Brad Salomons

Category: these crafts

  • multitaskable

    multitaskable

    I think a lot of us out there would like to think that we are superb multitaskers. I like to think that of myself. Or maybe you don’t. But we are out there and I know a lot of people who would fit that description: I can do everything, anything, as much as I want.

    Now…

    I have been doing this thing I’ve been calling a “career shift” —well, I mean, it stopped being a career break over a year ago when I started picking up odd jobs and part time work and going back to school. None of that is a so-called break anymore. It’s just a different kind of work, after all. My end goal is something different from where I was, but I am moving towards it with a careful, deliberate effort. So I’m calling it a shift. And in taking this approach I have been doing a lot—no, really, a lot—of multitasking. Or trying to, at least.

    I’ve been working jobs, volunteering, parenting, re-educating myself, writing, job hunting, trying to keep fit, coding, playing video games, reading more, socializing with friends, squeezing in a bit of travel—aaaaand, well… that’s the thing isn’t it? 

    As much as I’ve been doing all this stuff, I think I’ve become saturated. 

    Maxed out. Capacity reached.

    I am officially at the point where doing anything new seems to push something else out the back—and off the list.

    I started blogging more and my coding efforts suffered. 

    I upped the number of shifts I did each week at my part time job and suddenly I realize that I’m not making art.

    I’ve been reading more books, but almost simultaneously my progress on my novel ground to a halt.

    It’s not something I’m formally tracking, of course, but just trends I’ve noticed. Start one thing new, something old vanishes from my life.

    And yet I don’t view this as a weakness. My ability to multitask, something that I’ve long viewed without context or care or introspection is something that I’ve also long thought was nigh limitless. But actually it isn’t. And that’s okay.

    Understanding that the mind has limits, time is strict, that multitasking ones life and projects is finite, and that getting the most from ones efforts is a work of good and strategic choices—this is a kind of self-awareness that, for me at least, has been hard to come by. Knowing that taking on something new will take away something existing, or alternatively, giving up something existing will leave space for something new: this is a variable to help me understand my  ultimate potential to create, learn, and contribute. 

    And it sounds all-to-obvious to write that, but I think if more people could consciously articulate that variable about themselves they would not only make better decisions about their lives and careers, they’d probably find a kind of comfort in knowing that limits are nothing to fear and the very idea of multitasking should be evaluated with a unique and personal lens.

  • back story

    At the end of October, in less than a month as of writing this, I’ll mark the one year anniversary of starting work on the novel I’ve been scratching out into countless sheets of digital parchment.

    And for the last couple months, the book—the story, the wordcount, the everything—has been stuck at a perpetual eighty percent complete (as I tell anyone who asks.)

    My problem in just wrapping up the damn thing has a few little problems, and one big one. The big one: backstory.

    I had a great idea. I started plotting it out. I mapped out over one hundred waypoints. I wrote. I fleshed out characters. I wove the plot into a coherent story and built it up to a climactic setup. And then—

    See, some of those waypoints were markers on a path but they didn’t really elaborate on the nunace of the trail. Which was fine when I was plotting, planning and packing my bags for this year-long trip. But now that I reached this point in the journey the “figure it out later” part turned into a more immediate problem.

    So, I’ve set up camp on the trail and I’ve been writing stuff that—well—isn’t the novel, but is still part of the story. Rather, it’s back story, side story, character profiles, and history of everything and everyone connected with the world. It’s worldbuilding, really, but worldbuilding taking place kinda, sorta, actually half way (well, eighty percent way) into the process.

    Vital, yeah. Stalling, a bit. Inevitable, of course.

  • log-jammed

    My brain may be feeling a little log-jammed these days when it comes to the final writing push on my novel, but it is the truth of the work-a-day writer that the words cannot stop flowing just because the heart is struggling. 

    As an alternative to cranking out more chapters to my paranormal fiction efforts, I have instead created a collection of documents in my word processing software that are begging for fresh keystrokes and luring me into the mentality of “just write something” on a routine. 

    It is, after all, ineffective and self-defeating to plunk down at a keyboard and either write nothing or write words that leave one unsatisfied with their ultimate purpose.

    That is to say, I feel it is important to write, but writing junk for the sake of hitting a daily word count strikes me as counterproductive.

    In an effort to achieve that aforemention word count, I instead find myself nudging the metaphorical boulder of my novel up the hill a only just few modest steps each day but then gazing across the landscape of the dozens of other boulders I’ve been nudging and wandering off a for some quality time nudging each of those a little bit, too. 

    The result has been that I have both continued my daily efforts to put digital words onto digital paper and also succeeded in creating a few thousands of words of other writing on projects like podcast scripts, short stories, character sheets, blog posts, and essay collections—and the novel inches stepwise ever closer to a conclusion.

  • coder thoughts

    Coding is an iterative space in which I live.

