I am your typical introvert: I don’t have a need to talk to people. I can go an entire day and not say a single word and not mind at all.
Likewise, I don’t have a need to interact online. I enjoy peek into the socials to see what’s going on and what other people are up to, but I rarely feel the need to share my own activities.
Therefore I really don’t have much of a social media presence. I appear once in a while, say something snarky, and disappear back into my cave.
And I like it way.
However, I’ve been told repeatedly that I need a social media following to be a successful writer in this market. But it’s been hard to keep myself focused on the task. I have to pull myself away from other tasks – more important tasks – to do this… whatever ‘this’ is.
I’m not sure what I’m to do about it. I’ve laid out media plans, scheduled wiring tasks, outlines, etc. And have failed to stay on task at every turn. But yet, I’ll rework a single scene from my story for hours on end. Because ‘that’ is the work to me. Not this… not talking… not socializing in electronic packets… not showing you my lunch or my cat or derpy dog.
Sigh… But I guess I will for a laugh….
Whatever happened to that solitary tortured soul of a writer?
I am a busy guy. I don’t really have ‘free’ time and I like it that way.
I have things to do.
I am an engineer and project manager, a husband with a large yard and an old house, a scuba diver, a traveler, an aspiring writer and guitar player, and occasionally a blogger. It’s the ‘occasional’ that I want to address here.
I started blogging because I had ideas, opinions, and general thoughts that I believed someone would find entertaining. I also enjoy writing and do it every day in some form. Lately, it’s spent more planning to write than actually writing. But that is always a struggle.
Yet, this year my other tasks seemed to have gotten the edge on me and I found myself buried in ‘things to do.’ This all resulted in two months vanishing without me really writing anything substantive. This blog will break that cycle and tick off one of my tasks. I have made a nice dent in my list and have even started using a Kanban board to manage my priorities.
(I can honestly say that it has worked. The engineers and nerds out there will know what I’m talking about.)
The pics in this post are a small sample of what I was doing in May and June, including:
Rewiring a production line
Scuba diving in Key West
Visiting the Hemingway House
Laying tile in my basement
Shakespeare in the park
Drinking beer with a cat
And something to do with a saw
As you can see, I’ve been busy.
There are still lots of stories from our Egypt trip to write up and I need to have that wrapped before our Italy trip. So, I’ve got some work to get done.
I hope you’re enjoying your summer. I’m going to go tear out a basement closet, now.
I’ve done a little bit of traveling and I’m a little bit of a shutter-bug. I like to take pictures, but then never really get around to doing anything with them. So here are some from San Francisco last year.
While writing my previous post, I wanted to remember the little café we had stopped at on our first day in upstate New York.
What was the name of that place? Oh, I can find it on google maps. I’m good at maps.
I assumed I would be tracing our route on a map and locating the café that way. But once I got to the Maps page, I remembered Google Timeline. I had used the app before but had forgotten about it. It was hidden in the drop-down options menu.
There was more than a decade of my travel history displayed on the world map. It showed my travels from 2009 onward. Almost every place I had been was there. All the restaurants, stores, places I’d worked and just driven by! I spent an hour reliving my trips and recalling wonderful places I had forgotten about.
It wasn’t until later that the creepiness started to hit me. Who else was seeing this? Could someone hack into my Google Timeline page and know where I had been, when, and for how long? And, if so, what could they do with that information?
It was at this point that my writer-imagination clicked on.
What could be done with this information? Hmmm…
– A killer could predict my daily route to work and set up an ambush or an ‘accident’.
– Someone could research my travel itinerary and pose as someone I might have met on the trip as a means of getting closer to me.
– A door-to-door salesman could predict when I would be home and available!
– An employer could check to see what I was really doing on the day I called in sick.
– A sexy foreign spy would know what coffee shop I go to alone on Saturdays and make sure to be there sitting next to me. (All foreign lady-spies are sexy by default. Foreignness plus spyiness equals sexy – period.)
I am not one to see hidden conspiracies in every shadow, nor do I have a knee-jerk distrust of new technology or BigTech. So, I actually don’t mind being tracked or filmed or recorded or whatever my Alexa is doing. But then, I am also not involved in any illegal or seditious activities. So track away. I’ve got nothing to hide.
In truth, I have an appreciation for Google Timeline. Rather than just having a file of pictures from my trips that will require me to remember where they were taken and who is in the view, I now have mapped moment-to-moment tracking of the route we took. In addition, my pictures have embedded date and time data that I can then match to the map. So, if I wanted to, I could create a minute-by-minute itinerary of my trip with pictures of that moment. How’s that for a vacation slide show?
Google maps tracks me every day, and I am very cool with that. I find it both extremely handy and kind of creepy. However, unless I become a target for spies or start thinking about trading in contraband, my life is much too dull for this detailed information to be useful to anyone.
“How odd… I stopped at the guitar store on the way home. And now look, Marge, here is an ad for a deal on strings at Amazon. How do those online algorithms know so much?!”
So Many Words... 