Some Knowledge

I just finished reading a book called The Search that I checked out of the library yesterday.  This was an interesting book.  I learned a lot about the history and development of the various search engines.  I like reading about the net.  I like writing stuff that ends up on the net, like this blog.

I haven’t been doing much else besides reading today.  I just hooked up to check my emails and see how much traffic my blogs are getting.  I might go back to reading books for a while after I am done here.  One of these days I will get around to writing a book on something.  Right now, I just feel like checking in on everything and leaving a few posts to keep my blogs active.

This is a book by Jim Britt about how to go into business for yourself.  I checked this book out of the library yesterday and finished reading it this afternoon.  I have a lot of time to read now that I am not writing on my blogs constantly.  Anyway, this was a fairly decent book about business.  It had a lot of good advice for how to run an operation and how to make money.

I read books like this all the time.  I am probably an expert on getting rich now.  I got a good deal on the information in this book, as it was checked out for free from the library.  I would have to say that my library card has probably saved me hundreds of dollars already just in the books I haven’t bought because I get them for free now.  What a deal.

About the only practical advise this author gives for making money is to sell something.  He gives as an example his MLM business of selling soap.  I am not about to borrow thousands of dollars to buy soap to sell.  There has to be a better way to go into business than to sell some overpriced product.  I got another book on business from the library yesterday.  The Plymouth Library has a whole shelf full of books on business.  It will take me a while to read them all.

Go to the library.  Seriously, they have a lot of books.  As long as you bring stuff back on time it doesn’t cost anything.  They have new books and old books.  Depending on how big the library is, you might have any number of books.  If they don’t have the book, there is an inter-library loan program.

I have a room full of books that I have bought over the years.  I wonder what to do with these books after I read them.  I suppose I could sell them.  I have given away hundreds of books over the years.  I should have just gone to the library.  In any case, maybe I will start an online book store.

So, if you like to read, get a library card.  Go to the library cnd check out a book.  Of course, there are a lot of free books on the net as well.  Try the UPenn Digital Library for some of them.  There is also Google Books, which has a lot of material.  If you like to read, there is no end to stuff you can find to read for free.  Have fun.

There are a lot of books in the world.  Some authors seem to think the point of writing a book is to see how many words they can use to state a simple fact.  Lately, I have been learning to read for content.

I read a lot of nonfiction books.  The important thing about nonfiction is the facts it contains.  If you don’t have some interesting or important facts there’s no point writing a book.  You can get a lot of information from the table of contents.  This section should give you a good idea about what is in the book.

I generally read the introduction to a book, because it tends to sum up what the book is about.  It is a waste of time to read acknowledgements and dedications.  Some books are set up for skimming.  They have bold section headings that convey the important points covered inside.  These can lead you to information that is of interest to you.

Many books are written for people who have no clue about the subject.  For instance, most books about blogging are filled with a lot of useless information on how to set up a blog.  Seriously, you can find all this out by visiting the blogging website.  This material makes the books longer and more boring for people who already know this stuff.  Seriously, if the author is saying something you already know, skip ahead.

Sometimes you find parts of a book more interesting than others.  This is a sign that there is new material here.  If the author says the same thing over and over again, you are not getting your money’s worth out of that book.  Go to a library and look around.  All the books on the same topic are stored together.  Skim through the book and find one that is useful.  Forget about the rest.  Nobody lives long enough to read all the books.

Of course, this method doesn’t work for fiction.  You will want to read the whole novel to enjoy the story.  This can take a while.  If you read books on how to do stuff, the skimming method works fine.  You can get through a few books in a day just reading the parts that interest you.  Books with pictures are good as well.  Sometimes a picture says things text never could.  Get what you need out of your reading and move on.  There is no point reading something that’s dull or boring.  Scan for words that interest you and slow down to find out what you need.  Of course, there are books that are good all the way through, but they are rare.  Use the abilities of your mind to get what you need from a book and you will be putting that information to work for your benefit that much sooner.

A book is just a very long piece of writing.  Lots of people write books.  It takes some time and some effort to write a book.  There are a lot of things that go into a book.  You will not be able to write a book in one day, unless it is a very short book.  Think of writing a book as a project that you work on every day.  If you stick with it long enough, you will have your book.