    I build something that some would call a minimum viable product. It is little more than a toy that does something simple and basic and imperfect, yet it is functional. Once that utility reaches a certain point it is not unheard of for me to abandon such projects out of boredom or lack of direction, but on occasion the iterative mind steps in.

    I will think of this minimum viable product that with a few more hours of work it can perhaps do more things that would build off the simplicity and basic functionality. So I write more code and launch more tweaks. 

    This goes on and on in waves, sometimes for years, and after a long while composed of stints of development, revising, improving, removing, and refining I find myself with something that is no longer a minimum viable product, but rather something much more complex and interesting.

    This iterative thought about a wouldn’t-it-be-neat-if project has manifested by stepwise effort into a small but effective little code base that moves data around and renders web pages and sends emails and validates users and whatever other clever little algorithmic functionality that I have been poking away at making work.

    Sure, I could have sat down and mapped out a project in its entirety and worked tirelessly to make it all at once, but there is something organic and curious about my method, curious about this space in which I choose to call myself a coder.

  • sum total words

    You have a finite number of words in you. 

    Oh, sure, that finite number may be huge.

    But it is finite.

    And there is absolute truth in the notion that every word you say or write removes from the remining tally one more word and brings you one word closer to the sum total of every word that you have sad or written and will ever say or write.

    Should this thought paralyze you or make you rethink each of those words?

    On the contrary. This notion should implore you spend every word that you can and get those words out into the universe sooner to be enjoyed, cherished, listened to or read sooner. You shouldn’t hesitate to send as many words as possible now—today, tomorrow, and then again every day after that—to grind down from the list of words you have left and spend every syllable in your due with raw abandon. You must do this because the more those words swirl and whirl around the world, through the eyes, ears, and fingertips of anyone who might hear or read them, the sooner their effects can be enjoyed, compounded, and folded back to you in a vast loop of feedback and communication. The sooner their value propigates. The sooner you will feel their purpose and effect.

    The list of your words in is in of course fininte, but surely none of us know what that total number will come to until at the end our days and maybe into our last moments, we’ve typed our last keystroke or muttered our last gasp.

    Thus, I implore you—don’t let that number come up short.

  • nerd-vantage

    I posted an article a while back called raw code in which I detailed the notion that having skills in technology (though the lesson is transferable to virtually every refined skill, trade, or art) means that one can get a leg up on others without that skill for simple things.

    In my example, I talked about how I have solved many little problems or puzzles by writing a bit of code to support the effort. I hinted at this, but one of the biggest and most cost-savings of those has been in the realm of meal planning.

    It’s no secret that groceries are expensive.

    And eating isn’t exactly an optional activity.

    We’re all kinda stuck between a quac and hot spice.

    At least a dozen years ago I wrote the first version of a little piece of personal software we called MealPlannit. It’s simultaneously stupidly simple but also fairly complex. In essense it is a database of all our recipes, everything from elaborate and complex meals to favorite freezer meals whose sole cooking instruction is remove from box and heat.

    The end result of this after a dozen years and a hundred code tweaks is that we have a database of about four hundred recipes that can be added with the click of a button to a rolling weekly plan and from which we can generate a shopping list. That’s all it does.

    As simple as that sounds, we have used it faithfully for over a decade to plan meals and grocery shop. And all that simplified planning means that our nerd-vantage in the grocery store has probably saved us a few dollars each week in food wastage and impulse shopping. In fact, by my wife’s estimates we probably save about twenty bucks a week in both planning our weekly meals but in the savings that come from knowing what our core, regular recurring favorite meals are and buying ingredients when they are on sale. And that number is probably a low-ball estimate.

    But if you add up twenty bucks per week over even just ten years that means this little bit of code I put together in my spare time has personally saved us about ten thousand dollars—which is a pretty nice vacation and a pretty nice advantage from just being a nerd.

  • critical mass

    After a year of pecking away at this thing I’ve learned to think of as a “writing life” I’ve found that I’ve kinda reached a critical mass of projects.

    True. Part of me thought I would have created something worthy of publication by now, but rather that has not been the case. For example, I have a written 80% of a novel. I have penned about thirty scripts for yet-unrecorded podcast episodes. I have typed out a couple of completed short stories that need editing and the bones of at least a dozen more that need focus. My word processor files are now filled with so many personal essays on such a wide range of topics and in such a broad state of completion that I can barely keep track save for just to open one that looks interesting and polish, tweak, add, or prune.

    And. It would be fair to say that I have typed a quarter of a million words in the last year. Sure, I’ve not but published a whole number percentage of those but they exist and they are not without value. Hardly.

    In fact, as I stated, I’m at something of a critical mass. I have such a broad number of great little projects in progress that on any given day I can wake up and type a few hundred words here or few hundred words there and make progress on any one of those projects. Like, if I’m so inclined I can write another chapter in my novel, scope out a few more pages of that comic script I’ve been working on, or edit one of my essays for just a hint more of clarity.

    None of this is wasted effort. It’s all incrementally building and growing and progressing.

