www.andrewmackay.net:

If you read enough “how to blog effectively” articles, you’ll find “letting your readers into your life” listed somewhat frequently. Something about emotional bonds and stuff.

That’s not my motivation today. I had a lousy day yesterday. I want to talk about it. It’ll be therapeutic. My twelve step group doesn’t meet till next Tuesday. (That is a lie. I don’t have a group. I do meet with a therapist on a semi-weekly basis, but he’s my brother-in-law; we don’t meet for therapy, we meet to eat.)

Wednesday night, we got to our small group meeting in “Backwoods, WV” (name changed to protect the innocent), 45 minutes from home, on time. We were glad to get there. I parked in the wrong place, and when I endeavored to start the car to move it to the right place…

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Look out Leo, here I come… just kidding. I’m not going to change my blog into a “simple living blog,” but if you’re looking for one, Zenhabits.net has a lot of great tips.

My wife and I have been cleaning lately. I guess it might be more accurate to say that we’re “decluttering our lives.”

It’s funny, part of the way I make my living is gainful employment in the art of placing words on a page (not writing, but designing the words of others into pages). For someone who doesn’t get Jackson Pollack, typesetting is the perfect art. There are rules, there are guidelines, and there is beauty in the end result.

In typesetting, where you don’t have text is almost more important than where you do. As I was reminded in a design meeting not too long ago, whitespace feels luxurious. When you see a wide margin (artfully wide, not awkwardly wide), you think “Ooh, they weren’t worried about stuffing every word possible onto the page. They were willing to spend more to make it look prettier.” You don’t think that? Well… I do. And I think there’s a subconscious level on which it communicates, as well. Your eyes feel at ease. You enjoy the experience more. It’s good art.

The principle crosses over to your house, believe it or not. White space feels luxurious. Clean, flat surfaces with nothing on them — intentionally — make a room feel big, clean, and comfy.

We found this very thing when we removed 4 pieces of furniture from our living room. It’s still a little crowded, but for us… it feels huge. It’s easier to clean, easier to dust, easier to look at. It’s just wonderful.

So, here’s a start: pick a room. Clean off every surface… don’t just move things around, really clean them off — throw it out, put it away, find a place for it. Now, if after that you still feel crowded, remove one item of furniture. See how it feels. I think that you’ll find what we found… you’ll gladly live without that piece of furniture in exchange for the big, beautiful feeling you get when you walk into the room.

Seth Godin is a guy who gets the way business is changing. He’s an author and prolific blogger. The other day, he mentioned that craigslist would be better if they charged a dollar for every listing.

If Craigslist charged a dollar for every listing, what would happen?

Well, the number of bogus listings and repetitive listings would plummet, making the site far easier to use.

The number of scam artists using the site would go down, because it’s more difficult to be anonymous when money changes hands.

He went on to discuss the positive aspect of free as well as the negative. It was really a brilliant post.

So, I’ve decided to start charging for access to this site.

Just kidding.

But, it did raise some pretty interesting questions about our expectations as consumers. We use free services all day long. I use gmail for email, facebook and twitter for social networking, a hotmail account for any form I have to fill out online that I think will result in spam, hulu to catch up on tv, google news to get my news, and so on and so forth.

I also aspire to write. I’d even like to *gasp* get paid to do it one day. So, how do I balance that with loving my free stuff? Of course, this is a similar conversation to the one we had last week about music producers and royalties. We’re no less willing to pay for things, we simply want actual value for our dollars. So, one day, I hope you’ll pay for my writing, in book form or something. But before that day comes, I hope my writing will become valuable enough to ask people to pay for it.

Are there any products you’re happy paying for even though there’s a free, legal alternative?

You made it… I know, I know… you’ve got to update your rss feed links, you don’t like change, you wish things could stay the same. I hear ya. I feel ya.

I just couldn’t live any longer without owning my own domain name. Now I really am me… andrewmackay. Dot Net. I even get to have email addresses at andrewmackay-dot-net. That’s awesome. Also, it’ll make it easier for more people to find me (I hope) and more likely that I’ll get awesome google stats.

So, I apologize for the change over, but I’m excited. You should continue to see minor cosmetic changes around here for the next little while. I may even break the site every little bit. I’ve done it three times already. Where’s that back up button again?

Tomorrow, we’ll be back to posting as usual… the new usual.

