Hugh Hollowell

Writing against the clock

It’s 5:30 AM, and the sky is still dark outside, but not as dark as it was 15 minutes ago when I woke up. As I write this, it’s Friday, but it really doesn’t matter, as most days, the same thing happens. The birds are singing the song of their people, letting their friends know they made it through the night. The kettle is almost ready, and the coffee grinder just finished. My kingdom for a quiet coffee grinder.

After making a cup of coffee in my Melitta (best $6 purchase, ever), in my Fiesta bistro mug (this one is Poppy colored, but the Meadow Green one is my favorite), I walk, cup in hand, to the room at the end of the hall that once was the bedroom of six different foster children, but is now my office.

I have a hard time writing in silence – my ADHD won’t let me – but I also have a hard time writing when the music has strong lyrics – my ADHD won’t let me – so I end up mostly writing to instrumental jazz, classical or, rarely, techno. My audio setup is a bit of a hybrid of an old school stereo tuner (a cheap bookcase-sized Sharp) paired with my phone on bluetooth, via which today I am streaming this playlist from Amazon music.

Now it’s 5:45, I’ve been up for 30 minutes. Daylight is breaking through, and the birds are much louder, and the music is playing and the chair is adjusted. I shut the door to the office (we have cats who will want to get on my keyboard otherwise), open Google Docs, open a new doc, and begin to write for the next hour.

Hopefully.

I don’t mean that I write hopefully, although I generally do. I mean that hopefully, something to write about will occur to me. Some days, it’s like a firehose, just pouring out of you, the words are. On those days, it’s hard to keep up with the flow, especially if you are a three finger and a thumb typist, like I am.

On other days, nothing goes right. Nothing is interesting to you. You have nothing you want to say. You are bored with the world, and with the people in it, and have nothing to say to them, and wish you had not committed to yourself that you would hold this time sacred, this first hour of work each day. On those days, the words do not come.

There are a variety of ways writers deal with this. Some people have word-count commitments. They apply their ass to the chair and stay there until they have 500 words, or 2,000 words, or whatever their daily goal is. I think this makes sense, assuming you have control over your time and are working on a specific project.

I’m more of a time-based writer. This is the amount of time I have to write, and so I write, or try to, during this time, and how many words I get is just how many words I get that day. Some days, I might get 1200 words during that hour. Most days it’s 700 or thereabouts. Some days, when it’s particularly bad, it’s 50 words.

There are times I wish I was a word – count writer, with the ability to just sit there, ass in the chair, staring at an empty page until the words come. But alas, the writing I do only supplies a portion of my income, and the mortgage must be paid, and the cat kibble purchased, and the living earned, so if I am to have words on the page today, they must show up before 7AM, or else they will just have to wait until tomorrow morning, unless time gets stolen from other obligations. It’s like having homework you are behind on, everyday, for the rest of your life.

Because the time available to write is limited, and the words must show up then if they are to show up at all, you take pains to be careful with your words – or at least, it does for me. Sometimes, my limited writing time is spent staring at the screen, not because I do not have the words, but because I am forming the next sentence in my head, repeating it over and over, listening to the rhythm and the meter, because writing is for me just transcribing the words I already hear in my head. On the better days, it’s much faster, like transcribing the words you hear as they are being said.

But it also means the words seem more valuable, more scarce, more precious than they would otherwise. It makes revision particularly offensive – striking out a paragraph that you spent 30 of your precious sixty minutes on is viscerally painful.

I turned 52 this year. Every time I mention this, folks older than 52 love to tell me how young I am. I realize 52 is not old, per se. Although, I was reading an Agatha Christie novel not long ago and a character described someone as an elderly man in his early sixties, and I put the book down, as I was not ready for that sort of violence.

