Today, I wrote a pretty cool perl script that takes what I have written for a day and sorts it into my big-huge-file(s) for writing, based on subject. It has to be formatted correctly. Basically a chunk of text will start
ideas
Angst from 6th grade
Angst from High School
Angst from Purdue losing to Notre Dame again, **** the Irish
Angst from a GameFAQs message board post 8 years ago I can't let go of
Angst from someone pointing out a typo in a review/blog post
movies
Ishtar
Yentl
books
Infinite Jest
And so forth. The main file has books, etc. and so it should sweep through and pick up everything, and if it doesn't, there's a handy little dump file the unused stuff goes to.
Of course, it did. I thought of many ways the script could go wrong and 1) not put information in or 2) quite possibly zap my whole ideas file, which I've backed up, but it still scared me.
This can be shaken out with more testing, but of course, the immediate step back I took was amusing. So I'll still be doing a few cut-and-pastes a day. In fact, I may still do so. It's worth being sure about, and I enjoy rereading the miscellaneous ideas to look for something good--I just need to quit letting backlogs pile up.
Because of this, I hid in/stepped up to work-related stuff I'd wanted to do for a while. I got a good chunk done, actually. Seeing how tangled my code was a year ago, and how easily I could muck with it, really made me feel good about what I have come to expect from myself in terms of clarity, directness, flexibility, and practicality.
I think that's come to apply to "real" writing too. It doesn't automatically inject that creative magic, either, but it leaves more chances for it...
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