TWIC: More Sci Am, lectures, making stuff up, motivation

Dreaming and Daydreaming and more in March's issue - nothing free online though.
Update? At least one of the Daydreaming articles is available free online at their site.

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Being creatively dishonest is somehow more acceptable.

We are much harsher on people who rob banks than on people who achieve the same objective but through creative methods like those employed by Abagnale. This is important as it introduces a bias in the way we judge dishonesty and punish it, thus reducing the likelihood of seeing more of the same behavior in the future. But there is another reason why our research is potentially interesting: creative forms of unethical behavior are more likely to be imitated than other forms of unethical behavior because people admire the behavior’s creativity, we discovered. It seems that people view creativity as a positive, valuable trait that provides creative cheaters with a halo that makes their transgressions more palatable and more socially contagious.

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Meditation as a means of studying the brain.
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Ass-on-chair. "There is no trick to writing"
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College course lectures saved. They should be available here in April.
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Use a real-world setting or a made-up setting in your writing?

6 Advantages and Disadvantages of a Real-Life Setting
1. A Real-Life Setting Is Instantly Recognizable
2. A Real-Life Setting Offers Built-In Verisimilitude
3. A Real-Life Setting Requires Less Brainstorming4. Real-Life Settings Require More Research

...

2 Advantages and Disadvantages of a Made-Up Setting
1. A Made-Up Setting Frees You From the Burden of the Facts
2. A Made-Up Setting Demands Active Creativity

 Reader(s) familiar with this blog will know of my habit of removing all the details from the list above. To read them, follow the link.
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Jack Dorsey's Dos and Don'ts.

That Do list is as follows:
Stay present
Be vulnerable
Drink only lemon water and red wine
Six sets of 20 squats and push-ups every day
Run for 3 miles
Meditate on this list
Stand up straight
Spend 10 minutes with a heavy bag
Say hello to everyone
Get 7 hours of sleep
And the “Don’ts”:
Don’t avoid eye contact
Don’t be late
Don’t set expectations that you can’t meet
Don’t eat sugar 

Don’t drink hard liquor or beer during the weekday

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Forget the career ladder, organize your creative assets.

The strugglers live from project to project, gig to gig. Each new project feels like starting afresh, from scratch. Each new client needs to be pitched and sold from scratch. They are always too busy or too skint to do the work they really want to do. It’s exhausting and demoralising.
The ones who prosper take a longer term approach. As well as living day-to-day, they carve out time to create assets that will make everything easier, more enjoyable, and more profitable in the future. As time goes by, they have more and more assets, and the effects start to multiply – to the point where they achieve exponentially more with their efforts than they had ever thought possible.

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Our Gutenberg moment. It's easier to publish and that means it's easier to publish crap.
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Motivation

Reedsy has a free course on how to build a writing routine.

So I got word of this course on Twitter, followed the link and blogged it here. Maybe tomorrow, if I feel like it, I'll actually sign up for the course. Motivation level 0.5
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How to Motivate Yourself to Write
1. Sit down
2. Write
3. What?
3a. You wanted more?
3b. I got my own goddamn problems
3c. You shit
3d. Fuck

— Sam Sykes (@SamSykesSwears) March 23, 2017

Still looking for the magic pill or device that allows me to sit work on my own book rather than prepare for classes - which I am not doing either, seeing as I am adding content to my blog. Truth Telling by Sykes 94.7
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How writing fiction can get you out of poverty.
This may be me soon. Terror gives a +5 to motivation (=5.5)!
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Tracking a novel's progress to help you get to completion.

“I knew I needed help to avoid it being just a stack of paper that sat in my bedside drawer. I know too many people who have written half a novel,” he says.

A cool graphic or GIF showing the author's highs and lows. It also shows he took around a year and a half longer than he theoretically needed to. Terror eased by 3.

TWIC: maps, Agatha Christie, writing sex scenes, Jen Lee interviewed, Purpose, libraries,

It might be time to make this a cartography blog. I've certainly offered a number of map generators, and design tools. Here's another.

So a few weeks ago, I discovered that you can use Google Maps to draw on existing cities and make custom maps of your fictional locations. Needless to say, I was EXTREMELY EXCITED. Being an author practically guarantees you will struggle with real life details like travel distance at some point in your book. If you're writing about a real city, the bar is even higher. Even if you're writing about your own city, a map can be a life saver just for keeping everything straight in your head.
For years now, I've had to draw those maps by hand, and let me just say: a cartographer I am not. Enter Google Maps. Let's say you're writing a story set in London. Going to Google Maps to look up a street map is obvious, but Google has given us tools to take that even further, allowing authors to draw new boundaries, set landmarks, and make notes right on a custom map that you can save! And best of all, it's free!! (Well, okay, there is a paid version that has more features, but for our purposes, the free version works perfectly well).
All that said, the Google Maps customization interface isn't exactly user friendly. Most people don't even know it exists (I found it by accident). This a crime! Something this useful should be known by all! Lots of people on Twitter agreed with me. So, by popular request, here is my guide to using Google Maps for world building.

