Tag: Writing

My Rusty Tool Shed

On October 5, 2014

Writing is a rusty tool shed. I go inside and it all looks so familiar. I remember when I wrote that piece. I fondly thumb through decades old notebooks. I remember where I was and where I was when I first cracked the spine on the unwritten tome.

Look at my tools and my failures as one. I look for my successes. But they’re grown up and moved out of the house long ago. They left me and we talk. Sure, we talk every few months.

They call at Christmas and on my birthday. They’re dutiful children. But they’re gone now. Living their own lives with their own problems.

The failures still live with me. Malformed and demented they lounge around. They’ve not inspiration to better themselves. They feel their time has passed. They and I lock eyes, only for a moment. We don’t speak. There’s nothing left to say.

This familiar ritual taxes us. The missed opportunities are remembered along with piles of what ifs and we almosts.

As I stand to leave, there’s a shudder as the shed settles. The words rearranged slightly. The tools cleaned and put back in their places. All neat and tidy. A hand-crafted monument to disappointment.

Rarely, I will remove a tool from the shed. I will clean it off and prepare it for use. I use that tool or I lend it out. If I can’t use it, someone else might. If my rusty old tools can get new life in another shed, then it was worth it. It’s worth keeping all these old tools around.

It’s worth the ritual. The cleaning and organizing let me see them in a new light and reminds me of when they were new. It reminds me of when I first got them, so full of expectation and excitement. I was ready to use them. I was prepared to make great things with them. But now they sit, rusting away in my shed. Hoping for new life.

Their day may come. But they see the new tools join the shed. Even if only briefly before they’re used or shared. The new tools are always the exciting ones. The old tools are just that. They’ve lost their shine and purpose.

Feature photo from Gratisography

Secrets

By Carl

On January 2, 2014

In Observations

Derek Sivers started writing again and in a recent post called Why my code and ideas are public he recalls a conversation with a friend. during a dinner conversation, she said:

â€œIâ€™m not worried about someone finding out my secrets, because secrets are just facts, right? So if someone is going through my private things, for example, and gets upset about what they find, then thatâ€™s their problem, not mine!â€

He liked the attitude and it caused him to question his own secrets just as I did mine many years ago.

I had my secrets. They too were locked away in a notebook. I used to keep one in my pocket or backpack when I went to school. Growing up, I wrote in it everyday. I wrote poetry, terrible teenage angst poetry.

I wrote about the hurt I was feeling over my parent’s divorce. I wrote about how I felt isolated in the small town where I grew up. I felt like a freak to those around me. Being 6’5′ and preferring poetry to football helped that alienation.

It was all so real and raw and painful. I let myself out upon those pages. In varying colors of ink my emotions flowed out in words.

And I never shared them. With anyone. For any reason. Ever.

sunset hair
By Alexander Shustov via Unsplash

I was sure, if found, it would lead to questions I didn’t want to answer. It would lead to trouble. Because when I let my uncensored words out, they were painful. They were emotions I didn’t know what to do with so I wrote them down.

I kept my writing secret. It was for me. It didn’t need to be shared with anyone. It made me feel better. That’s all it needed to do. That’s all I required of it. Helping me to get through the dark nights and sometimes darker dawns.

Then I got involved with my school’s literary magazine.

I read writings from my peers. I read their pain. I read their confusion. I read their love. I read their passion. And I learned I wasn’t alone.

I wasn’t the only person who had fears and confusion and hurt. It was universal. I was not alone.

Learning this was the greatest lesson of my life. I am not alone! And it was liberating. It made me reconsider keeping everything I had secret.

I realized it didn’t matter how people reacted to what I wrote. It was what I felt. It was my reality, my life, my pain, my joy. It was me. My writing was myself on paper.

So I shared.

I submitted some of my writing to the magazine. Some of it was good enough to get published. Much of it was garbage. But some was good enough to earn a spot in the magazine.

This build my courage. When people told me they liked a line or a phrase, or even the entire piece it was a huge confidence boost.

It was very liberating to not only know I wasn’t alone, but to know I had found people who understood me.

My secrets, when confronted with the harsh light of day weren’t so important.

On profanity

By Carl

On May 24, 2012

In Introspection

Profanity on the web exists. People use it. Get used to it. If you don’t like it, don’t read it. If you read a writer who uses it, stop reading them. If you stumble across it on a normally curse-free site, it’s not the end of the world.

