Quantum Storytelling

Life deadlines make a great motivator. What if you found out that in eight months you were going to be very busy. So busy that you may have significantly less time for writing or other activities?

How would that change the way you spend your time right now? Would you work a little harder, or a little faster?

I don’t believe much in the clinical diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder, but if I did I’m sure I’d qualify as having it. Without getting too deep into my reasoning behind why I don’t believe in the clinical diagnosis of this particular ‘disease,’ I will justify myself by saying that almost everyone I’ve ever known is prone to distraction at one time or another. Some more than others. Some less.

I think it’s part of being human.

And the people who are Supreme Beings of Focus? You would often be surprised to learn that they too are distracted fools, but the difference is that they’ve learned to cope, hack their way around, or somehow deal with the problem in an effective manner. It is learning to avoid being a victim of your own problems and weaknesses by compensating through what I call ’self-hacks.’ Others call them ‘life-hacks.’

Since I am hopelessly distracted, I need to cope and hack my way through life’s problems to find focus.

Here are some nifty tools I’ve found to help:

• David Seah’s Printable CEO - It’s a weekly ‘Goals Tracker’ that you assign higher points to critical activities and lower points to less critical activities. You tally up the days for an end-of-the-week total, and see where you did well and where you went wrong.

“But what would that tell me? That I’m distracted? I already know that!”

Sure, but measure and find out exactly where and when you were distracted. There’s also the Gaming component. I love games. That’s why I work in the game industry. So any kind of tool that can present a personal challenge or problem as a game, with an objective or ‘final score’ gets me all hot and bothered. Printable CEO Goals Tracker lays out your week like a game.

How high can your score be? Can you get the highest score possible? Higher than last week? Or the week before? Oh, the fun of a challenge! Can you game your weekly writing goals?

• Notepaper Generator - I really like this one for the summary box. This would be great for doing a story outline, where you summarize the goals of the scene in the little box and have more detailed notes running down the page.

• Nodepad Generator - This one is more of a task tracker with space for notes.

What I like about these two is you could print them out with the marked punch holes and slap them in a story project binder. Mmm… paper gets me excited.

There’s also self-improvement guy Steve Pavlina, who has a bunch of great articles–including this one.

You’ve got to love LifeHacking. Speaking of which, I have to give credit where credit is due. All of these things I’ve discovered through my daily reading of LifeHacker.com, and digg.

I’ve been quiet the last few days. It’s because I’ve been exploring various open source Content Management Systems (C.M.S.) to see if one of them would work better for some of my websites. I’ve tried PostNuke, phpNuke, Drupal, Joomla, and Mambo Open Source. There’s a writing point at the end of this, I promise. But first, let me give a quick highlight of what I discovered.

PostNuke - Not bad. Templates seem pretty limited, and in the end it ‘felt’ more like a collaborative site tool. Like Wiki, but with an interface. It’s a little hard to explain, but if you take a look at some PostNuke sites you’ll see what I mean.

phpNuke - A lot like PostNuke. Less templates. I didn’t see anything that thrilled me, or that was very different from PostNuke. I’m sure there’s a difference among the hardcore, but I’m not one of those people. I want to build a site fast and hard with as little coding as possible, but with supreme flexibility to make all the kinds of choices I need to make. phpNuke wasn’t it.

Drupal - Drupal scored a lot better in my C.M.S. exploration. Very flexible. Very collaborative. They even have a Book Collaboration feature. That means, you and all your writer friends can login into the main page of your website, and start arranging chapter structures and do your little part of the book.

In the end, I had to pass on this one because it was missing a decent forum plugin/feature, or didn’t seem to interface as nicely as I thought it would. It was also lacking in the template department. All the templates felt very spacious and empty. Maybe that’s just an art/design thing, but if all the Drupal templates end up being spacious and empty in the same kind of way, then Drupal could be to blame?

Joomla - This is supposed to be, “Mambo, but better. And made by the same guys!” Except, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it from Mambo, and after messing with it while I was extremely tired, it just didn’t grab me. To Joomla’s defense, by this point my patience was wearing down a little and I was ready to move on as soon as I realized the tool wasn’t going to do it for me. And it pretty much is the same thing as Mambo. Oh well, you live and learn, right?

Mambo Open Source - This was the one I ended up going with. Why? The interface is very slick, very easy. See what I created with it in two days time. And because I thought Mambo and Joomla were different at first. I tried Joomla when I was exhausted, and Mambo when I wasn’t. Mambo wins! ;-)

Those polls? That’s just a component plugin. The forums? That’s a plugin too. The automatic RSS feed config? You’ve probably guessed it - a plugin. And the best part about all of these? They are completely customizeable. You can tell them to be on the left or right sidebar, or aligned to the top, or bottom. You can order the polls to come before or after the navigation bar, login screen, or syndication feeds. It’s entirely flexible, and entirely up to you.

There are tons of Mambo templates, to make your site look relatively unique. Oh, one more thing–and here’s the real kicker–I’ve only touched like 3-4 lines of code throughout the entire time building AbsurdMarketing.com.

Mambo turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. I’ve been making webpages the hard way for too long. Blogger is ok, but it’s just that–blogging. What if you want a full-featured site? Forums? Sure, you can do that. But none of it will interface with Blogger very well - you’d have to say, install phpBB and then put a link to it in your blog sidebar. That doesn’t gel… not very cohesive. Lots of people do that, and you could to–if your host allows php scripts.

That’s the other problem–right now I’m hosted through Yahoo Domains and Yahoo Hosting. They don’t support php, MySQL databases, CGI executables, etc. If you don’t know what these are, that’s ok. Just know you can’t do shopping carts on your site, or true forums, or anything other than basic websites using html and java/javascript/Flash. So I had to sign up with BlueHost in order to do AbsurdMarketing.com. BlueHost supports everything. They also give you single or double-click installs of things like phpBB or Mambo Open Source, shopping carts, all that great stuff.. All the CMS systems I listed above? BlueHost will install them for you in a few clicks, right to your site. Amazing huh?

I’m seriously considering moving redchurch.com and Quantum over to BlueHost, and building some REAL websites. :)

And now it’s time to get to the writing points. Where are the Content Management Systems for writers and creators? Even for game developers? We have very few.

What I’m talking about is this; How much time do you waste formatting things, setting things up, getting things ready, scribbling notes on paper, assembling notes, thoughts, and ideas–practically slaving over these things just so you can finally get to the point where you actually write? I don’t know about you, but I waste a lot of time on non-writing tasks that are prerequisites for the writing.

Sure there’s yWriter, which is great–I’m using it for my rewrite. There’s FreeMind, which I’m also using. I love these tools. But I have to admit, as in all likelihood you will too, they are not Content Management Systems. Some of their features border on C.M.S. But they are not C.M. Systems.

So until we get our Writing Content Management Systems, we will have to continue doing things the Hard Way instead of the Smart Way.

But in the meantime, check out something like Drupal. It might give you some ideas.

Oh yeah, and before I forget–one more plug… here’s Absurd Marketing. I built it in two days without touching much code at all, using a web-based click-driven interface.

Where is the writing C.M.S., indeed.