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Use the Force – and edit later

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One of my books was peer-reviewed by an academic who criticised the first draft with the comment that the first third was plainly rushed. The last two thirds, he or she said, were clearly far more considered and therefore vastly superior.

You know where this is going, don’t you? I’d spent five months writing the first third and one week doing the rest.

That wasn’t through some disinterest in the ending, it was more that I found it hard to start. Not in the sense of putting my backside down on the chair, rather that I had to find the right point and the right tone to start the book or the whole thing wouldn’t work. It was very important to me and I wanted to get this one right, more than ever.

But pondering turned into paralysis and though I was writing away all the time, I was really rewriting. I have no idea how many goes I had at the opening chapters. I just know that the deadline got frighteningly close and that suddenly I was having to write at speed and at 2am.

PressPageThumb03Stuff it, I’m going to tell you. The book was my first, BFI TV Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair (UK edition, US edition). It was important to me because everything is, of course, but also it was my first book. Plus it was about The Beiderbecke Affair, the 1980s drama serial by Alan Plater that either you don’t know at all or you are already humming the theme. It’s astonished me how many people have written to say they loved that show and also that they really believed they were the only ones. It was a show that felt like your own. It was that personal. I think it was Alan’s best work and that’s saying something because he wrote 300 or more scripts for television, stage, film and radio.

He was also a friend. He died in 2010 and not many months after that, I phoned up the British Film Institute to propose this. Someone should do a bio of Alan but I can’t, that would turn a friend into a journalism subject. But I could do Beiderbecke. I could really do Beiderbecke. It’s personal to me just as it is with so many.

Here’s how personal it got. I have roller blinds on my office window but I’ve never got them to work. They’re just hanging up there at the top, half stuck in knots. And it’s a big window. So at 2am, the lights on in my office, the dark night outside, that big window is a mirror. Even under deadline pressure, I was getting really, really, really intense about a particular point to do with the show. And I promise you I saw Alan Plater reflected in the window. He was leaning back in his chair, lighting up a cigarette, and saying that it’s only a TV show, William.

I didn’t have time to rewrite the last two thirds much. But I also didn’t need to.

Even when I went to the second draft – and I must say that anonymous academic had a lot of really good points that I stole, as well as some that I just ignored – I didn’t have to change the back of the book.

Sometimes, you just have to press on and, sometimes, that works. I’ve discovered that my top writing speed is twenty pages of script or 10,000 words a day and that I can keep that up for about eight days in a row. Whenever I’ve had to do that, it’s been with the full realisation that I’m going to have to change a lot later. Edit, improve, fix, rewrite. It’s true. But even in those times, it is remarkable – to me – how much doesn’t have to be fiddled with.

Stop analysing, just do it.

And then analyse later. I’m not advocating being careless about your work, but I am saying it’s easier to change something than it is to make those first marks on the page.

You need online backup – and it isn’t enough

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A friend is working on a large, complicated book and I asked how often she was backing it up. “Good point,” she said. “I should do that.”

You’ve just shivered. Prepare to put a coat on.

This very smart, very clever and actually very funny friend then said: “I’ll move it to Dropbox.”

I think the computer industry is in a mess right now as we move more things and more types of things to these online services. If you don’t know, then you would think Dropbox was a great answer because those of us who rely on it, love it. Same with iCloud. Probably the same with whatever Microsoft is calling its version today. Then there’s Backblaze and Crashplan. All excellent services but you need to know what they’re excellent at.

The problem for my friend with Dropbox, for instance, is that if she ever deletes her book on her computer, Dropbox will immediately delete it for her on its copy and on any other computer she uses. Because it’s supposed to.

Dropbox is for having your current work with you wherever you go. So is iCloud. In another way, so is Evernote. They are working online copies of everything.

In comparison, Backblaze and Crashplan are offsite backups: your data is copied to them and it sits there. All you can do is copy more to it or get your stuff back if you should have your laptop nicked or if there’s a fire in your house.

None of these are for archiving.

I use Backblaze and if I need to go back to an old version of a file, it’s on their servers for a month. They keep all versions they back up, they just only keep the current one forever. The rest are archived off after four weeks. I am not going to test out what happens if I delete something. But undoubtedly, I can’t just wait until Backblaze has copied up all my work on a particular book and then delete it all to save space on my local drive.

