Seeking Time: A Sort of Hiatus for Original Content

I'll be cutting back on blogging for probably the next six weeks while I help out a couple of family members. I have two blog posts in progress that I want to finish up and publish, because they are somewhat timely, and this cut back may lead to a Seeking Time post this summer, because what doesn't lead to a Seeking Time post? 

For the immediate future, though, I want to use what work time I have for nonblogging activity.

Looking forward to beginning here again.

The Reading History Project: What Are We Doing for Mother's Day? Mothers as Activists!

Mother's Day, in my humble opinion, can be fun if you have young children. Otherwise:

1. It's an opportunity for a lot of marketing.
2. It causes stress for moms over whether or not their kids will remember to observe the day for them and stress for kids, adult ones, anyway, over what they should do to observe it for mom.
3. It's a grieving time for many people who have lost their mothers or are in the process of doing so.
4. It's one more reminder for mothers who have lost children of what is gone from their lives. 

For some people, Mother's Day doesn't have a lot to recommend it.

The History of Mother's Day

Yesterday historian Heather Cox Richardson tipped her readers off to the fact that the originators of Mother's Day were interested in something else. She's supported by The History of Mother's Day: From Global Peace to Greeting Cards at The Smithsonian American Women's History Museum.

In 1870, Julia Ward Howe, responding to the American Civil War that had ended just a few years earlier and the Franco-Prussian War that was then being fought in Europe, tried to create an annual Mother's Day for peace. In the early twentieth century Anna Jarvis was successful in creating Mother's Day to honor her mother, Ann Jarvis, who just happened to have been involved with a mid-nineteenth century public health movement. She organized Mother's Work Days to, among other hygiene-related activities, collect trash. 

Mother's Day came out of reform movements.

Bringing Mother's Day Back to Activism?

Though a number of states allowed women to vote in local school elections in the nineteenth century, they couldn't vote on the national level. They had to find a different way to have a voice and did so by becoming involved with reform movements, the most prominent being abolition, suffrage, and temperance. 

I'm sort of over Mother's Day, myself. I feel it's a young woman's game. But this idea of Mother's Day and reform or activism brings a whole new level of interest for me. 

From now on, I actually will be thinking about doing something for Mother's Day. It may not be with any kids, though.

 

Seeking Time: The Unit System

Very early in my seeking time journey someone told me about an article in Poets & Writers by author Ellen Sussman in which she described something she called the unit system. 

She said she worked for 45 minutes of an hour, then spent 15minutes doing something that wasn't work-related. Then she'd go back to work for another 45 minutes. And repeat. The benefits, she said, were: 

1. During the 45 minutes that she worked, it was easier to stay on task when she knew she'd have a break in another X minutes
2. During those 15 minutes that she wasn't working, her "unconscious thought" could often continue working on a writing problem, which was helpful when she went back to work.

She had some science to support this work, research related to graduate students managing time for writing. 

Again, all you did was work for 45 minutes, break for 15 and then begin writing again for another 45 minutes. Later I would realize I am a minimalist. I love how minimal this work method is.

Like the Unit System

Over the years, I kept stumbling upon articles supporting working in what might be described as sprints or short units of time, like Sussman's plan.

• A study suggested recognizing "that you have a finite attentional window––and structure your workflow to be congruent with that capacity. This speaks to how we’ve talked about how work is a series of sprints––and to be our most productive and most creative, we need to unplug throughout our workdays." 
• Tony Scwartz recommends working in 90-minute blocks because at the end of ninety minutes, "we reach the limits of our capacity to work at the highest level." Then we need to renew. At his blog, Schwartz referred to the work pattern he suggests--90 minutes of work, followed by a break--as "mental intervals." Like the unit system but different.
• The fairly well-known Pomodoro Technique recommends working in 25-minute units of time, taking a 5-minute break, then going back to work for 25 minutes. Like 45-minutes but different.

All the above involve simple strategies. 

The Value of Small Units of Time 

For years I used the unit system daily. I will admit, the 45-minutes on, 15-minutes off system has failed for me the last few years. I still embrace small work periods, though, even without following a work, break, work, break pattern, for two reasons.

First, the idea that we should work in 90-minute, 45-minute, or even 25-minute units means we have accepted that we can do something in small amounts of time. We don't need to have a summer to write. We don't need a formal retreat, a three-day weekend, a day.  

In The Heartbreaking Ingenuity of the Mother-Writer at Literary Hub Olivia Campbell quotes author Alison Stine:  

"You can't be precious about writing if you have kids. You can't be fastidious or fussy. You can't always write at the cool coffee shop. I applied for a NEA grant at Burger King: They had free wifi and an indoor children's playground...I wrote my most recent novel draft during my son's remote school Zoom meetings. My first novel, Road Out Of Water, I wrote at the local skatepark, where my son belonged to the skate club."

Stine recognized that she could adapt small units of time to use for writing. It's not unusual to read of mothers who write working like this.

Additionally, psychologist Kelly McGonigal has talked about the what-the-hell-effect, in which people give up on a project because they feel bad about their lack of success with it. As in "It's 2:30, and I haven't written yet. The day is shot. What the hell. I'll try again tomorrow." With the unit system, we don't have to feel bad about ourselves for not starting work yet, because we realize at 2:30 we have two and a half hours before dinner to work. Or we have an hour before the kids get home. Even a half an hour can be helpful.  