However, I turned 52 this year. Somewhere around my mid-forties, something shifted. Instead of the future seeming wide open, my dreams began to be accompanied with a Use-By date. Instead of thinking, “I would like to go hiking in the Alps one day,” it became, “I would like to go hiking in the Alps while I am still healthy enough to do it.” Instead of enjoying the first day of Summer, it became, “I might, if I am lucky, get to do this thirty more times.”

Time began to move quicker. I notice this especially in my writing, where words are already valuable because of the lack of writing time. If I get an hour a day to write, and I live to be 82, that’s only about 10,000 hours of writing left.

The words are precious, and time is scarce.

And tomorrow, I will do it again.

When people choose to leave

There is a popular internet meme that makes the round from time to time that says something to the effect of, “You are going to be too much for some people. But it’s OK – those are not your people”.

And while I really want to cheer the sentiment, and applaud the self-confidence the idea pushes us toward, the cold hard reality is that, sometimes, the people we are too much for are our people.

Almost twenty years ago, in the beginning of my work around homelessness and hunger, there was a couple that was nearly always by my side. We had all moved to this new town at the same time, and none of us had any friends here, and so we latched onto each other.

We all became friends. We were often at each other’s houses, we ate together, we supported each other vocationally, and they both played a part in my wedding. I still own a coffee cup her mother gave me at Christmas. He had gotten me plugged into some churches where he had connections, and I played a part in his journey of deconstructing the religious fundamentalism he had grown up with.

We were, by any definition, friends. Close friends. And then we weren’t.

How the thing fell apart was epic, and a conversation for another day. If we are ever in the same room sharing a beverage, ask me and I will tell you about it. But for today’s purposes, just know that they are the ones who left me and that I am still proud of how I handled it.

But at the time, I was really confused and hurt. Eventually, I came to understand that at the core of the disagreement that led to our “breaking up” was the simple fact that, despite our having begun at roughly the same place, I had become far more radical in my view of the world than they were. And that was a threat to them and their belief systems, and so if it came down to sticking with me or holding onto their belief systems, they had to choose, and they chose, well, not me.

Years later, I was telling Brian McClaren the story, and he looked me in the eyes and said, “Hugh, not everyone who starts with you will finish with you. And that’s OK.”

While that seems self-evident, at the time it was a huge relief. Eventually, I came to peace with it. Sometimes the people who can’t journey along with us are family members, or romantic partners, or just good friends who have known us for years. And when they leave, it leaves a jagged hole in our lives and we wish they had stayed.

One of the hardest things for us to remember is that not everyone learns, grows, or develops at the same rate. And sometimes, when we grow or learn faster than our friends, they resent that. Or they have reasons for not being able to accept what you have come to see as self-evident.

In fact, that last sentence I wrote is often it. Sometimes, they do the math and realize that if they went where you went, it would cost them too much in terms of relationships and social standing, and so they must reject what you offer because it would simply cost them too much. And as Upton Sinclair famously said, “It is difficult to get a [person] to understand something, when [their] salary depends upon [their] not understanding it”.

People are endlessly complex, and while their actions and motivations don’t always make sense to us, their actions always make sense to them – there is always an internal logic that supports their actions, even though the logic eludes us on the outside.

But again – it will happen. Not everyone who starts with you will finish with you. And that’s OK.

We all must figure out what lines we will draw, and what is a bridge too far, in keeping with our values and internal logic. But one useful tool I have settled on is that, barring abuse, I won’t be the one to end the relationship. (I may, however, decide to invest less in the relationship.)

So, for example, in the example of my friends who left – they were the ones who left. I was OK with us not being at the same place. I was OK with them believing different things. I was OK with us disagreeing. I won’t pretend that it wasn’t sometimes hard to be in a relationship with them, but it was, on balance, worth it to me.

I’m not telling you that is the right line, or boundary. I’m just saying it’s mine.

But when people decide that they can’t be in a relationship with you, when they write you off for your beliefs or convictions, when they decide you have gone too far – please don’t take that personally.

Some folk who started with you won’t finish with you.

