Google, how did you know??

Clever writing isn’t just about print and type, you know.

Well, first, how do I myself balance these things? Not too well, clearly.

This weekend I was scrubbing and re-building the first chapter of my current novel project. I felt guilty for much of Saturday, agitated by the realization that I could instead be meeting up with people I haven’t seen in a while, or catching up on work, or running a few extra miles, or calling my mom (priorities, people!) or whatever else.

But on the flipside of that coin, these preoccupations already distract me from my project for about 90 percent of any given week.

Many accomplished writers counsel up-starts to block off time for writing each day. That’s easier done if you work a 9-to-5 than if you work a whenever-to-whenever, which happens to be my case–and it’s likely the case for many of us.

But common to both writing and work life is an essential skill: time management. Would if I could get my hands on Hermione’s time turner, but alas–there’s ultimately no neat device, no perfect algorithm that will tell me how much time I should allot or am allowed to spend writing a book. But if you believe in what you’re writing, and if you’re fully confident in your project, then your commitment will fulfill itself, and you’ll figure it out.

(I think.)

I’m back now, though, if only because I think blogging about my project and about writing generally might further fuel my productivity. Or, again, maybe it’ll just end up distracting me. 

Whatever, we’ll sort this shit out later. Fiction is king, so I’ll be blogging less about politics this time around; that I may aspire to be more interesting than the Republican primary calendar. 

I’m working on Chapter 1, 3 and 5 rewrites tonight–fun stuff. Keep ya posted.   

Morrissey:

For the national media, though, the Casey Anthony trial swamped out most other stories, including such minor topics as, er, who will lead the nation.  Eric Ostermeier at Smart Politics researched Lexis-Nexis for the period between the start of the trial and its conclusion yesterday and found that more media attention fell on Anthony than any Republican candidate for the presidential nomination.

Not surprisingly, CNN came in first place in the Casey sweepstakes, with a whopping 567 reports, including those at its sister channel HLN, which covered the trial live.  CNN had more invested in promoting the trial as a news story.  Remember this when media outlets try to argue that there is a “firewall” between news reporting and editorial and sales groups.  ABC finished second with 173 reports in the 42-day period, and Fox got the bronze medal with 122.

Doug:

In any case, while this is depressing in some sense, it is hardly surprising. The television media, especially the cable networks, tends to focus obsessively on trivialities like the Anthony trial, and the audience seems to eat it up. … Certainly people like Ed and I, and probably most of the people who read our respective blogs, would prefer it if the cable networks spend less time on nonsese like this (or other stories like the Natalee Holloway case or, to go back further in time, Jon Benet Ramsey).

I think it’s fair to assess that the Casey Anthony trial attracted more coverage over the past six weeks because the Casey Anthony trial had actually been happening in the past six weeks. The GOP primaries don’t even begin until a year that is not 2011, which we are still very much in the midst of.

So, yeah: Does anyone really mean to argue that what the U.S. really needed over the past couple months was less trial-of-the-century coverage, more reports that Candidate D may or may not have undertipped a waitress at a Denny’s outside of Dover, New Hampshire? Major news networks, especially this early in the race, “tend to focus obsessively on trivialities” no less when reporting who the next president may be. So why beg for a bonus six months of this?

The most prominent past races pitting a president against a former member of his team have come after deep public divisions over war, peace, and security. Lincoln fired McClellan, his top Civil War general, after months of exasperation over how McClellan was fighting the war. The dismissal came in November 1862, and it wasn’t until October 1863, nearly a year later, that McClellan declared himself a Democrat and entered the political arena.

Not that McClellan ever had to criticize Lincoln in public or explain to voters why he disagreed with his own party platform calling for a negotiated settlement with the Confederacy. Back then, “presidential candidates did not campaign themselves,” says John C. Waugh, author of the 2010 book Lincoln and McClellan. “McClellan certainly didn’t. He made three appearances during the whole campaign. He didn’t speak at any of them.” Lincoln didn’t campaign, either, but he pulled levers from behind the scenes and beat McClellan by 10 points.

