A Splintered Mind

Ever since I was a young boy in 7th grade, I have loved erasable ink pens. I never connected that love with my ADHD before, but recent evidence has shown me they’re inseparable. When I was younger, I didn’t so much write as much as I skipped, crashed, and tumbled with a pen across the page. Somehow my attempts at cursive would drop a letter or add an extra loop depending on how distracted or excited I was at the moment. My writing was filled with crossed out mistakes as well as corrections squeezed in on the tops and sides. It was a mess. Then Heaven sent me EraserMates. Suddenly, I could correct my constant mistakes in penmanship. I used EraserMates all through Junior High and High School. By the end of High School, however, I had switched from cursive to printed letters in all caps. It was slower, but it was also less prone to error. Even then the erasable pen was my pen of choice. I lived with the smeary ink and the blue pinky finger because I knew the trade off was worth it. I ...

I've decided to declare blogging bankruptcy. There's just too much going forward to tell you about. So I won't be writing all those blog posts where my navel is contemplated in full detail, complete with pictures. I know I promised, but considering what surrounds my navel now that I'm in my mid forties, you'll likely thank me for sparing you. How about I just give you the short details and we move forward? Big Item One: I finished my book. It took quitting a blogging gig, abandoning my friends, and giving up almost everything I used to consider fun to get to that point, but I did it despite Depression. Despite ADHD. Despite Netflix. I probably wrote more about it over at my writing blog, Absentminded Author , but not much more. I found that focusing in on finishing my book required doing one thing at a time, so I raised kids and I wrote. I didn't do much else. I didn't blog much, and even my Twitter usage took a hit. I cut back on everything because I was ...

Originally published at Absentminded Author, v1 . Having trouble with Adobe DRM? Are you unable to authorize new eReading apps on your smartphone or iOS device? You’re not alone. You may want to hold off installing that new eReader app on your iPhone or iPad. You may not realize this, but Adobe will only let you play with so many eReading apps on your device before you run out of allotted authorizations. Or worse, if you’ve installed too many apps, you may be in trouble when you restore or replace your device. I have been a longtime supporter of eBooks. Although I didn’t leap enthusiastically into them in my Palm Pilot days, I did have a few that I read. I especially loved to have the scriptures on my PDA. So convenient, and I loved those power searches! When I moved to the iPhone in 2007, I became enamored with eBooks with the release of Classics. I paid the full $3 and despite the bellyaching going on about how these books were available for free already on P...

Originally published at Absentminded Author, v1 . I got a phone call from my mother yesterday. "Douglas, what's this about you finishing your novel? I read about it on Twitter." Whoops. Yes, indeedy, I finished my novel by my June 1st deadline. I tweeted about it on both my accounts, interacted with folks on Facebook about it, then put it mostly out of my mind. I've kicked around some titles, thought of what my next project would be, thought about future blogging and podcasting, then promptly forgot to let you folks know about this amazing achievement. And I forgot to tell my mother, too. Oh, and my wife learned about it from my Facebook page. And here I thought I was tooting my horn too much online. Many people have requested that I share the manuscript with them, but that's not going to happen at this stage. I learned long ago not to show unfinished art & articles to people simply because they couldn't see what I had yet to chisel out of...