I need this to create.

Every few years, I get into podcasts.  During this current iteration of my listening, I am most enjoying Gore, Boars and Swords and We Have Concerns.  The latter one recently had an episode about a group of enthusiasts who long for the old, clicky IBM keyboards.
Well, the conversation of the two hosts started there, but went into people, and themselves specifically, that have superstitions and comfort zones when using equipment.
One speaker likes cheap notebooks because he was paralyzed with fear of writing something stupid in a $30 Moleskin notebook.

I myself enjoy using relatively cheap notebooks - mine come from a Korean private school and feature thick, strong cardboard covers and relatively thick paper.  I recently bought a set of disposable fountain pens.  My writing is still terrible but they are fun to use, glide super fast across paper and dry fast enough that my (left) hand doesn't smear the ink.

The episode, again, was about clicky keyboards and I really enjoy Ommwriter, which adds a clicky sound as you type.  I have long used Google Docs - now Drive - and preferred the old Wordpad to the newer versions.  Ommwriter is fullscreen and has almost no features aside from the clicky sounds and some white noise.  It is immersive and think I concentrate better when I use it.  I should say the Mac version of Ommwriter is better than the Windows version.

Ironically, when I get into a writing project, I sometimes want to listen to classical music -Janecek and Grieg normally -but actually like the discipline of sticking to Ommwriter only.

I have bought Scrivener and have started a few projects but so far it feels more fun to use than to create with if that makes any sense.
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Download lots of art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Casting call woes and running elephants

And more at Casting Call Woes.

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I have carved a few elephants from wood and one in a golf ball core.  I want to make one that is more dynamic in appearance as my typical work, in all the animals I have carved, has been still - four feet on the ground, trunk curled almost to the ground.  Whatever my next project is, I want it to be in motion.

And that's completely off topic.

The CBC has an interview with David Usher, author of Let the Elephants Run, a book on creativity.  The key concept is to let your big idea grow and try to find life for them.

Spoon!

While on a canoe trip in 2013, I was horrified to learn that I hadn't packed any cutlery.  I didn't need a fork because chopsticks are so easy to make but I did need a spoon and chose to make the spatula, well, just because I had the materials.  The photo of them below is foggy because I tipped my canoe early in the trip and my camera got wet... Really, it was a  pretty good trip and I do enjoy canoeing.  If you are interested in that trip, look here.  Here is the link to another spoon I worked on.

All that to introduce this post about a man serious about spoons.  Stian Korntved Ruud has been carving a spoon a day for, well, some time now.  He has thrown away the desire to make standard spoons and has been exploring, um, 'spoonness'.  I copied and pasted into Paint to display two of them and how one of them started.

via Boingboing.

Added a year and a half later: More from Ruud. Well, more pictures of his spoons.

How the Sea Wasp writes, how Pratchett signed

On a Google Group that discusses speculative writing, a man with this nym 'Sea Wasp' has described how he writes I added a link to one of the books he describes:

For instance, I just completed Phoenix in Shadow, sequel to Phoenix Rising, and the outline mostly went out the window pretty quickly. As I know that world so well, I didn't even use the outline once I started writing, except to look up names or something similar that I remembered inventing for the outline and didn't want to re-invent. But for the most part, I literally just let the characters lead me through their adventures until they reached the climactic points which I did know.  

That latter bit is one of the crucial parts of writing for me. I absolutely must know what I'm heading for, and specifically I need to have in my mind some awesome, spectacular, and/or tearjerking scene that will serve as the climax of the story. I write towards that scene, as a goal. Everything within the story will be focused on serving that goal of reaching that climax, and making sure that every single piece needed to make that envisioned scene work will be there, precisely as required.

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Terry Pratchett passed away recently - a victim of Alzheimer disease.  That makes this article written at Bookseller more special.  In it, Pratchett discusses the care and literal-and-figurative feeding of authors on tour.

It's a good idea to make sure advertising for the event takes place before the event. I wish I didn't have to say this.

The eventIs there a table and chair? I wish I was joking, too. One shop once forgot these completely, and elsewhere I've sat on, at or around various strange items of bookshop furniture. It should be a real table and a real chair, not a stool in front of a shelf unit with no room for the knees. Try and put together something you would be comfortable sitting and writing at for several hours.
Give some thought to where the signing table is.  I prefer to have my back to something - a wall, shelves, whatever. That means the kid with the blue anorak and one blocked nostril can't stare over my shoulder for two hours, which is off-putting (there's always one...)

Road Runner Rules, advice and a contest.

9 rules for Road Runner Cartoons.

Follow the link for the final five.
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Female characters as real human beings, some advice:

1. Have enough women in the story that they can talk to each other.2. Filling in tertiary characters with women, even if they have little dialogue or no major impact on plot, changes the background dynamic in unexpected ways.3. Set women characters into the plot as energetic participants in the plot, whether as primary or secondary or tertiary characters and whether in public or private roles within the setting. Have your female characters exist for themselves, not merely as passive adjuncts whose sole function is to serve as a mirror or a motivator or a victim in relationship to the male.

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Who will make the next MacGyver?

3.  All proposed ideas must meet these requirements:

            a. Must be a good story, well told. Entertainment is the highest priority.

                As Walt Disney famously said: “I would rather entertain and hope that people learned

                something than educate people and hope they were entertained.”

            b. Show must feature an engineer or engineers as the main protagonist OR

                engineering as a central element to the show (MacGyver, for example, was a spy

                who used engineering in every episode).

            c. Show must be compelling to a middle or high school audience (from which we will

                get the next generation of engineers).

Deadline for Entries is April 17.

Another day, another poster, and Twitter Fiction Festival

At Google + and via Kevin Hodgson on Twitter, comes this poster of 40 ways to stay creative.

See the rest at the Google+ link.
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Also Via Kevin is this blogpost on seven surprising things about creativity.

6. Creativity isn't finite. I remember using the term "creative juices" and imagining that creativity was this finite set of "stuff" inside of me that I had to save up so that my creativity didn't dry up. Now I realize that it's not like that at all. It's more like a muscle that either grows or atrophies. 7. Creativity isn't always fun. I had this picture of creative work as something that is always enjoyable. Go look up creativity on Google images and you'll see pictures of kids with finger paint and color objects popping out of your head. What they don't include are those agonizing moments when you want to give up and you are convinced your story sucks or your painting is ruined or that dish you are trying to make will turn out awful. We say "embrace failure" but in the moment those mistakes suck. They are gut-wrenching. Creative work encompasses a range of emotions and "fun" is just one of them.---

If you have an idea and are ready now, you might be able to take part in the Twitter Fiction Festival.

The festival takes place May 11-15 and:
March 2nd is the start of the open call for submissions. Check back to submit your ideas for a chance to be a featured participant.

According to Boingboing on the subject:

Entries can involve everything from parody accounts and poetry to Vines and crowdsourced fiction, just so long as they're tweeted. Check out last year's top entries for inspiration, and then get inventive. "We love fiction that uses Twitter functionality in the most creative way possible," reads the festival's website. "That means perhaps something more than just tweeting out a narrative line-by-line."

I browsed through last year's entries and found a narrative just tweeted out line-by-line but also an interesting story of people trapped in an airport during a snowstorm.  The author. Chris Arnold, apparently set up a variety of accounts and retweeted their reports to keep it a coherent story.