{"id":860,"date":"2009-01-16T00:05:10","date_gmt":"2009-01-16T07:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/?p=860"},"modified":"2013-08-02T20:00:33","modified_gmt":"2013-08-03T00:00:33","slug":"idea-hamster-syndrome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/16\/idea-hamster-syndrome\/","title":{"rendered":"Idea Hamster Syndrome"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been trying to decide &quot;the next thing&quot;&nbsp;I want to write about for a long time now.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I&nbsp;could write about passages in the book I&#8217;m reading (<em>The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging<\/em>).<\/li>\n<li>I have some notes on revision that I&#8217;d like to explore.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve saved news articles on the Wayback Machine, the Flickr 365 Project, grammar choices in online writing, and ways to entice boys to read more.<\/li>\n<li>Yesterday in Books-a-Million, I found 5 more books for my collection of young adult fiction that incorporate computers in an integral way. I&nbsp;need to write about all of them.<\/li>\n<li>I have a bunch of notes on effective writing online that I&nbsp;could work into something.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve printed out calls for manuscripts from <em>English Journal<\/em>, <em>Voices from the Middle<\/em>,&nbsp; and <em>Teaching in the Two-Year College<\/em>,.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve been doing some thinking on how scrapbooking and cardmaking magazines and resources talk about writing, from motivation to writing prompts.<\/li>\n<li>I have notes in several of my &quot;idea&quot; journals that I could write about.<\/li>\n<li>I&nbsp;found a number of starters for Lists of Ten that I&nbsp;could finish out and post.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I have plenty to write about&mdash;and I am writing.I have lots of scribbled notes, on paper and in pixels. It&#8217;s not blank page syndrome.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s sort of the opposite. I&nbsp;have all these pages, but I can&#8217;t decide which one to explore more deeply and publish. It&#8217;s Too Many Full Pages Syndrome.<\/p>\n<p>Or maybe it&#8217;s more like Writer&#8217;s Attention Deficit Disorder. I keep spinning from topic to topic to topic, unable to focus on any of them long enough. The ideas are all interesting, and I don&#8217;t want to ignore any of them long enough to click that publish button.<\/p>\n<p>Back in 1994, at the Computers and Writing Conference in Columbia, Missouri, Eric Crump called me an &quot;idea hamster,&quot; someone who just keeps scurrying around on the hamster wheel, pitching out good ideas. I have notebooks, bookmarks, annotations, rough draft. There are dozens of ideas I&#8217;ve spun out. I just have the quintessential problem of an idea hamster&mdash;how do I&nbsp;manage to stop scurrying around the wheel and settle down with an idea long enough to get something done?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been trying to decide &quot;the next thing&quot;&nbsp;I want to write about for a long time now. I&nbsp;could write about passages in the book I&#8217;m reading (The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging). I have some notes on revision that I&#8217;d like to explore. I&#8217;ve saved news articles on the Wayback Machine, the Flickr 365 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqzI8-dS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=860"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17151,"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860\/revisions\/17151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tengrrl.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}