What a to do!

My new favorite To Do list.

So, yesterday I was telling you about the miracle of getting back to getting things done.

The bottom line, of course, is that you have to decide to do things.

But I am a big believer in To Do lists, and I have been on a perpetual quest for the one perfect To Do list software. I’ve used the Task List in my Palm Pilot. I’ve used my Blackberry (forget that one!). I’ve used a word processor. I’ve used a spreadsheet. I’ve used Personal Brain–which is good for organizing information but not so good for a To Do list. I’ve tried Remember the Milk and other online solutions.

Lately, I’ve been using followupthen.com to get emailed reminders, and I like it. It’s a fast way to schedule follow ups, especially on anything that hits your email inbox.

But it’s not a To Do list.

Back when I was working, I made my own project management software using Microsoft Access. It was pretty good. But it wasn’t perfect. Mostly because I didn’t invest the time to make it better.

Now, lo and behold! Efficient To Do List from Efficient Software does almost everything I want a To Do List to do.

I can organize tasks by any hierarchy of categories I want. I can set due dates and reminders. I can sort by task, by category, by due date. I can sort by priority. And I can check off things that are done and watch them disappear from the list.

Downsides are limited documentation and help features. The priority list isn’t flexible enough for me. I’ve invented a way around that. Occasionally, assigning tasks to Groups (categories) is a bit slow.

Also, this is a Windows product. Mac users may be out of luck.

Considering I paid less than $15 for it, I find all of those caveats acceptable.

And I am getting things done!

Maybe you can, too.

Miracles

Never cease.

I’m back!

I said I would be if I had anything to say.

Two miracles to report this Monday. One is from a while ago. And one just happened.

The “while ago” miracle was in August. I became a produced playwright. This is a dividing line. There are the writers who write plays. And there are the writers who get them produced. Once you cross the threshold, you can never go back. (Not that you would want to.)

Anyway, I wrote an adaptation of The Looking Glass by Edith Wharton. It was produced by The Wharton Salon on the grounds of The Mount, Ms. Wharton’s Berkshire mansion.

Just getting a production is a miracle. But mine didn’t end there.

Because it could have been bad. It’s a one-woman show, and we lost our one woman about a week before we opened. (Health reasons. She’s fine now!)

Producer, director, everybody scrambling for a replacement.

And, the collateral miracle…they found Jane Nichols. The amazing Jane Nichols. Who came in late in the day, and saved it.

Jane gave a marvelous performance. Eternal gratitude? The term was invented for what we owe Jane.

It’s not easy coming into a one-person show at the last minute, learning pages of dialogue with no fellow actors to help you out if you stumble.

But she did it…and beautifully!

Audiences loved her. They loved the play.

Thanks to Edith Wharton, Jane Nichols, director Daniela Varon, and producer Catherine Taylor-Williams of The Wharton Salon, I am not only a produced playwright, but a beautifully produced one.

So, that’s the first miracle. Long overdue for a mention in this blog.

The second one is that I am back on track wrestling the To Do List from Hell into submission. I’m getting stuff done! I’ll tell you tomorrow about the software that’s helping me do it!

Right now, I have to get back to that To Do List.

Happy anniversary!

And goodbye.

Okay. Not really goodbye.

But today is the one year anniversary of this blog. (Cake!)

When I set out, I wasn’t sure I could manage a daily blog for six weeks let alone six months. When I made it to the six month mark, I wondered if I could manage a year.

When I hit the three-quarter mark, I realized that the mental overhead of coming up with something to write every day for the rest of my life and then writing it was probably not really how I wanted to be spending my time.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I do hope to be writing most days, if not all, for the rest of my life. But I have decided that is more likely to happen if I turn my attention back to fiction or playwriting and away from blogging.

I’m not closing down the blog.

I’ve enjoyed doing it.

I’ve enjoyed the feedback I’ve gotten, and I’ve loved having subscribers. Even if some of you are ignoring the daily invasion of your inbox—(I know, I’ve subscribed to some blogs, too. There isn’t always time to read them all)—I have enjoyed the feeling that we are communicating. It has been a privilege to be allowed to enter there.

Thank you for your attention.

The blog will stay open. I just won’t be posting daily. You may not hear from me for days, weeks, months. But, who knows? If I have something to say, I’ll speak up.

If you’ve signed up for the RSS feed or the email subscription, you’ll know when that happens.

The rest of you are welcome to subscribe now or pop back in here from time to time to check.

It’s been fun! I’m proud to know that I managed it 365 days in a row.

So here is the final entry for Smith Sundays.

Elaine Smith—once upon a time, she wrote a blog post every day for a whole year!

Don’t tell me it’s not time for cake!

Now THAT would be silly!

So, I didn’t do it.

Somewhere, round about November of last year, I decided that inaugurating Silly Saturdays would be a good way to ease the burden of finding topics for the blog. You see, I had assigned themes to Monday through Friday but left the weekends open for “write what you want” inspiration to strike.