Profanity is out there

They are merely words and those words cannot hurt you. As the old nursery rhyme goes, sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me.¹

There is no point in hiding a naughty word behind an asterisk. You’re not fooling anyone. I agree with the advice doled out by Tom Borowski.

If you’re going to use expletives, don’t try to hide them. Just write them out in full or figure out a way to compose your sentence with a more sophisticated vocabulary. For fuck’s sake.

My stance on profanity in my writing

This got me to thinking about profanity and how I view and use it. I’ve always maintained a policy of not using profanity in my writing.² Whether it be a social network update, comments on a blog or writing I sign my name to and post on my own pages across the web, I don’t curse when I write.

It’s not because I’m opposed to it morally or ethically. I feel I can craft a better sentence without it. There are plenty of acronyms for increasing the impact of the statement I’m making without a curse word thrown into the mix.

I also do not curse in my writing because it’s a distraction and turns away readers. I don’t want someone to not read my words or ignore the point I am making because they hit a disagreeable word.

When I was writing and recording for Splintered Reality I made a point to never use curse words in my lyrics because I wanted to reach as many people with my words as I could. I don’t agree with censorship but the fact remains, if there is cursing, there is editing or censoring and I didn’t want my words to be changed so I wrote them without it.

It’s vital to remember in the age of a connected world, what you say online stays online. What you say will never go away. It’s being indexed, and relinked and quoted across the web with or without your knowledge.

Some people curse like sailors, others never so much as utter a rude word. The web is a huge place and filled with people at both ends of the spectrum and all along it.

But you just used a naughty word in this post

Just as I don’t agree with censorship, asterisks and clean edits of songs, I don’t agree with censoring someone if I quote them.

The F-word appears in this post. It appears in its full and unfiltered glory but as part of a quote. Sure, I could have omitted the last part of the quote and kept it out of this post, but I wanted to prove a point.

I do not write with curse words in my writing but I am not afraid to use them when quoting what others have said. Just as I want to be heard and read exactly as I intended, I want to give others the same courtesy.

Hypocrite

Is this hypocritical? Probably. However, this is my blog. This is my site. This is my space to write on the web that is an extension of myself. This is my front porch where I sit in my rocking chair and yell at you kids to keep off the grass.

As Jeffrey Zeldman wrote recently, This is my personal site. There are many like it, but this one is mine. He is talking about the design changes but the same idea applies to the content.

This is my site. I am not posting on a Facebook or Twitter. You’re most likely not going to haphazardly come across this post in a stream of updates unless you’re previously subscribed.

What about offline

Offline, I do curse when I speak sometimes. I’ve gone between never uttering a curse word to cursing like a pressman.³

My cursing comes and goes. A lot of it has to do with the people I’m around and how they speak. I don’t have any objections to being exposed to it but I also find it jarring in certain contexts.

My policy on cursing in writing is more concrete than my personal language. There is plenty of room for shades of gray and there is no clear-cut answer for me. Sometimes I curse, sometimes I don’t but I keep my writing clean. That’s what is important to me and that’s how I carry myself online and off.

Photo Credit

Yes, I realize that words can hurt but that’s another topic or another time. ↩
Yes, I know there’s a naughty word in the last paragraph but I’m getting to that. ↩
If you’d ever spent any time working for a printing company, you’d understand. ↩

A Rush of Words to the Page

By Carl

On July 7, 2011

In Observations

My platform had gone silent. I had not written anything for Tech in the Trenches, or anything else in two weeks. Work took over my life and exhaustion filled my evenings instead of the written word. I had forgotten one of the key tenets to writing.

Place butt in seat.
Place fingers on keyboard.
Make the Clackity Noise
Go ahead and read Merlin Mann’s piece. Seriously, I’ll wait…

If you’ve chosen to plow on ahead or already read his words, I’ll give you this,

Your keyboard will have different things in it than mine does, of course. But, itâ€™s impossible to know whatâ€™s in there until youâ€™ve made the clackity noise for a few minutes. You think you know whatâ€™s in there. But you donâ€™t. Itâ€™s not your brain that makes the clackity noise, itâ€™s your fingers.

…

Iâ€™ve learned that my job is to just sit down and start making the clackity noise. If I make the clackity noise long enough every day, the â€œwritingâ€ seems to take care of itself. On the other hand, if thereâ€™s no clackity noise, no writing. No little stories. The stories may be in there, alongside God knows what else, but thereâ€™s no way to know. You must make the noise.

Make the clackity noise. Type on that keyboard, or if it’s more your style pick up your favorite pen, pencil or chisel and scrawl your words into your treasured notebook, writing pad or stone tablet. Make the words leave your brain and capture them to share.