I like the psychological impact of the unit system. It isn't just a way of managing time. It's a way of thinking about it. The thinking aspect becomes part of our view of ourselves and how we work.

That's the part that's kept me using it and maybe even kept me writing.

 

Friday Done List May 8

 A good week. At least, it feels like a good week.

Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor 

• Truly worked on a humor piece.
• Finished a blog post that is going to become an essay.
• Worked on an essay for a project.
• Took a workshop on literary submissions in preparation for submitting a new short story.
• Finished reading an excellent history book for The Reading History Project.
• Started reading another history book for The Reading History Project.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Published a blog post. Will publish another this weekend.
• Promoted said blog post. 
• Spent way too much time reading on social media about Mac Barnett, whom I hadn't heard of this time last week.

Goal 3. Submit Book-length Work to Agents and Editors 

• Received a rejection. Rejection means you're working!

The Story Behind the Story: Minimum Word Counts

Frontier Myth vs. Frontier Reality was published this weekend at Books Are Our Superpower after a request for editing because the publication has an 800-word minimum for its essays. I believe the essay I sent was originally in the low 600s or 700s. It's up over 900 words now.

As far as short nonfiction is concerned, I've become a bit of a minimalist writer. I like the traditional essay in which writers begin with a thesis statement and describe the support they'll be discussing for it later on. 

My impression is that the Medium platform, itself, favors longer writing. (You may not be able to read all that article. You'll have to trust me.) Up over a thousand words and more, which, actually, isn't outrageously long. However, a lot of medium writers are new to writing, and they may not be that knowledgeable about how to put an essay together. They take their time getting to the point and the more words they use, the longer they take. 

I'm also a minimalist reader. I like writers to get to the point sooner rather than later.

The point I'm getting to here, is that in spite of my being a minimalist writer, I feel the revision I did because the publication asked for more words was better than what I originally sent them. Why is that, Gail? Well, in order to add words, I:

• Added details that supported the point of one of the paragraphs.
• Included a thread relating to "our history" that wasn't originally there.

I felt both those changes enhanced the essay. So what I'll try to do in the future is consider whether I've gone so short on the word count that I haven't included important material

Friday Done List May 1

I read an article about a woman who tracked every hour she spent writing for six months. What she found out was that a lot of the time she wasn't writing, she was doing writing-related activities. My first response was, Oh, no, I am never tracking my writing. That is asking for misery. But now I'm thinking, wait. There is a lot of writing adjacent work that writers need to do. No judgement!

Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor 

• An essay submission I'd made last week came back requesting edits. Essentially, it was too short. So I did a rewrite that increased the word count. I think the essay was actually better afterward.
• The essay above has been approved for publication.
• I finished two blog posts that I plan to revise to submit as essays.
• I set up some files for the essays I plan to write from blog posts.
• I took a workshop yesterday that wasn't what I was expecting. However, I came away with some thoughts regarding the short story I recently finished and made a couple of changes to it today.
• I did just the tiniest bit of work on some humor pieces.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• I published a blog post last Saturday, which I also promoted.
• I wrote and published another blog post, which I also promoted.
• Read an article about AI and another about marketing books, for what good that will do me.

Goal 4. Begin Some Writing on the 19th Century Novel Idea

• Made some notes on this.

 

Seeking Time: Begin Again

I said recently that back during the fourteen years that I was writing about time regularly, "I was hungry for ways to get things done and sometimes even finding a few." 

One of my favorite fews is begin again.

Yes, Begin Again Comes from Meditation, Not Time Management

Begin Again is a concept from meditation. In Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics authors Dan Harris, Jeff Warren, and Carlyle Adler describe beginning again as the most important step in meditation. "The whole game is to notice when you're distracted, and begin again. And again. And again." Kelly McGonigal says In The Willpower Instinct that having to keep bringing your wandering mind back to your breath (beginning again) while meditating develops the brain. 

In my dabbling in meditation I have never seen begin again used as anything but a positive. 

That's Right. We've Done Nothing Wrong

I consider beginning again on a par with the writing advice to keep your butt-in-chair or write every day. The main difference is that beginning again doesn't involve guilt. Butt-in-chair and write every day carry with them a sense of othering. "Keeping your butt in a chair is what we writers do." "To be a writer, you have to write every day." 

But, remember, most of us are the kinds of writers who can't support ourselves with our writing. We've got a day job to keep us alive. For many of us, there are kids, sick relatives, moves to be made, newly diagnosed illness, depression over our lousy careers, existential dread...Those things are all going to happen and keep us, at least at times, from keeping those butts in chairs and writing every day. Kelly McGonigal has said (again In The Willpower Instinct) that self-criticism undermines motivation and self-control, leading us to give in, to give up. Feeling we are less than because we're being judged for not being able to live like writers are supposed to live is unlikely to be a positive for us.

Beginning again can be. We can get past those life issues or find a way to deal with them and then we can begin again.   

You Can Look Forward to Beginning Again

When we've done the begin again thing a few times, we find ourselves looking forward to it. Maybe it's because beginning again means whatever was standing in the way of our writing is over or we're managing it now. Maybe it's because we like sitting at our laptop in whatever passes as our workspace and know we'll enjoy getting back there again. Maybe it's because we're writers, and writers like nothing better than being able to begin writing again.

To paraphrase Dan Harris and company, "The whole game is to begin again. And again. And again." 

