blogging, allowing it to stagger and lurch erratically ever-onwards towards some…
Yes yes. Use less words. Listen! I may be imaginary, but I have a real question that needs a real answer.
Namely?
“What’s going on with you?” Because this is supposed to be a personal blog, but it’s Kindle this, authenticity that, trains, bad places….come on. Where’s you in all this? (more…)
For many years, people have told me I have the perfect face for radio.
Every time, my reaction was the same – when the red mist lifted and I finally stopped hitting them, I’d mull it over for a while. You know, that would be fun.
There’s something deliciously challenging about radio, and also something incredibly cheap about it too. It’s a place where imagination really takes flight. In Cyprus as a child, I’d sit spellbound in the shade, lost in the tapes my dad had recorded from the BBC World Service. I squeaked my enthusiasm for Lord Of The Rings (back then just a book) onto a TDK C90 cassette that we posted off to relatives back in England. I wore tapes out, replaying them until they broke. I was hooked.
Then I discovered live radio broadcasts. (“Is someone recording all this? No? But, what a waste!“)
Yes, I love audio.
Then I attended TBU, and it got me thinking. Why don’t I have a go?
So here I am, reading out this post. I think they call this “blogcasting”. You may call it something else, such as “awful”, or “the least useful 4 minutes I’ve spent since Rebecca Black’s Friday“. If so, I apologise deeply. And screw you.
I don’t yet know what I’ll do beyond playing – but I feel confident that once I get over my microphone-fright, relax a little and settle into a comfortable rhythm, it’ll get a hell of a lot worse.
Enjoy.
Image: laffy4k
Sometimes travel-blogging feels like one big difference of opinion. From the right way to travel to hating on partial RSS feeds, from debating whether the term “street food” is insulting to where the line gets drawn between it and restaurant food. There’s lots of disagreement, occasionally heated, and a lot of haranguing.
It’s all very healthy.
(And dead fun to watch)
But picking your way through it, finding a truth that fits you, takes time. There’s just so much of everything out there that grappling with a tiny fraction of it can bite your entire day in half.
My biggest problem is getting through it all. I’m swamped. Books piled high, RSS feeds in need of a digital machete, a Kindle so full it sweats. And I hate it, because everything is fascinating right now.
A few months back, I took stock of my 2010 (which I’ve started writing about already), and one of the truly worrying things was the amount of terrific advice that had gone into my head, lingered long enough for me to think “hey, great point” and then been trampled to jam by everything following behind it. Splat. Gone.
The only way to truly internalise good advice is to reinforce it until it’s strong enough to survive the crush in your head. And that’s how you keep it in mind long enough to do something about it.
In a way, the Internet is really good at this. There are bookmarks, and site archives, and e-mail notifications you can flag in your Inbox – but all these things involve wading directly into the flow of incoming Stuff and getting battered by it while you try to focus on something else. If you’re an Internet addict like me, this is really hard. You’re wired to respond to new Stuff, and your attention leaps at every distraction like a headcrab. Mate with my brain!
Knowing that my memory is either naturally this terrible, or has been addled by my online habits, I have chosen to take everything useful I’ve discovered or rediscovered since Christmas….offline.
It all goes in a huge notebook. I read this notebook on the bus, in the garden, in the smallest room in the house (you know the one)…pretty much everywhere, really. It’s my book of Thinky Stuff. Sometimes I scribble things out with a curse when I’ve decided they’re bullshit (yes, Mr Ferriss) and sometimes I underline things and ring them and occasionally write “Hurrah!” in the margins. It’s a knowledge bank that gets filtered as it gets added to – it evolves.
But mainly, it gets reread.
I can rarely say that about anything I read on the Internet.