If you think about it, a blog is like a book.  The only difference is that it’s written in reverse chronological order.  A book is written in a more linear fashion, with each subsequent chapter following the first.  Someday there will be an option on blogs to post things in chronological order, so people will be able to write novels online.  For now, it is better to use a word processor to write your book.

There are two basic categories of books, fiction and non-fiction.  Fiction is stories you make up.  Non-fiction is stuff about things that are supposed to be true.  If you are writing the story of your life, it might be a combination of these two categories, because you will probably have to make things up to fill in the blanks where you don’t remember details.  Both kinds of books might require research.  Non-fiction usually involves more research than fiction, because you have to get the facts straight.

If you want to write a book, it will take some time.  You will have to work on your project for many days.  It takes time to type out all the words in a book.  It takes time to think up all the things you want to say.  Don’t let the gravity of the task overwhelm you.  Write your book a little bit at a time.  Even if you only manage a thousand words a day, in a hundred days you will have a fairly long book.

In some ways, this blog is like a long book.  I have been working on this blog for over a year now, adding to it almost every day.  Still, the many posts here do not have focus or coherence like you would find in a book.  A book is usually about one story or topic.  This blog is about many things.  It would not work as a book.  Find something that interests you, do some research, and start to write.  You do not have to be perfect in the first draft.  That’s what revision is for.  You may end up rewriting your book many times.  It takes some effort to get words right.  Take your time and try to be as interesting as possible, and one day, you will have a book to shop around to publishers.

I took some books and movies back to the library this afternoon and checked out some more.  I think I like the library.  They have a lot of books, and all kinds of DVDs, and I haven’t even looked through the CDs yet.  I think they even have video games these days.  It beats the hell out of buying a book and having it sit around taking up space.  I must remember to thank whoever came up with the idea for a library.  It’s an idea from the ancient world.  Those ancient people had a few good ideas.

I just stopped by here this evening to check on how things are going on this blog.  People still seem to be finding the stuff I post here.  There are not a lot of people reading the new material though.  I have gotten into the habit of writing these little posts about things that are happening and things I have been doing.  It’s better than nothing.  I don’t really feel the need to be useful these days.  I am still trying to think of other projects to do.  I checked out a book today about how to find inspiration as a writer.  At least, I think that’s what this book is about.  The first 30 pages seemed to be nothing but trivial life stories about how this author doesn’t want to write any more.  Apparently it took her a month to get the first 24 pages written.  I suppose if I worked at it, it would take me a couple days, maybe even just one day, to write that much drivel.  Still, it’s interesting to get another person’s opinion on things like art.

I am off now to do some more research online.  I am reading about meditation and psychic phenomena.  I am interested in the paranormal.  Maybe I will write my own book about the strange properties of the human mind.  Anyway, I am going to poke around the net, then watch TV for a while.

It would be a long book.  Already, this is the 566th post here.  While some of my posts go 2000 words, most are in the 300-500 word range.  I estimate that in the last year, I have written something like 200,000 words on this blog.  That’s a couple of long novels.  All this is from writing for less than an hour a day.

Of course, I don’t do a lot of revising on this blog.  I tend to write something, read it over for mistakes, then hit the publish button and forget about it.  There’s really no point in doing multiple drafts for a blog post.  I am not writing any academic tome.  It’s just a blog that has some stuff people occasionally read.  Right now, I am getting like one page view for every three articles a day.  That’s not a lot, considering how many posts are on this blog, but it amounts to a few people every day being exposed to my writing.  I think that’s cool.

All this blogging is good practice for writing other things.  I have noticed my writing level has gone down a lot since I started blogging.  This means I am more understandable.  The easier it is to understand what a person writes, the more people who will be drawn to your writing.  I like to develop a simple style of writing.  I like to say what I am trying to say and then move on.  I do not like to make puzzles out of words like some scholarly people do.  I did not go to graduate school to learn how to confuse people.

So, one of these days I think I am going to start a new writing project.  It will be something with my word processor.  It is easier to write on a word processor than it is on a blog input form.  A word processor will auto-capitalize the first words of a sentence.  A blog input tells you if a word is spelled wrong, but offers no suggestions on what the right spelling is.  The only thing that will be different on my new project will be that I will have to shop my work around and find a publisher.  I want to kill trees and make money.  I see no way to make an electronic novel pay off.  People don’t read a lot of novels on their computers.

