Tuesday, January 31, 2017
The Dude and the Zen Master - reading
Finished "The Dude and the Zen Master" by Jeff Bridges and Bernie Glassman. I'm not really a zen kind of guy, but still enjoyed the book. I guess I would call it an honest discussion between two guys, and you, the reader, are sort of sitting in the room. It was a quick read. Not a bad way to end January. Funny side note - for a good part of the book I thought Bernie Glassman was actually Gerry Bednob (the guy from 40 Year Old Virgin and many other films). Rookie mistake, I know.
Sunday, January 22, 2017
Home Invasion, and two abandoned books - reading
Finished "Home Invasion" by me. This was the first readthrough of my 2016 NaNoWriMo story that begins much like the movie Independence Day, with UFOs hovering over cities and then attacking. To say much more than that would be giving it away, though, so I'll stop there.
There were some chapters that read like stereo instructions, which in writing this analogy I've come to realize don't really exist any more. But other chapters have good action, good escalations, and heroes being heroes. I am a little disappointed that the women I wrote did not get to contribute as much as I was hoping they would, particularly since I decided to base my female character names on the Matilda Effect.
As to the books I gave up on, there were two.
"Dreaming in Code" by Scott Rosenberg was to me like attending a very long project retrospective for a project on which I did not participate. I got a few chapters in, and suddenly did not find much time for reading.
"Getting Things Done" by David Allen was certainly talked up everywhere I could see. My two main problems with this book are:
1) Much like my NaNoWriMo novels, the author insisted on using 5,000 words where 50 would suffice. I'm not sure why he needed such a high word count. And this is the rewritten, revised, revisited version of the book. And,
2) I'm already living by the first piece of advice I could tease out of the book. That is to say, get your to-do list out of your head and written down somewhere.
In skimming the book just now looking for the expression he used for this place to write it down, I found a couple places where he asks, "Did your mind wander while you were reading this?" To which I say, "Hell, yeah."
One of the things I've worked on in my writing, especially my short script writing, is watching for places that take a person out of the read:
When your reader encounters these things, they lose the experience that you're trying to give them. I don't know if Mr. Allen did it on purpose to demonstrate his point, but this book did many things that pulled me out of the read, whether it was repetition, realizing that he hadn't made a good point in several pages, or, the one specific example I can remember, his RAM (computer memory) analogy. But I was pulled out of the read repeatedly, and ultimately decided it wasn't worth my time to power through.
I am amused that this post includes panning a book called, "Getting Things Done," and it took me a week to post this. I finished Home Invasion on 1/15/2017. But to my credit, I got a lot of things done in that week!
There were some chapters that read like stereo instructions, which in writing this analogy I've come to realize don't really exist any more. But other chapters have good action, good escalations, and heroes being heroes. I am a little disappointed that the women I wrote did not get to contribute as much as I was hoping they would, particularly since I decided to base my female character names on the Matilda Effect.
As to the books I gave up on, there were two.
"Dreaming in Code" by Scott Rosenberg was to me like attending a very long project retrospective for a project on which I did not participate. I got a few chapters in, and suddenly did not find much time for reading.
"Getting Things Done" by David Allen was certainly talked up everywhere I could see. My two main problems with this book are:
1) Much like my NaNoWriMo novels, the author insisted on using 5,000 words where 50 would suffice. I'm not sure why he needed such a high word count. And this is the rewritten, revised, revisited version of the book. And,
2) I'm already living by the first piece of advice I could tease out of the book. That is to say, get your to-do list out of your head and written down somewhere.
In skimming the book just now looking for the expression he used for this place to write it down, I found a couple places where he asks, "Did your mind wander while you were reading this?" To which I say, "Hell, yeah."
One of the things I've worked on in my writing, especially my short script writing, is watching for places that take a person out of the read:
- something unrealistic is happening
- bad phrasing
- factually incorrect
- something else
When your reader encounters these things, they lose the experience that you're trying to give them. I don't know if Mr. Allen did it on purpose to demonstrate his point, but this book did many things that pulled me out of the read, whether it was repetition, realizing that he hadn't made a good point in several pages, or, the one specific example I can remember, his RAM (computer memory) analogy. But I was pulled out of the read repeatedly, and ultimately decided it wasn't worth my time to power through.
I am amused that this post includes panning a book called, "Getting Things Done," and it took me a week to post this. I finished Home Invasion on 1/15/2017. But to my credit, I got a lot of things done in that week!
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