And that’s OK.

Touching Grass

If you spend enough time in the weirder parts of the Internet, you probably know the admonition to “touch grass”. Basically, it is most often used in response to someone who is really out there – who has spent way too much time online and has lost connection with the “real world”, and so someone responds to their wild, inane ideas with the advice to go outside and “touch grass” – to get offline and connect with nature, because they have lost touch with reality.

It’s often used dismissively and somewhat meanly – a way of shutting down conversation. But I think it’s also really good advice.

This morning, my alarm went off at 5:30, like it does every morning. My cat hears it too, and hops up on the bed to make sure that, instead of turning it off and falling back asleep, I pet her instead. I slipped into shorts and my sneakers and sort of shuffled to the kitchen, where I made a cup of coffee and saw the condensate on the windows. I check and it’s 75 degrees and 93% humidity outside.

Some days I listen to audiobooks when I go for a walk, but I’m wrestling with a gnawing low-level problem and need the time to think about it, so instead of putting in my earbuds, I turn off the alarm and head out the door. The humidity slaps me after coming from the cool, air-conditioned house. The chickens in the backyard are singing their “I laid an egg” song, the slight breeze activates the windchimes in our magnolia tree, and the cicadas are singing the song of their people.

My neighbor has put out his trash, reminding me that today is trash day, and so I drag the can to the curb, and begin my walk, looking at my watch as I step onto the road – 5:53 am.

Over the next 45 minutes, I will walk some two and a half miles. I will see the red headed woodpeckers, the mockingbirds, and hear, but not see, the Carolina wren. As I said last week, our neighborhood has feral cats, and I see the ginger tom that I suspect was one of the fathers of our current litter of kittens. I lecture him on his parental responsibilities, and he looks at me with interest, before walking off into a thicket.

As I walk along the small creek, I see a snapping turtle the size of a dinner plate, swimming just below the surface, and am fussed at by a squirrel that I startled. I notice the red buckeyes on the tree at the corner have already fruited – “is it early for that?” I ask myself, and debate looking it up on my phone, but decide to do it later. Truthfully, I will probably forget.

I see other animals that live in my neighborhood – the college professor getting in his car, the physical therapist in her scrubs, walking her dog before leaving for work, the lady with steel-gray hair that always waves at me from her porch does so again, for perhaps the 300th time. The house that had a tree fall on it a few storms back is covered in workmen instead of the blue tarps – a welcome sight for all concerned after a lengthy fight with the insurance company.

As I approach my own driveway, seeing the nearly six foot tall colorful rooster that guards my driveway loom large as I approach, I feel a bit of regret. I’m not quite ready for this time in “the real world” to end. As the door closes behind me, and the sounds of outside – the cicada, the wrens, the windchimes and the roofer’s nail gun – fade away. Today is going to be a good day. Because it already has been.

The Love List

100 things I love – a not-exhaustive list.

A cup of coffee in a quiet house, before anyone else wakes up.

The sound birds make just before dawn.

Windchimes

A breeze on a hot day

Gravy

Coming over a hill and seeing the ocean.

A crisp, sour apple.

Lemon drops

Dark chocolate with sea salt on it.

The brief gasp you make when coming in from a hot humid day and the air conditioning hits you

The way my muscles ache after a long walk – not exhausted, but pleasantly stretched and filled with the sense that I did something

Women vocalists

A perfectly done medium rare ribeye steak, cooked over charcoal

A baked sweet potato with butter, and nothing else

Waffle House

Carolina Beach, NC

The smell of a freshly blown out candle

The sound of the Pacific Ocean crashing on the rocks

Falling asleep to the sound of ocean surf

A date night that includes a bookstore

A Diet Coke with cherry syrup in it from Sonic

A freshly made bed

The smell of freshly ground coffee

The smell of fresh cut grass

Sitting on the front porch during a thunderstorm

A long hardwood floor hallway

Plum jelly

Strawberry preserves

A hot biscuit with melted butter dripping from it

Cats – all of them

A long, slow meal with friends

Cooking for people I love

The way my friend Brian runs his hand up and down my back when he hugs me.

