Edition 001

Last week my missus had a notion of growing tomatoes in the kitchen window so out she went and bought a packet of tomato seeds.

She paid €5 for the seeds.

“Would you not just have opened a tomato and taken the seeds from it?” I asked her.

“I never thought of that”, she said.

We took the 4 extremely high grade tomato seeds from the packet and planted them in the window box together, watered them and waited.

A couple days later I took a tomato from the fridge, split it open, took the gooey seeds out onto my finger and flicked them into the dirt.

There must have been about 15 seeds altogether and I just left them where the fell.

Let’s see how these get on compared to the shop bought seeds, I thought.

Two years ago we grew tomatoes indoors quite successfully, but the plants got out of control. We could have cultivated them a little better.

Signs Of Life

I’ve been watching for progress and watering them daily.

Then the seeds began to sprout. The shop bought ones growing faster it seems than the ones I took directly from the fruit.

Then I got thinking about how such a simple task as planting seeds allows such a complex sequence to start.

In fact the truth of the matter is that the complex sequence of things exists already in potential, waiting for the conditions to be right.

What role do we play in it? A small part I think. We just follow the rhythm, flow with the momentum, and watch it happen.

The shop bought seeds sat in the darkness of the seed packet for god knows how long. Then water, soil, sunlight, and bam!

It’s amazing isn’t it?

StoryBy Stuff This Week

I’ve been on Medium pretty much every day lately although my own writing has suffered a bit due to work commitments getting in the way.

My day job can be very demanding and has taken a lot of my spare time, so…

I’ve quit.

I handed my notice in last Monday. That means I need to replace my income quick smart, so maybe a little pressure there. But on the whole I’m happier.

It means I can put more time into my writing and art, then figure out how best to sell it and make a living.

I’ve been picking up some good articles and other stuff this week that I wanted to share with you so without further ado, here yiz go;

Books

Julian Barbour: The End Of Time

I bought a ton of books recently which will very likely keep me reading for the rest of the year or even longer.

One that I’m very eager to get stuck into is The End of Time by Julian Barbour. This book flies in the face of commonly held scientific beliefs around the existence of time. Interesting to me because I’m writing a book titled “The Illusion of Time”.

Julian Barbour argues that if nothing happened in the universe, if it were static, if nothing changed, then time would stop. He says time is nothing but change that we perceive occurring all around us, it is not time we witness. Put simply, he says time does not exist.

Articles

Writing Faster

I used to subscribe to The Copybot from Demian Farnworth, but he moved away from it in recent times so I jumped ship on that. However, I was happy to see he was writing here on Medium. He’s got good stuff on writing and recently wrote about the length of time required to write an article.

I can take anywhere from a couple hours to a couple of days to produce one and generally depends how much research I need to do on the topic. Anyway, I thought it was a good read. Check out the article

Should You Even Try to Write Faster?
It took me six hours in six days to write this post. It’s less than 430 words. That’s about 1.2 words per minute. Is…medium.com

Daily Routines

Yesterday I wrote about establishing daily routines. I recognise now that my own work scenario is changing, I need to establish better routine for writing and drawing.

Success does leave clues for sure, but I think we need to be careful not to look at what successful others do and assign their practices as precepts to success, whatever success happens to be.

A Writing Daily Routine | Larry G. Maguire
I'm about to move into writing full-time and for structure, I need a writing daily routine. I need a simple routine…larrygmaguire.com

The Beauty of Boredom

I was browsing Medium last week and I found this short but sweet little piece from alicia johnson. She writes about taking the month of June off to do nothing in particular. It pings the tones of Alan Watts as she talks about the analogy of sailing to explain that period in our experience where we seem to be stalled.

The Collaborative Marriage: The Beauty of Boredom
Why take a month offjournal.thriveglobal.com

More on Boredom

In this article by Niklas Goeke he writes about the illusion we often hold in our minds about work. Some of us believe the easier the job, the less demanding the job, then the better it is.

And maybe that could be true if we need to focus our mental energy on a side project that we are developing, but our core work has to be challenging and stimulating.

Taking a boring job, for the sake of doing nothing will end up killing us.

The Collaborative Marriage: The Beauty of Boredom
Why take a month offjournal.thriveglobal.com

Poetry & Prose

I recently requested to write for Other Voices, a new publication from Mike Essig. I’m not a big poetry writer but I’ve got a couple and was looking to share them.

Here’s a verse from Mike that fits the Storymaker idea like hand in glove;

Never Lose Your Edge
A poet can devolve into a preacher,
but the fire of imagination
should never be wasted on homilies.
Find your way back…medium.com

Until Next Week…

More from StoryBy next week. In the meantime, share your best work with us here and help us build and reach more people with the Storymaker content. You don’t need to worry about duplicate content, here’s why

Have a great weekend

-Larry