Seems like I do this every couple of years, or perhaps it is more often, but it seems like a long-scale cycle.
My mind is always awhirl, thinking, thinking about writing, thinking about ideas to share. Thinking about a way to make money from my writing about things I want to write about. I know that I could freelance. This isn’t about that. This is about identity, changing technology, and fear of success.
I put all my writings on this site, well most of the blog writings, a few years back. I was happy with this. Reason Creek is where the my personal logic flowed. Then while working a temp job to evade the demons that pecked at my brain constantly as my brother Roger was dying and for a while after his death, I listened to hundreds of audio books as I proofed digital versions of old theses for the local university library. During that time I found there was a spot in my brain where Interesting Things which could be filed under the heading of Women’s Legacy Project were found. I purchased the domain and began pulling things out of my brain with which to organize the site. Let’s see… this would have been in March 2015. A year later, this past March, the site was doing well enough to attract a diverse group of women to tell stories on WLP about women who had changed their own lives.
Then… somewhere along the path in the last six months… I’ve stumbled off my productive path and into a patch of rumination brambles. It is now September and I am looking at all these things/aspects over which I’ve stumbled:
So I came over here to Reason Creek to vent and create an image of what is going on in my scattered brain. (I created the Mind-map image with Scapple.) I now think I see the problem I am having, in addition to the shading non shading of certain items; the items in red at the bottom of the mind map exist in two different roles and at two different levels in my way of seeing the world. I either need to become comfortable with the status overlap in two areas of my life or rearrange something.
Nothing is solved. But I feel better. My world is both expanding as a business person, and this requires shifting my identity as a writer out of a very comfortable spot into a place that is risk-based, and this is happening as my daughter prepares to officially change her primary status from daughter to wife. Her status change does not change my mother role and how I will see her, but it will change how I behave towards a woman with her own household in her own right.
Word of advice: don’t change your business model when rearranging your personal life. Needless to say, I do not take my own advice.
Organizing Your Legacy Project
Evoking Essential Information
Sometimes you need to talk to others in order to corroborate or elicit information about a topic or person. sometimes you need to sit yourself down and collect and organize your thoughts and the information with which you want to work.
This post deals with how to elicit information from yourself.
I strongly suspect that you do have a body of information with which you want to work, or are working, or you would not be here on this page of this site.
So today for the fifth installation of my attempt at the A to Z April Blogging Challenge I am sharing some of the tools I have found most beneficial when I am trying to determine just what is essential to me or essential to the project on which I am working. The most essential to me is the mind map.
Mind Maps
I love diagramming, mapping, flow and organizational charts, taxonomies, and generally moving things around in little labeled boxes. Why? Because I am a collector. I collect ideas, projects, and components for these ethereal future ideas without even meaning to do so. I am just a clutter magnet. Some would call it scattered, I call it creative and multifaceted. But because of this I use mind maps to help me see all the aspects I have thought of about a concept. For example, the following mind map relates to the Women’s Legacy Project. This is my no means complete.
What I might do next is color code the various nodes so that the digital components were blue, printed components are green, and nodes that are of a different type, such a nodes that are people, could be purple. A different style of type, and the color of the type can further show similar elements across the branches.
There are free and professional versions of mind map software. But you can do this with a pencil and paper as well.
The other go to mapping tool I use is a simple grid that allows me to examine two aspects of an idea or process to see the strength and or completeness of concepts composing the idea.
Matrix / Grid
Action Priority Matrices are what these matrices are now called in the business world. This is often where effort and impact are the two traits compared vertically and horizontally to see what high effort, high impact projects in the plus/plus quadrant make for long term projects, what low effort but high value projects can bring quick rewards.
I was first introduced to the use of this tool to compare the presence and absence of words to describe all aspects of a situation or state.
I find the activity of writing for online consumption to be a bit of a Catch 22. The best way I have found for looking at why bloggers are so often dismissed as not a real writers can be shown by drawing a matrix overlapping dimensions of writing and publishing in the online world. From this mapping you can see that we have not yet created perfect words to describe these states. But if you plug in celebrity for a category that might be better described as person who is online, famous, or a media personality without having great subject authority you can see the categorization is getting at expertise attributed to creators with traditional or large scale publication.
I encourage regular old-fashioned list-making as well. But when the elements of list seem to need further processing or examination to make similarities, differences and nuances of the elements of the list apparent, there are a wealth of tools that can help to expand or focus understanding of the topic we want to organize, present and preserve.