Orange daylilies

Deep burgundy roses

Chickens

Any room with a wall of book-filled shelves

The act of sharpening my pocket knife. It always reminds me of Dad.

Going for a walk immediately after a rainstorm.

Our neighborhood

My city

The smell of lavender

Gardenias in bloom

Southern Magnolias in bloom

A good all-beef hotdog, with chili and cheese and yellow mustard.

A pond full of goldfish

Watching birds bath on the edge of a pond.

Walking into an office supply store.

Seeing the dust motes dance in the sunlight streaming into a dark room

Button mushrooms sauteed in butter

The movie Harvey

When you go to a Mexican restaurant, and they bring you chips and salsa, and the chips are still warm.

Murder She Wrote

Pulp mystery novels from the 1920’s-40’s.

How Renee has every card or note I have ever given her over the last 17 years

Opossums

Anthropomorphic animal illustrations

Large bodies of water

The southern Appalachian mountains

Tart, cold lemonade

The way my daddy would fry potatoes and onions in a cast iron skillet

The way Dad would answer my “Hey, Daddy?” with “Hey son.”

As a small child, when I would wake up it and would be foggy, and Dad would say it was froggy outside.

Sitting in a dark quiet bar, around 4:30 in the afternoon, with a pint of draft Stout

The sound of rain on a metal roof

Walking alone in a strange city

A long, hot shower

Implicit affirmations

Feeling known

Thick crisp bacon

Cut flowers

That people like to read things I wrote – it blows my mind, but I love it.

Sipping a Cafe Mocha while browsing a bookstore

A long solo road trip

Facebook memories (but not Facebook)

Family pictures

Watching children play

Watching birds scratch in piles of dried leaves

My sage green Fiestaware coffee mug

Cooking on a gas range

Blue Bell Vanilla Ice Cream

Earth-tone colored clothes

Being early

Oreos and ice-cold milk

A raucous cottage-garden flower border

Being asked for my opinion

Watching someone I trained thrive.

Being trusted with someone’s stories

Clothing without logos

Long vistas

The sound a canebrake makes when the wind blows.

Accent lighting

Daffodils

Handmade quilts

Boiled cookies

Live oak trees – bonus points if there is Spanish moss

People talking about things they are into

Inside jokes

A fire in a fireplace on a cold day

Me. Finally, at long last, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary – me.

What about you?

What are things you love?

The Writer

When I was 15, I wrote a short story. It wasn’t very good. But as a first story, it was awesome.

I showed it to three people, desperate for validation. They were all concerned about how violent it was, and even in those pre-Columbine days, I set off alarms, and ended up with a visit to the guidance counselor as a result.

It didn’t stop my writing, but it did stop me from showing it to people. I wouldn’t share anything I had written on my own for another 16 years, when I wrote my first blogpost on my first blog. I’ve only been writing in public ever since. To be clear, I do have a motley collection of half-assed ideas and tidbits scattered in both physical notebooks as well as digitally – should I ever hit the big time and some future archivist wants to delve into my papers, she will have her hands full.

But for the most part, I write in public. Maybe it’s wanting the validation, the oooohs and ahhhs, the “that’s amazing” that 15 year old Hugh was seeking from those trusted adults. Or maybe it’s lack of confidence, my unwillingness to trust my own opinion.

But I prefer to believe that we all have things deep inside us that we don’t share and don’t talk about, and because we dare not speak of them, we think we are the only ones who feel these things. My hope – in this rationalization of mine – is that if we can be even slightly vulnerable and share a sliver of our experience of those things, then the people who read those stories feel slightly less alone, and the world becomes an incrementally kinder place.

