Don’t throw away your old notes
Don’t throw out your old notes, even if you feel overwhelmed by them. Here are some helpful ideas on what to do instead.
💬 Back in 2018 I said “the next Web will be fit for humans”.
And how did that little prediction go? Well, I’ve updated my original post with some reflections.
📷 Photo challenge day 22: hometown.
The view from Yerroulbine (Balls Head) on our mid-winter walk in #Sydney yesterday. From this angle Me-mel (Goat Island) seems impossibly close to the CBD.
#mbjune
How Walter Breuggemann shaped me
At its best, a family can be ‘a communal network of memory and hope in which individual members may locate themselves and discern their identities’
📷 Photo challenge day 20: gather.
Six seagulls gather on a sandstone rock at La Perouse, #Sydney.
#mbjune
What to do when you've made some notes: Start writing
The next step after taking notes is to create a finished piece of writing, acknowledging that the first draft may be disorganized but serves as a foundation for improvement.
📷 Photo challenge day 19: equal.
💬 “I exist in a fractally connected, self-organized universe where everything relates dynamically to everything else” - Jeremy Lent, The Web of Meaning.
Yes, we all do.
#mbjune #zettelkasten
Bob Doto is the author of ‘A System for Writing’.
From reading to note-making to finished draft, his approach connects it all.
I watched his discussion with historian Dan Allosso and took notes so you don’t have to.
#WritingCommunity #NoteTaking #PKM #Zettelkasten #BookWriting #SlowWriting
📷 Photo challenge day 18: texture.
Furry or spiky? Spotted on a boardwalk in the Royal National Park near #Sydney - as featured in day 2.
#mbjune
What I Learned from Bob Doto about Making Effective Notes and Writing a Book
Historian Dan Allosso led a discussion on Bob Doto’s insights on flexible note-taking and writing processes. It emphasised the importance of iterative development and audience engagement. Here are my notes.
📷 Photo challenge day 17: warmth.
We saw a curious warning at this year’s Vivid, the big winter festival of light in #Sydney. #mbjune
📷 Photo challenge day 16: blur. A smoking ceremony at Prince Alfred Park, #Sydney. #mbjune
Influence is everything: novelty its flimsy dress
What happens when once fashionable ideas get left behind?
I’ve often felt the culture moves on too fast, leaving so much on the table in terms of untapped potential. This is certainly true for pop music. Fashions come and go so fast that they leave great concepts stranded in time. You could write a great glam rock song in 2023, but you would have needed at all costs to avoid staying stuck in 1973. The trick is to avoid descending from homage into mere pastiche.
The Nemesis guide to being early described the fashion cycle as an endless process in which:
“each new thing is supplanted by another new thing, and no linear pattern emerges. Things very rarely reach the plateau of productivity, more often falling straight to Hades through the trough of disillusionment. No one seems to follow up on the hyped project of yesterday.”
THE NEMESIS GUIDE TO BEING EARLY nemesisglobal.substack.com
But it’s worse than that. It’s not just that, mysteriously, no one merely seems to follow up. It feels like they’re not allowed to.
Finished reading: Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling by Henry Lien 📚
A ‘how-to’ book on kishotenketsu, a Japanese storytelling concept that’s an alternative to ’the hero’s quest’. Like many such books, it’s worth reading just for the summaries of example stories.
💬"When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway." - James Baldwin. Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 78. no. 91, 1984.
📷 Photo challenge day 15: tie. This is how the tugboat from day 9 was secured to the wharf at Pyrmont, #Sydney. #mbjune
Photo challenge, day 14: twilight at the mouth of Deerubbin, the Hawkesbury River #mbjune #Sydney
📷 Photo challenge day 13: pathway. Calna Creek, just north of #Sydney. #mbjune
📷 Photo challenge day 12: hidden.
It’s easy to watch the annual ‘humpback highway’ whale migration at Malabar Headland in #Sydney - so you might easily miss this guy, who is looking the other way.
#mbjune
