2018: Day 80 the one with some soccer practice and Pandora streaming
Word count 169,503 + 1,140 or 170,643 of 1,000,000

Dear Reader,

Well —- then again those things that were lined up managed to get unaligned. They managed to get totally unaligned. I thought things were getting pretty well sorted and managed. It turned out that I was wrong. Things were not managed. Today I’m sitting here at soccer practice in one of those folding chairs that fits in a bag for storage and hammering away at my keyboard. This time right here and right now seemed like the hour I could steal to write. I’m pretty much hammering at the keyboard and watching some type of soccer practice occuring on the edge of my vision. At this point in the evening, I’m just hoping nobody runs into anybody. People all around me seem to be having fun. That is probably a good thing. At this point in the year the grass is just starting to come back. You have a mix of dead and green blades of grass. All the snow has melted for the most part and people are ready to get out and about in Colorado. It seems like 5 different teams are out here practicing soccer in various states of what could be defined as an organized activity.

My thoughts are pretty fragmented today. They have been that way for a bit. That probably comes from a lack of being grounded to a clear purpose for today. Having purpose matters during the process of writing. My basic business philosophy rounds out to a simplistic mantra based on letting leaders lead, managers manage, and empowering employees to succeed. That pretty much means that things are lined up and people know where to go in the basic blocking and tackling that happens every day. Today I spent most of the day thinking about how to line things up. That as you can imagine is not the most ideal way to do things. You cannot hang out thinking about threading the needle when you are supposed to be sewing. It is getting colder out here on this field sitting in my chair as the sun is going down. I can feel the temperature dropping as my fingers hit the keys. The cold is making it a little bit harder to write. That happens I guess things start to lock up and the cold wins.

I’m back home now and my Warren Zevon Pandora internet streaming radio station is up and running. Despite all indications that would suggest the probability that I would pay to avoid advertisements that has not happened. I have held firm and just lived with them for now. That is helping me avoid a monthly subscription payment to the folks at Pandora. I went back and read the post from December 5, 2016. That post described why I gave up on my Pandora subscription. It might have taken a bit, but I’m back listening to Pandora and wondering about the future of online music streaming.

Today is the 80th day of this epic push to write more words on a daily basis. I’m not entirely sure that my overall quality of writing is improving. A few weeks into the process the overall quality of my writing improved and I’m pretty sure about that. Over the last 10 days I think the overall quality of my writing may have gotten worse. It seems more disjointed and the number of grammatical errors seems to be increasing. That is probably a side effect of being tired and lacking some degree of focus. Today I focused in long enough to order a new batch of espresso pods for my Nespresso Expert machine. Overall that machine has been working out pretty well. Ordering pods is sort of an annoyingly locked in experience. The only store that sells Nespresso pods in my area is over an hour away. Sure ordering pods from the Nespresso website is easy enough, but I would rather go buy them in person.

Topic 1: On writing topics

One of the things that I have been focusing in on is writing down writing topics as they come to me throughout the day. Sitting down and just expecting to write 3,000 words in a stream of consciousness mode may work out well enough sometimes. Other times I need to have a list of ideas to prime the intellectual and creative pump to produce some epic prose. I’m trying to decide if that means using Google Keep or writing them down in a notebook. Naturally writing things down in the notebook has a certain degree of charm to it. Writing that way involves a little bit of nostalgia. Using Google Keep is probably more efficient and overall easier to manage in the long run. For some inexplicable reason it is an application that I do not use all that often. Based on the last 80 days of trying to write 3,000 words per day it seems like having a list of 10 topics handy is a solid best practice.

Topic 2: Writing earlier in the day

Right now it is 20:16 hours and the whole writing effort for tonight has slowed to a crawl. I’m having a hard time locking in and focusing on the creation of words. I’m watching an Xfinity add to get one hour of uninterrupted streaming on my smartphone. Pandora algorithms suggested I may enjoy a 90’s alternative station. Throughout the next hour that is the station that will be powering the rest of the words that will be written tonight. Given that my word production today has not even hit 1,000 words this new radio station better inspire some epic prose generation. It is possible that tonight that like thundersnow the words will happen and be magical. I’m really amused at the moment that the word thundersnow did not flag the spell checker. I totally thought that was two words that I had combined as an ill conceived near portmanteau. I was going to keep mashing them together. Sure that was a plan that I have already given up on for the night. I’m not sure you can improve upon thundersnow.

Getting back into the groove of writing 3,000 words per day is going to require staying committed to producing an early morning writing session. It has been some time since that commitment was upheld on my part. For some reason that just does not seem to be happening. Maybe it is a motivation problem first thing in the morning. It is entirely possible that early in the morning writing is not a priority until I’m fully awake and thinking about the world around me. During those first few hours of the day thinking about the broader world around me does not really happen.

Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs