{"id":32305,"date":"2013-05-10T04:50:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-10T03:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/daily-rituals\/32305\/"},"modified":"2013-05-10T04:50:00","modified_gmt":"2013-05-10T03:50:00","slug":"daily-rituals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/daily-rituals\/","title":{"rendered":"Daily Rituals"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Daily Rituals<\/h2>\n
Email<\/a> \u00a0 \"Print Print<\/a> \u00a0 \"Share Share<\/a><\/div>\n
Posted on May\u00a09,\u00a02013<\/h6>\n\n\n\n\n
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By Gabriel Thompson<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cDaily Rituals: How Artists Work\u201d<\/em>
A book edited by Mason Currey<\/strong><\/p>\n

Precisely one day before this book review was due, I walked from my Oakland apartment to my Oakland office, a 20-minute southbound stroll on Telegraph Avenue. The scenery isn\u2019t particularly inspiring: The stretch includes multiple funeral homes, a dark freeway underpass that reeks of urine, and\u2013more often than not\u2013a new batch of glimmering glass along the curb, evidence of fresh auto theft. But the walk, especially when I\u2019m up against a deadline, can help nudge my mind onto a productive path, and on the best of days I stride into an opening line and quickly get lost in the assignment.<\/p>\n

Not always though. On this day, I brewed a small pot of coffee, cracked my knuckles, loosened my shoelaces, opened up a new Word document, and then spent 90 minutes sending emails, taking out the trash, and wandering down a trail of tweets and article links that ended, somehow, in a long essay about the board game Monopoly. By now it was nearly noon and I felt the first pangs of urgency. So I launched a software program I\u2019d recently downloaded, Freedom, which prevents a computer from going online for a prescribed period, and wrote the words that you\u2019re now reading. Two hours later I closed my laptop and stepped outside to eat a falafel sandwich, then returned to finish off the job, drinking two more cups of coffee in the process.<\/p>\n

These are hardly riveting details, but I don\u2019t think I\u2019m alone in feeling my ears perk up when I overhear writers of all sorts discuss their workaday habits. Any nugget of information, however small, can seem to be the star by which I ought to navigate the rocky shores of my self-discipline. If someone tells me that his or her daily writing schedule consists of three 36-minute sessions, with 14-minute breaks in between\u2013well, let\u2019s just say I\u2019ll be carrying around a stopwatch for a few days. In fact, I discovered my new friend Freedom, which I paid $10 to download, after reading an interview with an author who said it <\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on : TruthDig<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daily Rituals Email \u00a0 Print \u00a0 Share Posted on May\u00a09,\u00a02013 By Gabriel Thompson \u201cDaily Rituals: How Artists Work\u201dA book edited by Mason Currey Precisely one day before this book review was due, I walked from my Oakland apartment to my Oakland office, a 20-minute southbound stroll on Telegraph Avenue. The scenery isn\u2019t particularly inspiring: The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32306,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-32305","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32305\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}