So I need to look into archiving. Seriously need to. I used to use a thing I called the bucket under the stairs: it was an Apple Time Machine – you’ll never guess where I kept it – that all our Macs backed up to hourly. But it died. And it was full before it died. We haven’t lost any data but we have lost the ability to back up locally like that. I can see a few terabyte drives coming up in my near future.

This was on my mind to talk to you about in part because of my friend and her book but also chiefly because I’ve finally had the email notification I have waited for: my office iMac has now been backed up online to the Backblaze service. It has taken eleven months.

This is chiefly because I used to have such a slow internet connection and I’m sure if I hadn’t changed to Sky Fibre this month, I’d still be backing up. But it’s nice to know that it’s done and that now only anything new I do will be uploaded to their servers.

 

 

 

 

RescueTime interview feature

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What was I saying about seeing RescueTime everywhere? Just after I posted my Very, Very Snap Review of RescueTime, I found this on Lifehacker: it’s an interview with the creator and is a particularly interesting read. I recognise a huge number of the things he says about why the software was created:

Do you ever have those days where you know you’ve been working hard all day, but then can’t remember what you did by the time 5pm rolls around? We found ourselves in that position way too often and it was really frustrating. It felt like hours of our day were falling into a black hole. I could usually remember some things I did, but trying to account for a full eight hours always ended up with a bunch of blank spots in it. I ended up feeling really guilty about it, figuring that the missing time must have been spent screwing around on Twitter or reading blogs or something.

Robby Macdonnell of RescueTime, talking to Lifehacker.

 

Very, very snap review: RescueTime

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You know how you hear about something and then suddenly it’s everywhere? I’ve been hearing of RescueTime like it’s a new thing but it’s been around at least for a while and it does this (click to see it better):

 

Screen Shot 2014-02-18 at 11.37.46

If you didn’t click – and honestly who has the time to click? – then what it says is that I have spent about a minute and a half in Photoshop today. And that was the result. A cropped screen grab you can barely see. Oh, and also the wee cropped-even-closer graphic in Save a Whole Second When You’re Installing Software on Macs. A minute and a half. Wasn’t worth it, really, was it?

But it also tells me I stopped by the Omni Group website – not a shock, Omni does my long-beloved To Do manager OmniFocus and my recently-becoming-beloved OmniOutliner – and some stuff about how I piddled about in my Mac’s Finder. As you do.

But if that looks a bit rubbish as a snapshot of my entire working day – it’s now 11:45 and I’ve been writing since 5am so I promise I’ve accomplished more than that – it is a terrific snapshot of the three minutes since I installed RescueTime.

In the free version that I’m trying out, RescueTime does this logging so that you can see where in the world you spent your time. I’m looking forward to how it describes my bacon sandwiches at lunchtime. But armed with all this, you can see where you are effective and where you are procrastinating. You can see what on your computer keeps you working and what keeps you from working too. There’s a paid-for Premium version which lets you work with that information directly: it assigns scores to how distracting various sites or activities appear to be to you and then you can say no more. For the next thirty minutes, or whatever you choose, the premium version of RescueTime will deny you access to what most distracts you.

The premium version has other features and costs $9.99 US/month. The free one is impressing me, a whole four minutes in, so I’m going to keep it around for a time longer. I wrote in The Blank Screen (UK edition, US edition) about software that blocks distracting websites by actually blocking the whole internet but I have never used any of it. This might change my mind.

Two years is lightning fast

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Your mileage will vary, no doubt, but this or something like it has happened to you, will happen again and may be happening today. Right now, I need a cable. I need an old iPad 30-pin cable, the type that Apple used for every iPad and every iPhone and every everything else for a decade or more and now doesn’t.

I actually don’t have a problem with Apple changing to the new slimline Lightning cables. Ten years with one type, shrug. But the cables are expensive enough that I hesitated over buying a spare for my travelling bag. In the end, a close call with a low battery convinced me to do it and the discovery that the cables cost less in the States convinced me to replace a damaged one while I was in San Francisco.

