[LS] Finding Time to Write - Cows are Content, Though
Sure, authors write content, but cows are content. It's the difference between attitude and output. Yes, a pun, depending on how you look at it.
Hi,
There’s more to get done, and yet I frequently get asked how I do it all - I respond with a couple of quips: a) It gets easier after your hundredth book, b) My secret weapon is walking among cows…
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Farm News - New paddocks every few days. The great miscanthus grazing experiment showing results.
Writing News - Keep putting in my time every day on the Copywriting book. And I share my tips for getting things done.
Expectancy and the Future-verse. We’ve been over this before, but the bottom-line truth bears retelling.
Farming News
I’m getting requests from someone near and dear to me that I need to get the cows back up to cut the grass again. My response was - they’ll be back pretty soon. I just have some more paddocks to rotate them through first… (It’s spring, and “normal” front yards are being mowed every week around here.)
Curious about Miscanthus?
Miscanthus is a hybrid Japanese cane that grows about 12ft tall during the summer, and then leaves tall stalks that are very hard to cut down.
You may remember this from that remarkable story from a few weeks ago, with a photo of burning them off - where the flames got taller than the trees (some hundred-plus feet tall.)
That’s the side benefit of their original use as bio-fuel. What I haven’t been able to find was anyone using them for grazing - other than a quiet, short comment that the farmers in Japan would send their cattle out into the Miscanthus in June to keep it trimmed down.
I finally got things organized. After that burn, I fenced off a little bit of those 30+ acres so I could test the idea of grazing them. Before, there was just too much out there, and I couldn’t get them to graze it fast enough. I do have pictures of them pulling down huge stalks of the stuff and then chewing it like long, thick, green spaghetti noodles. Kinda.
By winter, it’s all just stalk, and useless for food. And hard for the machinery to cut it. By the next spring, it’s still there and so is hard to walk through or graze in the middle of.
This year, they are onto it early. That’s the top photo. You can see on the outside of the fence that the cane is already nearly eighteen inches tall, whilc the cow side is quite short. (Yes, that’s an electrified fence.) They are grazing it daily since they go to the water diversion pool for water a couple of times each day. And the grass right next to the water is always short, since the graze on their way over and then back again.
What’s great about this is that most grass, during a good year, with lots of warm rain, will grow about two or three feet high. So this cane means I should be able to keep them fed on a small piece of ground all through the summer and fall, until the first hard freeze. And if they don’t keep up with it, should be able to burn it off when the snow is on the ground.
That means we may be able to feed more cattle on less acres, even in a drought.
I’ll keep you posted. But the idea here is turning a problem into an opportunity.
Tiny Home News
The violet jelly turned out great.
Another cute pet shot - through the screen door:
Our two guard dogs as a kitten sandwich for our cat. Like the famous “Ghostbusters” movie line: “Cats and dogs sleeping together!”
They get along fine. Yes, they are up all night, so sleep most of the day.
We’re into gardening now. And I went down to my sister’s to get some dark pond-bottom dirt from her place. (Pix next week of how her pond-refurbishing came out.) But, despite my best efforts, I don’t have any pictures of it to share.
Today, we went and got five barrels (plastic, food-grade) to cut in half tomorrow and go get some more dirt. Nearly impossible to lift into the pickup, so I back the truck up next to the pile, and shovel it in, then scootch it to the front of the backend. A process. Then we bring it back to re-mix, shoveling it into a wheel barrow for that, then back into the now-empty half-barrel and wrestle it into position for the garden.
Container gardening, scaled. We also have found we can get empty fivc-gallon icing buckets cheaply from the WalMart bakery. And three-gallon ones. With lids. For about 80% off of what we pay anywhere else.
Those are going to have potatoes in the big buckets, with lettuce and radishes in the smaller ones. The five 55-gallon half-barrels will have tomatoes and whatnot. (Planning is in progress.)
Container gardening means less time weeding, but more time watering. Pix to come.
Writing News
Still taking my hour or so in the early morning, plus any time I can in the afternoon to push that Copywriting book forward.
The great thing about rehashing and revamping someone else’s book is that you learn so much as you put them into your own words. I’m trimming down and reorganizing the original text of a certain book, and make it easier to read, while of course crediting that author (long dead) and telling people to get his book. All this work is because he made huge breakthroughs in copywriting, and is mostly unknown.
This book is a lot of this. I’m pulling back from the classics - which are in libraries, but not widely known. Starting in the turn of the 19th century where the first copywriter was hired under that title. Then come forward to find only the truly evergreen principles (that never change) and not including any book which is just the same old stuff from known for over a century - but twisted to fit under different nomenclature.
You’ll hear more about this later, once I get over this particular hump.
Proofing Update
Oh, the proofing progress. It might be done in a few days. And then I get to go back through and tweak everything.
I have a new business plan developing. Look for more of this on Monday’s newsletter. This might mean I serialize the book through that blog - and maybe as a podcast.
But meanwhile, publish the book as a hardback…
How I Get Things Done
I’ve been asked many times how I get everything done. And yes, I’ve written and published around 166 fiction short stories, plus half-a-hundred or so non-fiction books. All self-published.
Yes, the half-joke I tell, “Well, it gets easier after the first hundred.” Because it does. But I like seeing the eyes go wide.
Seriously, I don’t try to get everything done. I do the the most important things done, and juggle that list of what’s more important than other things. And many things have to wait for the best time (like: digging fenceposts is easier in the Spring after several days of rain. And: it’s easier to set in steel post for a new fence during warm days in winter when the ground is soft enough to just sink them by hand. Also: fence off the front and back yard so the cows can mow it as they graze.)
You focus on one thing and get that done. Schedules are also key. I get up early and do at least one hour of writing before breakfast. After that, I check the cows and move them as needed. After lunch, on slow days, I can usualy get some more writing in. At night, it’s time for reading other’s books or watching movies - for inspiration and education.
An old phrase goes: Don’t sweat the small stuff - it’s all small stuff. And: Learn to pick your battles.
Hope that helps.
Oh - another point I’ve probably shared before: cows are empathetic. Walking around in nature and among them tends to calm me down no matter how the day has gone so far. My twice-daily pasture walks tend to keep me on an even keel. All in addition to my daily exercise.
The Recurring Special Offer:
ONCE AGAIN, the beta-readers version of Writerpreneur OS is still available. It’s still being proofed, so there will be revisions coming that makes your reading easiter.
But if you download before I get the most recent version up, you’ll still find some great stuff that’s relegated to cutting room floor material. Keep copies of your versions to see the changes. Gumroad will allow you to download it as many times as you want.
Here’s the link: https://livingsensical.gumroad.com/l/WOS01-beta-readers
Find the oopsies. Leave comments, reviews. Ask questions. Be one of the first anywhere.
Between 250 and 300 pages, depending on format. Available are epub and PDF. No charge. (Free download, in other words.)
Nearly 20 years of writing-publishing-entrepreneuring - all rolled into a single book. And updated. Condensed.
Expectancy and Future-Verse
I think I’ve told you this before. I was busy researching along and finding out how the universe works - distilling commonalities to patterns and then to systems and elements. Finally, I got it down to exactly what makes this universe tick.
It was going back through Earl Nightingale’s “Strangest Secret” and all the books he referenced there - like Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” and Bristol’s “Magic of Believing.”
It’s probably another version of Nightingale’s Strangest Secret: “We become what we think about.” In the old Huna belief system, that is: “The world is what you think it is.”
Nightingale’s own background was finding it in Hill’s book - that he could control what he thought about and so could create the world around him. Bristol’s book then built onto that. And of course, there’s “The Secret” DVD, and others.
They all say the same thing. And it is really whatever you expect life to hand to you, it pretty much does. Of course, if you can have an attitude of “take it or leave it” and are grateful for whatever you do wind up with, then you tend to get what you want more often than not - even if it’s kind of a miraculous coincidence at times.
Nightingale had is as keeping a “calm, cheerful, expectant” attitude. All the time.
If takes a bit of practice but is really that simple. Get anything and everything you want out of life. (Oh, that’s a book title of mine, isn’t it…)
Again, and always: test this for yourself.
Thanks for being there, opening this.
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I hope your life is not too interesting to be overwhelming, but sufficiently engaging to keep you amused. (Like some of us here...)
Robert
PS. Again, you can always email me about anything.
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