I Love LSD!

Long Slow Distance!!! and not the psychedelic drug Lysergic acid dyethylamide. Yeah, I had to look that up. LSD is the best way to train injury free. It's worked well for Ed Whitlock, now in his early seventies, and running really well.

Normal distance running training is difficult. Even Haile Gebrselassie, on retirement after not being able to complete the 2010 New York Marathon said the phrase hard training a number of times. Paul Tergat, a marathon legend also talks about the extremely dedicated hard work they do to prepare for endurance runs. And there's nothing wrong with hard, tough training. Except, at a certain point in time, when your body can no longer take it, when you're weary of the hard training and recovery from injury takes longer, then most distance athletes stop. Not slow down, they stop. Training ends, competition ends, and life slows down.

But for those of us that have chosen running as a lifestyle and not as a career with an end-date, then running is something that you do comfortably and enjoyably, like eating, strolling, enjoying time off and relaxing.

And those benefits come with LSD!

Long

Get outside, spend some time. Quality time. Have time, don't be in a rush. Like the clock above, the hands have been stripped off. You're not watching the clock because you have all the time in the world. Nothing is rushing you back. You've dedicated at least an hour, better two, to be outside with yourself.

Slow

Take your time. Don't exert yourself. Well, don't over-exert yourself. It's breezy and calm. You move easily and slowly, carefully and consciously putting one foot in front of the other. Feeling and remembering each step, to slow yourself even further. Imagine yourself slowing down, like the six million dollar man, in slow motion. You're barely breathing because it's so simple and slow. You feel weightless.

Distance

Go far. Don't worry about how far you are away. Long mileage. 10 K is for beginners, you tell yourself. You're used to chewing up the road. You're invincible. Your slow gait, your upright poise, step after step after step, moving purposely forward, further away, time slows down to a stop and everything around you stops moving, but you're surging ahead. You're not calculating the distance, but well aware of how far you've travelled. You know how far away you are and keep moving further. Life is motion and motion means moving ahead. Moving further and further away. Don't stop till you have to when you're completely spent. The tank is empty but not painfully so. Run far.

Running shoe closet

You know you're a runner when you're retired shoe closet looks like this:

Dress shoes normally end up in the garbage but running shoes can be donated. My running shoes normally still have some life left in them for walking about.

Running shoes

How long should you run before you retire your running shoes? A Google search for this returns numbers between 200 miles and 500 miles. Some people are running up to 800 miles on the same shoes. In kilometres that's approximately 400 Km to 800 Km. 800 miles is almost 1300 Km.

These shoes just finished 650 Km. They're done!

The shoe on the left was beginning to tear near the top. They still felt comfortable, bouncy, and I'm sure they could have done an additional 100 Km, but their time is up!

I read an article somewhere about this, the author said that the distance would also depend on the runner. The heavier you are, then the shorter the life of the shoe. In addition to that, there was a post I saw where the writer advises on buying two pairs of shoes. Using one of them more frequently and when it starts to feel off then you can replace it. In the buy more than one shoe category there's this notion that the shoe takes time to recover. The moulded cushioning provided by the shoe compresses after a workout. This needs between 24 to 48 hours to recover -- according to this source. Sounds logical, but I've worn the same shoe every morning for 650 Km without much of a problem. I used to have two shoes and alternate them and I might do that in the winter. The main problem in the winter is wet shoes and drying out definitely takes longer than a day.

Those shoes were replaced with these ones:

Same model, different colour. The last one had that green trim thing happening, this one's blue. Blue's definitely my colour though I was hoping to get yellow or red this time around. After all, I'm now comfortable running in red and orange tops.

So for me, I'll switch shoes close to the 600 Km mark. 700 Km is the outer limit but I should start looking for shoes once I reach about 550 Km. With my weekly 134 Km dosage it doesn't take long to go through running shoes.

Finding your voice: Part 10 of 10

We're here. The last titbit of advice that I can offer. Ten's a good number. Like George Carlin once remarked about the 10 commandments, they really did not need 10. Two was all they needed. Moses could have stuck them in his f*****g pocket. The quintessential Carlin!

And with that in mind, this last item has little to do with writing, per-Se, and more to do with you! It somewhat ties on to what we said in Part 9, that life is short and you should be busy just noting things down and putting them down on paper. And so for Part 10, it's all about you congratulating yourself. You have to have an attitude befit a writer. Think of yourself as a writer and you will become one. Think of yourself as a failure, and your mind will turn that image also into a reality. It isn't easy. If it was easy then everyone would be doing it. But they aren't because it isn't easy. Even those who have been trained formally to compose, organise and write aren't writing. It's easy to take direction from someone else. Especially for money. But when you are driven to do it for yourself, it isn't that easy. And so for that reason only, you should congratulate yourself for being brave enough to sit down and write.

Like Les Brown said, whatever is your passion, that thing in your life that you were given to do, do it with all your might. If you are a singer, and cannot sing, sing even if nobody will listen to you. If you are a writer, with the urge, the deep desire to write, write, even if nobody will read what you've written. After all, that running dialogue in your head is all yours. It's personal and keeps going without an audience except you.

It isn't easy. When running marathons, I sometimes come across someone holding a poster, a sign that reads, if it was easy then everyone would be doing it. That's the truth. That is the absolute truth. Writing takes physical effort. You have to devote time that you might otherwise be engaged in a different activity to do, but you choose to write. You find that time because it's what you want to do. Life can be nothing but pleasure. Drinking beer and watching movies. And in that life, you're simply a spectator. In that life, you aren't living, but life is living through you. You aren't in charge. You're just waiting. Waiting for the sun to rise so that you can go to work and be told what to do. Waiting for the bell to ring so that you can go back home to the beer and television.

I'm being a bit harsh, but in this life, you do have some options and that is to participate. Your participation will come at the cost of sacrificing other pleasures. While your friends are out on a Friday night enjoying cold beverages, you'll be quiet, sitting alone perhaps, inside your head having a discussion with yourself about mausoleums. Perhaps it's about technology and androids. Perhaps it's about fossil fuels, the dinosaurs and the corruption of big business. You'll have these wonderful debates, just you and you without the interference of other people.

The writing life is a solitary life. It isn't easy and so congratulate yourself. Give yourself the props! Give yourself a big pat on the back and know that you are singularly what a lot of people would find very difficult to do. Granted, there are a lot of writers. Look at the bookshelves lining the libraries, or the bookstores and you'll see that you're not the only one. The stuff that writers do is in demand. People want to read, they want to read to better themselves. In each book that they turn to, they hope to find out something more about themselves. Not consciously, but subconsciously, there's a learning experience even from the most mundane murder mystery. And so your life too, uninteresting though it might be to you, has crumbs that others can feed from.

If you can set aside some time for yourself, it also shows that you are committed to taking charge of your life and not simply sitting by and following. The rest of the day may be taken by your responsibilities, your duties as a mother, as a father, as an employee, as a friend, but in that melee of moving through life, you should find some time for yourself. Like sleeping or eating and exercise. All things that you do to enrich the quality of your life, writing is also one of them.

Writing goes hand-in-hand with reading, and so consume books. Learn from successful authors. There is no formula here but you should read a lot. Read, digest and get down to the business of writing. I haven't gotten to the point of saying how much writing you should do. Early in these posts, I hinted that time was more important than quantity and I still believe that. Spending the time seems to be the biggest hurdle and so if you spend the time and only glean out one paragraph of fifty words, then so be it. There are authors who commit to writing for at least a couple of hours a day. Perhaps you cannot find that time. You can only steal fifteen minutes at a time. It's difficult to get into the groove in fifteen minutes. It's tough to remember where you were and go from there and that's why writing practise is so important. Starting by just yammering on a page stuff that's going on in your head. Not worrying about structure or even content. But if you can find an hour, in the evening or in the morning or even at noon, then that's great. Some days will be very productive, others not so. On both productive and non-productive days, give yourself props for having tried. To be cliché, it's better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all. It is always, always, better to have tried to write and failed, than to never have written at all.

And with that we summarise our ten points.

