In the Ass

A big pain in the ass when laying out a hypercomplex book, where you’re trying to match up hundreds of diagrams with tens of thousands of words, and do so in a way that’s easy to read, easy on the eye, and keeps your page count down to a level that makes the book affordable, is when you keep coming up against images you forgot to draw (the four images above are how you lock of a rope before doing an explorative rappel). It really breaks the flow.⁣ ⁣⁣ ⁣Other things that break the flow is social media, and so apart from Instagram, everything else is beyond temptation, locked by the use of the Self Control app, set for 8 hour periods (you can turn your computer on and off and you’re still locked out). Youtube is locked out too, as thinking about what people are saying is also not good (for me), along with maybe a hundred sites (as soon as I find a site that breaks my flow I add it to my blacklist). Music is also a problem, and music you don’t listen to is the only way to go, so it’s Mozart: Requiem in D minor, not Carmen McRae in London.⁣ ⁣⁣ ⁣From about 7 am I just drink black coffee, and maybe some nuts, to try and keep my brain on task, and can easily do 7 am till 9 pm with the only break being toilet breaks or buying another coffee (coffee is good as it tastes OK when it’s cold, unlike tea). When you do a project like this it feels like a bit of a curse, you cannot wait to be rid of it and would give it up if you could, but although you still can’t see the end, you’ve given so much you have to go on. Like climbing, you say I’ll never do this again, life is too short, the reward not worth the effort, the sheer drudgery of it, like building The Great Pyramid out of Jenga blocks. Yes, the thought about the weight of what you’re doing is another distraction.⁣ ⁣⁣ ⁣So what’s this got to do with anything. What’s my point? I don’t have one. I’m just breaking the flow, shovelling time into the beast, just wasting time.