Writing more

Joel Hooks shared this post about writing more and worrying less about the polish. He mentions how shifting from thinking about his writing and site as a blog to a digital garden helped him to write more: > Seriously. The idea of a "blog" needs to get over itself. Everybody is treating writing as a "content marketing strategy" and using it to "build a personal brand" which leads to the fundamental flawed idea that everything you post has to be polished to perfection and ready to be consumed. I…

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The move to Ghost

It's been a while in the making, but I finally finished the move to Ghost [https://ghost.org] this past week. Earlier this year, I started to have a couple of issues with Kirby. And since I was a couple of versions behind, the thought of paying for another license and updating was feeling like a chore. When we added Ghost to People-First Jobs, I started to consider the idea of using a hosted service again. While using Digital Ocean was a good learning experience, I don't have a lot of time or i…

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Just write

One the topic of owning your own website, Sara Soueidan spends a few minutes sharing how important it is to simply write and put your thoughts out in the world. It’s good for you, but can also be good for others: > Even if only one person learns something from your article, you’ll feel great, and that you’ve contributed — even if just a little bit — to this amazing community that we’re all constantly learning from. And if no one reads your article, then that’s also okay. That voice telling you…

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Trying

Alan Jacobs shares why he likes writing his newsletter each week (emphasis mine): > Since I wrote that post I have started a newsletter, because a email newsletter is also a seasoned technology, and I wondered if I might be able to do some things with it that I can’t do with this blog. I’m still experimenting, still learning, still looking for what will make that project sing — but I am really enjoying it so far, and getting some lovely responses from people, and this morning I realized that on…

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How to create idea babies: a knowledge processing system for marketers, creators, and knowledge workers

I can’t recall how I came across this article. But it sure got me thinking long and hard about my set up for storing notes and information related to all the things I do. Andre Chaperon absolutely nailed the description of a problem I still experience from time to time: > The inefficiencies of a system (or lack of a system) don’t become apparent until we need to retrieve the information we’ve previously been exposed to; information we’ve already deemed important. … and then can’t find the info…

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You’re probably using the wrong dictionary

Another excellent read I came across in a newsletter (Sarah Bray [https://www.sarahjbray.com] this time), James Somers talks about dictionaries. That may not sound enticing, but he does it really well! He first describes the problem: > The way I thought you used a dictionary was that you looked up words you’ve never heard of, or whose sense you’re unsure of. You would never look up an ordinary word — like example, or sport, or magic — because all you’ll learn is what it means, and that you alr…

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How to write a novel with Ulysses, part I: organization and the writing process

Matt Gemmell gives some insight on how he writes his novels using Ulysses. > TOLL is the result of two years of work, and is the second book in my KESTREL series. It’s around 100,000 words long, and required a great deal of planning, research, and organisation. I used various tools for the planning stages, but ultimately I moved almost everything into Ulysses, to keep all my book-related material in one place and easy to access. You don’t have to be a novel writer to get some value from this po…

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My zettelkasten

Alan Jacobs gives some insight into how he keeps track of things when doing research for a book. Reading the post, you come to know he’s tried many ways of organizing things, but he’s recently begun following the methods of Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten system. He shares how he had thought he was too late in life to adopt this system, but… > But ultimately, when I was working on The Year of Our Lord 1943, I realized that the demands of my research — trying to track the thought and writing of f…

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