If this blog was a book, it would be a long book.  One of these days I have to look through what I have written here and see how I have developed in the last year.  While I have made no money off this blog, I have learned some things about writing.  Overall, this project has been successful and has taught me to take my writing seriously and to work on it every day.  I will continue to post things here, and maybe add some interesting pictures from time to time.  Right now, I am off to do some research on the web.  Perhaps someday I will be so famous that this blog becomes popular.  Until then, it is here to record my thoughts and anything else that strikes me as being worthy of a post.

I checked Tim Ferris’ book The 4-Hour Work Week out of the library yesterday afternoon.  I spent some time yesterday and today reading this book.  It seemed like an interesting book.  It had a lot to say about business and setting up operations to sell stuff to make money.  It also talked a lot about how to spend money.  In fact, after reading the whole thing, I would have to say that this book is more about how to spend money than how to make money.

One of the things Ferris talks about in this book is how to hire other people to do work and how to make your business take care of itself.  This was very interesting.  I’m not sure any of this will help me in my quest for wealth.  It might be good advice to get rid of people in your business who cause problems and not deal with troublesome customers, but shouldn’t that be obvious?  Some of the things this guy talks about seem pretty shady, like using autoresponders to avoid communicating with people.  If you don’t want email, don’t check it.  If you don’t want to talk to people on the phone, get rid of it.  Communication is there to transfer information among different people so they can get what they want, not to annoy you.  If you are annoyed by people communicating with you, maybe you are in the wrong business.

Ferris seems to put a lot of emphasis on traveling the world.  That’s fine, if you want to throw all your cash away on visiting places you could find out about in books or by other means.  One of my life goals is not to become a permanent tourist.  I skipped over most of the chapter on travel.  I don’t need other people trying to tell me how to spend the money I don’t have yet.  Perhaps he was including this as an advertisement for the travel industry.  There were enough references to places I could spend money in that chapter to make a millionaire broke.

Overall, this book was a good read and was entertaining.  It didn’t really show me anything new, but it was written in a very readable style.  I’m glad I found this book at the library and did not have to fork over $20 for it from the book store.  I got some information and ideas from reading this, so it was not a waste of time.

I went to the library yesterday and got a card so I can check out books, movies, and games now.  It doesn’t cost anything to check out stuff from the library.  There are a lot of interesting books to read.  They have movies and games and audio books and music.  Why didn’t I think of doing this before?

I think I spent two hours yesterday exploring the library.  I can use my card at a whole bunch of other libraries as well as just the local branch.  I can get stuff online from the databases as well.  It’s one thing to read stuff off the net, where anyone can post anything.  It’s another thing to read material that has been through editors and publishers.  People tend to check facts and spelling before they commit something to being printed, because it costs money to make books.  I like all the free stuff online, but you can get free stuff at the library as well.

I found a book on writing yesterday afternoon and I am already more than half way through it.  It would have cost me $20 to buy this book new, if I could even find it, and then it would have sat on my book shelf taking up space when I finished reading it.  A library is a better deal than a book store, though they do not have as many new books.  That’s one of the things about books though, they don’t have to be new for you to get good information from them.  Facts don’t go changing a whole lot in life.

I am off now to do some reading online and maybe start up a writing project.  I have already written about a thousand words today on my blogs, but I may start another writing project with the aim of getting published on dead tree fibers.  Blogs are nice, but the chance of making any profit off a blog is pretty slim.  There is a whole world of writing waiting for me if I will only put in the effort to poke keys and do the thinking required to make a story or an article.  I now have access to tons of books and media that will cost me nothing more than the gas to get back and forth to the place.  Someday I will even finish reading my own collection of books.  Right now, I am off to find out how to be a better writer.

I think I am going to go out this afternoon and get a library card.  I haven’t been to a library in a long time.  I have so many books that I’ve bought that I haven’t thought of going to the library in a long time.  They have movies now that you can check out and watch, and they have video games at some libraries even.

I used to like going to the library just to read books and browse through the shelves.  There is a lot of information in the library.  There is a lot of information online as well, but a lot of the free stuff is nonsense and very commercial.  If I ever run out of ways to spend money, Internet, I’ll let you know.

So, I am off for a while on a quest for information in the real world.  I think I will come back later to do some writing on my new project.  I did some research this morning on various things about writing novels, but a lot of the stuff I found online was various sales pitches for training I could buy.  I am off to the real world to look for hard copy that might help me in my quest to become a bettter writer.  Maybe I will make a career out of this yet.