    It all just adds bit by bit, drip by drab, onto the whole of my collected efforts.

    And while I may sometimes feel a little discouraged by the lack of publication-readiness of most of it, I am deeply encouraged that so much of it is slowly and steadily moving with momemtum towards that publish-ready state at some point in the future. Maybe even the near future.

  • multimodal worlds

    Written word. Spoken audio. Graphic novellas.

    It’s an interesting concept in fashioning a micro-universe in which to set a collection of fictional stories to reach into a multi-modal mentality and try to create different pieces in different formats all within the same world.

    If you know me then it has been no real secret that I’ve spent the last six to eight months writing a paranormal science fiction novel set in a fictionalized city but based on an amalgamation of a few real places I know and love.

    If you know me then you also know that sometimes I get stuck and veer off on personal side projects while I’m supposed to working on other personal side projects.

    Yet sometimes—often—this is just because I have a bit of writers block. And what I’ve learned about writers block is that nothing breaks through the block better than just writing. If that sounds counterintutive, then take a deep breath and think about what it means to be a professional at anything. When you need to get stuff done, you can’t just stop and feel sorry for yourself. Instead, you need to buckle down and keep at it. The same is true for personal projects.

    “But I’m blocked!” You say.

    Well, have I got a solution for you: multimodal world building.

    Can’t quite squeeze out the next chapter of a novel? Work on a short story set in the same universe, telling a quirky tale about the people who work at the restaurant your characters visited a few chapters back.

    Struggling to figure out the plot twist that has you tangled in knots? Draw a cartoon about a minor character from your novel who pops his head into one brief scene as a mention, but has a huge influential backstory to explore.

    Hung up on some funky character development in chapter thirty seven? Write a script for an audio drama centred around the prequel events of your novel and then maybe even record some of it.

    I mean, sure, you’re not putting words into your novel, but the machine keeps working and the words keep flowing and that is sure a heck of a lot better than letting that keyboard gather dust, right?

  • audio drama

    In 2001, having recently finished university and found my first “real job” I packed up and moved to the west coast of Canada to a city called Vancouver.

    I had no car. I had few friends. I had a lot of free time. And I had the hulking desktop computer that had seen me through my school work.  

    So I wrote a blog. It was a new toy, a new platform, and no expectations. A way to communicate to the world, to my friends back in Alberta, and to chronicle this life I was living.

    I’ve posted millions of words online since I penned the first journal entry into the early blogosphere back in 2001, scattered across countless platforms and dozens of websites with various lifespans.  I have wrung the dish cloth of the printed word so throughly that is sometimes seems not but a drop is left in it to squeeze out.

    Of course, there always is more to write. More to type. More to post.  These words are the very example of that, but I write like I breath these days, it’s just what I do every single day.

    The spark of creativity that I once felt in creating new and exciting websites has become just another buzz in the background of my creative life, rarely the end result and often more of a necessary foundation to the rest of it.

    Enter audio.

    I have been a consumer of audio for decades, from music to audiobooks to podcasts to soundtracks. I listen therefore I am.

    Yet, I have had so little experience recording, producing and sharing audio that on a graph comparing my written word output to my audio file output, the latter would likely not even register as anything more than an approximation error.

    In 2024 I decided to remedy that.

    I bought a digital audio field recorder, a tool with which I can step away from the keyboard and focus on the sounds of the world and my own spoken voice.  I bought a podcasting microphone. And I have come up with multiple plans for multiple podcasts.

    Like everyone I cringe at the sound of my own voice coming through my headphones as I’m editing, but after hours and hours of recording, retakes, production, mixing, and generally just playing around I sort of feel the same way I felt back in 2001: like a guy with a new toy, a new platform and no expectations.  A new way to communicate and chronicle about this creative life I’m living.

    And who knows, maybe in ten or twenty years, recording audio will be just as much a part of my daily routine as writing.  You can check out my podcasting at squwetchy.art/podcasts

  • workflow

    From what I understand about the craft of writing a novel, in writing said novel it is not advisable to expect that you will take a linear path from idea to published book.

    That is to say, the way there is no clear and easy path to you goal.

    There are curves and switchbacks. There are hang ups. There might be massive u-turns.

    Getting from A to Z is not necessarily straight shot.

    I’ve been working on my own craft and building on this advice by implementing what I am calling a writing workflow. Maybe it is that things don’t move in a straight line in general, but in smaller segments maybe those lines are a little less wobbly. Maybe the first draft comes together in a pretty logical way. And then maybe the editing is all over the place too, but as a segment of the journey alone it is less obviously so. Heck, I learned in high school geometry that even a circle can be a whole lot of straight lines connected up in the right way.

    Workflow can be a way of moving a project from phase A to phase Z stepwise, so that something new can move into phase A when something done moves into step B. And if the trip from A to Z is a long, winding road, breaking the wobbly, winding trip into manageable straight-shot pieces might make the whole thing a bit less dizzying.