The Reading History Project: Yes, I Am Obsessed with Frederick Jackson Turner

Frederick Jackson Turner is a historian who could be said to have gone down in history pretty much for what amounts to an essay, The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893.*   According to Colin Woodard in How the Myth of the American Frontier Got Its Start in Smithsonian, Turner arranged to have Significance of the Frontier in American History published in the American History Association's annual report, taught his thesis to graduate history classes, and lectured about it, but he never wrote a book on the subject. Yet in Does Turner Still Live? Considerations on the Popular Afterlife of The American Frontier by Walter Nugent in The Athenaeum Review describes the essay's influence up until the 1970s and '80s.

I first heard of Turner's essay in high school. I got a totally wrong impression about what the thing was about that I carried with me for many years. So many years. This is my misinterpretation:

In The Closing of the American Frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner said that the frontier served as a place for Easterners who didn't fit in where they were to move where there weren't so many social restrictions and they could get along better. Turner was concerned about what would happen when there was no longer an American frontier and society had no place to send these people.  

Let's be clear, Turner did not write anything called The Closing of the American Frontier. In the nine pages of excerpts that I read from the essay he did write, The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893, I found nothing about the frontier being used as a dumping ground for Easterners who didn't fit in in Boston and Hartford. 

Did I come up with this myself, as a result of watching too may Westerns on TV while growing up? I have to say, I'm wondering about my high school history teacher now. Was this some kind of Turner interpretation when he was at UVM back in the day? Is it a Turner spin he came up with himself, as a person who reads history?

Also, why did I remember this, particularly since it was wrong?

At any rate, Turner's actual essay, The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893, was embraced for generations. Though Turner didn't write a book about it, himself, he and Significance of the Frontier turn up in other historians' books to this very day.

What Jackson Really Said About the Frontier

In Significance of the Frontier, Turner argues that

 "Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development."

This experience, happening over and over again as the people on the East coast moved West, settled, then moved further West "promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people." 

He describes conflicts between East and West, saying, "The East has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the frontier, and has tried to check and guide it." Nonetheless, "Steadily the frontier of settlement advanced and carried with it individualism, democracy, and nationalism, and powerfully affected the East and the Old World."

The frontier experience made all of America what it was, not just Western America.

Note that Turner writes about the "existence of an area of free land." He mentions it more than once. And how does he define "frontier?" "...the meeting point between savagery and civilization."

I will also point out here that these days the word "colonization" carries some negative connotations involving oh, taking land from others, enslavement, destroying cultures, and other things of that nature.

What Others Have to Say about Turner

A Historian of His Times. In These Truths: A History of the United States Jill Lepore describes what was going on in the field of history in the late nineteenth century when Turner delivered his paper. History, like other fields then, was professionalizing. Turner was one of the first Americans to hold a doctorate in history. He read his paper at a meeting of The American Historical Association, which had only been founded in 1884. Lepore says: 

"...historians borrowed from the emerging social sciences, relying on quantitative analysis to understand how change happens."  

How does Turner begin The Significance of the Frontier in American History? With a quote from the 1890 Census. 

"Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports."

He was using a quantitative analysis of something from the present rather than something from the past in his material but by turning to something so scientific he was marking himself as being from and of his period. In fact, the AHA meeting where he presented his paper was held during the Columbian Exposition in Chicago where all kinds of new things were displayed. They had a Ferris wheel! 

A Historian Who Said Something People Liked.  Megan Kate Nelson writes about Turner in the recently published  The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier. She's not the only writer to point out that Turner's reading of his essay didn't immediately take the academic world by storm. She says that pre-Turner most historians believed the United States became the United States because of European influence. In fact, Turner may be talking about that when he refers to "germs" in his paper. "Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment."

But according to Nelson popular perception of the "Great West" supported Turner. Novels featured Indian fighters saving white families, painters romanticized Western landscapes, and government policies (providing that free land Turner talks about) encouraged people in the East to go West. Turner was preaching to a choir that already believed in a frontier story they thought explained them even if they'd never been West of the Mississippi. Or West of anything. That's mythic.   

A Historian Whose Thesis Is Now Dated.  Remember I asked you to note that Turner writes about the "existence of an area of free land" and defines "frontier" as "...the meeting point between savagery and civilization?" 

Well.

In Thinking About History Sarah Maza says,

"Turner's vision of early Americans marching into "free land" is today discredited by our awareness that in most cases the lands European pioneers trekked into and grabbed already had owners, namely indigenous peoples, and were not theirs to claim by right or destiny."

Nowadays we are also likely to recognize that areas described in the past by Europeans as "savage" and "uncivilized" did have civilizations, they were just not civilizations familiar to Europeans and therefore deemed savage. 

A Historian Who May Have Been Ready to Move on Even If American Culture Wasn't 

In How the Myth of the American Frontier Got Its Start, Colin Woodard says that Frederick Jackson Turner eventually rethought his frontier theory. 

"...he had been relying too narrowly on the experiences in his own region of the Upper Midwest, which had been colonized by a settlement stream originating in New England. In fact, he found, the values he had ascribed to the frontier's environmental conditioning were actually those of this Greater New England settlement culture..."

Turner is supposed to have spent years working on a project that didn't treat the frontier as some kind of unifying force but instead involved the differences among America's various sections. But, Woodard says, Turner was a procrastinator. The work was never completed.

