This time around the realization came via Cal Newport’s article on fixed-schedule productivity. Read it. Great stuff. I’m also digging the Zen Habits blog.

A while ago I realized that my life’s work is in books, and more recently I found that that’s in writing them and designing them. That’s what I’m made for. But is that what I spend most of my free time doing?

No. And that’s the problem.

From now on I’m not letting myself work on any side projects unless they have to do with books. I’m axing Donne (the to do list web app I had just started building), Beyond (my genealogy web app), the chord chart I was designing, and all other non-book projects. Instead, I’ll make do with existing tools.

For example, I was going to typeset a nice PDF of our Mormon Artist volunteer handbook, but I can just put the information up on the website. Much faster. Similarly, I was going to extend my Glider wiki for multiple users so we could use it for the magazine style guide, but I realized I could just use Google Sites and have it up immediately. Check.

Also, to keep myself from getting distracted too often, I’m going to do my best to limit my time on email, Twitter, and Google Reader. We’ll see how it goes.

My new plan is to have no more than one writing project and two book design projects going at any given time. Here’s what I’m working on:

Current writing project: Tanglewood. It’s coming along really well, too — I’ve woken up fifteen minutes early each morning to write and have managed to hit my 500-word quota every single day so far.

Current book design project #1: the D&C reader’s edition. I’m still reparagraphing it and have been dragging my heels, but I’m going to focus now and make it happen.

Current book design project #2: a short illustrated edition of Christina Rossetti’s poem “The Rainbow” (which is actually part of a longer poem). More on this soon.

Will I still be thinking and writing about web stuff? Sure. That’s my job, after all. But in my free time I’m focusing strictly on books. That’s the only way to get really, really good at making them.

I’m currently about a fourth of the way through reparagraphing the text and hope to have everything done by the end of the year.

The book will be available as a free PDF, and you’ll also be able to order a hardcover or paperback edition through Lulu if you want a hard copy.

Back to distractions. (Ahem.) When I’m not focusing on the task at hand, I turn into distraction-seeking mode — checking my email every couple minutes, scrolling through the latest tweets in my Twitter feed, pulling up Google Reader to see if there’s anything new, and then looking through my open tabs to see if there’s something interesting I haven’t read yet.

It hurts my head. No, really — when I spend more than a little bit of time in this mode, I feel my brain scrambling like a pair of eggs. Oh, wait, that’s drugs. Anyway, it’s not healthy. (Can we say headache?)

Much better to isolate distractions into their own corner. My new goal is to check email only a few times a day, and then only read through RSS feeds and tweets once a day or so. Or at the very least make sure there are clear boundaries for when I do all of that so that it doesn’t bleed over across the whole day, because when that happens, blech, yuck, and ick, nothing gets done.

Focus is soothing and feels oh so good, but when my mind is pulled hither and thither, it’s too much. I want peace like a river, and you only get that when you turn the distractions off. That’s this week’s project: to become a distraction exterminator.

P.S. My new dream job? Doing book design/typesetting for a major publisher on a line of the classics (like the Penguin Classics). Oh my goodness, that would awesome.

P.P.S. Classical music sooths my mind, too. Mmm. (I’m listening to Beethoven’s Fifth right now.)

Once it’s done, I’ll release it on my website (in PDF and ePub) and put it up on Lulu as well so people can get hard copies (both paperback and hardcover) if they want.

Anyway, if you’d like to help me proofread it (just by reading through it and letting me know if you see any typos), either post a comment on here or email me directly and I’ll get you the PDF. Thanks!

Goosebumps.

You see, that section lists early fantasy writers and their works (William Morris, E. Nesbit, Lord Dunsany, Walter de la Mare, John Buchan, etc.), and almost all of the books and stories mentioned are pre-1923. Out of copyright. Fair game. Mmm. :)

So, I’ve decided that Riverglen Press will have one line focusing on early fantasy — a trend I’ve already started with Phantastes and the upcoming A Voyage to Arcturus. I’m very, very excited about this.

The other two main areas I see Riverglen Press publishing in, by the way, are classics (like A Christmas Carol and Jekyll & Hyde) and language-related books (both grammars, like the Old Icelandic Primer, and actual texts, like Beowulf).

I plan to work on at least one book in each of the three main categories at any given time. Right now I’m finishing up A Voyage to Arcturus in the fantasy line, and I’ve let Pride & Prejudice slip to the back burner in the classics line but I could easily bring it back. As for the language line, I’m feeling like either a Latin text (Augustine?), Grimm in German, or Afanasyev’s collection of Russian tales. (I do plan to publish lots of fairy tales in all sorts of languages, by the way. Lang, Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Perrault, the Arabian Nights, etc.)

