Is there any way that I can type up these things that I’m dictating to Siri. Yes, there is! And the proof of it is that spoke that very sentence to Siri (to which the reply was (predictably) ‘I have no idea what you are talking about, Robert’) and then cut and pasted the result into here as my first sentence.
Also happening in my ‘life’ right now – I am ‘Downloading Enhanced Dictation’ onto my trusty MacBook Pro so that I can dictate stuff without having to put up with Siri‘s snarky comments.
I’m doing this on Premier Inn‘s wi-fi network. I’m not actually in the Inn, I’m in the pub next door (New York Club – Working Men’s Club,), where the Writing Group I’m attending is being held. Isn’t it nice of them to give me free access to the internet, though? Yay for huge chains of hotels!
I’m slightly worried that I won’t have enough juice in this machine to finish what I want to say this evening. I am at the beginning of a one-hour brain-dump and my battery stands at 27% (down from 36% when I first turned it on forty minutes ago. Let’s see. It has to survive for at least one hundred and twenty minutes and so … (one sec) … yeah, it should only use 27% in total over two hours, which gives me 9% to spare. So, theoretically, I could go for two hours and forty minutes in total. Wheee – life is good.
All this supposes that I have enough stuff to talk about within that time.
When I try to meditate, I have no small difficulty getting thoughts to stop humming and whirring around my head. When I sit down to write … hmm – I was going to say that my thoughts stop speaking to me, but actually – that’s not true. I seem to have no shortage of things going on in my head at all times.
Even as I am falling asleep, I still see thoughts and ideas coming and going. When I wake up, I notice that they have continued unabated whilst I was sleeping. It’s not just dreams that occupy my mind, it’s actual thoughts. Sometimes I have fully formed sentences just aching to be noticed as my mind opens. At times, they even make sense to me.
I come to a pause. In this pause, I hear, once again, the sounds of people around me as they tap on their own keyboards, or push their pen nibs against the frictive surfaces of they pads and papers, spewing ink in all manner of patterns as they do so. I can hear the family of one-legged pirates moving about upstairs, and the shush, shush of tyres on the road outside tells me that the traffic jam around the corner has finally cleared.
Life goes on.
I remember being fascinated by attention on a psychology course I did with the Open University a few years back. Can’ remember a damn thing about it now (oh, apart from the Cocktail Party Effect), but still – I can remember the fascination I felt, so that’s okay.
I’ve been reading a book about Blogging – Blog Inc. by Joy Deangdeelert Cho, which is quite a good intro to the subject, but has only really taught me one thing (so far – with about 35 pages to go) and that is to put lots of links in my pieces.
Links are apparently good for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). To work properly they must include the full name of the thing you wish to link to (such as Justin Bieber) as well as a useful URL underneath (such as his Fanclub: http://www.bieberfever.com/).
It’s at this point in my writing that I begin to read back for places where I could add useful links.
I just asked the organiser of this writing group if I could link to the public page for this group on my blog and he said ‘what, your creepy blog? I’m not sure if I want blah, blah, blah’. As you can imagine, I stopped listening at that point, and this’ll be the last time I attend this group.
I’m going to eat my Maltesers® now. And I’m not going to share.
Robert C Day 