dose

So one part of me says: “blogging is a waste of time.” Not that there is no value in blogging but that it takes away lots of time from work and other constructive pursuits (which certainly it does).

But I also notice that I become much more blog-prolific when I am busiest, most creative, and most productive. An article about LibriVox appeared in Wired.com last week, and it’s been bananas at the LibriVox forum since then. We’ve had a 10x uptick in traffic, with a correlated increase in newbie forum postings - all requiring monitoring of one kind or another. There are other forum moderators there, all handling things admirably, but LibriVox is my baby, and I just can’t seem to stay away.

At the same time, I’ve been blogging way more than normal. Chapter 1 of novel #2 has revealed itself to me, and I have written the first draft - about 7,000 words of what I think could be a very good novel (much better than Blind Spot). I wrote a letter to a publisher I’ve been planning to contact for a long time, and more exciting ideas about CBC 2.0, Broadcasting 2.0, are percolating into a coherent proposal, which you’ll all see oulined here shortly. Plus I have almost finished hammering out my contract with the little publishing house for the top-secret non-fiction book I have in the works.

My particular brain seems to work best in a frenzy, with many things going on; ideas just start pouring out of me when I am in that situation (unfortunately, I usually don’t have time to implement many of my brilliant ideas, and I usually get stuck after launch with a half-done great idea - which by the way is why collaborative web projects are so cool, others come in with complementary skills & personalities). But I’m not too good at, for instance, a day of plodding work. I need space and freedom in my thinking process, then as many things bubble away, and then gel, I spew it all out pretty quick. For instance, when I am writing fiction, I can do about an hour and a half at a time. Maybe two hours; but I need a fair bit of time around that to get anything out of the time I am writing. If I get four hours of fiction writing in a day I am well above average.

Anyway, all that to say that blogging — both reading and writing — sometimes, is part of a hyper-creative, hyper-productive spurt, as it was today. And now I’m cooking a nice roast (spencer steak), from Joe the Hungarian butcher on St-Laurent. That guy is amazing. I sense a little audio/video project coming up.