Now if only I had more time… :)

You see, as I browse through the books out there, a lot of them don’t feel like they do things the right way. I’m not saying I know what the “right way” is, but I think there’s often room for improvement — particularly among the less common languages (like Gothic) where most of the grammars were written in the 1800s and early 1900s. And so I want to write introductory grammar books for dead languages. And live ones, too, but there’s more available material for them, so it’s less pressing. (Seeing as there isn’t a whole lot of market for, say, Middle High German grammar texts, I’m not planning to get any money out of them. They’ll be freely available online, probably with print-on-demand hard copies through Lulu at cost.)

The other half of the coin is actual texts. I’ve done an edition of Beowulf, but that’s about it so far. Project Gutenberg has a nice list of foreign-language texts (like Don Quijote), but it’s not as long as I’d like. Getting texts that I’m sure are public domain will be the hard part. But not insurmountable. :) (Luckily my tastes run towards the older books, which are generally more likely to be public domain.)

I mainly made it as a test to see how Lulu’s pocket size books look (4.25×6.875″); if it turns out well, I’ll make it available on Lulu. As for the book itself, I spent about an hour on the guts and half an hour on the cover. More time would of course have been better, but I didn’t want to drag my heels on this any longer than I needed to, seeing as I haven’t put any books out in over a year. :)

Anyway, expect more books in the near future.

Okay, that’s too harsh. And I realize that a lot of it has to do with my having used InDesign for so long. But I really, really, really don’t like Quark. It just wigged out on me after I double-clicked on a text box, and all the text that used to be in the box is now showing up in a cascading fountain to the left of the pasteboard. But the text is still in the box, just invisible. I reopened the file, but still the same problem. I quit the program and restarted it, then tried to open the file again. Crashed. Tried again. Crashed. Tried again. Crashed. Luckily I saved an earlier version of the file, but still…

I hate Quark.

[tags]Quark, InDesign[/tags]

That old PC I mentioned had issues with my monitor (it would just go blank), and it was fairly slow anyway, so I bought a newer yet still used box from some guy on Facebook Marketplace. It came with Xubuntu already installed, conveniently, and it’s blazing fast. I’m very, very, very pleased.

Except for one thing. Blender doesn’t work! When I load it, it draws strange triangles from the left vertices of the default cube all the way to the edge of the screen, and as soon as I try to add an object (any kind), it freezes not only Blender but also the X server. I’m thinking it’s the video card. ~sigh~ So I can’t start Blending at home just yet, but I’m deadset on fixing this, because Blender will seriously fly on this machine.

In other news, I’m starting to migrate to a LaTeX-based workflow for typesetting. I initially had reservations, primarily because I subconsciously thought I’d be stuck with the Computer Modern font (horror!), but now that there are fairly easy ways to install OpenType fonts, I’m in heaven. In fact, in many ways this will be better than InDesign — the files are hundreds of times smaller, I can edit them at lightning speed in vi, and it’s easier to make across-the-board changes. If I get everything into place — and I think I can — then I may end up doing almost all my book work in LaTeX from now on. I’m starting the transition by typesetting David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus.

I’m digitizing the Welsh Book of Mormon (I’ve blogged about it on Top of the Mountains here and here). I’ve been chunking the text into verses (I’m in Mosiah 6 right now, 136 pages out of 483), and I’m also slowly cleaning up the OCRed text (I’m in 1 Nephi 4, I think). Pretty soon I’ll cook up a web interface for it and start uploading chapters as I finish them. And once all that’s done, I’ll import the whole thing into LaTeX and release newly typeset versions (both with verses and without).

Finally, here’s the tentative cover to one of the family history books I’m designing right now:

The book should be done within a week or two, and then the other book is due by sometime in early July.

First, I’m wrapping things up on the phone directory for my ward:

(Yes, I realize all of the text is blurred; I suppose I could’ve changed everyone’s names to fake ones, so you could see the typography, but it seemed to be overkill. :))

Next, I designed the student journal for the College of Health & Human Performance here on campus:

It should be going to press within the next month.

Finally, I’ve started writing stories for the ward announcements I send out each week, and I typeset them as I go:

They’re whimsical, but it seems like most of my personal projects lately have been tending in that direction, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. :)

I’m also designing a book for a friend and a book for hire.

The end.