\n\t\t\tA book recommendation and some related thoughts…\n\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\tVron kindly let me peruse her bookshelves, and one of the things I spotted was Barbara Sher’s Refuse to Choose: What do I do when I want to do everything?<\/a> I had read that before, but it was a long time ago and I’d been meaning to re-read it. And oh yes, it is a lovely book.\n\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tMy closest fit to the profiles in this book, I think, is as a “cyclical scanner”. Most “scanners”, as Barbara describes them, are continually getting interested in completely new things. But cyclical ones come back to the same things again as inspiration shifts.\n\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tOK, I do have what you might call “underlying themes” to what I do. But I don’t have one big project or genre occupying my whole creative life. I don’t write about the same things all the time, and I’ve got more than one music project and more than one source of income, and I like coding and d.i.y. as well as writing and music.\n\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tI was thinking about that a while ago and I came up with the metaphor of a series of beads of different colours. The necklace as a whole is my creative life; the beads don’t have to match.\n\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t“Cycles” too is “one of my metaphors”. For a long time now, I’ve used the expression “work cycles” to describe the way I’ll be immersed in something for a few days, then come to a natural end of that burst of inspiration and move to something else.\n\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tOr at least, that’s how it works when I’m on a roll – though a lot of the time I accidentally fall out of that mode, e.g. discombobulated by the looming presence of some conscience-driven task for which I feel no inspiration :-\/\n\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tAs it happens I don’t really identify with the term “scanner”, as a word. Metaphorically, I think that fits better to the people who are less cyclical and more on a continual quest for completely new stuff. But the label hasn’t got in the way of me finding lots in the book that’s useful and validating to me.\n\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tHere are a couple of book extracts which I most want to remember for the new year:\n\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\tEvery Scanner knows what it’s like to be suddenly taken with a desire to stop what he’s doing and pick up something else that calls to him. … If that’s something you do, I advise you to just give in. Pick up any project that calls you and give it an hour, a day, or a week, however long it keeps you fascinated, and then put it away and get back to what you were doing.\n\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tThis arrangement is called the Random Acts of Passion Life Design Model – and it might be just right for how your creativity operates.\n\t\t<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \n\t\t\tSo true!\n\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t(One of these days I should really write up my “Timed seed and herb dispenser” model of inspiration. And my concept of “Pingalation”.)\n\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tI used to wish that I had a huge, empty room with rows of long tables against the walls and, on each table, everything I needed for one of my projects. Then I could leave everything out in the open on its own table and walk over to it and start working whenever the mood took me.\n\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\tI don’t have a room that large and I bet you don’t, either, but the fantasy gave me the idea of Avocation Stations, and I started wondering what kind of arrangement could replace all those tables and take up less space. …\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\tThen, last month in a home furnishings catalog, I saw a little rolling stand with drawers and a couple of fun gadgets like a desk space that opened, a slot for large pages, a shelf for books. It was called a bill paying center, as I recall, but to me it was a dead ringer for an Avocation Station. …\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\tIf you’re a Scanner with lots of projects going on at the same time, you should have some variation of those little pieces of furniture. You can make your own to suit yourself … and keep a whole bunch of them ready to go.\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \n\t\t\tIn an ideal world I’d have an ENORMOUS wooden multi-cupboard thing, taking up say one whole wall of my workroom, which incorporated lots of different sizes of drawer and cupboard, so that everything half done had a perfectly suited storage space and was easy to get out and put back.\n\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tI don’t think I’d actually want everything out at once. In fact, I imagine I’d probably dis<\/em>like that. When something’s not hot, I’d probably rather it was out of my space, to leave the space clearer for the few things that are<\/em>. For me, what appeals about the “Avocation Station” idea is the easy getting out and putting back, plus the “all relevant bits together ready to go” – not the idea of everything at once being literally visible.\n\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tAnd it’s not that I don’t do something like that already – I do. I have shelves and boxes and drawers, and some of them are<\/em> designated for particular projects.\n\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tBut I think the principle of “ready to go” could be optimised further, and I think that would be a good thing. So that’s why I wanted to remember that bit of the book.\n\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tAnd then, poking around on the net, I discovered that Barbara has several blogs, a Twitter account and a web site<\/a>! I don’t know why it never occurred to me before to look for these.\n\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tHere are two of the blogs, which seem to be the most current:\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\tThe Resistance Whisperer<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\tLife of a WriterSpeaker<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n \t\t\tAnd here is a funny and insightful video about different people loving different things:\n\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tBarbara Sher: “Design, Execute, Maintain”, on YouTube<\/a>\n\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tHappy creative New Year, everyone.\n\t\t<\/p>\n Here, have an index… A book recommendation and some related thoughts…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,6,4,13,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-creativity-logistics","category-metaphors","category-quasi-blogroll","category-what-am-i-like"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1575,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions\/1575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uncharted-worlds.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>Beads, cycles and other metaphors<\/h2>\n
<\/a>Random Acts of Passion Life Design Model<\/h2>\n
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<\/a>Avocation Stations<\/h2>\n
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<\/a>Barbara’s blogs<\/h2>\n
\n
Top of article<\/a>
Beads, cycles and other metaphors<\/a>
Random Acts of Passion Life Design Model<\/a>
Avocation Stations<\/a>
Barbara’s blogs<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"