What I’ve Learned So Far

So, it will be obvious that I write here — and maybe it will be obvious that I’ve been writing here more steadily in recent weeks.

I also write every weekday at my professional blog, the Hoover’s Business Insight Zone.

Lately I’ve begun posting a weekly column on fitness and wellness on the CareOne “Life Balance” blog.

Thanks to the kind hospitality of some fellow Red Sox fans, I also share thoughts on sports at Big Papelbon. (Yes, I also write about sports here, but if it’s Boston-specific, or the kind of thing I know my buddies at BigP will like, I usually publish it there instead.)

When I can, I also write in other venues — blogs, magazines, what-have-you — and when that happens I often link to it or republish it on this blog or my professional blog. For example, I recently posted something on my Hoover’s blog to let people know about a feature of mine in the alumni magazine of UT’s McCombs School of Business.

Is that enough self-promotion for you? Because, you know, I’m sure I redouble my efforts, if the public cries out for it.

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(Photo by Ryan Sandridge, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)

If you would, please note that I’ve started writing for the “Life Balance” blog at the CareOne site. Among other topics, I’ve recently praised the virtues of the humble push-up and its friends, and shared my best tips on finding a healthy lunch in cubicle-land.

CareOne specializes in helping people cope with excess debt, so if you’d like to read more about topics in that vein, be sure to check out the other blogs on the CareOne site as well.

As always, I’d love to get your feedback on my writing, so please feel free to share it, either in the Life Balance comment threads or right here.

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(Photo by Ed Yourdon, used under a CC-Share Alike license.)

Why, a book to which I contributed, that’s what.

Celebrate with me, friends. Yesterday I received a box with this two-volume beauty in it:

The first volume contains my Cold War-esque thoughts on George H. W. Bush and on Computer Technology. For writing those two articles — and my wife was impressed to see that they were long entries, not little tidbits — I got a free copy of the encyclopedia to fondle lovingly and bring out at cocktail parties.

Now, I understand that at $475 it’s not likely to be a big beach read, so I’m not going to tell you to go out and buy your own copy. Heck, I wouldn’t make a penny off of it if you did get that crazy notion. But maybe, someday, when you’re stuck in an out-of-the-way university library waiting for your rendezvous with your spy handler, you can flip open the ol’ Encyclopedia of the Cold War and look for the entries authored by one T. E. Walker.

Writing a book
requires many a look.
Writing a grook
requires only a hook.

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(More on grooks — the verbal form pioneered by Piet Hein — here.)

Talkin’ bout some overhang, people.

The number of 1,200- and 3,000- and 5,500-word unfinished — and potentially unfinishable — drafts of things I have lying around? It’s LARGE, people. It’s depressingly LARGE.

I sigh. I move on.

Okay, please resume your normal activities, secure in the knowledge that you are burdened with a smaller amount of leftover scribbles than I am.

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(Photo by Will Ellis.)

I neglected to mention it a dozen posts ago when it happened, but I’ve now written more than 1,000 posts for this blog, stretching all the way back to the first two posts I ever made — on my blogging raison d’etre and on Jack LaLanne — on 17 December 2005.

What will the next 1,000 posts bring? My moods tend to shift, so who knows, but given how I’m thinking about it right now, I’d say less in the way of pop-psych and pep talks, and more in the way of active analysis of books, policy, and history — maybe even fiction and poetry. More posts, more intensity, better quality. Given my personality, the choice is probably always going to come down to perfectionism or prolificity; given that choice, I’m leaning toward being prolific.

But here, let me take your pulse on this: what would you suggest I write about?

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(Image: Simon Davison.)

Yesterday I posted this frivolous tweet:

Someday I’m going to write a cop novel in which all the characters are named after Intel chips. Lead roles played by Tukwila and Dunnington.

Egged on by a couple of Twitter friends, I started composing the story, 140 characters or less at a time, in Twitter. Partway in, I started using “hashtags” to capture the tweets on the fly, but here’s the whole story in one place. Expect small but regular updates. Oh, you should also expect typos, abbreviations, and so on until I have a chance to clean it up.

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Tukwila and Dunnington: Chapter 1

Tukwila sat on the porch at Taco Shack, sipping his coffee while he stared, puzzled, at the iPhone screen. Dunnington sat down next to him.

