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Keeping it Personal

"Every night, write down a list of ten things. Use the following to get you started:
10 things I want people to say about me at my funeral
10 books I’ve always wanted to read, but didn’t
10 things to do every day to be healthier
10 best films I’ve ever seen
10 things I can do to help my career
10 ideas for a time travel story
10 happiest moments of my life
10 worst moments of my life
10 of my greatest strengths
10 of my greatest weaknesses
10 things I find exciting/sexy/sensual
10 other lists I can write

Douglas Johnston
A Million Monkeys Typing

Praise to Journal keepers

"Thousands of personal journals were coming from every state and several countries. Dream journals, idea journals, journey journals, travel journals, sketch journals, war journals, anything else journals. She read them, analyzed them and discussed of them with their authors, know or unknown.

Leaving a Trace is praise to personal journals. It's a compilation of all personal journals that Alexandra Johnson read over time. Why people are writing in personal journals? How most famous personality of our history used journals? How to keep your personal journal? What type of journal are people creating? It's the question she asks and answers with his personal love of journaling. She do her demonstration with thousands of quotes took in personal journals of know and unknown writers."

Praise to Journal Keepers
Fred on Something

Start Writing Gooder Today

"For years, I'd carried around the ubiquitous 39-cent top-spiral notebook. I wore a wallet/chew faded pattern into the back left-pocket of several pairs of blue jeans. As a professional observer paid to capture and re-interpret the human condition, it seemed silly to me not to write down the stolen little moments between those strange and wonderful to me.

Curiosity ... again ... that theme keeps popping up, eh?

And it's curiosity that has led me to note little interactions between people ... not big stories, but small phrases or interesting micro-vignettes that clicked with me.

"Click." I've mentioned before that Dick Orkin and Chris Coyle taught me to recognize

"Click" moments ... like a photographer snapping the shutter - capturing a moment in time, only within my frame (and outside it for that matter) are words, not visual images.
But remember, verbal suggestions can create mental images.

The goal with your notebook - whether the 39-cent variety or the fancy 10-dollar Moleskine version gifted and inscribed to me by Josh - should be to simply capture any such moment that clicks.

Don't judge or analyze the moments. Leave the left brain out of this. Just document them."

Tim Miles
Hover Studios

Writing in Other People's Houses

"I only knew that the house and grounds felt enchanted. The garden was ablaze with old roses. My many guests and I climbed nearby Templar ruins, stuffed ourselves with cabecou and cherries as fat as Ping-Pong balls and drank vats of plonk while waiting for the nightly parade of sheep in front of the house. The sheepdog yelped and nipped. The shepherd followed his flock -- in his car. Then we watched the bats circle in the endless twilight and agreed that there was nothing more relaxing than sitting in someone else's garden, unfettered by the obligation to deadhead the roses.

In the afternoons I sent my guests off on expeditions to the pilgrimage site at Rocamadour so I could pretend to work. Merwin's book collection was so enticing that I spent hours on the terrace reading. After I devoured three volumes of E. Beresford Chancellor's ''Lives of the Rakes,'' a key element of my plot suddenly fell into place. Thus the delightful Merwin house shaped not only my summer but also the entire structure of my novel."

Karen Moline
NYT Travel Style Magazine 3.20.05

Reg. Required

"How I pretend to be organized"

"My personal life, however, could use a little order. I have come to accept that although all the books, clothes, posters, and accumulated cruft in the bedroom could be better organized in the limited space available now, but it would be silly to spend the time and money necessary to fit all that stuff in a room that's too small to reasonably hold it all, only to rearrange everything again in two and a half months when we'll have enough room for everything. While that mess bugs me occasionally, the real issue is that I forget things constantly. Every time I go into a bookstore or Amoeba or Target or even the grocery store, I completely forget why I'm there. Every single trip, it seems, ends with me forgetting lettuce for the tacos, dish soap, or the new Kelly Clarkson CD."

Afsheen Family

[via LS]

Tips for productive business writing

"Unless we're super-fast typists, writing is a relatively slow way to process information. As the chart below indicates, most of us can think roughly twice as fast as we can talk, talk twice as fast as we can use a keyboard, and use a keyboard four times as fast as we can write by hand:

Given these obstacles, how can we produce the best possible business writing in the limited time available to us? This month I'll share some techniques to use before we actually begin writing, and next month I'll describe techniques to use when we're ready to put words on paper or screen.

A crucial element in preparing well for a writing task is to gather and store information. According to Darrell Gouldin, manager of a hydroelectric dam on the Columbia River, paying attention to peak demand and low demand periods assists in distributing electrical power efficiently..."

Tips for productive business writing
Highbeam

Dear diary, you make me sick

"Keeping a diary is bad for your health, say UK psychologists. They found that regular diarists were more likely than non-diarists to suffer from headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and social awkwardness.

Their finding challenges assumptions that people find it easier to get over a traumatic event if they write about it.

“We expected diary keepers to have some benefit, or be the same, but they were the worst off,” says Elaine Duncan of the Glasgow Caledonian University. “In fact, you’re probably much better off if you don’t write anything at all,” she adds.

The study, carried out with David Sheffield of Staffordshire University, was presented on Wednesday at a meeting of the British Psychological Society in Edinburgh."

New Scientist.com news service
Andy Coghlan

[Thanks Janine/via MeFi]

Palaeography: reading old handwriting

"The huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. The oredr of the ltteers in the wrod can be in a total mses but you can sitll raed it wouthit any porbelm.

While this way of reading and comprehending whole words at a glance is very useful in the modern world, it can lead to incomprehension and mistakes when trying to read documents written in an old and unfamiliar style of handwriting.

Be prepared to tackle an old document letter by letter if necessary. If you cannot identify a letter, leave it out, or put in a suggestion of what you think it is, perhaps with a question mark by it. Do a few more lines and then go back to see if you can now identify the letter. Or see if you have already come across it and understood it somewhere else in the document."

Palaeography: reading old handwriting
1500 - 1800
A practical online tutorial
The National Archives, U.K.

[Thanks Christine!]

Tameri

"The Tameri Guide for Writers serves writers, students, teachers, and others with our thoughts on how best to format, edit, complete, or create a written work. Our visitors range from published novelists to Fortune 1000 companies. If it involves communicating with others, consider using Tameri."

A Writer's Lexicon
Tameri

[via Cindy BeMent]

Jordon Cooper

"Now you would think that a Daytimer would be a perfect solution. Small and portable and you can have your address book and calendar with you. May work for you. Doesn't work for me. Small papers don't work for me and the people that I know. Changing e-mail addresses, cell phones, Skype usernames, IM. Doesn't work for me. Plus, a bunch of small pages is not how I like to create. I like to write so I can see it. The ones small enough to fit in my pocket are too small to be usable and the ones that I like to use are bindersize.

Now the Palm doesn't do a perfect job for me. I wish it would sync with Gmail's address book (I actually wish Gmail had a decent address book). I also wish Google had a Intellisync of it's own that would allow me to get selected Gmail on my Palm and also be able to send it later on.

In the end, give me a notebook, moleskin or not, to create when I want to create new ideas. At the same time, don't let me leave the house without my Clie. It has much of life in it and when life changes, it is easy to make some quick changes. Two different tools, good for two different tasks and in the end it depends how you use them."

Jordon Cooper
LINK