I’m sure that I’ve mentioned this before in my writing. I don’t remember where, but I’m certain that I have because I was incensed. I once read an article in a newspaper that was by one of the staff reporters. This staff reporter had, and I believe still has, regular space that presumably she’s paid well for. This article that she spent considerable space and time on said, in a nutshell, I have nothing to say but there was a deadline so I typed out all these words and turned it in. I couldn’t believe that a professional would simply put something like that out. If it were a column by a satirist like Dave Barry, then I could much more easily understand why something like that would be “newsworthy” for lack of better term. Notably satirists tend not to waste their column space. This person is nowhere near that sort of level nor is she a satirist. This is also something that always bothered about people who on their blogs or their Vlogs or their audio podcasts do essentially the same thing – putting out a big fat pile of “I have nothing to say”.

I haven’t been on the computer much at all when I’ve been at home lately. I have been on the computer for extended amounts of time at my day job. Between that and other life circumstances it has been very difficult to have something to say that is is worthy of posting, let alone finding the time to actually sit down and be willing to get in front of a screen again. I don’t want to be one of those people that simply puts nothing out there for the sake of putting something on a screen. I hope that I can put something out there that is in some small way either useful to myself or useful to others. Perhaps I’ve been unfair now that I think about it to this other person, if she put forth the article in some form or fashion saying nothing but that was useful to her. Something I hadn’t thought of before but it still makes me angry that she got paid for a number of words that essentially said “I have nothing to say”.

Today I am continuing my experiment in audio. I have set up a way to connect my technology with my technology.

Because I spend so much time at the screen already, one of the things that I attempt to do is keep myself physically healthy. Being healthy really matters for all people, but specifically for people who spend a lot of time in a sedentary position working at a screen. I don’t know that this this post necessarily counts as “something to say”, but I’m putting it out there so that if there are any other authors who feel the time crunch that I do combining family and work and other things with their craft. I have a treadmill in the same room with the computer. It took me awhile to come around to the solution, and once I mentioned it to a friend found out that it is not new or even necessarily uncommon. I have added a shelf over the front end of the treadmill and I have set up my laptop on that shelf. I then hooked my microphone in to my laptop and connected myself to the computer while walking on the treadmill. This gives me the opportunity to simply speak all of the things that I wanted to type well actually being able to walk on the treadmill and try to stay healthy at the same time.

Something else I’ve done while walking on the treadmill actually hook myself into the safety equipment. There’s an emergency stop connected to a string that you can clip to whatever you’re wearing. Normally I bypass that right away and simply use the treadmill. It’s something that I haven’t ever had problems with in the past. Now I’m clipped into the safety piece and because I don’t have a wireless microphone I’m also clipped in to the headset attached to my laptop. I think all I need now is some sort of breathing apparatus like one of those things you always see in science fiction films and I’ll look pretty out there. I went with the safety thing because I could clearly imagine the first time I tried to do this something would go horribly wrong I would fall, then the laptop would drop on my head and the tread portion of this machine would simply continue to run either or both pushing me off to the end and creating some unnecessarily painful friction.

I think I have learned a couple of lessons already this morning. First, it’s hard to type while walking so put your password before starting the walk. Next, I don’t know if there’s a way to move the cursor backwards. If there’s any kind of mistake and what it is that you said, you need to go back and edit it later. Lastly, this does make this post (and anything I’m writing) essentially a pure stream-of-consciousness writing style. I have yet to discover whether or not this will in fact make my writing any easier to read in terms of flow and understandability.

I also find it amusing, but I believe there’s the very real chance that I’ll be speaking to somebody and actually use my punctuation when I’m speaking out loud to them now. I definitely think that would be an entertaining story the first time that happens. “Oops. Sorry, I’m used to speaking this narrative into my computer and I just forgot that I was actually speaking to a person. Good news, you’re in the story now”.

Interestingly enough I’ve actually gone past my normal daily amount of walking on the treadmill while doing the speaking and still been able to knock out all these words. I think this experiment’s going to continue into the future. Hopefully that means that I’ll have more things that I will be able to say in a timely manner and get them out to my blog on a regular basis.

Now I just have to make sure that I always have something to say.