“What? Can’t get your new toy to work?” Tukwila cut him a glance; it was Dunnington who refused to keep up with the times.

“No, it works fine,” Tukwila said. “But my girlfriend signed me up for this thing, this messaging thing, and I can’t figure it out.”

Dunnington chewed his Burnet Road Burrito for a second, then said, “Even I know how to IM.”

Tukwila cranked his glare up to about an 8 out of 10. “Thanks, genius, I know how to send an IM, too. This is a group-messaging thing.”

“What’s it called?” Dunnington wiped his chin with a paper napkin, then took a sip from his coffee.

Tukwila looked back down at his phone and said “Twitter.” He said it in a soft voice.

“Twitter?” Dunnington was talking with his mouth full, and his eyebrows were halfway up his forehead. “Twitter-twitter, like a mockingbird?”

“Something like that.” Tukwila took another sip of his coffee, tossed the phone onto the table, and started unwrapping his tacos.

“So how do you like that phone?” Dunnington had a habit of talking with his mouth full. 8 years with the same partner will erode manners.

“The phone’s great. It’s more than I can even use.” Tukwila chewed thoughtfully. “It’s like a drug.”

“That might be *slightly* melodramatic, bro!” Dunnington took another huge bite; the burrito was already nearly gone. Tukwila shrugged, took another bite of his taco, and looked down at the phone. It rang.

“Tukwila.” He squinted at the flower beds next to the patio, not seeing them. “Right… Right… Got it.” He hung up the phone and turned to his partner. “Let’s go.”

They got into Dunnington’s black Suburban. It belonged to the P.D., but everyone thought of it as his, since he alone drove it. The tall, rawboned detective had driven HumVees in Kuwait & Somalia with the Tenth Mountain Div. He wasn’t the sort to argue with. Dunnington still kept his sandy hair cropped close, just shy of a buzz-cut, and he hadn’t lost the look of a soldier. Tukwila was most of a foot shorter and looked almost delicate — until you saw him handle a weapon or a rough customer. His looks were hard to place until you learned he was Native American, Korean, & what he called “American whitebread” all in one.

“Where are we headed?,” Dunnington said.

“The Four Seasons, downtown.” Tukwila was tapping away at his phone as Dunnington pulled into traffic on Spicewood Springs Road.

“We’re moving up in the world.” Dunnington chuckled at his own joke, but Tukwila wasn’t paying attention.

~~~

[To be continued . . .]

The other night I was talking with a family member about how the different media each create the conditions for artistic masterpieces. The conversation was in the context of “The Wire” — a show I’ve never watched, but which many think is the best drama on television (and one of the best ever).

Well, haiku would seem to be a good genre to fit on Twitter, where each message has to come in at 140 characters or less. But some Twitterers take it as a challenge to write “twooshes” — i.e. messages that are exactly 140 characters.

After I posted a tweet hypothesizing that a twoosh-haiku might be impossible, a friend pointed me to a Wikipedia page listing the longest single-syllable words in English. Then I composed this twoosh-haiku:

Scootched, then scratched, then squelched
scrounged, then scrunched, then squeezed through straits
breathed, stretched, and then squealed.

A masterpiece? Hardly. But it fascinated me to discover how a theme emerged from the materials I was given. There’s really something to this idea of constraints driving creativity.

On the very, very off chance that you’re interested, I have a new picture up on my business blog. We had gotten feedback that the prior picture was sub-optimal.

Here’s the new, “Tim is very pleased” picture:

For comparison, here’s the old, “Tim is about to drop some knowledge on you” picture:

Which do you like better?

My beloved people: Please lend me a hand by checking out my professional blog and then telling me a few things:

1. What do you like about the BIZ blog?
2. What don’t you like about it?
3. To whom do you think the BIZ blog would most appeal?
4. What would you do differently with it?

If you please, do all this telling in the comments here, not there.

What I’m after: outside perspectives. We’ve been running the blog seriously for 2/3 of a year now and we’re gaining traffic bit by bit. But we know there’s a lot more we can do. So I will be grateful for any insights that you worthies might offer.

Thank you in advance!