Okay, so McClellan was a wartime U.S. Army general who campaigned against and otherwise antagonized a wartime president. None of that is true of Huntsman; none of the context is comparable to this possible scenario of Huntsman vs. President Obama. Having once served as a general is not the same as having once served as a political appointee. Dare I say, these two scenarios aren’t meaningfully comparable at all.

On a separate note, the analysis in this piece is awful.

“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.” – Martin Luther King, Jr

A quick google search turns up lots of tweets, all of them from today.  Searching Martin Luther King Jr. quote pages for the word “enemy” does not turn up this quote, only things that probably wouldn’t go over nearly so well, like “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy to a friend.” I’m pretty sure that this quote, too, is fake.

She attributes spread of the “quotation” to unease among many observers that Americans have seized this moment, a long-postponed victory over a global villain, to take leave of our own moral bearings.

It is hard not to think that some of the impulse to celebrate “justice being done” may also contain a certain pleasure in revenge — not just “closure” but “getting even.” The world is not safer with Osama bin Laden’s violent demise (threat levels are going up, not down), so no cause for celebration there; evil has not been finally removed from the Earth, so no reason for jubilation on that count. The War on Terror goes on, so there is no closure in that regard. The truth is that “celebrating justice” when one person is killed — as happens regularly in the gang wars of American cities — only incites further desire for revenge, which, from “the other side’s” viewpoint, is usually called “justice.”

I think there’s a difference between celebrating the death of a categorically evil force and morbidly savoring the many crude details: that bin Laden “saw it coming,” that the bullet smashed through his cornea, that maybe we’ll get to grin over photos of a bruised, bloodied corpse. Anyone who could savor a death — any death — so thoroughly, I don’t want to share a moral plane with in condemning murder and murderers.

All of that said, I have no idea what Kai Wright is on about:

We have a $14 trillion deficit. A massive giveaway to defense contractors lurks inside that number—a transfer of public funds that has been justified, in ways both explicit and implicit, by the evil visage of Osama Bin Laden. And now, Washington is as likely as not to make up the loss by taking apart the safety net that once created something like economic justice in America. But the president would like us to agree that we are great because we can kill. “May God bless the United States of America,” Obama declared last night, a sentiment echoed by so many today. Indeed. But the familiar refrain feels to me more like an urgent plea for forgiveness than the triumphant war cry that it is.

So there you have it: We have no business celebrating the death of a mass murderer as a basically just event, because our economic system is corrupt. It’s a sloppy and obnoxious argument — all 1960s sentiment, but with none of the inspiration or focus. It’s the moral pose of a Very Serious Liberal. It’s a pose that aimlessly strains both the poseur and anyone who entertains him.

Part of Trump’s appeal is that he is a giant middle finger to the political system—the politicians, the press, all of us. This is all very postmodern, of course. Trump is not a champion of those who have lost faith in the system. He’s a champion of himself. His views are not well-known. But he is a place for the faithless to park their feelings.

Neither Trump nor ‘birtherism’ are champions of the downtrodden, sure — but they’re not “a place for the faithless to park their feelings” either. ‘Birtherism’ has nothing to do with “the system;” it’s a reaction to the scary, Manchurian, black guy who happens to be helming the system at this moment.

“The system” now isn’t much more oppressive, or significantly different, than it was three years ago under our most-recently-former president. “The system” (and the unemployment rate, and the federal budget deficit, and the housing market, and income tax rates) won’t be instantaneously rebooted and transformed upon Mitt Romney’s inauguration. Yet I bet you many dollars that the ‘birthers’ will resume their normal sleep cycles the moment that one no longer occupies the Oval Office, just as they slept soundly prior to his inauguration.

This is all to say: Jamelle Bouie is correct.

A few commentators have suggested that we’re living in the age of conspiracies, and while that might be true, I’m not sure that it explains the extent to which birtherism has found a prominent place within the Republican Party. Here’s my guess: birtherism is prominent because the president is black. To a depressingly large number of Americans, “blackness” runs counter to this country’s identity, and an African American president is, by definition, illegitimate. Short of resigning the presidency, there’s really nothing Obama can do to change that.