1. Pay attention to that voice in your head. Listen to what it's saying. Don't be critical. Allow it to express those dark fears and say whatever it wants to say in whatever language. Allow it to give up if it feels like.
2. Write down what you hear. Write down the words without editing and without judging. See the images clearly and note them down too. Don't be worried about grammar or consistency. Just hear and write. Be automatic and keep going. Don't re-read what you've heard, just write.
3. Get to the point where you can finish complete thoughts. Set time limits. Hear something from your head and then write it. Try your best to complete the thought. If you can't, that's OK, that's still part of the training but as you continue to learn, you will want to get to the point where that voice in your head that has expressed something concrete needs to be concretely written.
4. Exaggerate. Go ahead and give yourself license to write the unimaginable and the unintelligible. Sometimes the thought in your head just can't be sanely articulated. The way the cat looks at you, you can almost hear the words coming out of it's mouth. Telepathic communication with the dog. The room asking you to get out, the grass that's parched.
5. Along with Part 4, throw everything in the mixer and put stuff in unusual circumstances. You're no longer on planet earth where gravity confines you to solid ground. Rather, you can float in the air and fly to the south pole where you can have tea with the penguins.
6. Fight distractions by writing about them. Sometimes you're stuck and cannot move on and so you switch to your writing practise journal and describe that particular distraction. Do this for a solid fifteen minutes at least to see if it will go away. Fight the urge to get up and do something. Keep at the desk and look over the words you've written to see if they'll jump out.
7. Find time to write. Don't look for the perfect time, the perfect spot, the perfect ambiance. It isn't there. Just find a spot and sit down and write. That might even be in the lobby of an airport, the lobby of your dentist. It will mostly be in your house, possibly at the kitchen table or in your den. Don't imagine that perfect writers desk, made of oak, by the window by the sea. Don't wait till you've taken an writing vacation to write. Write all the time when you feel like it.
8. Give real distractions their due. If you're really tired, and you've been at it for a significant amount of time, then take that fifteen minute break. Better still, take a break by writing about something else just to keep yourself in the mood. Sometimes, if you're writing a novel, and you've been thinking about this character for some time, you need a break from them. Go ahead, ramble on about something else in your writing practise journal. That will be a good break. The words flow easily in that journal. Switching from one topic to another is an excellent way to take a break, better than getting up.
9. Life is short. Don't wait to write till you think you have the perfect plot. Don't look for the perfect spot to dig, just find a shovel and start digging. While you're digging, you're gaining digging experience. You'll learn a lot more by doing than by waiting. Life won't wait for you, it will continue without you. Time doesn't wait for anyone. The good comes and so does the bad, take them both. Worry about not writing instead of writing something bad. Write bad stuff from time to time if you think it will free you from that fear. Face your fears kind of thing. But life is short, so write!
10. Congratulate yourself each time you see an achievement. Don't overdo it, just a nod in the mirror and a pat on the back. If it was easy, then everyone would do it. Write that on a card and put it somewhere where you can see it every time. If it were easy, then everyone would be doing it. But it isn't and you're one of the chosen few. Be happy that you can sit quietly and pen down the things that are in your head. It's nerve racking to expose your mind and you'll face criticism, but that's OK. After all, life is short and we too will expire. So be happy, give thanks, and admire your achievements.

So go forth, open that writing practise journal and try to fill in a few pages each day.

Finding your voice: Part 9 of 10

We're almost done. We'll recap everything in the last post and I'm hoping that the simple advice on what to do has somehow filtered through practically. Practical advice is hard to give. Like telling the worried mother to stop worrying. Great advice it may be, but how? These posts on finding your voice have focussed on one thing primarily, and that's the way you see the world by the voice that is your companion in your head. That voice rambles on tirelessly all day making judgements about the things you see with your eyes, the smells around you, the voices and sounds you hear and the things you touch. That voice is confident in its statements, bold in its obstinacy. It doesn't face criticism most of the time unless you let it out. At those times, when you write something and someone criticises it, you are likely to sulk. Your thoughts are filled with defeatism, and you're less likely to be bold in your next attempt.

But that doesn't stop the inner voice, it continues and even when you sleep, it continues to assault you with a biased, unedited, review of the day, embellished with commentary that you didn't ask for. It presents the situations where you were weak and gives you advice on how you could have performed better. Sometimes it doesn't seem like that voice is on your side, but it is. It's your friend, it's trying to help you make you a better person, but oh, don't let it out or you'll be attacked again!

So my advice, in this Part 9, is that life is short. Really short. Wasting time on self pity, self abasement, inactivity due to unseen obstacles, isn't really positive. You can't do too much harm in writing. You can be criticised and you will be, but at the end of the day, the impact of that criticism is deserved on a number of levels. It was you that wrote that and not writing it doesn't make it less true that you believe it. The only difference is that now, the world knows.

There's no time to waste in feeling disappointed in not writing, write. There's no time to be critical about producing your best work and therefore producing none. Produce good works and bad ones. Produce insanely great sentences and massively boring ones. Write clever and inspirational thoughts and idiotic and nonsensical ones. Mix and match and keep going. Keep the critics employed, after all, they've got nothing else to do. It takes great courage to expose your thoughts in the face of certain criticism, no matter what topic you choose. If you choose to reflect on humanity and bring forth your ideas on racial separation, expect to be hit with a torrent of negativity. If you fantasise about angels and demons and compare them to the religious icons of the day, expect to have some bad press. If you write about vampires and life sucking demons, then publicists might relegate your books to the horror and fiction section for adults over eighteen. That thing you thought was a children's story, it aint!

Write mainly because you want to get better and because the more you write, the better you'll become. The more you run the stronger you become. It doesn't happen overnight. The first time you venture out you might make a few metres and stop puffing and panting. In your minds eye, you can already see yourself prancing like an antelope, moving effortlessly and gracefully. You're the epitome of fitness. Your mind isn't very practical, but it's amazingly good at seeing into the future. It know, unlike your body, that if you keep jogging everyday, then those changes will happen. You will get stronger, you will get better and you will be able to do what's in your mind's eye. It doesn't happen overnight. And the more you write, the better you get. Like running, you'll probably be disappointed with the initial attempts. That doesn't sound much like John Grisham or Jeffery Deaver (two of my favourites). And you're right, it doesn't and it never will. Your mind will create you but you need to get that stuff out of your head onto paper so that you can see it. The more you see it on paper, the better you'll be at being able to shape it.

Get it out of your head onto paper.

Write like your life depended on it. Write everyday, like you only had a few more minutes to spare. Get to a point where you consider it finished, put it aside, and move on to the next project. Some pieces you won't like. But if you don't continue writing, you won't get better. You must learn to take the good with the bad. A bit of both goes a long way. I have my favourite authors but not all their books are that good. I loved Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose but I find his other books too academic. Too verbose and focussed on minutia. They're dense and take a long time for me to read. I learn a lot, but connecting the dots take a while. But that's what he is, a professor of semiotics. A man who studies words, linguistics and language for a living. This is a man who could write an entire novel on the word "and." Stephen King too has his moments for me. His early books were fast and enjoyable. Fun books for me to read. Then the books took on an epic air. Large volumes. Pages on detail and he began to lose me. As you can tell, my ability for sustained concentration is very limited. Like most readers, I expect them to connect a few of the dots. Fill in some of the story themselves so that I don't have to describe absolutely everything.

Write, publish then move on. Life is short, time is of the essence, you have things to say, you cannot afford to wait for the perfect sentence, just say what's on your mind right now, and even if it doesn't look right, move on to something else.

You'll only get better with time and practice.

Finding your voice: Part 8 of 10

Here we are. Three more to go and I hope by now you're convinced that this method really works. Your mind is a well of writing material, entertaining and serious. There are obstacles along the way that stop you from putting down words on paper, but these can be overcome. Your voice is singularly yours and you shouldn't be frightened of seeing it on paper. Sometimes you might be disappointed in the things you write, but sometimes you'll surprise yourself and say, "hey, that's not bad!"

Let's summarise what we've said so far.

• Listen to that voice in your head continuously rambling on and on.
• Write down what you're hearing, don't edit, don't stop, just keep the voice active and speaking. Even if it veers off to the left, try to keep in step. If you fall behind, take a giant leap, stop where you were and continue with the voice so that you can keep going.
• Finish the thought, do it quickly because the next one's coming up. When you look up from the page, a new thought arrives and you'll have to deal with that. But after you've done step 1 and 2 for a while, you'll get comfortable finishing things off.
• Be weird and wacky. Horses talk, in horse language. Bees seem to plan their attack and sometimes you'll see the cat sitting in front of the television, watching and taking mental notes.
• Give yourself license to exaggerate. Put stuff in the writing that doesn't exist in reality, after all, it's your thought as long as you aren't being too serious about it.
• Along with exaggeration, contemplate, dream and think up unusual circumstances. This is very much like the fifth point, but it's really key to keeping yourself motivated in your writing. Part's 5 and 6 ask you to go outside the box. Dream, exaggerate and then move that exaggeration into outer space. The way I think about it is, the talking horse is exaggeration, the talking horse as the captain of flight 719 to London is the unusual combination.
• There is no perfect setting for writing. You should not look for the perfect time, the perfect location, just a place to sit quietly. Don't turn on the television and as much as possible, turn down the music. Recognise that you do get fatigued and discuss that fatigue by breaking into a writing practise. Start the novel in the middle, write parts back and forth if that's the way to get going. Sooner or later, you'll realise that an outline will allow you to track your path, but that's not important till you get going.

So here we are at Part 8, and in this part we continue to fight those demons that won't let us continue writing. Those urges to go get a drink of water or go for a cigarette, a drink of wine, or a stroll. Those things we call distractions that we identified in Part 7. In that section, I encouraged you to identify them and to discuss them in writing. In this section, we acknowledge them and let them have a bit of control. There will be circumstances where you will get up and go away. Smokers will find it difficult to keep to the page while they're urged to go outside for a smoke. And so after we've been through the advice of part 7, we've analysed our distraction and found that we can commit to a distraction, we give in and make a pact with ourselves to continue. As you can see, this isn't boot camp for writing. This isn't the perfect writing school that will make you churn out novels every three months, but acknowledging that you are tired and truly need a break is one of those things that's very difficult to determine. Do I really need a break or am I struggling with the writing? If I'm struggling with the writing then it's time for a practise exercise. That's as good as a break but it keeps you on top of things. But if you're truly tired, then use a timed break.

Many of us have regular jobs. We show up at nine in the morning, or eight, and work our seven, eight or nine hour shift. That work is predetermined and we are expected to behave a certain way and produce certain things. We have a job description that lays out what we should be doing. Our writing life isn't like that. It's more of a hobby, not serious enough to be considered a vocation unless you are writing for a living, which means that your writing alone makes you money. At work we have breaks and lunch at which time we down tools and go off for a break. At work we can tell how far ahead we are with specific tasks and how far we have left to go. Our writing lives aren't like that. We can procrastinate forever. We turn forty and swear that by the time we hit forty-five we'll have that grand novel published. But forty-one, forty-two and forty-three slip by without anxiety because we know that forty-five is still a couple of years away and that once inspiration hits, boy, watch out world!