Instead The Significance of the Frontier in American History continued to be taught for decades, promoting a belief in American characteristics involving individualism, democracy, and nationalism.  

______________________________________

*This link directs you to nine pages of excerpts, which is all I read.

Friday Done List April 24

Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor  

• Some basic revision of the prose poem I began in a workshop last week.
• Made a submission!
• Revised a blog post I'd forgotten about into an essay for submission.
• Submitted the essay I just told you about.
• Wrote a blog post I hope will become part of a series/arc I'll publish directly at Medium. A case of using the blog for actual writing/first drafts.
• Wrote a draft of a blog post for the Reading History Project that I hope to revise to submit to a Medium publication.
• Finally got a little market research done. Swung this because I had to spend time in a waiting room while someone had a medical test. Got on the office's WIFI!

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• 
  
  Someone made a lovely comment on BlueSky about Happy Kid! Which I then reposted and wrote about on Facebook.

Goal 3. Submit Book-length Work to Agents and Editors 

• Made a submission!

 

Seeking Time: A 24-Hour Readathon? In My Day, We Did 48.

I learned of Dewey's 24-Hour Readathon, which is happening today, nine minutes before it started. For a hot second I considered being all impulsive, dropping everything, and taking part. Believe me, I have way more than 24-hours of reading to do. But in my search for time, I'm try to stay on-task, and the task this Saturday involves some invasive plants at the back of my yard and a wide array of additional activities both work- and personal-related. Taking a day off to read will have a bad impact on how I use my time next week.

But a community reading binge is very attractive. I know, because I've done them.

The 48-Hour Book Challenge

I believe I have a couple of readers still with me from back in the day when there was a children's lit blogger community. And for ten years that community took part in The 48-Hour Book Challenge. We didn't just read for 48-hours. We blogged about what we were reading. We were fierce.

Karen Yingling of Ms. Yingling Reads ran a #MGReadathon in 2022 that I took part in. I don't read many children's books these days, so I don't know if that's still happening. 

I think there are definite benefits to binge reading, and I've been trying to work what I think of as a targeted weekend reading retreat into my life for months. I'm struggling to find the time to do that.

Friday Done List April 17

 Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor 

• Started a new humor piece. Not one of the new humor pieces I've been thinking about starting for weeks, but a totally different humor piece.
• Took a workshop during which I started 3 prose poems, all variations of the same material. Which I think I might turn into a piece of flash fiction, my original idea, after all.
• Started a blog post that I am already thinking about revising to submit elsewhere.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Bratz v Anthropic blog post.
• Promoted the above blog post.
• Started another blog post, as mentioned under Goal 1.

Goal 3. Submit Book-length Work to Agents and Editors 

• Checked a couple of hours ago, and an agent I'm interested in submitting to has finally reopened. On next week's To Do List.

Goal 4. Begin Some Writing on the 19th Century Novel Idea

• Some thoughts. Some notes.

I Don't Think I've Written About Bartz v Anthropic. How Did I Miss That?

Pirated!

Bartz v Anthropic, or "the Anthropic case," as it's known at my house, was a big topic of discussion in my home for months last winter. Part of this is because I have a book involved and am thus a claimant in the class-action suit. Part of this is because we have a deceased family member who is also a
claimant. 

I see a lot of rage regarding the case and artificial intelligence in general on Facebook. On Medium, I see a lot of people writing about the glories of AI, even though Medium supposedly doesn't allow AI-generated writing. Or it hasn't in the past. Things are always changing there.

Bartz vs. Anthropic is confusing. I was confused about the two-part decision originally, but I think I've got it down now, and I have a couple of links to help explain what happened.

What Was Going On

Richard W. Stevens writes in Can AI Legally Be Trained Using All the Books in the World? | Mind Matters that Anthropic trained its chatbot, Claude, by creating a huge data base of copyrighted books. It got these books in two ways:

• It purchased hardcover books, tore them apart, and scanned them. According to Benj Edwards in Anthropic Destroyed Millions of Print Books to Build its AI Models these were used books. Anthropic was not going to its local independent bookseller or placing an order with publishers and paying full price.  
• It got digital books for free from pirate sites. They're called pirate sites, because they're full of stolen books.

In either case, the issue was whether copying these books for the use of training a computer program without the copyright holders' permission was copyright infringement.

Nobody Got a Full Win Here

The court found:

• Acceptable:  The court ruled that Anthropic using used books it purchased, copied, and trained its program on was fair use, because people can do what they want with a book after they purchase it.*  Also, evidently training a computer program is considered teaching, and teaching books, say in schools, is also fair use. This is the portion of the decision I didn't originally understand. It wasn't clear in early articles that Anthropic had paid something to somebody. There was a sense that they had just taken work directly from writers, possibly because the books were secondhand, therefore authors didn't gain anything from the Anthropic purchase. 
• Unacceptable: Anthropic taking digital books from pirate sites to do whatever it wants with was not acceptable. Presumably because pirate sites steal books, and Anthropic was knowingly accepting stolen goods. On TV that's always frowned on. I guess the people at Anthropic didn't watch the same shows I do.

As Stevens says at the end of his article "the decision tends to encourage AI systems that train on other people's written works, so long as those works are either paid for or in the public domain."

Why Do Writers Care About AI?

