Poet Ponders the Digital

I encourage writers, including my students, to imagine creative ways to use technology to support writing. Many aspiring writers keep logs of what they have written, to where they have submitted works, and when works have been published or produced.  My magazine columns for one publisher are listed in a basic Excel spreadsheet. Sure, this is using the system as a database, but a list of almost 100 columns doesn't require a database. The spreadsheet column headings are: Column Number, Date Submitted, Date Published, Title, Slug, and Notes. The publication dates trail the submission dates by a month to three months. I thought about adding a "Word Count" column, since I'm paid by the word, but the columns are consistently 1000 words, give or take a few.  Tracking scripts, however, requires more than a spreadsheet. That's because I might have nine or ten works submitted at any moment. Acceptance or rejection might come six months to a year after sending a wor...

Back to school means back to the battles with Blackboard (I've posted on that plenty of times). Even if BB was the perfect learning management system, there would still be the days spent planning and organizing online content for a new course. This week, I'm gathering the reusable materials I will upload and preparing new materials. By next week, the shell for the writing course I'm teaching will be reasonably complete. My summer was meant to be spent learning to program in Objective-C. It was also meant as a time to finished a research project and revise an academic book chapter. None of those things happened. Life in the digital age doesn't seem to give us more time, but it does give us more potential tasks. My to-do list kept growing faster than I could complete projects. Maybe it is a time management issue. I completed a lot of tasks in the last few months, many of them creative writing projects. I also am preparing a new website complementing my creative inte...