But if we are to be serious about our lives, that we write not because someone else tells us to, like in a job, but we write because we must or we die, then we need to create a job description for our writing lives, complete with the recognition of distractions. It is this job description that makes us sit down for those five minutes and write something down, no matter how good or bad it is. No matter how we feel at the time. No matter how rushed we are. We sit down because we're on the job.  And an amazing thing happens when we do that. If we follow the writing practise method, it ceases being a chore to get started, but rather becomes a happy obsession. You are happy continuing. It's starting that's always a problem, going on isn't until you hit that distraction. And if you obey the instruction in Part 7, and discuss it in a quick practise exercise, and have your job description that says you will write for fifteen minutes, then this step urges you to step away. Put the pen down. Stop typing, and think and look and imagine and relax. Take time to yourself. If you must leave the desk, if you really, really must, because you've been there too long, then give yourself a time limit. We all must have bathroom breaks and walk breaks, a drink of water, a stretch and sometimes these things take over the rest of the day. You should have a way to go back to the writing.

Make a pact with yourself to accomplish a few more lines and then stop if the urge to step away becomes too great. Give yourself a job description, it works for your professional life, it will work for your writing life too.

Finding your voice: Part 7 of 10

In the last section we touched on the issue of distractions. You're writing and you run out of creativity, you no longer feel inspired and want to quit. Or you're writing and something else, something more interesting comes to mind. Something that you'd rather be doing than writing. Distractions make you step away from your writing.

In this section, we're going to address the big topic. The mother of all topics. This is it ladies and gentlemen, the reason why that great Canadian novel, or the great American novel or the great Kenyan novel or the super humongous greatest of all time novel hasn't been started. Well, there are a couple of reasons, but one of the big ones is TIME. Where do you find the time? The commitment part.

To write that great novel, that essay, get those thoughts out of your head onto paper, you need to write. It's that simple. If you write a word each day, then at the end of the year, you've written 365 words! If you write ten words a day, you've written 3,650 words at the end of the year. And if, by superhuman effort, you write a single page, that's roughly 300 words on a page, then at the end of the year, you've written down 109,500 words. That's a novel. Writing a page is a big deal, most people can't find the time to do it, but if you can, and go beyond, you can see how novelist can write a novel in three to six months. It takes time.

It takes time.

You need to find the time and not worry about the setting. And this is the problem. Most of us that aspire to write, will look for the perfect setting before they pen down a single word. A desk by the window, with writing materials or laptop arranged perfectly, writing chair comfortable, oak writing desk and the perfect ambiance. And there's always something not quite right with the setting. Something's always off. The light just isn't right. Oops, I just heard the phone ring. I forgot I promised to run to the store and stock the pantry before the end of the day. Maybe I will run out of paper, I seem to only have a hundred sheets and I intend to really rock today, after all, this is the great novel about to start. Or something like, the start isn't ready yet. I'm not sure what I'm going to write about, and when I put words on paper, I want them to rock! This has got to be the work of genius, the writing of a lifetime. So, I'm just going to let the story reveal itself to me, it will let me know when it's ready to be written.

And so we need to abolish two preconceived ideas here:

• Every setting is a writing setting.
• Write something, anything, while you wait for the great novel to reveal itself.

Like anything, getting into the groove means that you've started. Athletes will tell you, the race started really badly but by the time I rounded the corner, I'd settled down. It took starting the race and getting to the corner for that to happen. Ignore the opening. If you don't have an opening, imagine starting with the action, the stuff that you want to write. Your character is already in the vault, had managed to bypass the bank's security systems and they're drilling as quietly as possible through six inches of tempered steel to get to the gold bars. Or, the kidnapper already has his quarry, don't need to worry about how he got here, but he's in the barn, and his captives are all tied up. The young lady had already slipped a bobby pin in her hand and is slowly hacking at her restraints. The kidnapper needs to go to the washroom, and here's your opening.

And if you get tired of that, move off somewhere else. Do a little writing practice to get you into the groove. But don't not start. And even if you're sitting in front of the television, a bad idea to begin with, if your journal's close by, you can start. You can type something in your computer. Go into your bedroom, sit down, type a few words.

Don't occupy your entire life struggling to find time, but when you are home, or near your writing materials, and have five minutes, then spend that five minutes writing. You'll find that if you start with the practice, you'll flow quickly into the novel.

Finding your voice: Part 6 of 10

By now you're used to just letting words rip off your keyboard, or pen, and onto the screen, or journal, without much thought. That's great. In the past few exercises, we talk a lot about just moving around your mind. Not worrying too much about what's coming, surprising yourself by just letting your mind say things. You hear distractions outside and your mind switches to them and your hand also switches to the distractions quickly.

In Parts 4 and 5 we added that element of the unusual. Exaggerate. Add stuff that you wouldn't normally find next to each other. Yes, the horse that looks at you and give you the evil eye at the grocery store. Juan Valdez's burro enticing you to buy Columbian coffee. Your hammer toes and their gnarled toe nails. But you eventually reach a point where you need to step away. The electric signals that form thought, that create images in your mind are seemingly tireless. You can close your eyes and stay that way without too much fatigue. But your hand isn't like that. Eventually your mind says, "hey, you're way too slow, I need to move a little faster," and the frustration sets in. You will get fatigued and your hand will stop. All of a sudden, a drink of water isn't a bad idea. You probably need one anyway, but the urgency is now immediate. You need to stretch also. You need to turn your eyes on something else. The television beckons. The phone is saying, "hey, you haven't spoken to John in a while," all the distractions are coming at you full force and you can't seem to slow them down.

In this Part we learn how to deal with them. The main idea in practising to keep your hand on the paper, to keep going, to keep typing, is so that you get used to seeing your voice on paper. So at this time, the new technique is timing. Take note of the distraction and write about it for a few minutes. OK, it's the fatigue, well, this is really something that's going on in your mind so you shouldn't ignore it. So argue with it. It's the thirst? Say something about how you really should be writing, but you feel that it's time for a break. A thirst break, after all, our bodies are 70% water and we need to maintain that balance. Take a look at your watch and determine that you're going to stay put for the next fifteen minutes. Not five, not ten. But fifteen. This is a magical number with magical powers. In fifteen minutes, you'll get rid of the argument. A five minute discussion with yourself isn't strong enough. But after ten minutes you'll have analysed the need to walk away quite well. Say, like me, you're in the library. You're typing away and you can see people all around you. You feel that you should, like I do, go over to the stacks and pick out a book. Something to change direction. This is an excuse to get off the current topic. You're bored. At this time, discuss the type of book you think you should be going to get and why you think you should be going to get it. Write about this for a while. Check your watch and then after fifteen minutes, see if you still need to get up. Chances are you won't feel that way. Chances are you'll be right back to the writing having argued yourself out of going to get that book. It's the same with a glass of water, although this one's a bit tougher. There are instances where your body's telling you something real and you should get up and get that drink.

If you were in the middle of writing that novel, it's a good idea to have your writing practice book nearby. In my case, I write on the computer so my writing practise book is a document. When I draw blanks and my mind wanders and I can't go on, I'm fighting my character who doesn't want to entertain me, well, I switch to that writing practise document and discuss this particular deadlock. It's almost like creating an outline for the next step. What is going on? Why can't I move? What should this person be doing? What else is going on. And on and on and on and on I go till finally, I begin to understand something and it's almost resolved.

The fatigue of writing can also stop you from being productive. If you write with pen and paper, your hand does get tired after a while and so Natalie Goldberg advises keeping those writing practices short. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes or twenty minutes. Some can go on for an hour if you so feel. I can type for about fifteen minutes before I have to stop. That's because I type quite quickly and so after fifteen minutes my hand's tired. My brains still going, but my hand needs a break. So I stop. Consciously. Down tools and look at what I've done. Not all the time, but sometimes I'll re-read what I just wrote. This isn't necessary because I've scared myself often with the gobledegook that's on screen. Sometimes I don't even understand it. Words collated from my brain onto paper and they just don't make sense. But I've noticed one thing. They normally have to do with my emotional state. If I've come back from a run and I'm resting, I analyse the run and think about it. If I'm in the library, I'm more contemplative. At those times I'm apt to write longer and about nonsensical philosophical subjects. If I'm at home, it's in the evening and I'm literally brain dead, then my typing is slow and I'm wondering about my surroundings.

In conclusion, when you feel that fatigue set in, stop and identify the source of the fatigue. Time yourself for fifteen minutes to write about it in your journal. Keep a bottle or glass of water handy, next to you so that you can continually stay hydrated. Coffee's OK, but water's better. And don't re-read what you've done if you can help it. Just keep going and let the words come as they may.

Finding your voice: Part 5 of 10

The list so far:

• Listen to that voice in your head continuously rambling on and on.
• Write down what you're hearing, don't edit, don't stop, just keep the voice active and speaking. Even if it veers off to the left, try to keep in step. If you fall behind, take a giant leap, stop where you were and continue with the voice so that you can keep going.
• Finish the thought, do it quickly because the next one's coming up. When you look up from the page, a new thought arrives and you'll have to deal with that. But after you've done step 1 and 2 for a while, you'll get comfortable finishing things off.
• Be weird and wacky. Horses talk, in horse language. Bees seem to plan their attack and sometimes you'll see the cat sitting in front of the television, watching and taking mental notes.

