In a very real sense, the writer writes in order to teach himself; to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratifications, is a curious anticlimax.
Alfred Kazin
Reading
It’s been a couple of weeks more since I started to use the tablet holder over my bed (see here and here).
And it still works like a charm.
Perhaps there are more relaxing ways to read, but so far, I think this is as good as it gets.
Still highly recommended.
Writing
On Thursday, I finished writing the first draft of an article. I used a content outline of about a hundred pages to write a 40 pages APA styled draft in six days. Yup, I do feel like a god. Of course, creating the content outline took much longer than six days. And sure, there is no guarantee that the article gets accepted. I’m not really part of the community and it’s a paper highlighting potentials. But still, I finished writing it. While writing tips have to suit the individual, I think content outlines are really useful.
For the actual writing, using the Pomodoro technique also worked very well — but only because I forced myself to adhere to the breaks. Get up, get a tea, leave the desk.
Listening to instrumental music while writing also worked well. I started with a freely available recording of the Goldberg Variations. When they became boring, I switched to background music from games. There are mixes on YouTube, just search for “epic music”. If you want to save bandwidth or write where no Internet connection is available, you can use VideoDownloader to save the videos and use AudioConverter to convert the videos into mp3 files.
After writing the first draft, I have copied the text into Hemingway (using it offline as a saved webpage)… it gave me instant feedback (see image on the right). I’ll probably have to work a little on it. I also suspect that the citations did confuse Hemingway a little. But yup, it’s a cool website that gives you instant feedback.
So, so far, reading and writing works really well …
