This week in Creativity (Early October)

Finally a Facebook Suggested post I like!  The post/ad was for 'Spookhaus', which might be a band devoted to spooky music instrumentals or simply one that prepared some goodies for Hallowe'en. Leviathan's Wake is suitably atmospheric music that calls out for a short story (there are more free downloads at that link). So now I am trying to write one.  I even downloaded Audacity in case I choose to record it as an MP3.

Once my story is done, I could do worse than have Stalin (yes, that Stalin) as an editor.

 The Soviet historian Mikhail Gefter has written about coming across a manuscript on the German statesman Otto von Bismarck edited by Stalin's own hand. The marked-up copy dated from 1940, when the Soviet Union was allied with Nazi Germany. Knowing that Stalin had been responsible for so much death and suffering, Gefter searched "for traces of those horrible things in the book." He found none. What he saw instead was "reasonable editing, pointing to quite a good taste and an understanding of history."

How did Ben Goldacre write Bad Pharma?

Broadly speaking, my life is spent hoovering up information, loving it, filing it, and using it. I read a lot through “Feedly”, which lets me subscribe to multiple journals, blogs, and other news feeds. I also pick things up from twitter, mailing lists, conferences, and conversations. When I stumble on anything I might want to use again – an academic paper, an insight, a thought, an explanatory framework, an author I want to read more from – I store it in a service called Evernote, which synchronises my notes across my phones, tablets, and laptops. I’m obsessed with devices and systems, and I’ll cheerfully spend four hours automating a task that could be done by hand in two minutes.
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People sometimes ask how long it took to write Bad Pharma, and there’s no clear answer, because it can’t be disentangled from this ongoing game of populating the giant, delicious, monstrous, synchronising ecosystem of knowledge that lives and breathes across all these electronic devices and services

Wonderbook seems like a fun, graphic way to see the writing process.

My son loves cheetahs.  I think I am capable of carving one so I will speak to some carvers at the local club for assistance and hopefully a block of suitable wood.  Time to study cheetah images to look at what to carve.  I still look back at my heron carvings as the way I finally really learned what herons really look like.