advice

Fear Of Fragmentation

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

Right now it’s a challenging time for many of us. Politics is a nightmare. Wages are stagnant and the inevitable recession looms while US economic policy is made by tantrum. The planet is heating up. Medical care costs skyrocket.

It’s also a challenging time for people I know, and doubtlessly you’re in the same boat. I get it.

I’ve got several friends and family dealing with medical issues.

Other are coping with layoffs and challenges of finding work.

Still others live in places that are being hit or will be hit by climate changes.

And of course, several people fit one or more category. You’re also probably nodding your head, if not trying to cope with sudden anxiety from reading this. We know something is really messed up.

This is something we rarely talk about. It’s not just that our travails of today hurt us or hurt people, they hurt the connections we’ve built. They hurt friends and family and groups and clubs because these stresses on people stress the social bonds we have. It’s hard to keep it all together when everything else is coming apart.

Again, you’ve probably been there. Sorry. And, yes, with climate change it’s going to be worse as we wonder if our friends in Florida will be flooded or our family in Arizona will have their AC crash from overload.

I think it’s up to us to work hard to hold our friends and family and groups together as we face a much more challenging world. We’ll need to stay in touch, back each other up, and help each other out. Then again, that’s what our social structures are for, and man are we going to need them because they are the only thing that’s going to let us get through these times.

So let’s get ready. The world is changing – and not for the better in many ways. We’ve got to survive the change so we can change it back – and not be alone.

So connect with chat. Send text messages. Do a newsletter. Cool someone a meal. Lend them some cash. Do your part to keep it all together.

Steven Savage

An Exercise: Facing Past Choices

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

A while ago I caught myself reflecting on my life choices, and my wish to have done things differently. Sure we all do that, but I found myself going over what could be, and it was distracting. There’s a point where done is done, and going over things yields no useful lessons and wastes time.

I also wanted to get this non-productive overthinking out of my system, both to stop doing it but also to see what I could learn. I quickly came up with an exercise that I want to recommend to people – because I’m sure many of you go into “what if” phases as I did.

Set aside at least an hour of your time and go to some place where you can have a nice non-distracted walk or sit (a park, a large mall, etc.). Take your phone, but during your time there don’t use it – it can be a distraction.

Now while you walk (or sit) do the following:

  • Take your most recent “life choice you may have done differently” and ask what would have happened if you had really made another choice. Keep it to two or three possibilities like “if I’d done X then probably Y and Z,” and make sure the answer “feels” right to you.
  • Once you finish with that item, move to the next, earliest “choice point” in your history and do the same, working through your life backward.
  • It’s OK to say the answer to any of your questions is “I don’t know.” That’s fine and healthy.
  • Go back as far as you need to, though I found for we older folks 18 is more than enough.
  • Don’t rush this, just don’t dwell on anything so deeply that you go down a mental rabbit hole.
  • When done take a break.

I found this an incredibly cleansing exercise. It got me over some things I kept obsessing over. It gave me an excellent retrospective. It definitely shortened this phase of “what if I had done things differently.”

I guess it got a lot out of my system.

I also had a few insights I want to share that may help you make sense of your own choices if you do this exercise:

  • Saying “if I did X then I don’t know” was liberating – as was the effort to see if I really could guess at what changes my choices would bring.
  • I found some interesting divergence points in my life where I could have become radically different in ways I could visualize. I didn’t always like those mes.
  • I was able to recognize people and groups and occurrences that helped keep me grounded in my life, and that may explain some of my behavior and what things keep my attention.
  • Significant trends in my career became apparent – as in there are three locations I kept thinking of moving career-wise to since my teens to 30’s. I live in one of those locations now.
  • A lot of my childhood interests are still part of my life. I wanted to work in tech, in science, and be a writer. I’m more or less doing those things, just in different ways.
  • I had a much better sense of what I wanted mattered to me.

Feeling reflective to the level it’s like being in a hall of mirrors? Try this exercise and see what you find.

Steven Savage

A Bridge To The Quiet Planet: A Few Thoughts On The Final Run

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

All right, A Bridge To The Quiet Planet is out.  Done.  So it was a bit later than I expected, and the final run on it gave me food for thought.

WATCH SWITCHING BETWEEN SOFTWARE: I found some annoying artifacts from moving from one piece of software to another – there can be subtle differences.   I had to do some annoying search and replaces.

THINK OVER STYLISTIC CHOICES EARLY AND FOLLOW UP: You may make certain formatting choices – like bolding certain things (business cards or telepathy), certain uses of quotes, etc.  Make sure you’re consistent.  I found ONE case of not following my own formatting, and I nearly missed it.

DO A SERIOUS READ-THROUGH AND CORRECTION EARLY: I wish I did this.  Take, say, an early draft, and edit it as if it’s for print.  This will help you find your mistakes, issues, common problems, and get plenty of distracting tiny errors out of the way – so you can edit.

KEEP A LIST OF ERRORS YOU FIND OR WORRY ABOUT: This helped me a lot.  As I did my final readthroughs, I kept a list of suspicious things or choices I want to review.  This let me do some amazing fine editing easy because then I could globally search.

SEARCH AND REPLACE IS YOUR FRIEND IF YOU DO IT STEP BY STEP: Global search and replace can mess up your document (as we all know).  However going slow, reviewing EACH possible replacement (or doing it by hand for each found) let’s you avoid problems.  Also it acts as a second review!

YOU CAN ONLY DO SO MUCH: At some point you can’t edit forever.  So don’t.  Learn your limits.  In fact . . .

GO EBOOK FIRST: This is a trick I evolved from a friend.  Do an ebook first, and distribute it.  It gives you immediate feedback, then you can update the ebook quickly.  Go print a bit later (like I’m doing it 4-6 weeks later).

KEEP A “LIVE” DOCUMENT: A big advantage of going ebook first is feedback.  So I keep a “Live” document I’m always editing as a core, representative document.  That will become the print book – but if I find errors I modify all 3 documents (ebook, Print, Live) for later.

So lots of lessons to share.  I’m certain I’ll have more to share – I think I need to make a kind of writing checklist sometime!

Steven Savage