Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

That grinding sting of rework

Self censorship can create a sense of hesitation to publish or even cause people to suppress content entirely. Writing a page of prose and giving it one quick editorial review is all that happens before I click publish each day. That is pretty much it. Things boil down to a three step process: 1) write it, 2) read it, and 3) publish it. That is one of the things that my morning writing routine reinforces. Really trusting my ability to create content and stay focused drives that process forward each day. Getting passed the grinding sting of self censorship can be a very difficult process. In this case, you have to both be confident in your ability to produce prose and in your ability to edit it and publish in one quick pass. Most of the content you read here on this weblog is just lightly edited before publication. I check for blatant things, but nothing gets a ton of rework, editing, or revision. This is mostly about the act of being creative and thinking out loud within the confines of the written word. My efforts in the moment are locked into the process of writing and I slowly work from the top of the page to the bottom of the page. I have been doing that and not letting go of that process until it is complete for the last 10 days or so each morning. That is the key to getting into the habit of starting the day by writing. 

All right, I have to admit that a couple of sentences just got deleted, but they were a false start. They just had to go and things needed to move on from that derivative nonsense. I don’t consider trimming out a couple sentences of a false start to be an act of self censorship; it is really just a bit of editing in the moment. You have probably been writing and produced a sentence that just did not work and either needed to be rewritten or had to vanish from the screen and forever be banished to the scrapheap. Strangely enough I’m not sure if that act of hitting delete really needed three sentences of coverage today, but that happened and it is where my thoughts in the moment focused. During that whole time the music selection algorithm of my Pandora station was streaming really well picked songs. Sometimes that algorithm really strings together songs in a well matched series. Other times it is all over the place, but today was one of those days where it worked remarkably well. Compared to the quality of my prose today the streaming algorithm is winning the quality output battle. 

My screen just exited the Windows 10 night light mode. Apparently, daybreak was 06:05 hours this morning. That feature really is rather useful and appreciated. Earlier this week I took a little bit of video while waiting in a parking lot of a rainstorm. Initially I was just trying to capture the audio of the really heavy rain from inside the car. Yesterday I used a photo that was taken looking out from the sunroof into the falling rain as the featured image. It was one of those rare photos that when you look back at it you think that it could very well be a desktop wallpaper. Every year I probably take two or three photographs that could be a Windows desktop background. This photograph is one I might just try to add to that service as an option. Right now my desktop background is set to an image of Tony Stark in the background and Iron Man in the foreground. It is probably from when the Avenger’s Endgame movie came out. I don’t spend a lot of time looking at the desktop background image. Most of the time I have two things open each taking up half of the screen divided vertically. Later today I’ll see how hard it is to upload things to the Microsoft desktop and let you know how that process went.


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