And this fifth point continues from the wild and wacky and asks you to exaggerate. Now this should be easy. Sometimes when we're dreaming, we see ourselves up on that stage, the world's chanting our name, "tony! tony! tony!," they just can't get enough of us! The show's over and the limo arrives, right on stage, from the sky, lowered by a thin strand held by an invisible spider's claw. Amid smoke you get in, the wire disengages itself, the car hovers, the wheels retract like the amphibious car in James Bond's movie, and it takes off into space. The sky opens up and you're in deep space.

You're normally imaginative in your head, there's stuff there that's singularly yours. Nobody else's in there and you can entertain yourself for brief moments. Sometimes you need the inspiration of a line, a headline, a story you've just read. This afternoon, I read about a young university student who'd fallen off the barrier at Niagara falls. She was posing for a photograph and when she got up to get off, lost her footing and slipped into the water. There were a ton of people watching. I think she's dead, but don't know since the search was still on. Still, that's a pretty bad fall. Few survive, even the idiots who do it intentionally off a barrel. Who'd think of running a barrel off the Niagara falls? Have you seen those falls? You can just imagine that conversation. A few young guys at home, after a few beers, one of them says, "hey, I can bungee jump with the chord tied to one toe." The other says, "hey, I can bungee jump with a the chord tied to one toe off the propeller of a twin engine plane that's ten thousand feet in the air." The third guy says, "well, I can bungee jump off a barrel over the Niagara falls!" They look at each other as though this guy's crazy. "That isn't even bungee jumping," one of them says. "Well, the thing about one toe, c'mon man, your toe would break off. You'd smash into the ground and flatten out like roadkill." "Yeah?" the guy responds, and soon it turns into a bet. Start small, from a barrel roll off the Niagara. But you have to find a barrel first.

Can you see how easy that is. Why was this woman on the ledge? What kind of stupidity is that? They interviewed someone who said that they've also done it, just to get a picture. One of the parks employees said something about eleven million visitors a year. That number sounds really high, but that's not the point. They should build a higher barrier, but then you wouldn't be able to get a good view of the falls.

Use a huge barrel. A really big barrel and have a state of the art interior where you don't feel a thing when you're inside. Have the NASA people build it. Yes, the supermatic barrel. The park people could use it as an attraction. Barrel rolls, just like they have that boat, the lady of the mist that takes visitors close to the falls.

You could be back in your room, remembering when you were a student, in a roach infested apartment. The super roaches, feared no-one, expected to be treated equally like full tenants. You couldn't kill them. Nothing killed these things, the poison only made them stronger. Your only hope was to shrink yourself to their size and combat them, mano a mano. The war would be bloody, but eventually, you come out victorious, and find that you can't resize yourself back to human size. Someone else moves into the apartment and tries to kill you. Now you see how the roaches feel. You won't get your degree, but that doesn't matter right now. You have to save yourself because the friggin' tenant has gone out to buy bug spray. You organise the bugs, it's a life and death situation.

That pie eating contest that you joined. You have to consume fifteen pork pies in less than fifteen minutes. You used to be champ, but you're in your thirties now. Fifteen beers, no problem, but fifteen pies, this will take a miracle. You pray an god sends an angel to grant you your pie eating wish. You wish for victory and you're told that this would come at a price. Anything, you say. The price is that you will have to continue consuming at that rate for the next fifteen years. After you're champ, you don't think it will be a problem but your hunger is dangerous and soon enough, people start looking good enough to eat. They send you to prison not knowing that this is the worst thing that they could have done.

You can't write any more. Your hands tired. All this writing practice has made your fingers numb. You remember the monks who used to copy sections, or entire, books in the fifteenth century. They didn't have printing presses. The books are due back the next day so you have to work by candlelight to copy everything. Your hand is swollen, it's huge. Fingers all gnarled and they expect you to decorate the letters. You're using a quill and patiently dipping it into sepia ink. The fat librarian is watching from the desk at the front of the room. You don't like his look, he's not writing, just eating cheese and cucumber sandwiches. You loath him, hate his fat look and his clean smug smile. You'd like to poke him in the eye with your quill, use it like a dart. Yes, the distance looks doable... perhaps

You live in a one-room apartment but you've bought this IMAX television. They're going to have to knock out doors to get it in the room and you'll probably have to watch it from the ceiling since it will have to go on the ground. You don't know why you bought it but the move Jaws looks awfully interesting when you're on top of it.

You've seen pictures of angels, why do they have wings on their backs? Who's idea was it to give angels wings, like chickens, or pigeons (since chickens don't officially fly). It seems that a more biologically suited way to fly was to open your mouth real wide, revealing gills that came out from your belly. You'd be able to take in air, at a really fast rate, into your body, propelling you forward. By adjusting your belly gills, you could reduce the pressure below you and hence lift off. Simple physics. Genetics could make your tongue act as a propeller. Oh, this is better, perhaps, by eating special foods you are able to release dense gasses from your posterior. These gasses, being dense, would allow you to use them, much as a fish uses water, to propel yourself forward.

You hate grocery shopping, so you enter the store, stand at one corner and mentally visualise the things you want to buy. They come off the shelves, moving down the aisles and neatly place themselves into the basket. The basket wheels itself over to the cash where a ray passes over them so that the cashier doesn't have to pick them out  and scan them one at a time. After the scanning is over, the trolley rolls itself out and takes off into the air. You'll both meet up at home later, you have a game and movie to attend.

Dream, it doesn't have to be real, and the more it detracts from the real, the more fun it is to continue. Starting with the a basic idea, you stretch it and milk it for all its worth. The pen that moves itself over the paper and writes your novel for you while you eat pork rinds, drink Dr. Pepper and watch Die Hard 10.

Sometimes you think this stuff up, it's in your head, you can imagine it that's easy. But for some reason, monkey brain, your ever ready censor is there to tell you to watch out what you write. Hey, monkey brain screams, that doesn't make sense, I mean, c'mon, what an idiot you are. And your job is to ignore the sounds and continue on.

Much like I've done for this segment. Unusual circumstances and exaggeration, all good tools to keep the hand moving. This is natural. This is what happens in your head. This should feel good.

Finding your voice: Part 4 of 10

In the first three sections, parts, we've discussed the voice in the head and how to make use of that dialogue to keep the pen on the paper, or the fingers on the keyboard. Keep moving because there's no silence in your train of thought and so the words coming off your hand shouldn't be edited.

We've also seen how the written word is often edited because it exposes us to the world. The thoughts in our head can't get us fired. We can think what we want and nobody, not even the police or the best judge, can really know what's there. But when we write it, we commit it to the world. We expose ourselves and say, hey! Here's what I think about you and your show, and we stand the risk of a million "boos" coming back our way. We need to be able to write without fear.

We've touched a bit on the procrastination theme, how other things surrounding you seem so much more fun to do but that if you time yourself, give yourself that five minutes to write down anything, or that half a page, then it's easier to get going. Once you start, it's normally easy to get going until, of course, you run into a wall, a blank. Your character's dead. They've been sitting there idly doing nothing but contemplating and they need some action to get the blood moving. That's the time you let that beast out of your head and let them patrol the grounds. Don't be afraid to just say what's wrong with the picture, you can always edit it out later.

And so now we reach the next part of keeping yourself motivated and going. In his memory building book, and course, Dr. Bruno First describes various techniques for building a strong memory. One of them is placing unusual situations, or unusual objects next to each other. For example, say you have to go to the grocery store and buy some milk, you know that you'll forget it when you get there, so you close your eyes and picture the grocery store, but it's damaged. There's a huge milk leak and volumes of milk, like the Niagara falls, are pouring out of the front doors of the grocery store in tidal waves. People are drowning and the parking lot's a debris of washed up cars smashed against each other from the torrential milk storm coming out of the store. You can hear the screaming of anguished people and the sirens of approaching fire engines. The trick is that when you approach the grocery store, the image of the store will conjure up the disaster you saw so clearly in your mind. You'll be able to conjure up the image since it was so graphic. And so unusual. Don't imagine yourself walking up to the cash to pay for the milk. Imagine yourself lugging a huge carton of milk, about six times your size, on your back, grunting and groaning, all the way to the cash and you slip as you're about to put it on the cashier's conveyor, where it wouldn't have fit anyway, and you fall down the milk carton crushing you under it. That's how graphic it has to be.

But it doesn't have to be all about pain. That was fun for me to write since I like to put together stuff like that, but you need to take the familiar and put it adjacent the unfamiliar. When you see the familiar, it will evoke the unfamiliar and your memory will be that much better.

How do we use this in our writing. Well, you're moving along and things are going honkey dorey.  Your character isn't setting up the scene very well. They're kinda boring, lethargic and you need to inject them with something. Well, here's where you break into the scene and fast forward them into the future, or the past. Yes, the past is always interesting, all kinds of things lurking in the dark. And you do something that I've repeatedly asked you not to do. You pause, for an instant as you put this character in an unusual situation. The inquisition perhaps. The Indianapolis 500 perhaps. In the middle of an airline descent, on one engine. Running for their life, being chased by a werewolf that was her brother. You get the picture. All of a sudden, your character has to save themselves. Yes, it's a way to continue to go on to keep trucking on. Your image doesn't have to veer completely off track. You might be stuck because you were going too deeply into the financial problems that brought your character to their despicable state. They were screwed royally by their accountant and you're relating tax issues that got the mortgage payment re-assessed. They were destitute on the verge of being kicked out of their home. You're putting your reader to sleep and boom, all of a sudden, your character is stalking the accountant. You've got them pinned and are asking them a dozen questions in the basement of a building a mile under the ground. Nobody's going to hear them scream. Not a soul. Your sharp instruments are prepared but you're not quite ready. You're now a hacker and you need to see if you can reduce this snivelling worm to dust, like he's done with your life. You don't want to overplay this since we're only looking for breath so that we can continue. Later, we'll come back to edit out the parts we don't need.