And I want to live in a world that is somewhat kinder than the one in which I currently reside. So I share my stories.

Yeah, it’s either that or lack of confidence.

In any event, I love to write, and to write in public.

In a bit more than 10 weeks, I will turn 52, and have been pondering things I have done, and things left undone. I have written a couple thousand blog posts, many of which are lost to history and the ephemerality of the internet, written before I learned to save what I wrote in my own archive.

The undone list is longer, filled with things I thought I would have done, and have not.

Had kids. Been to Europe. Ran a marathon. Written a novel.

Not that I now wish I had ran a marathon, for example. 51.9 year old Hugh hates to run. It’s just that 22 year old Hugh, who ran 20 miles most weeks, would have assumed it would have happened by now.

I also thought I would be a “writer” by now.

If you ever want to start a fight on the Internet, announce your definition of who is a writer, and who is not. I make a portion of my living from my writing, thanks to my Members. In fact, I make more per year from my writing than most people who will publish a novel this year will.

But when people say, “He is a writer”, they don’t mean the guy who writes ad copy for cigarette companies, and neither do they mean a stocky, introverted, middle aged man with a newsletter read by less than 5,000 people and a sporadically updated blog filled with comfort food recipes, aborted dreams, and sad memories.

Instead they mean someone whose things can be ordered from Amazon, who has maybe won some literary awards, and probably has an agent. Maybe we will see your stuff in The New Yorker or more likely, The Atlantic after The New Yorker passed on it. You were probably interviewed on obscure podcasts to talk about your book, and people love to talk about your “voice”. And, hopefully, when you die, there are people who never knew you that are sad you are gone, and who will lament the fact your voice has been silenced.

I’ve never been that kind of writer. But part of me wishes I was. Another part of me wants to try it. To put out some queries. Seek freelance work. Enter some things in some contests. Try to get an agent.

You know – be a writer.

I’m thinking about it.

Complication

My first car was a 1971 Ford Torino. It had two keys – one for the ignition and one for the doors. The keys, when I got the car in 1987, were already 16 years old, and functioned perfectly. The ignition key had a square head, and the door key a round one, so they were instantly indistinguishable in the dark, by feel. I could go to any hardware store and have a duplicate made in minutes for about the cost of a McDonald’s hamburger.

I am the owner right now of a 2001 Ford Ranger. It’s beat to hell, but I use it to haul mulch, take things to the dump, and scoring marketplace finds. It only has one key for both the door and the ignition, which I see as a logical improvement on the old system. The key on my keychain is the original key, currently 24 years old, and it works perfectly. It can be duplicated at any hardware store in minutes for the cost of a McDonald’s hamburger.

My wife’s car is a 2018 Hyundai Tucson. We bought it used, and it came with exactly one key, which has a computer device in it that prohibits anyone other than Hyundai from duplicating it, at a cost of hundreds of dollars. I spent hours researching and found a hardware store that could order the key blank, and then program the key, but Hyundai would not give them the codes to do it. Even the blank was more than $100.

This does not feel like progress to me.

When I owned the Torino, I dropped my keys in a swimming pool once at a party (it was that kind of party – it was the eighties, man). After fishing them out, I dried them off roughly with a towel and then drove home.

That would have destroyed the keys to the Tucson.

I now have a much more complicated thing than the old thing. It’s more fragile, has batteries that need replaced periodically, and because the key contains both mechanical and electrical functions, it will eventually fail. It can be damaged by water, by heat, or by impact. Duplication cost is easily 100 times what the old system would have cost to duplicate.

To replace the ignition switch on the Torino, I could have ordered the part through my local parts store and installed it myself in an afternoon with a relatively minimal toolkit. The Tucson would require, among other things, a computer and proprietary programs.

The new system is worse in literally every way, except one. Fans of the new system would say that yes, all of this is true, but I gained a panic switch and the ability to unlock my car doors remotely. This is a marginal benefit, to be sure, but I question if this benefit is truly worth the cost, and could surely have been accomplished by other means – for instance, having a key fob as an upgrade that contained those functions.