Well, I'll tell you this writer's main issues with AI in publishing: 

1. Flooding the market with books, producing more material than the reading public can possibly consume and thus making it even more difficult for writers to afford to write. It's already difficult. It's been difficult for a long time. 
2. Lowering the overall quality of work produced, because AI isn't particularly accurate or literate at this point, and it enables people without knowledge of writing to produce lesser quality work and overwhelm the marketplace with it.
3. And, yes, I have concerns about AI being created with the intellectual property of writers who didn't have the option of choosing to be part of the project, some of whom were actually robbed of their intellectual property.

I've been hearing about too many books being published for probably twenty years. I'm talking before self-publishing became big and produced three and a half million books last year compared to poor little trad publishing's 600,000 and change. 

What happens when you have that many books being produced? 

Consider Coral Hart (not her real name) who claims that using AI she was able to write and self-publish 200 romance novels on Amazon last year. She's supposed to have racked up total sales of around 50,000 books. Get your calculators out, folks. That means she sold around 250 copies per book. That's probably not bad, since this article claims many self-published books sell fewer than 100 copies in their lifetimes. 

But imagine a multitude of Coral Hart's writing and publishing 200 AI-generated books a year. She teaches classes on how to use AI to write books. Indirectly, she could be responsible for a lot more AI books. More and more and more books to buy and read. 

You know what we don't have, though? More and more and more people to buy those books and read them.

It's interesting that Hart's got the side job teaching, because I see many writers doing that sort of thing now. Traditionally writers have had day jobs as professors, teachers, librarians, and bookstore owners. Insurance executives. But now I see writers are coming up with income producing gigs like running writers' retreats or businesses as on-line writing coaches. Just recently I learned that a rather well-known writer is selling on-line writing products that I don't understand, but they cost anywhere from 4 to 14 dollars. 

Why? Presumably because they can't sell enough books to make a living. 

There are so many books out there. Who thought we needed computer programs to generate more?

Get Back to Bartz vs. Anthropic, Gail

Oh, yes. Well, my understanding is that Bartz vs. Anthropic wasn't originally a class action case, a judge ruled it one at some point, which is how my family member and I and many, many other people got involved. Anthropic has been hit with a $1.5 billion payout relating to the digital books it took from the pirate site. It's not going to mean a great deal to individual authors, though. Each book can get $3,000, but legal expenses have to be deducted first, and tradtionally published writers have to split what's left with our publishers. 

Not a great pay day, but I like to think that by filing my claim, I've made some paperwork headaches for someone at Anthropic.

Or maybe they've got Claude taking care of all this. Yeah, I bet that's it.

____________________________ 

*I was wrong to say people can do whatever they want with a book after they purchase it. They cannot, for instance, purchase a book and republish it with their name on it as the author. They cannot cut and paste material from the book into one of their own and claim it as their own work. That is not what is known as fair use. No one had purchased writers' work and then used it to train a computer program before. This court case was about whether or not that particular use was legal.

Friday Done List April 10

Well, this was a better week. Yes, I'm feeling better. 

Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor 

• Made two submissions.
• Attended a Zoom workshop.
• Finished a short story, except I've got to do something about the last few lines.
• Am considering a new series of essays for Medium that I would publish myself, not through publications.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Did a blog post.
• Promoted the blog post.
• Have plans to increase writing about time here.
• Updated the What's New and Essays, Short Stories, and Humor sections of my website. That hadn't been done for a while. It took a couple of weeks for me to do my section of the job. Computer Guy did his in a couple of hours.

Seeking Time: A Rebrand

I have been writing about time management, specifically for writers, since January, 2012 as part of a feature I called Time Management Tuesday. That's more than fourteen years for those of you who don't like to do math. The month before I got started writing about time management I wrote here: 

"Organization and self-discipline are not things I learned at my mother's knee. Or at all. I have to make major efforts to manage my time so I can write. Always. It's not a linear process. It's more two steps forward and one step back, if I'm lucky and I haven't fallen over altogether, metaphorically speaking. Then I get started again. I'm always reading about better ways to manage time in all aspects of my life in order to isolate time to work. This has been going on for years. I won't even get into how many years."

I've tapered off with the time management writing, because, as I said last week, many random on-line people claim the expertise to write about time management, and I don't want to be another one of them. But, also as I said last week, in the time that I haven't been writing about time management my management of time has been spiraling. Back when I was writing about time, "I was hungry for ways to get things done and sometimes even finding a few." 

Finding those occasional ways to get things done provided a sense of optimism that I'd enjoy feeling again. 

Seeking Time

Among the things I've learned these last fourteen years is that time cannot be controlled. There is always more to do than there is time to do it, and the more to do comes at you when it will, not when you want it. Knowing that, the old title, Time Management Tuesday, seems woefully inaccurate. It also gives the appearance of expertise that I can't claim. I am only a seeker, one who is willing to seek everywhere, not just in what might be called the field of traditional "time management." So, I'm changing the title of this feature to Seeking Time.  

Additionally, without the "Tuesday" in the title I eliminate the pressure to write and publish a time-related post every week and give myself the option to post any day. 

A positive impact on my time! I'm feeling optimistic already.

Friday Done List April 3

It's Easter Week. Whatever time I haven't been baking and cleaning, I've been angsting about not being able to write. In Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman says sometimes we have to accept we can't do everything.

Next week I will begin again.

