Questions

Someone asked: what would happen if Matthew Simmons asked The Man Who Couldn't Blog questions. Probably something like this.

Hey, so when do you find time to write?

I think it's important to have set times during which to write. Creative work requires discipline. The creative part of the brain needs daily attention. So I set aside time.

I do it like this: every day, I allow myself the last second of every single minute to write a single word. That gives me 60 words for every minute I am awake. I tend to sleep anywhere from 6 to 10 hours a day, but it probably averages to 8. That leaves us with 16 hours of waking time, and precisely 960 seconds in which to write. A word for each second, 960 words a day. That's my process.

At about second 55, I open up whatever Google document or word file or yellow legal pad or bar napkin I happen to be working with—I try to stick with only one piece, and try to keep it organized on no more than two files, like, say, a legal pad page and a Google document each day—and by the time I have opened it, I have just enough time to write that minute's word. And then it's back to whatever I happened to be doing before that. Dishes, say. Or reading. Or jogging. Or watching a DVD. Or watching a youtube video of VHS signal decay.

More questions to come.

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Ross Simonini quoted me in this article. Gene, too.

Ross asked me to submit an essay to the next music issue of The Believer, too, so I did. I wrote about my favorite episode of Over The Edge, a radio show created by members of Negativland. I had written a piece about Over The Edge for a magazine, but then the magazine went out of business. While writing it, I had breakfast with The Weatherman and Pastor Dick. They were very nice.

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