By now, you are no doubt tired of hearing me prattle on about my keys, and wish I would get to the point. And the point is this – things are being needlessly complicated in the name of “progress”.

As another example: we live in a place where the power goes out often. Our infrastructure is fragile here. Part of our resiliency plan involves having redundancy built into the system – so, for example, when our power went out last winter, we still had a gas fireplace to keep us warm.

We are currently renovating our kitchen, and looked for ages for a simple gas range with mechanical controls. These are user-repairable, use 100-year-old technology and should last a lifetime. I grew up eating food cooked on these sorts of stoves. They existed. They should be easy to manufacture.

The starting point for these stoves is around $2,000, and the “good” ones are closer to $4,000. I can buy a better (in terms of specs) stove with digital all sorts of things for $800. According to the reviews, they will last about 8 years and are unrepairable.

In the end, we bought a relatively affordable stove that hits all my buttons, except it has digital controls for the oven, and according to the reviews, if you use the self-cleaning oven feature, it will melt the motherboard. It was either that or get the one that had Bluetooth, and I refuse to own a stove that can talk to anyone.

I’m already saving for the next, lifetime stove, after we send this one to the landfill in a few years.

This stove is not an improvement on existing stoves in any way. It does everything the stove we had in our kitchen in 1984 did, with the addition of a digital clock and timer, and in exchange we got a motherboard, lack of user serviceability, and planned obsolescence.

But it is not at all easy for a company to make billions of dollars by making affordable goods that a reasonably handy person can repair, and that with care will last decades. These companies have shareholders who demand ever-increasing profit margins, and so a thing – like my truck keys – which reached its design and usability peak as an analog device and will last at least 24 years with no care at all is now replaced with a vastly more complicated and expensive machine.

My back against the wall

The biggest problem with a new office? Desk Placement.

Last week, in my Member’s Only newsletter, I wrote about moving into a new office. I described it thus:

It’s Monday morning, and I’m sitting in my new office. Or maybe it’s my new study. My new den?

This is where I always get hung up – on the naming of things. Some writers even have studios, like they are painters or podcasters.

In any event, I am sitting in the new room where, going forward and likely for the rest of my life, I shall do my writing.

It’s a bedroom on the northeast corner in our house – some 11 and a half feet by 13 feet (3.5 x 4 meters) – with a double closet and three windows letting in lots of light, but none of it too aggressively.

Long-time readers will remember that a bit more than a year ago I had moved into a storeroom off the carport. It was fine, if cramped, but was always suboptimal. So, when our housemate moved out, I took over his room and turned it into my office. Or study. Den?

Anyway, it’s the room where I write.

It’s such a larger room than I had – almost twice the size, and laid out much better, squares being better suited to the human body than narrow rectangles. After I moved all the previous resident’s stuff out, I put a folding chair in the doorway of the room and just sat, waiting for the room to tell me what it wanted to be.

This is, honestly, my favorite part of any project. In the beginning, everything is possible. Built-in wall of shelves? No problem. A massive desk and credenza? Sure thing. Before such minor inconveniences such as budget and time factor in, I just let my mind roam with all the possibilities.

But quickly, the main limitation became desk placement.

The two general defaults I have seen are either putting the desk in the middle of the room, or putting it facing the wall. Neither made me excited.

Putting it in the center of the room would be OK if I were Wendell Berry, dutifully typing out stories of Port William on an old manual Underwood, or Shelby Foote writing about the drama of the Civil War with a dip pen, but alas, I am me, writing on a modern computer, complete with a loud mechanical keyboard and a large computer monitor. And all of that needs to be plugged in, and whatever aesthetic value is gained from having your desk in the middle of the room is negated by having cords running from the wall. And yes, one can have outlets moved to the middle of the floor, but I’m still renovating my kitchen, so this office project needed to happen both quickly and cheaply.