Time Management Tuesday: Recalling "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals" Brings Back the Good Old Days

Recently--Sunday, in fact--author Ryan T. Pozzi suggested on BlueSky that people read Chapter 13 of Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. I have that book! And it was Sunday, when I feel as if I should be able to go off on deep tangents with my reading. (I often go off on tangents with my reading, they're just not deep as a general rule.) And Chapter 13 isn't that long. So, I did, indeed, read it.

Back in 2021, I did a seven-part arc on Four Thousand Weeks, a blog-while-you-read thing. I found the book to be much more about time philosophy than time management, and Chapter 13 is very representative of that. Burkeman seems more concerned with how we should live than he is with finding ways for us to manage our time so we can live as we want to live. That is not a criticism. We're just talking two different ways of thinking about and talking about time. 

For those of us who are intent on trying to manage our time so we can live as we want to, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals doesn't seem to have a lot to offer. However, rereading Chapter 13 led me to skim my Four Thousand Weeks blog posts. I was reminded of some philosophical points I want to try to keep in mind.

Chapter 13 Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

Chapter 13 deals with the idea that individually we're not all that important in the grand scheme of things. And this is good for us. We can lower the bar and use our time to enjoy the small moments of life, knowing that we are not expected to struggle to use our lives to accomplish something big and profound. Enjoy your time in your pollinator garden, Gail, without worrying that it doesn't attract much in the way of bees, which is what you're supposed to be doing with it. It's okay to admire the spring ephemerals you planted, even though you know they don't do much except please you.

This knowledge can be a relief, as Burkeman says, though, personally, I've known people who would take a we're-not-that-important-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things philosophy to mean that there's no reason for them to make an effort with, say, environmentalism or voting. One person doesn't make a difference, after all. I feel this attitude carries a bit of risk. 

But it's good for me, since it's pollinator garden time!

We Pay for What We Do with Hours of Our Lives

In another portion of the book, Burkeman writes that when we become distracted with something like social media, we pay for the time we spend on the distraction with hours of our lives, the hours we could have been using to do something we value more. He didn't elaborate on this point, but it was meaningful to me, because it was similar to something I'd read about minimalism. When you buy something, you really pay for it with the hours of your life it took to make the money you exchanged for it. 

I'd forgotten about Burkeman's view of social media, though I have been applying something like it, nonetheless, to my on-line reading in general. Do I need to read any more about the man formerly known as Prince Andrew? Do I need to read about this week's best memes? If I could stop doing that, wouldn't I have more time for reading the New Yorker and all the links to journal articles I keep saving? It's a possibility, at least. 

Procrastination is a Solution to a Problem

Time management writers usually deal with procrastination as a problem to be solved. Burkeman has a fascinating spin on it. He sees procrastination as a solution to a problem we may not even know we have. The real problem is that the work we're doing is hard. Or it's boring. Or we know it's going to get us nowhere. We may not even be aware that we're trying to escape it when we rush off to Facebook or BlueSky, where we can find something easy and interesting to do and quickly. We just think we're procrastinating. 

Figuring out what problem we're trying to escape and trying to deal with it might be a better use of time than heading to social media. Maybe it could make some kind of change in our lives.

I Need to Do More with Time Management 

I haven't been reading or writing much about time management the last few years, because I've seen so many people on-line writing about the subject who clearly have no background to be doing so. They've just read a book or even some on-line material about it. Which sounds a lot like me. I'd rather not be that person.

But while I haven't been reading or writing about time management, my ability to manage my own time has been spiraling. Going over my Four Thousand Weeks blog posts brought back the days when I was hungry for ways to get things done and sometimes even finding a few. I'm going to go back to some time management writing because it makes me feel good, which I think Oliver Burkeman would appreciate.

One thing I've done to manage time recently is revise blog posts for essays that I could submit to publications on the Medium platform. As luck would have it, one of the first essays I wrote in this way was We Are All Going to Die, In Case You Weren't Feeling Enough Time Pressure, which was published back in 2022. It's a review of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. 

The Story Behind the Story: Paying Attention to Structure

On Tuesday Books Are Our Superpower published my essay A DEI Story Time Violation: What can we talk about and where can we talk about it? This is a revision of my blog post The Reading History Project: "Pedal Pusher" by Mary Boone. Watch Out for Women on Bikes!

When writing here about revising blog posts for essays to submit elsewhere, I've often said my second drafts end up having a somewhat different focus than the original blog post did. That is definitely the case here. The second draft focuses much more strongly on the DEI violation aspect of this story than on the book Pedal Pusher, itself.

The way the essays were structured had a big impact on the change in focus.

Structure Makes a Difference in Focus

Original Content Essay. The original post was laid out with a first paragraph stating that Pedal Pusher was a good subject for a Women's History Month for a couple of reasons. "...a couple of reasons" suggested that there was going to be two things discussed. 

Then I discussed the book, itself, which deals with a woman from the past and why she is significant. A subheading leads into the second reason the book was a good subject, the fact that a story time related to it had been canceled because of a claim that it violated an executive order dealing with DEI. 

The essay then ends with what might be called a "call to action," the suggestion that we can all speak out in support of books and bring attention to them.

This first essay was a gathering of my material--what the book is about, the DEI issue, the call to action.

Books Are Our Superpower Essay. This essay is significantly different. I dropped the call-to-action section at the end altogether. Instead, I "bookended" the Pedal Pusher book material with the story of what happened with the story time being cancelled because of the DEI violation complaint and included a couple more details about it.

