The System 501: Novel Idea by Rosscott, Inc.
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Category Archives: goals
Figure it out
Let’s get something out of the way: growing food to feed yourself is not rocket science.
Now, I understand that in the last half of the 20th century, a lot of rocket science found its way into growing food, and I think that fact is responsible for so many of the problems we face in food production today. Growing food and sending things into space are different kinds of magic, and what is good for doing one well is rarely good for doing the other well.
Over the past two years, I have learned as much about what I am doing and about myself as I think I have in the rest of my life up to this point, and I owe most of that education to a simple fact about the way I’ve taken over the farm I run: I’ve had to figure out most of what I am doing on my own.
Don’t get me wrong, I have had lots of help and advice along the way, most of it good and some of it bad, but at the moment when the work actually needs to be done, its usually me, the task, and my brain participating in accomplishing it. It has been mind expanding in ways that are hard to describe unless you’ve undertaken something similar.
What does this have to do with you? Well, if I can figure out how to run a 185 acre farm–and don’t get me wrong, I still have a lot to learn–you can figure out how to plant a salad garden in your back yard. If I can learn to master the raising of as many as 40 head of beef cattle, you can figure out how to plant a small plot of wheat for making bread.
There is a lot of talk these days about the cost of food, food security, and the threat hunger poses to national stability. One of the things nearly every policy maker and pundit gets wrong as they fret over these kinds of things is that they assume the solutions will involve massive expenditures of government programs that centrally manage food production. They get it wrong because they are trying to use political magic to solve a food growing problem.
The solution instead comes from when individuals establish food independence by growing it themselves. During the last days the Soviet Union, as the central government was collapsing and central food planning had reduced agricultural output to a fraction of what was needed for the Soviets to feed their citizens, as much as 70 percent of the calories consumed came from the roughly 4 percent of the land dedicated to small, individual farm plots tended by people after work and on weekends. To this day, as much as 50 percent of Russia’s agricultural output comes from about 2 percent of the land under cultivation.
What remains, then, is for people to figure it out. You can grow your own food and feed yourself and your family, and you don’t have to have a degree or a green thumb to do it. But, you do have to do it.
What are you waiting for?
DLH
DeNoWriMo the First
Granted I haven’t written here for a while, but I have been writing since the last time I posted. So much so, that I have decided to declare May the first arbitrary Dennis’s Novel Writing Month (DeNoWriMo I). Over the next 31 days, I plan to churn out 50,000 or so words on a project I have been working on–on and off–since last year’s NaNoWriMo. If May goes well, I may well declare June DeNoWriMo II.
What’s the point of all of this? Well, my hope is that I will have something to report by the end of this year, but you will just have to stay tuned. And, while you’re waiting, why not try YoNoWriMo (your own Novel Writing Month).
DLH
Sharpening one’s focus
I find that it is very easy as a writer to lose one’s focus or to have far too broad of a focus. For me, that lack of focus usually comes from my obsession with writing a novel.
The problem is that–at least I suspect the problem is that–I am not a novel writer in the classic sense of the idea. I cannot nor do I usually sit down and write copious amounts of words every day that can eventually come to represent a novel. Instead, I find that I am more of a vignette writer: someone who write short bursts of fiction, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, but rarely of the kind that can be considered a novel.
As a result, I have spun my wheels for almost a decade now trying to finish a novel while some of my widest reaching and most successful works have been short stories that I finished in my characteristic vignette style. Over the past several months, that reality in my writing has come into sharp focus, and I cannot help but pursue the path that focus reveals.
The latter is not to say that I am abandoning my obsession with writing a novel. To the contrary, I am changing my approach to writing a novel that better fits the way I write and why I write that way. The objective remains the same even if the route is different.
So, what is your obsession in writing? What causes you to lose focus? What kind of writing are you the best at? The worst at? What helps you regain your focus?
DLH
Staying the course, or farming goals for 2010
As I mentioned previously, I give myself a D+ for the past year’s effort. That means there’s still a long way to go, so the goal for this year is to stay the course with what I am already doing.
Staying the course means resisting the temptation to add more when what I am already doing is not quite working yet. I have a lot of ideas I would like to try, but before I do, I want the stuff I’ve already started to work.