I love Churchill. He was a) British, b) ridiculously motivated, c) responsible for saving the world. That’s quite the resume. So, today, I’m going to let him give us a quick little motivator.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

All the existential, po-mo stuff you can come up with can’t top that.

Okay, here’s a confession: My favorite team in the National Hockey League (if you have to ask… well, it’s the Maple Leafs… and you haven’t been here long, have you? Allow me to introduce myself… I’m Andrew Mackay. I write things here. Welcome. Glad to have you.) has undergone some changes in the off-season.

In particular, we’ve loaded up on scrappers. That means that every game that I watch this year featuring my favorite team is likely to feature more fighting than any three games in previous years.

I think I alluded to this last week, but let me say it full out: I do not see the point of fights in hockey. I understand all the various arguments — particularly the one that says that if the other team pulls a dirty play on your star player, you need a scrapper to go remind him not to do it again.

But, as far as I can tell, if we got serious about dirty plays, we wouldn’t have any need for fighting. And, we have rules against dirty play already on the books… so why not get serious?

Now, I’ll admit, I’ve watched a hockey game turn on a fight. It definitely causes a momentum shift. But, it’s kind of like a horse going down in a horse race. Does it shift the momentum? Sure. Is it a good thing? Probably not.

So, Brian Burke, if you could, can we get rid of some of the scrappers and bring in some guys with talent moving the puck? We could start a revolution right here.

Nah, he doesn’t care what I think. Well… bring on the fights.

Focus is an area of struggle for me. I am prone to multitasking. Everyone knows men can’t multitask. Why we continue to try, I’ll never know. Nevertheless, I’m often found with music playing, seventeen browser windows open, and a blank word document floating in the background. Empty.

It’s likely to stay empty, too, unless I focus. So here are 3 tips to help:

Pick a steady soundtrack. I’m certain I first heard this on writing excuses… someone was talking about what they listened to while writing, and basically said he had three or four CDs that he listened to on repeat. They were fairly anthemic (I think one was the soundtrack from Braveheart), and yet could be played in the background without being distracting. I’m trying to do better at this, so I can cease stopping myself to ask “What did that song just say?”

(Aside: duh, songs don’t say anything!)

Turn off the orange button. Chances are — if you write on a laptop, anyway — that you have a switch or button that enables your wifi connection. Did you know it disables it, too? That’s right! Push that button, and you’ll be cut off from the internet. Not so handy if you’re researching, but it usually doesn’t take more than a few seconds for your wifi connection to, well, reconnect. The rest of the time, your email won’t ding, your instant messenger notifications won’t notificate, and you’ll be left in relative peace.

(Aside: don’t try that one if you use google docs online to write in. You’d probably lose some work).

Do Less. Leo Babauta said it better than I ever will. But I’ll say it here where you’ll read it. Slow down! Save a life. Wait, wrong campaign. Slow down! Save your sanity! That’s the truth. Empower yourself to do the things you want to do. For me, that’s meant taking the time to get ahead on this blog so that instead of being a burden, it’s become a joy. It’s also meant saying no to more extra-curricular things. But it’s good, because they weren’t the things I needed to spend time on.

So there you have it. Three ways that you can refocus today. I hope it helps. I hope it helps me too… I’ve got to get back into my groove!

I’ve been thinking a lot about defining my audience lately. All thirty-or-so of you. I’ve been thinking about defining my audience for one reason, and one reason only: so that I can feed you an overwhelming stream of ads and make hundreds of millions of dollars.

Seriously though, I’m trying to define an audience because I read somewhere that wannabe writers write for themselves, while true writers write to give something to their audience. It rang true for me, but I’m not sure where to go with it.

I know that my goal in writing fiction is to write stories that reflect truth. I guess I’m trying to figure out how that applies to this blog. In fiction, it’s easy: I want to reflect that good is good, even when it’s hard, that bad is bad, even when it’s easy, and that there are consequences to both. A little overly cerebral, perhaps, but still, fairly straight forward.

Currently, this blog is nothing but an attempt to share my thoughts. The problem is coming up with a value proposition for it… that is, what’s in it for you? I can tell what’s in it for me. You read me, you like me, you help me get better at writing, one day, hopefully, you buy a book I write. What’s in it for you though? My ramblings are not so exciting or brilliant as to be worthwhile in and of themselves.

So, I guess what I’m telling you is, I’m trying to come up with a reason to come back everyday, too. Maybe I can make my ramblings into a focused, valuable resource. I’ll give it my best. I’ll try to make it worth something for you.