I was not doing this. Sure, I was reading though not as much as normal as my Kindle’s WhisperSync has grown silent and my Instapaper queue grows ever larger. I was listening to wonderful tales courtesy of Audible. I was living inside another world.

I was not adding anything to my world. I was not moving anything lurking inside my head to the glorious sunlight outside the dusty, cobwebbed corners. I was not making the clackity noise. I was not racing my fingers across the keys in a vain attempt to keep up with the stories in my mind.

I was not telling stories.
I was not sharing with you.
I was not sharing anything with anyone.

I knew where I had to go and like a junkie aching for the next fix, I returned to 750 Words. I returned to that wonderful place with its welcoming black screen and 80’s green text with nothing more than the time and a word count and the assurance of 750 Words â€“ Private, unfiltered, spontaneous, daily at the page’s end.

I came back and let the words flow. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I made the clackity noise again. I relieved the pressure valve on the story reservoir which nearly overflowed its banks. Now that it has crested, the stories are flowing again.

I wrote about my love for the Google Chromebook.
I wrote about my love for books and reading.
I write now, about my love for writing.

I write now. For the sake of writing. For the sake of storytelling.
I write inside my protected camp of 750 Words. I write in this familiar setting with nothing but the words to comfort me. I write in the non-judging, acceptance of darkness. I let the words flow freely from me again and I let them stain the page with their neon green shine.

I am telling you a story. A story about my way back from silence. I am sharing the story of my inability to remember the cardinal rule of writing.

To write.

Writing and printing are in my blood

By Carl

On May 12, 2011

In Observations

I like writing and I’ve really enjoyed living in an age where we can write and share our words with not just the people near us but worldwide. This is a great time to be alive for the sharing of words and ideas.

I remember when I was growing up I really wanted to produce a book of my poetry. I was obsessed with the printing process and creating lasting works from my own words. I had the skills and ability to create a layout in PageMaker and I had enough works even then to make a small book of my works.

I would design, print and somehow sell or giveaway the books myself. I had no idea how to go about doing this though. There was not internet like we have today. We were still on the early days of modems and my family’s farmhouse got a blazing 26.4bps connection to the internet. This was just enough to load medium sizes pictures at a decent rate and in the early days of Napster, download a single MP3 file in a couple of hours.

I thought long and hard about getting my book into stores. I had no idea how to accomplish this. I had no clue how to get my book into anywhere but the local coffee shop where I knew the owners and they were family friends. I had no way to get my tiny book into a proper bookstore other than walk in and place a couple of copies on a shelf which I did think about. ((Not that I thought about any legal repercussions of that act at the time.))

I never did create a book for myself. Sure, I still thought about it. I poured a lot of my energy into creating the literary magazines ((Lit Mags)) for my middle school and high school. I always prided myself on seeing larger schools produce only a single magazine throughout the school year. Whereas, we always strove to produce two or in one year, three separate magazines.

I loved being able to get my work and the work of my peers into a magazine. We also took steps to creation a CD project my senior year of high school. Equipped with our school’s distance learning room that had long run out of funding, we plugged a couple of microphones into the system and get a pretty clean recording from the acoustic guitar, a capella performances, a full three or four piece band, and I believe a single monologue or something similar. ((I always kick myself I did not keep one of those discs in a safer place. I had a couple of copies but I think I gave them all out to friends and family of the performers who had not gotten a chance to buy one with the magazine.))

I’ve always had a passion for creation, especially in print. From the literary magazines I helped to create in high school to going on to be the Production Chief for The Commonwealth Times in college I’ve always enjoyed the feel of print. Seeing your name on a printed page is a small thrill.

I wrote a comedy column in the college newspaper for about a year and a half under a pen name. It got to the point where I had my page to fill every week for my Q&A style column. I was very fortunate to have helpful and nerdy roommates who always had a great question I could riff on for a couple hundred words. One of my favorite pages still remains my interview with the Magic 8 Ball.

Even now, as I write for the Larry Hunt newsletter which is a project my father is helping to run and produce. Both Larry Hunt and my father, Dirck have been in and around the copy and quick printing business since the 70s when it was still metal on paper and layouts were done by hand. It’s been great working with them to explore and explain the newer media of the day. Especially my recent Cloud Computing writing which prompted an editor from Ireland to contact me and I’ve recently written another piece on Cloud Printing for their magazine. So if you’re in Ireland, keep an eye out for it. I’ve gone truly international!