Unusual circumstances are great for the writing practises. You can combine anything you want and it will work because your mind works that way. You look at the keyboard and you feel the letters, and see the words. The constant backspacing irritates you if you're a good typist. You tell yourself that perhaps it's the keyboard's fault. You continue to analyse your feelings and then you burst into another thought. What would happen, just think about this for a minute, what would happen if you didn't have to use your hands to write. If your thoughts could display themselves on paper. Would it be the same thing or is there a craft, a sense of work ethic, if you are using your hands to craft something. Like a painting that appears because you close your eyes and see it. Is it better, different than one that slowly is formed by painstakingly dipping a brush into paint and placing strokes on the paper?

Even in this article, there's been a fair amount of play, jumping from one thought to the next, not structured or formed. Something that would make an English literature teacher scream and run for their gun, or rope. But this type of censorship doesn't happen in your head and this is what finding your voice is all about. It's about not judging what you're writing, not censoring immediately, till you've had a chance to put it aside and read it later. You're mind is a wandering vessel always doing things you don't want it to do and that's what you want to capture. If you stop and think and try to arrange things in your mind, then it will feel fake and stifled.

Finding your voice: Part 3 of 10

So it's all in your head, and you need to write it as it sounds. You shouldn't care, at least not initially, about political correctness, but should just wander about the literary landscape painting the colours you see and chopping down the walls with your bare hands. Sometimes it might be necessary to trip up small children and laugh but it's not evil, it's only rolling about in your head.

And there are times when you'll reach a road block. You can't seem to go further. Or in runners terms, you hit the wall. Your muscles are laced with lactic acid and you can't move an additional step. But somehow, you take one more. You stop thinking about the distance, about the pain, about how long its taking you and how much further you still have to go. You're down to the sub atomic level. Thinking only about that next step.

And so it is with writing. During writing practice, you'll be tempted to go over to the fridge and fetch a glass of water. Perhaps just a quick drink. You remember suddenly that all important email you were supposed to send, and it's amazing how communicative we are on email. We can write volumes. But it's back to writing practise and you're stumped. You can't move a muscle.

With writing practise, writing exercises, and writing novels, short stories or anything else that you're trying to communicate, you have to free your mind to think and put down anything that it wants to. It makes no sense to censor yourself at the start line since you won't be able to get off the blocks when the gun goes off. When the gun goes off, you won't be ready to race to the finish and you'll stay where you are, adjusting your shoes, untying and tying your shoe laces, since they aren't just right. Wondering if you look OK in those blue shorts, or perhaps you should wear something brighter. Perhaps you should take a sip of water before you run, after all, you want to be properly hydrated before you run. And that's another excuse. Sometimes when we sit down to write, we want to pen down our best thoughts, we don't want to just write anything, we want the stuff that comes out to have been filtered to purity. Like cool refreshing aqua spring water, but with all the minerals and deposits ionised and then the water distilled. There's nothing in there but hydrogen and oxygen molecules.

But we know the truth. We aren't on our best form all the time. We're barely at our best for more than a few seconds each day, and some days are best forgotten altogether. Yet we're still able to do some of the most basic things. Writing isn't one of them. Thinking is. We're able to think through good feelings and bad feelings. We're even able to relate these feelings to our friends and co-workers. "You'll never believe the weekend I just had!" you exclaim as you launch into a fifteen minute monologue over lunch. And our ancestors knew that this was the best way to pass on information, from person to person, word of mouth. I watched the movie Shaka Zulu, sometime back. In it, the movie, Shaka's introduced to writing as a means of communication or preservation of history. In that movie, we're led to believe that Shaka distrusts the written word though he learns enough to write down his name and sign a dubious treaty giving away land to some British explorers.

And our ancestors acted out plays in the evening. These plays, drama, supposed to pass on their knowledge to the youth and entertain as well. By repeating various parts of the story, the message is continually reinforced. Stories of victories won, loves lost, growing up and becoming a warrior, judging good and evil, praying, respect. These lessons were taught by the spoken word and by the acted play. Not transmitted by writing.

In the second lesson in this series, we talked about non-stop writing without thinking. Just pour out what's in your head. Just write and not edit. Don't even stop to think about the words you just wrote or the sentence you just constructed. You'll come back to it later. Later it will be easier to kill it, erase it and forget it, because you didn't put too much effort into putting it down. Shouldn't take much to kill it. But don't think of that now. You'll come to that later. Right now it's time to direct our attention to that table, or that person, or that latte, or that cup of coffee. It's time to keep the hand moving.

In this lesson, we're emphasising the ability to talk to ourselves in stories, whole complete stories. Where in writing practise we don't stop but we do things in a disconnected way, here, we do the same thing, but when we get tired, when that call for a drink of water comes, we don't stop. In order to do this, we'll have to have a mechanism of timing ourselves. This could be time, but I think the better measure is distance. When I run, I have a loop that's about 14 kilometres that I must run. If I run fast, I can make it in about an hour and fifteen minutes. If I'm slow, an additional five minutes appears from nowhere. I've even been known to finish this in an hour and thirty minutes. I was really tired that morning and that's my excuse. In any case, when constructing a story, I'd encourage the use of distance, this time by using a page as a measure of distance. So, start your story, and commit yourself to writing at least two pages. If it takes you thirty minutes, woo hoo! Of you go, perhaps add another page, consider it a lap of honour for your first place finish. If it takes you fifteen minutes, boy, were you hot that day or what! If it takes an hour to write two pages, well, perhaps we'll do better next time. Glad that's over. Whew, it was tough getting past that last four or five sentences. When you're on that second page, you're heading down the home stretch, you know you only have to do half the distance you've already done. One word at a time. And so, even though you can find something else to do, just keep typing, or writing, watching the lines as they roll off, one at a time.

Sometimes, it's not about fidgeting with the quality of the thought, but just making the thought. You have this idea in your head, you just can't get it on paper, but it has something to do with paper, and something also about roughness, colours are there also, but you can't define it. It's during the day and slowly as you're thinking out loud, and on paper, much like I'm doing right now, you begin to define the path you're walking on. At first it's a grassy opening, and as you walk up and down, trampling the grass, you begin to form a path that's defined. You can see the earth. You recognise how you should walk. And later, you'll be able to lead people down that path.

This section then emphasises what we stared in part 2. Just write, find that voice in your head, catch it and transfer it to paper. And when distractions come, like those moments when you feel better if you just switch on the television, for background noise you tell yourself, or go get a glass of water, pass by the washroom and then you're suddenly fascinated by the dust on the living room floor, give yourself a quota. A set of pages that must be completed before you get up. Consider it the 35 kilometer mark in the 42 kilometer marathon. You have seven more kilometres left. They may not be your best work, but if you keep running daily, writing daily, thinking out loud daily, you'll form a habit and it will get easier and easier to pen things down.

Finding your voice: Part 2 of 10

In the first section, we discussed that voice in your head. That running dialogue that you maintain during your waking state. When you're asleep, it's called dreaming. Entire epic stories are created, fabricated, while you sleep. While you're awake, going through the motions of work, play, associating with co-workers, salespeople, negotiating your way through traffic, on the road, on the side-walks, you're taking in the sights and analysing them. Thinking about them, comparing them with sights, smells, sounds that you've heard before. Creating your own story. Imagining your own history. Later, when you're back in your home, you can retell it to your spouse, your children, your brother or sister, or simply sit and think about it.

There's no way to stop the analysis from happening and two friends watching a sports game will each be watching a different game. Their viewpoint is what makes the story. Like that scene from the television show Seinfeld where Kramer and Newman are telling Jerry, George and Elaine what happened outside a ballgame. It's where they accuse Keith Hernandez of spitting on them after a Mets game. It's a short idea but well played out. The story's funny and Jerry, who wasn't at the game provides the analysis, and the joke. I like detail like that. It's part of my personality. I'll be walking across the street and see someone walking towards me and I can assume, by the way they walk, by their demeanour, what type of mood they're in and I try to guess what they're thinking about. Most people are inside their heads all the time and I believe that most of us, even when we're out and about, we're preoccupied by what's going on in our heads.

George Carlin, a man who I believe to be extremely intelligent once did a skit about the stuff that people have. In the skit, he talks about the number of cars that American families own. The gadgets that they carry around with them when they go on vacation. In particular, video cameras. The craziness of videotaping everything that we encounter and not taking the time just to stop and enjoy it, live. We're saving it for later so that we can relive the thing that we're missing while videotaping it. As though it's not important for us to be in the moment, rather it's important for us to collect the imagery, the sounds and the pictures, so that we can show them off to our friends and relatives who couldn't make it.

In the first section we also discussed Natalie Goldberg's writing practice. The art of sitting down for a timed writing session and keeping your pen on the paper, not letting yourself stop and edit words. It's important to make it as realistic as it really is. When you're inside your head, your dialogue with yourself isn't edited. However, when you sit down to write, you feel pressed to make sure that the words you put down actually say what you mean to say. Even though, you will probably construct about ten sentences in your head, and only write one of them down. Having discarded the other nine. The tenth, you think, is the real thought.