Because the essay began and ended with the DEI complaint, it became particularly important. We remember what we read in the beginning of a section of writing and at the end. The ending of the BAOS essay, therefore, connecting back to the beginning, made the DEI complaint memorable.

Learn to Take Advantage of Structure

Structure helps readers comprehend and remember what they read, so it's valuable for us as readers. That makes it valuable for us as writers, as well. It's worthwhile to spend some time studying structure and paying attention to the structure of essays and blog posts you read.

For instance, paragraphs, which might be described as the building blocks of essays, are sections of writing, just as essays are. They're just shorter. That makes the beginning and endings of paragraphs important. The first sentence is usually a topic sentence, and the last sentence is usually a conclusion of some sort. Every paragraph thus gives readers two points--a beginning and an ending--with material they are likely to recall. 

On more than one occasion, I've noticed writing on the Medium platform that doesn't use paragraphs at all. The pieces are lists of sentences. They're not a true listicle, which is an actual format. They're just a list of sentences that appear to be either undeveloped thoughts or connected thoughts that weren't placed in paragraph form.

A list of sentences is difficult for readers to follow, because:

• It's choppy.
• Unless the first sentence in the list is an obvious topic sentence, it's hard for readers to identify one. They have to work out what all these sentences are supposed to be about themselves. 
• Again, readers remember the beginning and ending of a section of writing, including paragraphs. When your format uses multiple paragraphs, your readers have multiple opportunities to recall the important material you have put at the beginning and ending of those multiple paragraphs. In a piece of writing that is just a list of sentences, only the first and last sentence in the list act as that important spot that readers are likely to remember. 

Notice how I used the beginning and ending of this essay. In the first section I introduced the idea that structure can make an impact on the focus of an essay. In the second section, I showed how structure changed the focus of the second essay I wrote about Pedal Pusher. In the third section, I reinforced the importance of paying attention to the beginning and ending sections of writing while structuring essays. I gave readers multiple opportunities to absorb the points I wanted to make.

My hope is that I've structured this essay in such a way as to make readers appreciate the importance of understanding structure and paying attention to it when writing.

Friday Done List March 27

Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor 

• An essay was published earlier this week. 
• Received a rejection yesterday. "While we are saying no this time, we want you to know that we particularly enjoyed your work and would love to see more from you in the future." Sure. That's what they say to all the girls. Nonetheless, I've got something in mind to submit to them.
• Nearly finished a short story.  It's been so long since I've finished anything that just nearly finishing something brings tears to my eyes.
• Have finished an essay for Original Content to publish tomorrow.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Promoted everything I needed to promote.

 

Friday Done List March 20

Oh, my gosh. Another week of family stuff. Next week should be better, except I'm going shopping. And walking. And then I think it's Easter.

Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor 

• Rejection! On Sunday! There is no safe place!
• Submission!
• Just wrote my sisters an email that I'm calling a first draft of a humor piece.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• I fished BlueSky's 30-Day Women Writer Challenge in which you post a book you've read by a woman writer, no particular order, no commentary. Because if there's one thing I can do, it's stick to low-risk, low-labor activity. I did finally break 400 followers because of this challenge. Perhaps I should find another.
• Published my most recent Reading Project post. Promoted it at one place. More next week!

The Reading History Project: "The Westerners: Myth-Making and Belonging on the American Frontier" by Megan Kate Nelson

The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier by Megan Kate Nelson will be published March 31. I read a digital ARC provided by NetGalley.

This is a book that definitely addresses the "our" in "our shared history," my reading subject for this year.

Nelson begins in her prologue with an account of Frederick Jackson Turner's reading of The Significance of the Frontier in American History at a meeting of the American Historical Association in 1893. Turner argued that "...American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West." Nelson says that before Turner, most historians believed that Europe had the greatest impact on what America became. Turner's contention that America became America because of the "colonization of the Great West" by white people from the East was a shift in thinking for professional historians.

To give you some idea of how big a deal Turner and his theory of the American frontier became, I recall hearing at least something about it in high school. I've had a copy of The Significance of the Frontier in American History floating around my office for a year now. 

While it was new thinking in 1893 as far as professional history was concerned, Nelson says popular perception of the "Great West" supported Turner. Novels featured Indian fighters saving white families, painters romanticized Western landscapes, and government policies encouraged people in the East to go West. Turner was preaching to a choir that already believed a mythic frontier story involving white Americans moving West and bringing civilization with them.    

Some of Nelson's content moves on to the beginning of the twentieth century, but it is primarily laid out chronologically from the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 to that American Historical Association meeting in 1893 at which Frederick Jackson Turner read his paper. Along that timeline are what might be called a collection of microhistories, in this case the stories of people who lived in the West, people who didn't reflect the frontier myth. (Except for the one person who actually promoted it.) All these people are what we would consider today as minor historical figures, the most recognizable being Sacajawea. But they are also people who had some significance at the time they lived or were even well known then. Others wrote about them, or they left writing themselves. In her epilogue, Nelson describes what happened to them after death, a sad afterlife for people who didn't fit the Western myth narrative but were part of the West, nonetheless. 

My first thought while reading The Westerners was that I was ignorant of a great deal that happened in the western part of this country in the nineteenth century. That was probably Nelson's intention, and, if so, she was very successful in educating this reader. I was going to give some examples of the depth of what I didn't know but decided I didn't want to get into that.