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Agatha Christie's secrets.

1. Christie introduced ROMANCE into the murder mystery.


2. Christie was very good at hiding the identity of the murderer. And she usually did this cleverly and fairly.


Today I’m only going to concentrate on (2), above. (If you would like to read more about including romance in a story, see: The Structure of a Romance Story.)

How to Make Readers Think the Murderer Couldn't Have Done It.


There’s no other way to say it: Agatha Christie deceived her readers! And we loved it. How did she do this?

7 Ways to Disguise a Murderer:


1. Agatha Christie made readers think the murderer was a victim. (Peril at End House.)


Examples: Peril at End House, The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor, And Then There Were None.
In PERIL AT END HOUSE Nick—the eventual murderer—convinces Poirot that someone is trying to kill her. She is subtle and drops clues she knows the great detective (who loves clues!) will pick up on.

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How to Write a Sex Scene:
1. Write it
2. Realize someone will read it
3. Delete it
4. Destroy your computer
5. Fake your death

— Sam Sykes (@SamSykesSwears) March 17, 2017

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@SamSykesSwears I've always wondered, do you & your Mom just pretend neither of you write sex scenes?

— Kat Arnett (@katarnett) March 17, 2017

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Jen Lee draws comics documenting her life here in South Korea. Here is an interview.
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Rob Beshizza shows us his writing space.

I'm one of those people who has trouble writing at length on my main machine, because of all the distractions it offers. Email and messaging and social networking: they all combine to form the "ludic loop" that Mark recently blogged about.
I've tried various things over the years to help keep me focused, from simple full-screen word processors such as WriteRoom and FocusWriter to gadgets like the Alphasmart and Freewrite. But apps are a tab away from fun, and glorified typewriters tend to expose their limitations in odd and frustrating ways.

Full-sized image at the link.

GRR Martin does something similar. He uses an old word processor that does 'all the things he needs and none of the things he doesn't'. Autoplay video and GRRM interview here. Specifically, he uses Wordstar.
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What is the purpose of creativity? This is a question at Quora that I answered. I think Velikovsky's answers is excellent and contains links to interesting articles on creativity and evolution. His blog is here.
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Gaiman on reading and libraries

I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?
It’s simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

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R.L. Stine's Writing Program

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Songwriting at Literature suggestions An ESL instructor colleague asked for suggestions for a Songwriting as Literature course. Here are some of the suggestions
Bob Dylan - Nobel Prize winner
The Road Goes on Forever - Robert Earl Keen
Otis Redding's "Dock of the Bay"
Rappers, sorted by the size of their vocabulary
 The Logical Song - Supertramp
Simon and Garfunkel
They Might Be Giants
Wesley Willis
American Pie
American Songwriter.
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - Murder Ballads

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Pixar Story Telling class - Did I offer this link before?

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Starting writing late in life. The writer started writing novels at age 47 and says that's old. I guess at 49, I am in trouble.

So what about those thirty years I wasted in self-doubt?
I don’t think they were wasted, actually. In fact, I’d argue that the best thing a writer can do is delay publishing for as long as possible.
This isn’t an attractive argument; it’s not sexy. Nobody’s going to make any Top Thirty Under Thirty lists that way. And dammit, writing is difficult. It takes so much hard work and dedication. How long can a person go on working with nothing to show for it?
As long as you can.
Those thirty years didn’t just make me a writer. They made me a good writer. That paralyzing self-doubt morphed into a keen sense for quality in my own work. When I write something that stinks, I can usually smell it. I’ve been reading for more than forty years, so I have thousands of great books and stories banked for information and inspiration. And best of all, I have a lifetime’s worth of unplumbed material to draw on—I’ve seen the world in all its glory and ugliness.

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TWIC: busy,diy coffin, music, motivation, maps

It seems like even easy posts like This Week In Creativiti are shrinking.  I normally start a new TWIC around the same day I post the finished one. Then I add to it all week.

Big news! I have a job! Last year we moved to a new city in South Korea and I took on various short contracts while looking for more full time work. I am fully employed again!