And so the challenge in this second part is to try out Natalie Goldberg's writing practice, but with a twist. The words that are in your head should not be edited, but should be written as thought. But there's a problem here, a real problem. Your mind works lightning fast, and your hand isn't so fast. Even if you decide that your writing instrument of choice is the computer, and you're a very fast typist, you'll find that your hand slows you down greatly. While it was possible to take in a view from a lookout in one great sweep, writing down that one great sweep takes time.

And so here's my suggestion to get over this handicap, this disability. Edit the writing, but not the imagery. See the scene in your head and ask your hand to move and write, but as your mind moves on to the next thought, cut yourself off and continue with that next thought. Just don't stop your mind from moving on and thinking. And the reason for this is that you really can't stop your mind from thinking. While you sit and write the words, the auto mobile was moving along the German autobahn and blurring the landscape behind it, you couldn't make out the trees any more, only smudged green and brown tones, and some blue from the sky peeking behind. The black car also a smudge on a grey background, the lines on the road, invisible. Your mind's already thinking of the weather and the other cars around the one you're writing about. So at some point you continue with red smudges of red cars, blue smudges of blue cars and bright yellow smudges of yellow cars, mostly Volkswagens, the German car of choice, of course the latest Volkswagens, not those unsightly beetles that they sold in mass in the late seventies, but gorgeous, sleek, aerodynamic engineering marvels, the sharks of the land. And again you're already switched to the engines and the noise and the other stuff that cars and motion mean to you.

And when you get stuck, and bored, you can imagine, what would it be like for one of these things to take flight? How about something falling from the sky? How about falling asleep on the wheel, lulled to sleep by the quietness of everything? You can even get crazy and interrupt yourself because you are now thinking of that boss that grinds you at work, and you're all of a sudden feeling the angst of loss of power. Doesn't matter what you write, the important thing is to keep your hand moving.

Get the point. The car, the autobahn was my example, but yours could be the lion chasing you, in the zoo, you transforming into spider-man and swinging to safety. Or winning the Nobel prize for physics, or chemistry. Or the underwater coral growing so fast that the ships are unaware of the dangers. The sharks in the water. The rain falling so hard that they knock the squirrels unconscious. It's the heavy water, the deuterium in the water that's causing the density. How on earth did you move from the autobahn to the heavy deuterium? Who cares, the point is, that's how your brain's working and that's all that really matters. Writing the stuff that's in your head.

You can begin your writing with the words, I see... and continue from there. Or I think... and continue from there. Or The noise... and so on. I think's a particularly good one since you can extrapolate from that point to anywhere in the universe. Same with I see. I see a day when the African continent reclaims the Sahara desert, much like the Dutch reclaimed parts of the sea and made it into habitable land. Windmills are also interesting and can provide a few minutes of writing.

So the idea behind this second post, Finding your voice: Part 2, urges you to write, anything, the more disconnected, the better. You can review it later and see how your mind actually works. You'll be surprised that it isn't as disconnected as you might think originally.

Finding your voice: Part 1 of 10

Nathalie Goldberg in her book Writing Down The Bones emphasises the importance of writing practice. Until I read that book, it seemed that the advice that writers give to aspiring writers is to go out and write. You can't teach creativity, that's something inside you, or so it's assumed to be. Just write.

There's the story of novelist Lewis Sinclair when asked to give a lecture at Columbia University, walked up to the podium and asked the students, how many of you here are really serious about being writers? Many hands shot up. And then he said, well then, why the hell aren't you at home writing? And he walked off the podium. Now that was instructive in some way. The message, that the only way to learn something is to do it. The only way to get better at writing is to write. Nathalie Goldberg takes this a step further and introduces writing practice. An exercise in which you sit down and you pen down what comes. Thinking, but not. Not worrying about the things that normally you'd worry about when writing. Sentence structure, grammar, punctuation and even, logic. Just going on and on. Letting your hand get used to putting down letters, words, sentences and paragraphs. Just keeping the pen on the paper and not lifting it up, so to speak.

It's a wonderful book and if you haven't read it, I suggest you do. What I found, during writing practice, is that it's easy to start. It's amazingly easy to put down a couple of thoughts and then you lose that trail. What Natalie calls, the monkey brain starts to edit your words. And when this editing starts, you lose traction and stop. That's probably why it's easy to write simple comments, short stories, observations, make witty comments. But it's difficult to pen entire novels and weave whole stories. After a while your hand gets tired. Writing practice engages your hands so that when you are doing serious writing, it doesn't get tired. After all, your brain doesn't get tired.

Have you ever wondered how easy it is to keep that running dialogue in your head going? It's easy to have a conversation with yourself for a long time. You can sit down, close your eyes and have a discussion about anything and this discussion can last for hours. But to sit down and do the same thing on paper is difficult. Why? How different is that discussion in your head from the one on paper?

The first reason has to do with censorship. In your head, you're brainstorming. Literally. There's no censor in there and if she's in there, the censorship becomes part of the discussion. That's your own voice arguing with itself. On paper, it's different. You're putting down words that the world might see. You're baring your soul, and that's difficult to do. The mumbled, garbled thoughts that cancel each other out, going nowhere sometimes, aren't confusing. Even if you're in a dreamlike state, thinking about something that's going to happen. Say, a vacation. You imagine in your head packing your stuff, getting the suitcase from the store. Finding everything that you need in your closet and buying the ones that you don't have. Toothpaste, brush, towels, hoping that they have soap and toiletries. You anticipate calling the cab to take you to the airport if you're flying. You can see this cab in your head clearly. It's a black cab driven by a foreigner. You could describe this person and the musty smell in the cab. The small talk all the way to the airport. Checking in and eventually taking off. You are comfortable. Probably it's a cruise and you can see the ship. Walking up the gangway, wondering why they even call it a gangway. You're excited now and as you sit there dreamily, all you can think of is how small your cabin might be. But you don't care since all you need to do is drop your stuff in there and head for the bar. It's the bar that you were thinking of all that time that you were packing. All the time that you were buying the suitcase and putting your clothes in it, you were imagining sitting at the bar, on a barstool, or perhaps on one of those comfy chairs as they served you a nice cool drink. Perhaps it's a beer, or a Martini.

You see, all of this can run around in your head quickly, fast and furious and you can sit and even dream up people you're going to meet. The captain, who you don't take a liking to immediately, but later proves to be an asset as they help you use ships services that are off limits. That guy you're going to meet, handsome, perhaps, or rich. The money that you wish you had, you now have. Perhaps this entire trip was forged in your mind from having imagined to have won the lottery. You're rich beyond imagination and your first item is to take this long deserved vacation.

Thinking is fast, writing is slow but you still have the ability to keep the hand moving, like the mind. The main difference is that in the mind, you never censor your thoughts. You never think consciously about correct grammar or word placement. If the words aren't there, the pictures take their place. The description of the car isn't a literal one. It's a picture in your mind but you can see the details. You just don't need to mouth them. It occurs in your mind in a vivid flash.

Natalie's book taught me something really important about that aspect of writing. That monkey brain needs to be quietened. That you can write down what comes to your mind without thinking and then later censor, or edit, it. Not worrying about who's going to read it and what they're going to say about it. It doesn't matter, in much the same way as thinking and feeling. You are sitting in a meeting, the speaker is going on and on about something or the other, boring you to tears. You're trying majestically to stay awake and so you recede into your mind. As they flick the PowerPoint slide to display a graph that you care nothing about, you're already on the beach in Honolulu. Doesn't matter that you've never actually been there, the only thing is that you've seen magazine pictures of Honolulu and can overlay feelings of beaches that you've actually been to. Looking around the conference room, you can see that other people are also on vacation. Nobody's writing. They're all just staring at the speaker, but many of them aren't here.

That's the first part of finding your voice. Your writing voice. Quietening down monkey brain. Taking a pen and keeping the hand moving. Not worrying about what you're writing. In Writing Down The Bones, Natalie Goldberg has some excellent ideas on how to keep the hand moving and the ideas flowing. Stephen King in his book On Writing discusses how he does his craft, writing. He starts with a question. What if... and that leads to the movement of the hand. In the book Cujo he talks about what would happen if the family dog decided to attack the family. Natalie also has some ideas on questions that you might ask yourself as you continue to write. When you get to that point where you put a period, the sentence ended, having forgotten what you were going to say next, and you pause. That pause lasting a few seconds, coming dangerously close to lasting minutes and then to the point where you get up to get a drink of water. Natalie shows us how to ask the next question to start the hand moving again.

You talk to yourself all the time in your head, so you need to learn to talk to yourself on paper. It's something like I'm doing right now. Having a conversation with you. This is actually the way we'd talk. In our discussion though, you'd be an active participant, and you'd have your own input, things to say. In a novel, I'd make those up, just like I'd make up the dialogue that would happen as I walked up the gangway onto the cruise ship. I can already see the crew at the top in their ship's whites waiting to check my boarding ticket. Welcome to the QEW, may I see your boarding pass please? Or something like that. Maybe not as rigid, but when you're thinking in your head, you don't have to worry about being impressive all the time.

Just talk to yourself, yatter about, yak on without a care as to who's listening. Once you get the hang of writing practice, you'll be able to go on for pages, and hours, without stopping.

In the next segment, we'll talk more about that voice. How does it actually sound in your head and how to we extract it onto paper.

Technical Support Guidelines

It is often not clear where the duties of the technical support staff end, and where the responsibilities of the end user begin. In many organisations, when things don't work, everyone blames the equipment. There's something wrong with my computer. What normally goes on in the mind of the technical support person is, "Yeah, there's something wrong with your computer. There's an idiot using it!"