Organizing, Digital Hoarding and Brushes with Mortality
Oh Fa-aack. I’ve been trying really, really hard to be a responsible grown-up. Now that my daughter is in grad-school, engaged, and Hubby and I are celebrating our 25th Wedding Anniversary this summer I have to come to grips with this life being the reality I have for the rest of my life. For some reason I have Peggy Lee’s Version of “Is That All There Is?” running through my mind. I
t took me all week to finish another post that has to be well-written, proofed, and appropriate for my business site. I know that people can go back and forth between this blog and my business site, but not everyone who is looking for a research-savvy content creator will click through to my lifestyle blog. It is on my take on The Writing Process. There has been a blog sort of pay-it-forward, read-my-cool-friends-take-on-this-topic-too, blog-hop going around the inter-webs for the last many months.
Why did it take me so long to write that piece? I’m not the cool kid on the blog block (few seem to recognize my weird brilliance) so until now I hadn’t had an opportunity to participate until Chloe of Mountain asked if there was someone who would like to participate. My hand popped up in the best Horschack style and Chloe graciously extended an invite and included me. It should have posted days ago. I had the local Tucson bloggers to whom I have passed the challenge all lined up. But I felt like crap. And I don’t feel like doing anything but napping because of a reminder of my own temporary status in the world.
I had a brush with mortality this past week that reminded me how tenuous life and health are. I had bronchitis that would not go away and seemed to morph into other problems. I finally went to the doctor on Tuesday after my discomfort extended beyond the 10 days a cold lasts. The cold turned bronchitis that became an ear and throat infection, and it was also a terrible undiagnosed sinus infection. I knew I was in bad shape when all the places in my head where bones and connective tissue join began to really, really hurt and my eyes swelled shut. I realized, “Holy shit, this is the kind of thing that kills old people. ”
The trip to my Doctor ensued and multiple drugs were prescribed. The mega-antibiotic, contact-like substance, and super strong anti-inflammatory drugs decreased the inflammation in my ears, throat and nose by Wednesday night, and then blood began draining out from my sinuses. Weirded me out. So I’ve been down for over a week and not getting much accomplished with:
- my household. That would be okay, except I live online or on the computer and have always only managed to maintain minimum hygienic standards in the home I make with my mad scientist, big drooling mastiff dog, two neurotic cats, one black African river turtle and assorted fish. (Fish configuration varies dependent upon frequency of the turtle’s bad moods that co-occur with fish disappearances.)
- planning the summer trip. We are driving across country to Niagara Falls for our 25th.
I managed to break my glasses this past week too, 
so reading has been accomplished only with my new magnifying readers 
that can light up. I will use them on my vacation this summer when we camp.
This next week I have to play catch up. on office and storage room organization, spend several evenings at meetings for NOW, WordPress, and othert public meetings, find a gonga-deal on a truck type vehicle that is appropriate for traveling across the country with Hubby after BlogHer. I need to find a house-sitter for that time period… and on and on. But the thing that really makes me nutso is the digital organization in the office that I have to get done before I leave. I’m getting my physical collecting under control. Hubby says I am a hoarder. The organizer I hired says I’m not. I think the overcrowding problem we have is because we have two tiny closets mainly filled with wires and ductwork and other conduits of infrastructure and one walk-through closet between our bedroom and bath, no attic, and no basement.
I do, however, have a real problem with information. I am a digital hoarder. Everything can go away in an instant. I had logic boards die on several laptops, one after the other. Then when I purchased my huge screen desktop I restored from several different back-ups. Files were duplicated on different backups. Long story short my filing system has gotten all messy. I also have a partitioned drive to accommodate Windows, which I never use. And I have a veritable plethora of business cards, bits of paper and the like that need to be organized with my receipt scanner and optical reader. So to make sense out of this mess I have purchased a 4 terra byte backup drive. And next week I will start attacking the physical strata and digital disorganization in my office, after I complete the organization of my crafting room.
I think I will start by transferring everything from my desktop to the backup drive. Then I erase and reformat my desktop which will get rid of the Windows partition. Then I reinstall software and create an organizational structure that makes sense to me and that I can maintain. I have no idea what that structure will be. That scares me. But I have to come up with it. And then I have to maintain it.
I will document my process and share it with you… eventually. Then I can get down to writing all the sensible stuff that middle age women write about, right? Nah. I don’t think I will ever slide on in to sensibility, not even with great infrastructure.