The trouble was that inspiration did not always strike. I have found that the fish of inspiration prefers the bait of a few guidelines rather than the empty hook of unlimited choice.

Thus, Silly Saturdays was born, and I have had a lot of fun finding the various sillinesses I have posted.

You may have wondered, however—if you spent that much time on it—whether I was spending all my time scouring the internet for silly things. (I wonder that myself about George Takei’s Facebook page.)

And I did spend quite a bit of time on it. More, actually, than is conducive to productivity.

But not all my time.

Quite a few of the silly sites I posted were also linked to an amalgamation of silliness to which I now direct you and which will streamline your own search for nonsense and make it possible for you to find useless and time-wasting games with ease.

The title says it all:

PointlessSites.com

You’ll find a few of the silly links I’ve used there already along with many, many more.

Enjoy!

3.14…..

life of pi

Maybe you’ve already seen the movie?

I understand it did rather well. And I hear that it is visually spectacular. Having been directed by Ang Lee, I don’t doubt that. Nor do I doubt that it is as faithful as possible to the novel.

I haven’t seen the movie yet. I am going to put it at the top of my list, though. And I’m going to use this Friday Find post to tell you that the book is is a FIND.

If you haven’t read life of pi, get thee to a library. Or a bookstore.

This novel is a work of art, destined to be a classic.

A sea story, an adventure yarn, a word painting, a philosophical fascination.

Author Yann Martel has pulled off a miracle.

Compelling plot, beautiful prose, ideas to linger and provoke thought.

This is one of those books that is both dangerous and inspirational to those of us trying to be writers. The inspiration comes from the illustration of what’s possible, the dangling carrot of poetry and plot. The danger comes from the very well-founded fear that I am not capable of transcending my limitations and achieving something close to this.

The hope lies in the story itself.

Pi transcended his limitations.

Maybe we can, too.

The canna lilies are in bloom again.

Such a pretty flower.

Actually, they bloom pretty much all the time around here. There is, however, a brief few weeks when they die back and look all brown and scraggly. Then, their foliage turns green again.

And then!

All of a sudden!

Flowers!

Mine look like this, all orange and white.

Where yesterday there was nothing but green leaves, today there are exuberant open blooms. And I hear Katharine Hepburn’s voice in my head:

The canna lilies are in bloom again. Such a strange flower!

In that odd, magnificent, Connecticut Yankee, Hepburn voice. (The line is actually “calla lilies,” but who are you to quibble with the voices I hear in my head?)

The cannas are not strange except in so far as I have not killed any of them yet. (Not much of a green thumb. I may have mentioned it.) I haven’t even been able to kill the ones I’ve tried.

My cannas are meant to be tastefully confined to the flowerbeds within their concrete borders. A few of them didn’t get the memo.

I mow them down. They come back up. I dig them up. They sprout again. They are an unrestrained flower, if not strange.

But, I am thankful, thankful, thankful for something that blooms far beyond my poor power to ignore, neglect and actively thwart it. I have blossoms out my office window for at least six months of the year, if not more.

The grasshoppers, touch wood, don’t seem to like them. Occasionally, a little brown lizard will pretend to be the dried out center of a bloom—dangerous to my blood pressure and his life if I happen to be deadheading the old ones to make way for the new. But, generally speaking, they are maintenance-free. They don’t care if I water them or not. They don’t care if they get any sun or not.

They just go on being bright and cheerful.

I am thankful.

Cognitive surplus

And what’s next?

I’ve been reading Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky. I haven’t finished it yet, and I haven’t processed it fully. Maybe I don’t fully understand it.

But the idea that new technology has fostered new methods of collaboration is certainly something I’ve experienced for myself working on creative projects with people around the globe.

The idea that it has altered the way we market our creativity is also one I recognize. One, too, that comes up frequently in the work of Seth Godin, one of my favorite bloggers.

Traditional publishing methods of the book and music industries, while still in existence, are losing ground to the tools available to all of us to get our work out ourselves.

Got a website?

Publish your novel, post your artwork, stream your movie or your music.

In addition, the accessibility of pretty much the sum of human knowledge and creative works is altering how audiences approach them. If I can read this book for free, will I want, for very much longer, to pay for that one?

I think the answer is probably no.

And I wonder what’s going to happen?

The gatekeepers have less power than ever before. They can no longer keep you from getting your work out to the public. All they can do is curate. Suggest one thing over another. And the fact that they do it from behind a desk in a monolithic museum is becoming less relevant.

We don’t pay so much to go to a movie, anymore. We pay a monthly fee for the right to watch all movies. Curation by algorithm. Because you liked this one, you might like that one.

So, what happens?

How does the model for how creative people get paid change in the face of this new paradigm?

Because it’s going to change, certainly. It already is changing.

Sometimes I think, on some level, that the whole capitalist endeavor has reached the end of its sustainability and, possibly, usefulness.