But today is the first time I’ve noticed I can’t find any of my old cables. I had oodles of these. I haven’t sold them or given them away, but they ain’t nowhere to be found. Unless they’ve gone to the same planet that old Biros do, they are right here with me and I can’t find them.

All I can find are lots of new Lightning cables.

Apparently these little suckers were introduced on September 12, 2012 and now, less than two years later, all traces of the old ones are gone.

I’m minded of this because I need the cable and I thought telling you might bring it back to mind where in the hell I’d left one. But also, I was in a chat the other night with some folk I’d not talked to in about the same length of time. And they asked me what I’d been up to and I told them nothing, really, couldn’t think of anything, and they pressed, and no, honestly but they pressed. Until I worked it out that when we’d spoken before, I’d done maybe one presentation to a group and this week I’ll be doing my fifty-something one.

I wanted to do this, I didn’t believe I could do it, and it’s done. And I can’t remember when I didn’t do it.

I need to find a cable, yes, but I think I also want to find more virtual cables and things I don’t believe I can do and go do those until they’re part of me too.

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Just to tantalise you, I’m not saying here why I write, I’m sort-of saying it in a guest blog on Lindsay Stanberry-Flynn’s blog.

And in truth, I’m not even saying it there. She asked, I answered, I threw my answer away, I tried again. And again. Yes: and again.

Read my twelfth attempt here.

Gasp as one twitter user unfollows another

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This is either a very slow news day or a sign that some people keep checking the twitter follows list of – who? Celebrities? Industry figures?

Nonetheless, it's a slow news day and I didn't do the constant monitoring of lists so let me take you live to the scene:

BREAKING NEWS – TWITTER – Apple's Phil Schiller unfollowed Nest's Tony Fadell after the latter sold his firm to Google. DETAILS AND ANALYSIS FOLLOWS

But not here.

Beat this – the ‘proven’ ultimate workout playlist

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Sometimes you have to look at the data and just say no. That's not right. Spotify has released what it calls the ultimate workout playlist which has 20 songs scientifically proven to be the best ones to get you going and keep you exercising. There's a real scientist involved – Dr Costas Karageorghis, read his Brunel University bio – and the claim is that 6.7 million tracks were analysed.

You're unthinkingly assuming that there aren't 6.7m songs in the world, though you're not sure, and you're also unthinkingly presuming that it isn't that they listened to one song 6.7m times. There is no doubt in your mind that it'll be something in the middle of those two extremes and you're right. But possibly it's just a wee bit slanted toward the one song 6.7m times.

Easily the most respected and revered peer-reviewed science journal in the world, Britain's Daily Mail explains:

The team analysed 6.7 million Spotify playlists containing the word ‘workout’ in the title and compared the different beats per minute (bpm) to those used in certain workouts. For example, a person’s typical stride rate while jogging or running is 150 to 190 strides per minute. If these figures are halved it gives a range of 75 to 95 bpm – the beat range found most commonly in urban music, particularly rap.

There's your skew right there. They looked at the music of people who already go to the gym enough to make playlists and to give them names with the word 'workout' in them. It's not fair or statistically proven that the age of these people will tend toward the younger end of the scale but you know it's true and at least I used the word statisically instead of SCIENTISTS PROVE YOUNG PEOPLE USE GYMS.

And still I can't quite accept the findings of this research because Spotify has published the playlist. I'm 48 and I haven't heard any track on the list. I haven't even heard of any of the tracks on the list.

Tell me Spotify wants a playlist of current tracks, I'll believe you. But tell me that it is scientifically proven that no piece of music of any kind ever beats these twenty released since last Wednesday and I have my doubts.

I'm just not willing to go to a gym to prove it to you or to affect the statistics. Or listen to the music.

But other than that, we're good, right?

The Roommate Agreement – on your iPhone

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There’s a new app called Legitimo that lets you rapidly knock up a contract. We’re not talking international co-financing, more a way to divide the dishes if you ask me but reportedly at least one happy customer is using it to create sublease agreements.

But tell me you didn’t read all that and immediately think of Dr Sheldon Cooper’s Roommate Agreement in The Big Bang Theory. If you didn’t, it’s probably best to ignore the entirely free Legitimo app and go enjoy The Big Bang Theory immediately. I’m all for being productive, but there are limits, you know.