#gtd

All of my life, I was in love with monsters; this is a fact."

Because OH MY GOD THE FRANKENSTEIN TRAILER!!

FINALLY!! Someone’s done this story JUSTICE!! Even IF Oscar wasn’t in it, I would still be freaking out!! I’ve loved Frankenstein for so long, it’s been my favorite book for so long and FINALLY someone who’s passionate about it has made a movie!!

I haven’t even seen it and I can tell you that this is a love letter to the source material!!

So many things to say but one thing that stuck out to me right away was GTD’s use of color. Victor with his red gloves.

At first I thought it was blood. But BUT!! It’s a BEAUTIFUL visual metaphor! VICTOR HAS BLOOD ON HIS HANDS. If you’ve read the story, you know how true this is. Death follows Victor. At every turn he’s paying the price for playing God. THERES BLOOD ON HIS HANDS AHHHHH!!!

And the scarf!!

He is a bleeding heart!! He’s passionate and crazed and obsessed and lonely and fevered and this scarf makes him look like he’s bleeding from his chest! A HUGE GAPING BLEEDING HEART. MY GOD ITS SO GOOD!!!

And the creation!! The point of conception!! The moment of life!! The use of red is representing blood, yes but it’s also as if Victor is bleeding into his creation. He’s passionate about his work!! He’s creating life and pouring every bit of his soul into him!! AHHHHH!!!

I’m sure I’ll have more to say when I can analyze it a bit more closely but I NEEDED to post this!! UGH IM IN LOVE WITH THIS MOVIE!!

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

Two decades ago, I was part of a group of nerds who got really interested in how each other managed to do what we did. The effort was kicked off by Danny O'Brien, who called it "Lifehacking" and I played a small role in getting that term popularized:

https://craphound.com/lifehacksetcon04.txt

While we were all devoted to sharing tips and tricks from our own lives, many of us converged on an outside expert, David Allen, and his bestselling book "Getting Things Done" (GTD, to those in the know):

https://gettingthingsdone.com/

GTD is a collection of relatively simple tactics for coping with, prioritizing, and organizing the things you want to do. Many of the methods relate to organizing your own projects, using a handful of context-based to-do lists (e.g. a list of things to do at the office, at home, while waiting in line, etc). These lists consist of simple tasks. Those tasks are, in turn, derived from another list, of "projects" – things that require more than one task, which can be anything from planning dinner to writing a novel to helping your kid apply to university.

The point of all this list-making isn't to do everything on the lists. While these lists do help you remember what to do next, what they're really good for is deciding what not to do – at all. The promise of GTD is that it will help you consciously choose not to do some of the things you set out to accomplish. This is in contrast to how most of us operate: we have a bunch of things we want to do, and we end up doing the things that are easiest, or at top of mind, even if they're not the most important things.

GTD recognizes that you can be very "productive" (in the sense of getting many things done) and still not do the things that you really wanted to do. You know what this is like: you finish a Sunday with an organized sock-drawer, all your pennies neatly rolled, the trash-can in your car emptied…and no work at all on that novel you're hoping to write.

You can't do everything, but you can control what you don't do, rather than just defaulting into completing a string of trivial, meaningless tasks and leaving the big stuff on the sidelines. Organizing your own tasks and projects is a hugely powerful habit, and one that's made a world of difference to my personal and professional life.

But while good to-do lists can take you very far in life, they have a hard limit: other people. Almost every ambitious thing you want to do involves someone else's contribution. Even the most solitary of projects can be derailed if your tax accountant misses a key email and you end up getting audited or paying a huge penalty.

That's where the other kind of GTD list comes in: the list of things you're waiting for from other people. I used to be assiduous in maintaining this list, but then the pandemic struck and no one was meeting any of their commitments, and I just gave up on it, and never went back…until about a month ago. Returning to these lists (they're sometimes called "suspense files") made me realize how many of the problems – some hugely consequential – in my life could have been avoided if I'd just gone back to this habit earlier.

My suspense file is literally just some lines partway down a text file that lives on my desktop called todo.txt that has all my to-dos as well. Here's some sample entries from my suspense file:

WAITING EMAIL Sean about ENSHITTIIFCATION manuscript deadline 10/24/24 WAITING EMAIL Russ about missing royalty statement 10/12/24 WAITING EMAIL Alice about Christmas vacation hotel 10/8/24 10/20/24 WAITING EMAIL Ted about Sacramento event 8/12/24 9/5/24 10/5/24 10/20/24

WAITING CALL LA County about mosquito abatement 10/25/24 WAITING CALL School attendance officer about London trip 10/18/24

WAITING MONEY EFF reimbusement for taxi to staff retreat $34.98 10/7/24

WAITING SHIPMENT New Neal Stephenson novel from Bookshop.org 10/23/24

This is as simple as things could possibly be! I literally just type "WAITING," then a space, then the category of thing I'm waiting for, then a few specifics, then the date. When I follow up on an item, I add the date of the followup to the end of the line. If I get some details that I might need to reference later (say, a tracking code for a shipment, or a date for an event I'm trying to organize), I'll add that, too, as it comes up. Creating a new entry on this list takes 10-25 seconds. When someone gets back to me, I just delete that line.

That is literally it.

This is a sequel to @come-down-that-tree! I strongly recommend reading it first! You'll be spoiled if you decided to read it later otherwise and it's certainly better for understanding this story.

Summary:

Dream, Nightmare and Geno had their (more-or-less) happy ending and are now living quietly in the middle of the woods, far from their past.

One day, however, a grim messager comes bearing devastating news about their family's latest addition...

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10: wip

Credits:

This story is co-written by @shinechermont and @bluepallilworld Dream, Nightmare and Dreamtale belong to @/jokublog Reaper!Sans, Reaper!Papyrus and reapertale belong to @/renrink Geno!Sans belongs to @/loverofpiggies Vivid and Come Down That Tree! belong to @bluepallilworld