I just don’t know what takes its place.

I wonder.

This is not original

But I’m adding my endorsement.

Today’s tip is about something I have resisted for a long time.

I believe I’ve written now and again about wanting to lose some weight and about how moving out of the City to car country has sent my weight climbing in the opposite direction.

For a long time, I resisted the idea that I would have to actually go on a diet. I thought, maybe, if I could just motivate myself to get back into exercising that would be enough.

Diets don’t have a good reputation. People keep falling off them.

They don’t have a lot of culinary appeal. Maybe some of you like cottage cheese, but…. blech!

My sister, however, directed me to myfitnesspal, and it was a most excellent tip!

I am now, for the first time in my life counting calories. I’ve been doing it for 9 weeks, and I have lost 10 pounds.

Not bad, huh?

Myfitnesspal makes it easy to track your food intake with thousands of entries in their database and an easy interface.

Now, I will say that nutritional content has been a secondary concern for me in the early stages of shedding these pounds, but just out of necessity, I am eating more fruits and vegetables.

1200 calories is an astonishingly small amount of food, you see, compared to the contemporary diet of most people in this day and age. But, if you eat fruits and vegetables you can eat almost all day—thus, satisfying the “munchies” and still shedding pounds.

But what I like about myfitnesspal is that I can have chips and ice cream so long as I keep them within my calorie budget. Plus, in an incentive to exercise, you can eat more if you track the calories you’ve burned. (I’m walking for pizza is a thought that has crossed my mind more than once on the treadmill.)

I’ve got a ways to go, and I might hit a plateau, of course. I might fail to keep it off.

But I set myfitnessplan goal to lose a pound a week, and I’ve done better than that just by religiously tracking what I eat. I haven’t felt deprived—in fact, I’ve had ice cream every day. I’ve never eaten detested “diet” foods, and it’s been remarkably easy.

So, I’m thanking my sister, my other fitness pal, for the tip, and I’m passing it on to you.

You, too, can learn to like

Yogurt

I’m sure that many of you already do. Like yogurt, I mean.

I, on the other hand, have never been able to acquire a taste for it. I’m aware of the health benefits, of the low calorie-ness of it.

It’s just that I’m a person for whom texture is more important than taste when it comes to food. And, let’s face it, yogurt does not have an appealing texture for one who thinks that the four basic food groups are pizza, popcorn, pickles and potato chips.

I have lately embarked on a serious quest to shed some pounds, however. Consequently, I thought I’d try again to see if there were any yogurt flavors or brands that I could actually bear to swallow.

Now, I’m not saying that it’s likely to become a staple of my diet—although I am starting to appreciate the quickness and portability of it—but the miracle is I think I’ve found one.

Yocrunch Cheesecake-Flavored Yogurt.

It doesn’t taste much like cheesecake. At least, not the delicious Baby Watson Cheesecake of my NYC days. On the other hand, the calorie count is, like, a million times less.

And it’s crunchy!

Well, not the yogurt itself. But it comes packaged with some crunchy graham cracker crust bits that you sprinkle into the yogurt, thus providing some welcome relief from the sheer awful smoothness of the yogurt.

A quick 100 calorie snack.

No comparison to pizza. Or potato chips. Or even pickles.

But it’s edible.

I even selected it out of the refrigerator by choice today. The choice was a little more due to the desire for a fast and easy boost to the blood sugar than to a craving for the actual taste, but I did choose it. And ate it.

And realized that herein lies a miracle.

A yogurt I can stand to eat!

Anna Deveare Smith

National treasure.

Anna Deveare Smith is a playwright, professor and one of the most extraordinary actresses you will ever see.

She is a pioneer of documentary theatre and became widely known for her one-person shows in which she used material from countless interviews to construct a script and embody the people interviewed. Her best known pieces using this technique are Fires in the Mirror about the Crown Heights Riot of 1991 and Twilight: Los Angeles about the 1992 L.A. riots. If you get a chance to see them, do!

She is now known to a wider public due to her recurring roles as National Security Advisor Nancy McNally on The West Wing and as the hospital administrator on Nurse Jackie.

Her ability to fully embody, physically and vocally, the people she has interviewed has been rightfully described as chameleon-like. It’s truly amazing.

I’m really excited about an interview she recently gave to The Boston Globe in which she talks about writing a fictional play for the first time. I can’t wait to see what that turns out to be.

Go take a look at the complete interview, of course, but here’s a little bit that caught my attention and explains a lot about Ms. Smith’s work:

The thing that speaks to me the most is the idea that a child understands, an early, primal idea, which is: That’s not fair. When somebody tells me something in the course of the interview that’s not fair, I become very interested because I know what’s going to happen linguistically is that as they tell me about a moment or something that shattered their sense of who they were, they will then have to go to their most rich resources to make the world right again, in front of me. And that’s when I start working.

It sure is good work.

Take a look at this TED Talk and see for yourself.

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants