Blood, sweat, and tears.
Jan. 17th, 2012 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinTHE DAILY REPORT
Some goings-on in various blogospheres I overlap with have left me with some thoughts about the nature of community, and the nature of branding. They're still kind of coming together, but I think I'm working out the "better way to engage with my readership" that I've talked about looking for in the past.
The actual implementation of these thoughts is going to wait until the thoughts are more coherent, but the basic foundation of it is this: a top-down community is not a community.
We'll have more on that as it develops, as they say dans la belle newsroom.
STATE OF THE ME AKA THE YESTERDAILY REPORT
I had a fairly bad weekend but a pretty good day yesterday up until the point where I decided to clean the bathtub. To make a long story short*, I ended up slicing the pad/tip of my finger open. Not badly, just terribly inconveniently.
It's the index finger on my left hand, and I've discovered that I absolutely cannot type without using it, even hunting and pecking. I can thumb-type or swipe-type on a smaller device, but I'd have to be very slow and deliberate and looking directly at the keys the whole time to poke out a word without using it on a full-sized keyboard. I've talked about how I need a physical keyboard to type effectively, and it's the same thing. Typing is a very fluid, natural act for me. It's second nature.
Because of the nature of the injury I had serious concerns about infection, so I cleaned it and applied topical antibiotic cream and swaddled it in adhesive bandages as well as I could (you know how finger cuts can be) and then tried to get back to the business of writing. That proved impossible to do without knocking the bandages off, so I waited a while to let the cut close up a bit and took them off. Unfortunately the location of the cut meant that it was bleeding again soon. I'd already decided to go with a short chapter, but I ended up making it shorter than it would have been.
All in all I only added a couple of hundred words to the chapter, post-cut. After that I decided to stay away from the computer for a while because no matter my intention to just hang out on Facebook and Tumblr and not type anything, it kept happening that I saw something that just cried out for some ever-so-brief reply on my part. It's the "second nature" thing again... put a keyboard within my reach and I'll reach for it and start spilling out my thoughts.
The wound did eventually close to the point that I could somewhat gingerly type, but a desire to not aggravate it helped me end up going to bed at an earlier hour last night than I might otherwise have done, and I am now awake at nine in the morning and feeling pretty good. The cut on my finger is now just a thin line, and the pressure of ordinary typing provokes no pain.
DREAMS FROM LAST NIGHT
I seem to have a recurring theme in my dreams lately of my siblings and I all living with our parents as we did when we were younger, though our ages in these dreams are kind of an indeterminate mash-up. My dream last night ended up there, but it started off as a sort of mash-up of D&D and Zelda and Fallout 3. Like, in this dream I was a Link-esque adventurer fighting ogres and orcs amid bombed-out ruins of suburbia. Eventually a scene of looting a semi-intact house with things like desks and dressers and such turned into a dream where I was hastily rifling through my own dresser trying to decide what to pack for a trip. My family lived in this house and were preparing to leave it to go camping in Florida for the duration of the winter. There was a strong sense of time-sensitive urgency about it, too.
PLANS FOR TODAY
Got a great newsletter in the works, and for once I don't think there will be any scrambling to get it done.
Some goings-on in various blogospheres I overlap with have left me with some thoughts about the nature of community, and the nature of branding. They're still kind of coming together, but I think I'm working out the "better way to engage with my readership" that I've talked about looking for in the past.
The actual implementation of these thoughts is going to wait until the thoughts are more coherent, but the basic foundation of it is this: a top-down community is not a community.
We'll have more on that as it develops, as they say dans la belle newsroom.
STATE OF THE ME AKA THE YESTERDAILY REPORT
I had a fairly bad weekend but a pretty good day yesterday up until the point where I decided to clean the bathtub. To make a long story short*, I ended up slicing the pad/tip of my finger open. Not badly, just terribly inconveniently.
It's the index finger on my left hand, and I've discovered that I absolutely cannot type without using it, even hunting and pecking. I can thumb-type or swipe-type on a smaller device, but I'd have to be very slow and deliberate and looking directly at the keys the whole time to poke out a word without using it on a full-sized keyboard. I've talked about how I need a physical keyboard to type effectively, and it's the same thing. Typing is a very fluid, natural act for me. It's second nature.
Because of the nature of the injury I had serious concerns about infection, so I cleaned it and applied topical antibiotic cream and swaddled it in adhesive bandages as well as I could (you know how finger cuts can be) and then tried to get back to the business of writing. That proved impossible to do without knocking the bandages off, so I waited a while to let the cut close up a bit and took them off. Unfortunately the location of the cut meant that it was bleeding again soon. I'd already decided to go with a short chapter, but I ended up making it shorter than it would have been.
All in all I only added a couple of hundred words to the chapter, post-cut. After that I decided to stay away from the computer for a while because no matter my intention to just hang out on Facebook and Tumblr and not type anything, it kept happening that I saw something that just cried out for some ever-so-brief reply on my part. It's the "second nature" thing again... put a keyboard within my reach and I'll reach for it and start spilling out my thoughts.
The wound did eventually close to the point that I could somewhat gingerly type, but a desire to not aggravate it helped me end up going to bed at an earlier hour last night than I might otherwise have done, and I am now awake at nine in the morning and feeling pretty good. The cut on my finger is now just a thin line, and the pressure of ordinary typing provokes no pain.
DREAMS FROM LAST NIGHT
I seem to have a recurring theme in my dreams lately of my siblings and I all living with our parents as we did when we were younger, though our ages in these dreams are kind of an indeterminate mash-up. My dream last night ended up there, but it started off as a sort of mash-up of D&D and Zelda and Fallout 3. Like, in this dream I was a Link-esque adventurer fighting ogres and orcs amid bombed-out ruins of suburbia. Eventually a scene of looting a semi-intact house with things like desks and dressers and such turned into a dream where I was hastily rifling through my own dresser trying to decide what to pack for a trip. My family lived in this house and were preparing to leave it to go camping in Florida for the duration of the winter. There was a strong sense of time-sensitive urgency about it, too.
PLANS FOR TODAY
Got a great newsletter in the works, and for once I don't think there will be any scrambling to get it done.