To that end, I will be focusing on the following efforts this year:
- Install at least half the fencing needed to improve our pasture management.
- Continue to expand our chicken operation, to include the addition of chicken tractors to our existing coop.
- Improve our pasture management by taming the weeds using goats.
- Successfully harvest something from our test garden which will include:
- Maris Widgeon Wheat (planted Fall 2010)
- Painted Mountain Flour Corn
- Taylor’s Dwarf Horticultural Beans
- Dale Sorghum
- Hulless Oats
- Hulless Barley
- Japanese Hulless Popcorn
- Cascade Hops
- Magnum Hops
- Sterling Hops
- And, possibly, others I have not mentioned
My hope is that, by the end of this year, I can improve my grade to at least a C+ and have something to show for it too. Keep reading on this site for updates.
DLH
Complex and evolving: Education 2011
My views on education are complex and evolving. On one hand, I love learning and want to learn all I can. On the other hand, I am coming to the realization that I hate the process of formal education.
My hatred of the process of formal education comes from the fact that it presumes too much about the commonality of the people involved in the process and denies too much about their differences. Formal education is, by definition, a process catering to the lowest common denominator. As a result, it stifles the most advanced so that everyone can advance.
In realizing that I hate the process of formal education, I have come to a point of view far more in keeping with the idea most famously expressed in the movie Good Will Hunting: “See the sad thing about a guy like you, is in about 50 years you’re gonna start doin’ some thinkin’ on your own and you’re gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One, don’t do that. And two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin’ education you coulda’ got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the Public Library.”
As I see it, the fact of the matter is not that formal education educates someone but that it vets someone by comparing what they have learned, really on their own, to what someone else says they should know in order to be able to claim they know it. I find that whole idea repugnant because it denies that I can learn on my own, vet myself, and demonstrate my knowledge without someone else’s approval.
Now, I know there are all kinds of people who have benefited from the formal education process and are all the better for it, but I now realize the reason I am not one of those people is because I find the process too constraining.
Of course, now the problem becomes what to do. How do I educate myself, establish myself, and promote myself if I intend to reject the process 99 percent of the modern world believes is the only way to do those things? I think I will do so by accomplishing those tasks on my own terms and by succeeding at what I intend to do. In order to do so, I must do them myself, and the only barrier, then, between me and success is myself.
So what does that mean for 2011? I think this will be a year for exploring the idea of self-education to its fullest extent, and I plan to share that journey with anyone who cares as much as I can.
DLH
2011: A year to write
Frankly, my writing goals for 2011 are not much different from my writing goals for 2010 with perhaps the exception that I’ve taken on another project besides the Eagle Stone in an effort to get something going.
Really, all I want for 2011 is to establish a regular routine of writing that produces some volume of work by the end of the year. If we pretend that I can write 2,000 words a day between now and 31 December, then we can also pretend that I should have 730,000 words to show for it at the end of the year.
While I hope that I write, I also hope that, if you have something you want to write about, you write too. If you need someone to encourage you in that task, please let me know. I am always willing to help encourage other writers as much as I appreciate the encouragement myself.
DLH
Art goals for 2010
My first, obvious goal for 2010 is to complete my associate’s degree in Art at Sinclair Community College. Essentially, I have photography, my internship, and my graduation show between me and finishing. I’m taking photography and the internship this quarter, so assuming I pass, I will only have my show left in the spring.
Beyond that, my art goals for 2010 are a little more complex. Over the past couple of years I have learned a lot about art and about myself as an artist, but I have not committed to the art I think I will be creating. To that end, in 2010, I hope to accomplish the following:
- Establish a regular routine of “developmental” art that includes more time with sketch books and just generally messing around with ideas.
- Explore the idea that I am really more of a sculptor than I am a draftsman or painter.
- See what I can do with all this cardboard I have been collecting over the past year. Specifically, I want to produce a dozen or so experimental pieces.
- Push painting to its limits in class and at home.
- Reestablish a regular routine for art in general.
My overall goal, then, is to return to the regular habit of creation that I once had but have since abandoned. Of course, the competing considerations will be my pursuits of education, writing, and farming, but I think it can still be done.
DLH