My second thought was how different regional history must be for elementary school students in different parts of the country from what I was exposed to growing up in rural New England. At least, it should be different. 

In the very readable The Westerners Megan Kate Nelson replaces the myth of the Great West with a reality that is just as empowering, because it includes so many more people. It's a reality based on our shared history.

You can hear her speaking about the frontier myth at her publisher's website.

Friday Done List March 13

I spent two days this week with family. Then two hours on the phone with family business. Not my best work week. No, I don't know what was my best work week. Perhaps it's still in my future.

Goal 1. Write And Publish Adult Short Stories, Essays, and Humor 

• Have nearly finished a revision of my Pedal Pusher post for an essay submission. 
• Worked on revising a book chapter into a short story. Definitely an interesting experience. Because a short story is a short story and a book chapter is a book chapter. We're talking two different animals.

Goal 2. Build Community/Market Work/Brand Myself and My Work

• Mainly I've just been continuing to take part in BlueSky's 30-Day Women Writer Challenge in which you post a book you've read by a woman writer, no particular order, no commentary. Got a lot of attention for posting an old book by Joyce Carol Oates. No new followers.
• Though I'm also close to being done with a Reading History post for a book publishing next month. I think I worked on that earlier this week. But who knows?

Goal 3. Submit Book-length Work to Agents and Editors 

• Get this--an agent who posted her Manuscript Wish List to BlueSky's MSWL event isn't accepting submissions until next month. She's just screwing with us.

The Reading History Project: "Pedal Pusher" by Mary Boone. Watch Out for Women on Bikes!

Pedal Pusher: How One Woman's Bicycle Adventure Helped Change the World  by Mary Boone with illustrations by Lisa Anchin is a great subject for Women's History Month. For a couple of reasons.

Women on Bikes Were a Big Deal in the Late Nineteenth Century

First off, Pedal Pusher is described as a picture book biography, though it only deals with one period in Annie Cohen Kopchovsky's life. Kopchovsky was the first women to ride a bicycle around the world in 1894-95. Nowadays, this seems like a kind of meaningless stunt. And it may have been a stunt then, too. But bicycling was part of a cultural change for women, giving them more ability to get around and leading to changes in how they dressed, which was far more than just fashion. Kopchovsky represents all that.

I wonder, too, if she represents nineteenth century public relations and self-promotion. Kopchovsky seems to have been very adept at raising money for the trip by signing pictures and giving lectures as she traveled. Boone raises the question of whether or not Kopchovsky was one hundred percent accurate/truthful in her talks. Was she creating an Annie Cohen Kopchovsky for public consumption/sale?  

Which leads me to wonder about another aspect of the Annie Cohen Kopchovsky story. She was a Latvian Jewish immigrant at a time "when prejudice against Jewish people was widespread," as Boone tells readers. Soon after she began her trip, she temporarily changed her name to Londonderry in exchange for a donation from the Londonderry Spring Water Company. She appears as Annie Londonderry in the newspaper quotes Boone provides at the end of the book.

Would public interest have been as great in Kopchovsky if she had used her own name?

Pedal Pusher is a great introduction to its subject. But I want more! I want a movie! I want a Netflix limited series! 

Oh, But There is More

I bought a copy of Pedal Pusher, because I'm interested in the era involved and still have young people around who might read it. But what brought the book to my attention last October was an opinion piece author Mary Boone wrote for The Seattle Times. (I may have stumbled upon it on BlueSky.)

In it, Boone describes how during last year's Women's History Month, the Tacoma Children's Museum invited her to lead two story times about Pedal Pusher. She ran the first program at its downtown location, but the second was going to be held at the museum's site on Joint Base Lewis-McChord. A Federal site. And that one was cancelled four days before the event.

Boone was told "it violated the administration's executive order restricting so-called "radical" Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs across federal institutions." 

Hmm. Could that be Executive Order 14253 Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History she's talking about, since that specifically includes federal sites? The one covered here at Original Content back at the beginning of February? 

I have questions.

• If the story hour was cancelled because of Executive Order 14253 Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, is there a claim here that the book isn't true? Annie Cohen Kopchovsky wasn't the first woman to ride a bicycle around the world? I'm not touching the sanity issue. I don't even know what it means in the context of the executive order.
• Otherwise, what was "radical" about the book? It was about a woman? It was about a Jew? It was about a Jewish woman who did something successfully? 
• Or I could phrase that a different way: It wasn't about a man? It wasn't about a Christian? It wasn't about a Christian man who did something successfully?

The Power of One Voice

I have a long history of obsessing on the wrong point in a story, and I am probably about to do that right now. In her article about the cancellation of her appearance Boone writes, "Someone complained when they saw my story time being promoted."  "... museum staff later suggested the event might have gone forward if it hadn't been advertised." 

This program was cancelled because one person heard about it and complained? Now, on the one hand, that's a very positive thing, isn't it? It suggests that any one of us can complain and have an impact. We can get the ball rolling to take attention away from books we object to.

But doesn't it also suggest that any one of us can have an impact by speaking out in support of and bringing attention to books we appreciate? Which is what I'm trying to do here.

One voice can make a difference. Imagine the kind of difference many voices could make.

Pardon me while I leave to spread the word about Pedal Pusher on Facebook, BlueSky, and Goodreads.