The strange focus from public work

One of the things that I noticed was the strange degree of focus that happens when you are writing and working in a public place. Maybe that is why coffee shop writing has been so popular.

I’m waiting for an oil change this morning to be completed on the old vista cruiser. One of the things that I noticed was the strange degree of focus that happens when you are writing and working in a public place. Maybe that is why coffee shop writing has been so popular. At the moment, I’m just camped out at a desk they had set up for people to work. Things are going well enough. They had espresso and I had a double shot of it and some water. Not together, but separately as espresso is perfect on its own. Part of the fun of writing has been jumping around to the different Substacks in the last two weeks. Right now during the month of November all 4 of the various Substack efforts are fully alive and running forward toward that perfect possible future.

Intellectually, I know that I should be working on academic articles and that writing daily observations about quantum technology is just research. It really is just an ongoing form of research note generation. The same thing is true about my Lindahl Letter efforts or reading civics related articles. All of that is just about learning and getting ready to move into the academic article space. I have a couple of drafts that are set up and have been started out on my Overleaf account. Online LaTeX editing is so much better than it used to be or so I have been told a number of times. I need to frame a problem that can be tested with data and work on an academic article that way based on quantitative efforts. That is where I need to take my writing, but for some reason I still have some hesitation or maybe self-censorship. I’m not sure exactly what might be blocking me from moving forward on that one. Something is blocking my efforts for sure. I need to tackle that roadblock and move forward.

I’m not totally focused on the title for this Substack post, but I think I’m going to go with it anyway. Gemini has already generated the thumbnail for this post. I’ll admit that Substack post thumbnails are not really my favorite thing to deal with along the journey. They are a 14:10 ratio and not 1:1 like a normal square thumbnail. At one point, I had elected to just jump into my photos and pick some random thing to be the image. The only time they really show the thumbnail is on the homepage for the website, during social sharing, or if it is manually inserted into the post structure. That means the vast majority of time a reader never really sees whatever was cooked up for the post as a thumbnail. I’m sure at some point Substack developers will make an auto thumbnail button and it will be most excellent. Until that user story gets completed and joy erupts throughout Substack I’ll just keep on muddling through the selection process.