I have never really liked having a desk that faces a wall. I dislike having my back to the room, and especially to the door. I am told by webpages that purport to extol the virtues of Feng Shui that having your back to the door is unlucky, and while I know nothing of Feng Shui, I have no problem believing it.

In addition, I find myself on a decent number of Zoom calls these days, and need a backdrop that doesn’t suck, to use a professional term. So facing the wall is out.

I am not the first writer to struggle with desk placement.

In his memoir On Writing, Stephen King advises:

The last thing I want to tell you in this part is about my desk. For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room–no more child’s desk in a trailer laundry-closet, no more cramped kneehole in a rented house. In 1981 I got the one I wanted and placed it in the middle of a spacious, skylighted study… For six years I sat behind that desk either drunk or wrecked out of my mind, like a ship’s captain in charge of a voyage to nowhere.

A year or two after I sobered up, I got rid of that monstrosity and put in a living-room suite where it had been… I got another desk–it’s handmade, beautiful, and half the size of the T. Rex desk. I put it at the far west end of the office, in a corner under the eave…I’m sitting under it now, a fifty-three-year-old man with bad eyes, a gimp leg, and no hangover. I’m doing what I know how to do, and as well as I know how to do it. I came through all the stuff I told you about (and plenty more that I didn’t), and now I’m going to tell you as much as I can about the job…

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.

My desk isn’t handmade, and it isn’t beautiful – perhaps one day it will be, but remember, this needed to be fast and cheap – but I put on the Northern wall in front of a window, but perpendicular to it, so my back is to a wall, but some five feet from it, so I have room for a small credenza for storage. I’m also some six feet away from another wall, on which I have hung many photographs and long shelves, which contain a number of talismans and my working library.

To my right is a large north-facing window that looks out over the neighbor’s backyard. Cafe curtains ordered off Amazon block my view of his deck, but allow me to see the pine trees and the clouds, reminding me that I am part of the world, and not retreating from it. I hung a shelf just above the cafe curtains, on which half a dozen potted plants sit, serving as a sort of living portcullis between me and the world outside.

To my left as I sit is an open space large enough for me to stretch out on the floor and stare at the ceiling, as I do sometimes when my brain is just in too much tumult, and beyond that the door to the hallway. I leave that door open unless I am on a call, because I like seeing my wife walk by as she goes to check the mail, or that our two cats will sometimes walk in and sniff around to see what has changed in their absence. This too, is part of my world, and I am not retreating from it, either.

So, here I sit, between shelter and the wild, back safely protected from the unexpected, looked upon by generations of people who loved me and believed me capable of great things, and facing the hundreds of books that shaped me into being.

And in this protected space, I write.

Dealing with transitions

I hate transitions. ADHD brains need routine, and transitions kill them.

I’m in a very liminal space on a big project.

Liminality is the idea that you are passing from one thing into another. You know that feeling – like the last week of a job where you have turned in notice. Your brain is already on the new job, but your body is still in the old one. It’s a time of transition.

Apparently, the word liminal comes from the same root that the word lintel does – the bar that sits over the door in a brick wall, that keeps the doorway open and prevents the brick from crashing down on your head.

Huh.

Words are cool. Even so, I still hate them. Not words. I love words.

I mean transitions. I hate them.

Hate. Them.

I have attention deficit disorder – ADHD is the official diagnosis. I’ve written about it quite a bit.

And people who have brains like mine need routine. (That’s not the same thing as saying we are good at making routines – that is another type of brain. But we need them.)

Transitions always kill your routines. Take away your hard-fought coping mechanisms and accommodations. And you have to make new ones.

But there is this period of time in a transition- that liminal time, when you are still in the old world, but your brain is in the new one, where you are just a mess.

And that is where I am right now. A big mess.