Rule 1: Not everyone likes computers like you do.

For most people, it's just a tool, a thing to use to get stuff done. Like a car, it must be easy and comfortable. A mechanic will want to pop open the hood, stare at the twin cams and glow in admiration, but we're not interested. We just want to put the key in the ignition, hope it starts on the first turn and that the ride is quiet and smooth. So too with computers. Most people just want to push the on button, hope that it starts quickly and that they can click on their programs to get their stuff done. Who cares if it's Microsoft Windows, or Linux, or a Mac? So when you're talking to users, all you need to do is find out what they actually want to accomplish. What were they trying to do, what did they do and what did they see.

Rule 2: People generally don't like to type.

Clickety, clickety, click. In fact those were too many clicks. One click's the way to go. And don't ask them to remember more than one password. One password to get to everything's the way to go. So for those of us command line aficionados this click to access the world mentality, though simplistic, is what people want.

Rule 3: Teach them the language.

I used to think that users don't need to understand what the word protocol meant, but now I'm different. If they're using FTP to copy files from websites, and they need HTTP to browse the Internet, then they need to understand the different technologies at work. And I don't let them get away with saying FTP when they really mean SFTP. Yup, they need to realise that there's a difference between SFTP and FTP, just like there's a difference between HTTP and HTTPS. And those certificate thingys that bring up warning dialogs that people aren't reading. Well, you don't have to read the dialog warning if you're aware that it's a warning, but if you click on it, and accept it's warning not to proceed, but you proceed anyway, then if you get a flu, it's totally your own fault. Don't come crying to support that your fifty page essay that you've worked on for the past six months has just been shredded by the system and that you need it recovered from the backup tapes immediately. We'll recover it, but it won't be immediate. And there's a possibility that your copy on backup might have some infections too.

Rule 4: Teach them to fish.

There's a saying, give a man a fish and you feed them for a day, but teach them to fish and you feed them for a lifetime. Every technical support call is an opportunity to teach them to fish. And for this reason, sometimes, even if I know the answer right away, I'll see if I can point something out. This approach can backfire since all they really need to do is get an answer and proceed on their way. They don't need a lecture. And they might develop a habit of not asking you any questions, even when they have a problem, since they're thinking, Andrew's always so wordy and preachy when I ask questions and he makes me feel so dumb, and you don't want this to happen. But sometimes, there are opportunities to teach.

Rule 5: Know when to give up.

Some problems don't have a solution that's effective in a given time frame. Some answers take too long to find and the cost of all the searching doesn't pay off. The answer's not worth it. The problem isn't worth solving. It's possible that you've been asked a question which the person was only curious about. They've given you a ton of work to do and you don't really need to give them an answer since they don't really need it.

Rule 6: Be proactive.

Some people will approach you with every little thing that's bothering them and some won't ask any questions and will prefer to stew and simmer with the problem. It's those shy ones that need to be approached most of the time to find out if everything's going well. Like the shy kid in the back of the class. The teacher can choose to spend all their time with the kids that are asking the questions, demanding attention, and ignore the quiet one at the back painfully struggling through the exercises, or they can choose to go over to little Johnny and ask intelligent questions. Start an intelligent conversation and leave them with some tidbit of information.

Rule 7: Not every problem's a computer problem.

This should have been rule 1. And sometimes it's not a user problem either. Someone trying to send an email attachment but isn't getting very far. Perhaps a courier or snail mail might help. Someone's got a thousand page document that seems to black out and cause the entire computer to crash when they try to scroll down to page one thousand. Well, perhaps the document needs to be reconstructed, or broken down, or cut-and-pasted into a new document, or printed, or abandoned. I see these Excel-type requests all the time. How come the same document seems to work on their home computer, but when they bring it in to work, it blows up? Unfortunately we don't have access to the home computer so that troubleshooting bit can't be done. We'll just have to take your word for it. However, there may be things that you've inserted into the document that aren't available at work... so, it's so sad, too bad.

Rule 8: Some users are beyond help.

This should have been rule 2! They say we shouldn't judge people, pigeon hole them, categorise and label them, but it's tough to do. Some people just got it all wrong years ago when they were introduced to computers. To make matters worse, in most cases, it's this group of people who think that they actually know more than they do and so they tend not to listen when you're giving advice. It's tempting to put them in their place, but that's not right. It would be rude and of no benefit to you or them. So, my advice in this case is just to solve the problem and move on. When they tell you that they tried the steps that you just performed, and it didn't work for them, and how come it worked for you, you can politely shrug your shoulders, and say something like, there's a whole lot going on in there, it's tough to say. Let them off and move on.

Rule 9: Take time for lunch.

We're tempted to jump at every problem and solve it to the detriment of taking time for ourselves. This is really important. You have to work within schedules, taking time to help people, continue to grow in your profession, which means taking courses and reading and learning, as well as taking lunch, coffee/tea breaks and vacations. Many of the technical people I know, me included, spend way too much time in front of computers. They're warm and friendly. They interest us in how they can do so many things. We're always crunching out code, building web sites, bit fiddling, compressing files, squeezing memory and over-clocking the CPU. And there's a real danger of making them more than the tools they are. It's like a carpenter who's always sawing and shaping wood, just for the sake of it. Not building anything, but even during their down time, finding a piece of wood to shave. And like we have to say NO to people sometimes, there are times when we have to say NO to ourselves.

Rule 10: Pass it on.

One of the best ways to get better at something is to teach it to someone else. Learn to pass on your skill.

What to do...

Boredom, boredom, boredom.... it's amazing how time just passes. I had my morning long run, from 7:45am till just after 11. Long, and slow. Took everything and then, laundry, shower, food. Intending to sit down and get some quality writing done, but I zonked out. Sleep took over. A huge, dense, cloudy sleep. The kind of sleep that rises from your belly suddenly knocking you out. Nausea hits, you feel like vomiting if you don't lie down and close your eyes. Might have been the popcorn that I ate. I really should have had something more nutritious, but it was popcorn and a Dr. Pepper. That's quality rejuvenation food for you right there.

And that was earlier on, it's now close to 6pm and I haven't done a thing today. Not a jot. Not a single word penned down. I don't feel too bad about it though, I feel like something will come out of today. I'd hate to lose my entire Saturday to just running. Running's great, but there's more to life.

It seems like most long run days are like this. I manage to do the stuff that's scheduled, like laundry. That has to be done or there'll be no clean clothes for the week, or a basket full of dirty clothes going into the week. But the unscheduled, the stuff that can wait, well, it just waits. Like writing. I should do a bit of it every day, but since it can wait, it waits. Sometimes for days. And days, and days.

And I watch a TV show while I'm recuperating, recovering from the long run, or at least that's how I like to think about it. And a movie will kill two hours easily. Before you know it, the afternoon's completely gone. And if the afternoon's gone, you can kiss the evening goodbye. And that's because tomorrow, Sunday, we're scheduled for another 32k run. And that run will kill the morning, which will kill the afternoon, and the evening will be shot too. And so the weekend will be gone and we'll cruise into the week having accomplished nothing all weekend. And when people in the office ask, how was your weekend, you can say, it was excellent, I did some running and stuff.

I have an idea, a thought, some notes on finding your voice. It's a writing topic that's supposed to help writers remove the fear of the empty page. But it's not the empty page that's scary, it's how to write with your own voice. Not John Grisham's voice, not Stephen King's voice, but yours. What's your voice? What does it sound like. I enjoy reading Simon Singh. He's got a way of explaining science that I enjoy. I also enjoy reading Dan Brown. He weaves a story very well. So does Michael Connelly and Jeffery Deaver. I envy their style. They seem to have an easy way with words. They seem to be able to take complex subjects and explain them with such ease. Like Simon Singh's The Code Book. About mathematics and encryption. Who would have thought?

Finding your voice is like talking to yourself. Explaining things to yourself. Not imagining the crowd, the audience, but talking inside your head to yourself and telling yourself stuff.

I'm writing now so I'd best get back to my real work.

IQ Testing

I don't know much about the IQ test and until recently couldn't tell you what a good score was. But if you score less than 55, you're severely challenged. A score above 85 is average and above 115 is much better than the average person.

What does this mean in life? Absolutely nothing. It's said that one of Einstein's teachers told him that he'd never amount to much. And so if that teacher was giving out an evaluation, poor Einstein would have been at the back of the class with the "D" students.

I'm against testing for intelligence because I believe that it's learned experience. Learned experience, from having evaluated and seen and done. I suppose that it's OK to test for acceptance for a certain role, where you're looking for specific characteristics, personality traits, ways of thinking, but seeing whether someone can complete the next two digits in the Fibonacci sequence isn't a show of intelligence.

Some people have that innate ability to be quite forceful. They're leaders only because that part of their personality has been nurtured. Other people are quite reserved and have an inner strength, comparable to, but not equal to, the loud obnoxious types.

So in IQ testing, how do you differentiate between those types of unmeasurable quantities? The Q in IQ is a measurement, a Quotient. A calculation. We've observed that the subject takes a longer stride with the left leg than with the right leg, therefore, we conclude that the left brain is slightly deformed, and therefore the creative capability has been reduced by a measure of 8.6%. In addition to that, we observe that he seems to turn to the right and is unable to walk in a straight line. This, of course, makes it difficult to carry out inebriation tests.

But I suppose that we must continue to test and measure. It's the gift that the Greeks left us with. Analyse and catalogue everything. Put names on everything and then classify them. Once classified, rate and rank and then reorganise again. Repeat this exercise until you can't breathe properly any longer, and then stop before you faint.

