(c) Bill Watterson
*another hot minute passes*
*the author wonders just where the hell that phrase originated, anyway*
I’ve managed to close a couple of the loops I was talking about in the last post. I finished up both The Birthday of the World and No Time to Spare. Both really grabbed me in the back third. Le Guin spins a beautiful tale in a novella about a generation ship at the end of World, and has some beautiful observations on nature, imagination, and creativity at the end of No Time. The selection for No Time to Spare felt a little uneven, but I think that’s been true of every “this book of blog posts I mean essays y’all” book I’ve read. By which I mean this, Neil Gaiman’s The View from the Cheap Seats, and John Scalzi’s Don’t Live For Your Obituary.
I was actually thinking about Don’t Live for Your Obituary the other day. I was remembering not something specific from that collection, but rather the experience of reading it while I was at Rainforest Writer’s Workshop in 2018. It was pouring most of the time we were there, so I spent a lot of time holed up in my little cabin, writing and reading and napping. It was perfect, and I finished my Shivering Deeps draft I was working on and in general just got a bunch of stuff done while feeling very calm and peaceful. All helped by not having access to the internet. And, I’d like to think, the pounding sound of the rain. Oh, and my friend GG Silverman was there and she has magic powers of supportiveness and positivity, don’t you know.
I’ve been thinking more generally about trying to be more offline lately. It’s a tricky business to manage these days, where the default state, at least in a city with high-speed ‘net and wifi everywhere, is to be online and connected. This isn’t like a “quit all social media and only check the internet out from an RSS reader hooked up to a dot matrix printer in my cave” (though, that’s an idea…). It’s just more only going online when I need to, instead of just getting sucked into it whenever I have an idle moment. Hell, staying offline and reading is how I finished No Time To Spare mostly at work on my breaks. I’d love any tips or thoughts people have on how to be more deliberate with one’s internet use. Probably not just pure self-discipline techniques, though, I’m bad at maintaining those over the long term. So something semi-automated or otherwise encouraged would be good. Please do leave your thoughts. 🙂
PS I wrote this post on my alphasmart! Small steps, yeah?
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