Glenn Glidden's Writing Blog

This blog has been quiet of late, so I’m looking at what I’m doing on the writing side. I’ve also been inspired by a getting things done article, that stated a good option is to focus on only one or two things daily as your main tasks, so I’m seeing if I can adopt that in my writing.

So the tasks are as follows;

• This blog post on minimum tasks
• Work on one novel only in Scrivener, using all it’s features to help getting into a workflow
• Journal 500 words a day
• Review existing blog posts

OK, there’s four items here, but one is already done (this), and one shouldn’t take too long (review posts) as there are a number of naff posts I can get rid of.

So the one novel focus and the journaling are the two tasks I will be focussing on.

These are my creation tasks. There are other task like reading about writing and the Writing Magazine, but those are development tasks and not considered so important as actually creating stuff.

Let’s see how this goes.

I am currently reviewing my writing resources weblinks. So far I have found 155 web links, around writing, journalism and short stories. I have what must be a couple of thousand other weblinks that I still have to go through to dig out writing weblinks, so it gave me pause for thought. Are these actually any good, or am I just wasting my time.

Age

Some of these writing resources have been curated over a good 10 to 15 years, so a lot of them are either dead or no longer relevant to me.

Relevance

Relevance is in relation to how they fit with my writing ideas at the moment. I will have looked at some because it featured a genre that I was considering writing for. Or it was related to additional types of writing as a form of income. Or just what I would have though of as a good writing site. Now I probably don’t have any idea why I selected it, so have to look at it again.

Quantity

As I said earlier, 155 web links that I know about. If all of them are any good, can you imagine the time it would take to regularly review them, extract topics that are useful for me and put them into practice? I’d hate to think, because obviously it’s something I haven’t done. And guess what, my blog will be an element of that as well, so I’m currently dissing something I am creating myself.

Conclusion

The conclusion I have come to is as follows;

• Weblinks all depend on my viewpoint, so will tend to be very specific.
• If I have referred to a link, it doesn’t means it’s of any use to you, but I’ll try to indicate why I selected it.
• What I try and do is extract useful information/skills that I’ll use in my day to day writing life from the site. I’m sticking it into a document that may one day become a ‘this is how I write’ book.

As ever, these are my opinions. Ultimately, you have to determine if weblinks are of any use to you and how you use them. The bottom line is, unless you are careful, they can soak up a lot of your time that you would be better using by actual writing.

Take a tip from me, set aside and hour and 45 minutes to watch “The Last Lecture”, a lecture given by Randy Pausch at Carnegie Mellon University on September 18, 2007.  Worth every second.