To be blunt, I'd rather be me than to be Einstein. I'm sure he was a great guy, but my IQ, whatever it is, should be fine.

More running shoes

Here's where we are in August 2011, already 5 pairs of running shoes into the year. Averaging about 600k per shoe and stepping into the sixth shoe soon. The one at the front already 350K in.

Website domain names

Clearly the dot-com domain is the most popular domain extension. Registering a dot-com should come first, and if you miss the dot-com extension, then changing the extension won't give you the web presence that want. In fact, suppose that Microsoft didn't have the dot-com extension, many people would be driven to the dot-com site first, unintentionally.

I've missed a couple of dot-com registrations because I waited too long. I was an early Internet adopter and when Google mail, a.k.a., GMail, was launched, I grabbed the address mathenge-at-gmail-dot-com quickly. I did the same thing with Hotmail, but I lost that account because I wasn't using it and when I forgot my password, I couldn't retrieve it. I don't know if someone else has it now. I did the same thing with Yahoo!. I grabbed the mathenge-at-yahoo-dot-com address. Lost that one too.

As far as website domains are concerned, I wanted to get the mathenge-dot-com address, and when I first checked, years ago, it was available. I did nothing. I didn't have ideas to build a website, and I just didn't want to squat on it, or park it. But I regret since that address has since been taken.

But that loss doesn't irk me as much as loosing digital-pencil-dot-com. Back in 2006, when I first came up with that business name for a digital art, writing and creative media company site, the domain was available. I hummed and hawed and didn't register it. Finally, a couple of years later, I decided to buy it and, yup, you guessed it, it's gone!

So here's the dilemma. Although I have a Canadian company registered under "Digital Pencil," I don't have the dot-com site. The interesting thing is that the dot-ca site is available. Since it's a Canadian registered company, I could register the website under digital-pencil-dot-ca. That would be fine. I'd hand out business cards and all would be well, sort of. I suspect that many visitors wouldn't read the business card properly, they'd see the part that reads, http://www.digital-pencil... and they'd assume that it ends in dot-com. I know. They would. Really. It happens all the time with these dot-ca sites. Is WalMart a dot-ca or a dot-com? Well, in that case, they've got both. So does Microsoft. So does Dell. So do most of the large, international companies.

Not all though. Air Canada has grabbed both aircanada-dot-com and aircanada-dot-ca. When you go to the dot-ca site, it redirects you to the dot-com site. But the Ontario government hasn't grabbed both of them. The ontario-dot-com site is a tourist information site while the ontario-dot-ca site is the government's site. Why would they care? It's clearly obvious when you get to the dot-com site that it isn't the government so, if it were the government you were looking for, you've knocked on the wrong door. Same thing goes for the city of Toronto. The toronto-dot-com site is a tourist site, a city information site, while the dot-ca site is the official city's site.

So people are smart enough to know when they're in the wrong place. In my case, digital-pencil-dot-com looks very close in business nature to the kind of things I want to do. But hey, they're all the way out in England. So I suppose I'll go ahead and register the dot-ca site, and make sure that I bold the ca part in my business cards.

Computers, technology... and crime

They call this the information age. Perhaps because we can't call it the industrial age, that one's already taken. But information, who are you kidding? The cumulative knowledge of the world is at our fingertips, but we really shouldn't be taking credit for something that we had no control over. The information just accumulated, like dust bunnies, we just happened to be here.

But maybe it's the information age because those who can, somehow, access, control, manipulate information have become more popular, more influential, that everyone else. Bill Gates the nerd (or is that the third) wouldn't have been so successful in medieval Europe trying to sell software for the newly invented abacus. Then again, he might have cornered the market on square, coloured abacus balls, that could slide easily and lock into place putting Steve Jobs and his newfangled idea to use chestnuts out of business. The information's there, and if you know where to find it, at the right time, you can get lucky and become successful.

It isn't a wonder that about 2% of Canadians are employed on farms. I found that number somewhere, not on Wikipedia, the source of all semi accurate information, not even on Statistics Canada's website, but hunting and pecking through the vast sea of opinions on the web, I came across that number. 2%. See, if I were doing a research paper, I would have done it entirely on the seat of my pants. No wandering off to a farm to ask questions. Why bother? It's all online.

And so you have our top citizens working primarily in this information space. Our presidents are lawyers, or business people, politicians, clergy and even actors. The more syllables you can use in a single word, then the higher your hourly rate usually is. More syllables, equates to more mental energy, which in turn means more effort, which requires more pay. Fewer syllables although possibly contained in more words to say the same thing, don't require as many synapses to fire, hence don't require as much pay.

So it seems.

But let's take a quick look back shall we? The kings of the past, the leaders, the conquerors were in their own right strong and powerful. Genghis was supposed to have lead the charges in his conquests. And it is said that when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more lands left to conquer. Even the kings of England were brutish fighting types. Men of the sword. Richard III himself was killed in battle after leading a charge when some of his allies switched sides weakening the numbers in his army. But there were also some rulers who were there without physical power. They ruled by design. They were appointed, sometimes because it was ordained and they had some spiritual power, but mostly because of family ties. Tutankhamen himself was said to be deformed. But who knows, it's all speculation based on information that's highly suspect. Like trying to reconstruct what he told his sister before he died by looking at a fragment of dirt logged in between his teeth in his mummified body. No wonder historians are so engaged in story telling.

Empires were obtained, land was the currency, and servants, serfs, livestock, women all signified accumulated wealth. The more you had, the more wealthy you were. Gold was good too, but you used it to buy more stuff.

Criminals, back then, stole things. Real things, physical things that you could touch, and take. At first it was your shoes, or your clothes. Then, if you had a house, they'd steal your cookware. Perhaps your drinking tankard. In many cases, I doubt that they'd have gotten too far. After all, everyone knew what your favourite drinking tankard looked like. And shoes, well, they'd better wear them in the next village or someone would find out. And stealing too was risky business. Organising a heist required months, years sometimes, of planning. You had to go to the location and case it. You needed to watch carefully and consider all obstacles. Were the shoes left carelessly in the dining room when the man went to sleep. How many dogs were in the house and did anyone else sleep in the dining room. Being caught wasn't an option. We've read stories about the consequences of being caught, some may be true since there are instances where that type of justice is being carried out today, however, criminals were specialised and few. Once they were outlawed, then they stayed in a band, all to themselves, singing songs and robbing travellers on the highway.

In this information age, having brute strength guarantees nothing, unless you're Hulk Hogan, Mohammed Ali, Mike Tyson or Bruce Lee. And there aren't too many of those. In this information age, you need to pick up books, write a few exams, add a number of cryptic letters after your surname, and then join the millions trying to out sell, out argue, out finagle, out smart, out do each other. Sure you could do it without the additional letters by your name, and a few have done so, but our society today requires that you show your credentials before you walk in through the door. You have to prove who you are before you can take a sip at the trough. And we don't need battle axes, swords or strength to build our empires. We can convince those who work for us to take on the task of the actual labour. We'll just watch, earn our 20%, and sip cafe latte's while we figure out our next move.

This actually makes it a lot easier. It would have been tough surviving in medieval times. I'd have really sucked as a knight. I could have made a good builder, a bricklayer or a carpenter, but some brute would have stolen my tools at night when I was asleep. I'd have been forced to go into hiding, into a monastery, living out my life in quiet contemplation while copying out sections of the bible, with my own edits of course.

Today's criminals have it easier too. The research to commit a crime has probably already been done, a quick search on Wikipedia and perhaps the Deep Internet will probably unearth detailed plans of the Louvre including the alarm system configuration. Further inspection will reveal the name of the company that monitors security at the Louvre, including their off-shored immediate response team. A delivery of curried delights to a disgruntled programmer will soon lead to delivery of the codes required to disable the alarms and carry out your deed. What deed you ask? Of course you're not going to do anything as crass as actually travel to France to manually pick locks and steal Leonardo's Last Supper. Of course not. You only need to get into the database so that you can siphon funds from the museum's fat account to a small savings, no interest, numbered account on an island in the Caribbean that begins with the letter C. You don't need to go to that island to make sure that your funds have been transferred, with the beauty of the Interac system, you can safely withdraw legal tender bills from ATM's worldwide.

That type of crime is becoming insanely popular among the get-rich-quick demographic. These seem to be people in their late teens to early thirties. They have a lot of energy, seem to survive on liquid diets consisting mostly of caffeine beverages with powers of concentration that would make Houdini look like an infant. Not only can they sit in front of computers for an entire month without moving a muscle and typing at a thousand words a minute, but they seem to lack the requirement for bowel movements. Single-mindedly drilling down computer code, line by line, looking for that loophole that will grant them entry. Fearless in the knowledge that even though they're being tracked by IP address, they'll be long gone before someone realises a crime's even been committed.

And so we await the next revolution, the next turn around, cycle, movement of human evolution. And here's my take on it.

We're becoming redundant in the physical experience to the point where there's no need for some extremities any longer. These we need to lose. Our brains work much faster than our hands and typing and writing is becoming a chore. We think. It happens. That's where we need to be. In today's world, this accumulation of wealth goes to buy more stuff, but we won't be bothering with stuff any more. We'll need to accumulate stuff just so that other people can't have it. Like a game. Like a video, or Internet, game. Killing people off in cyberspace results in actual penalties, real physical consequences. After all, the Nintendo generation will be running the world soon. And after we're dead, we'll be deleted, usable parts recycled and fed back into the system to make the next generation abacus.