Ok, I'm going to start a new variant of my writing discipline, which I'm calling Fifteen Minutes of Rant
The precursor to this exercise was something I started a few summers ago, when I was really interested in having some basis for making and evaluating and budgeting for writing assignments. How long does it take to write N words? How long does it take silently to read N words? How long does it take to read aloud N words? How long does it take to listen to N words? I was just looking for ballpark numbers, but numbers that had some basis in reality, in experience.
I also wanted to just capture the morning experience of having thoughts racing around in my brain and having some enthusiasm for trying to tackle them.
So, I decided every morning I would just sit down and try to write, just write. I wanted to do as little research or editing or other adjacent activity as possible. Words. Make them. Now.
I did that at a time when circumstances and decisions had increased the amount of unstructured time I had. This month I might have otherwise been teaching the RIT HFOSS course but chose not to. So, I am again at sort of loose ends with how I structure my time and pursue my interests. I found the "just write" exercise useful, so I've decided to try to revive that, to revisit it, certainly with some revisions in the practice and in the purpose.
For starters, I have this name for it--Fifteen Minutes of Rant. Maybe I should call it Fifteen Minutes of Write, I don't know. That would sell better into the whole NaNoWriMo crowd, maybe, but the heck with that. To me the purpose is to just rant, to just get out words in response, as it were, to the Muse. But then again Fifteen Minutes of Muse sounds like sitting around pondering and pondering is absolutely antithetical to what I'm trying to do.
The aim isn't maximum word count, as such, no. Some pausing is inevitable. Reflection happens. Sometimes the words won't come. But the goal of this is to discipline the meat to put fingers to keyboard and make words come out. Ideally, the words will be full sentences, but sometimes I manage just phrases or lists of words.
Waiting for a moment to prime the word output buffer with some things isn't so bad. Occasionally I'll catch myself editing, backspacing, hitting the 'delete line' key combo, and I'll chide myself that that isn't the spirit of the exercise.
So. Here we are. I've made a sub-subdirectory, fifteen-minutes/ in my ~/rants folder. I've made a little script to invoke an editor on an automatically generated filename, called do15.
I've revived my use of my homemade task timer called eyesaver which was built mostly as a break timer to interrupt the grind in my Minecraft playing, back when I played Minecraft, before I switched over the Minetest's Mineclone 2 game, but which now I sometimes use as a sort of Pomodoro-style timer.
The script is pretty simple: It ingests a timespan denoted in seconds. It sleeps that long, and then pops up instances of xeyes until I go and kill it.
Oh, there it is now.
So it goes, here we are.
time passes
Now, after the fact of having spent some time debugging do15 I'm also going to revive a challenge that didn't work out so well for me as the first iteration of my rants exercise. My intention was to try to move some things out of ~/rants into my blog. So, I'm going to give that a go now also under the working title Fifteen Minutes of Edit to see if I can bring something out of ~/rants into my blog folder and get it closer to a shape I'm willing to see exposed to the world. Whether I keep Fifteen Minutes of Rant and Fifteen Minutes of Edit tightly coupled or not, I don't know, but I do know I've got to get some stuff out there.
And so, here we are again.