Luckily, this has happened to me enough that I have a liminal space routine.

Make a big pot of coffee.
Get out your favorite pen and a yellow legal pad. (Must be yellow – brains are weird)
Make a list. A long list.
Don’t censor. It all goes on the list. Everything pending, everything you want to do, everything you need to do. No categories, no priorities.
Then get up and go for a walk.

I’ve learned it really doesn’t matter what you do when you come back from the walk – the act of list making seems to be where the magic is. Even so, I find that I get clarity on what I ought to be doing, and even have energy for it after this exercise.

But your mileage may vary. Because brains are weird.

You don’t simplify by adding things.

The urge to complicate things is almost endless.

There is always the hope that adding another layer will make it cleaner, easier, smoother. That if only you did this other thing, it would all magically work. We want there to be a shortcut. There has to be a shortcut.

There is no shortcut.

The urge to complicate things is almost endless.

Sadly, I have not found this to be true. I wish it were true, dear reader. But sadly, as my father used to remind me often, if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. Or, as my less poetic but much more pragmatic neighbor would later say: Wish in one hand and shit in the other, and see which one fills up the fastest.

I need a hack – a trick – a secret technique or program or app that, if added to my routine, will simplify my life.

But the hard reality is that adding things almost never simplifies them. Adding only increases the complexity.

These days I’m trying to reduce the complexities in my life. One website instead of three. Two email accounts instead of a separate email account for each project. Two checking accounts – one business, one personal – instead of various subaccounts and complicated transfer regimens. A few social media outlets – One primary, another secondary, and a third to experiment with – is plenty, and maybe even two too many.

As I grow older, I find myself craving simplicity. Maybe it’s that I am more aware of the finite number of hours remaining, the limited number of mornings left for me to sit in front of the computer and actually do the work. The siren call of a YouTuber – let’s call them “Bookpreneur” – and their tempting video “7 Things You Should Buy to Make Writing Easier” – complete with affiliate links in the description! – goes unviewed, and I know that all the killer apps in the world won’t help you write if you don’t put your ass in the chair, and your fingers on the keyboard.

A lot of complication is ultimately just an avoidance activity. It’s more fun to shop for gym shoes than it is to go to the gym, more fun to search for and set up productivity apps than it is to be productive, and more fun to shop for notebooks than it is to write in them.

Simplify

February is the most expensive month in my little publishing empire. My hosting all comes due. My domains renew. My bookkeeping subscription renews. My Evernote subscription renews. My Microsoft 365 subscription comes due. I’m sure I’m forgetting something. (Edit: I was! My PO Box comes due.)

I did not plan this – not at all. But when it is cold and damp and grey outside (like, say, February here in the Southland), I tend to curl up by the fireplace in the evenings and feel the irresistible urge to putter around these digital halls and ~~fix~~ change things on my website, or change business things like bookkeeping software, or try a new system, like Evernote or Microsoft 365.

I’ve been writing on the web for 21 years now, and it’s astonishing to me how much change always happens in February.

So, in related news – I’m making some changes around here.

In the early ought’s, when I was cutting my internet teeth, it was somewhat fashionable to have subdomains for different websites. Then, as domains got easier to buy and branding got involved and everything was getting optimized for search, we started buying new domains for everything. At one point, I was using something like 8 domains to run a personal website and a blog and a newsletter.

But now I’ve reverted – there is strength that comes from not chasing clicks and Google – and so I’m bringing everything back to subdomains, and not renewing most of my URLs. This means just one hosting bill, and just one URL. This is also much easier for my ADHD brain to keep track of.

My current setup is:

My personal site – hughhollowell.org

My blog – blog.hughhollowell.org

My newsletter – lisb.hughhollowell.org

I still own and will keep hughlh.com – it was the first URL I ever bought, and it is my social media handle on most sites, and it’s short, so I will keep it, even if I’m unsure what I’m going to do with it.

Not everything has to make sense.