It is a new position and I need to plan new lessons and organize homework and such so posting here has been infrequent.

Indeed, it is now Sunday and TWIC normally goes up on Monday evening or Tuesday. I gotta find some stuff.
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Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins. The book doesn't come out for another six or seven weeks (May 2) but it looks interesting for a variety of reasons.

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Getting on? Maybe it's time to build your own coffin.

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Theft. A history of music. The link goes to a site to buy the book or download a PDF free.

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shortlist for Sony's world photography awards.
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Unintended consequences  What would you want if you could any one thing, real or imaginary? How difficult would it be to keep it?
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Tremendously wealthy and still working on Sundays. Why? The article is about ambition and motivation. Things I need.

Consider the journalist Ryan Avent, who recently wrote a piece titled Why do we work so hard? He confesses to an internal struggle about the pros and cons of his self-described workaholic life. But he ends up optimistic about his tradeoffs. For his grandparents, he says, work was a means to an end. “Work” was the thing you did during the week to make money in order to enjoy “life” on the weekends. For our grandparents, in a different economy, work was duller and more physically taxing. Today, for the educated among us, work can be intellectually invigorating as never before. It’s easier to love your work, as he says he loves journalism. When his parents worry about his job and its long hours, Avent observes the disconnect: They are asking him about his “work,” he says, but “I am thinking about identity, community, purpose – the things that provide meaning and motivation. I am talking about my life.”

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The Components of Happy Ambition: Tweaks to Prioritize Happiness As You Quest for Meaning
Become mindful of status triggers with mindfulness meditation
Set fewer goals. Love the craft itself: be process-driven, not goal-driven
Choose work and set goals where relative status is harder to compare or measure
The people around you shape the nature of your ambition, so pick your peer group carefully
Diversify your identity by operating a portfolio
Operate a dashboard, not a leaderboard. Play against yourself, not an opponent
Physically move and be a big fish in a small pond

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Designing the graphics for Harry Potter movies. I am a 'get the function right and don't worry about the design' guy. I make some useful things but I seldom go the extra mile to work on the presentation.  My PPTs of lesson materials carry the details I want and I value simplicity but they could be better organized. One thing I know I should fix is consistency - A constant style in how I display information so students know where to look. On one slide I might have nouns in blue but on the next slide I have circled the nouns. Ah, enough about me. I like the depth of planning that went into basically all movies and this example shines.
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A fantasy map generator. Kottke does a good job of summarizing how this generator works and why it is special. There are some small scale generators too play with but the completed work is posted to Twitter @unchartedatlas.

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Need to add whale song to your life? Here is a whale synthesizer. It sounds awfully like a theremin to me.
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TWIC: bees,dialog, azimov, card design, eatables,

I gotta eat more bees. Vital writing advice from Chuck Wendig.

10. Write 1,000 Words A Day. But don’t write them in order. That’s how you confuse the witches. You can put the words in order later when the witches are asleep in their tower.

11. Study Other Successful Writers. Other writers have done this well, so study what they do. Look at their sentence structure. Examine the rhythm of their storytelling. Chart the map of their many footsteps, ideally tracking them with RFID tags. Rifle through their trash like a raccoon. Steal their debit cards. Eat their food and their bank statements and the hair you find in their shower drains, all while miming their mannerisms in a mirror. Live under their floors or behind their walls. That way, you find the ideal time to strike — pop them with a tranq dart and once asleep, search their bodies for ancient sigils and secret messages tattooed there. Then lock them in a cage and steal their manuscripts for your own. Become them by performing The Rites. Or say fuck it and then go back to number four, where you bludgeon them and eat their brains.
12. Eat Bees. You gotta eat some bees, man. C’mon. Just fuckin’ eat ‘em already. We all do it. They’re full of protein. They also sting you as you eat them which activates your Imaginatory Gland, so eat a handful of bees and then you get jacked on cool thoughts and ideas. Eat the bees. Don’t be a baby about it.
13. Stop Eating Bees. All right, you’ve eaten too many bees. It’s weird. You got a problem. Go to a meeting. Bees are going extinct the fuck is wrong with you.
14. Don’t Ever Look At The News. Because like Fiona Apple said, “This world is bullshit.” It is. It’s all bullshit. It’ll just make you sad and then you won’t write, you’ll just sit around eating cheesecake and offering up stupid writing advice on the Internet. The news is dumb. The world is dumb. Retreat into your land of unicorns where it’s safe.

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More writing tips blogs here.
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I think my attempts at dialog are clunky. I want to add some humour and sarcasm but I also want them to sound natural. My own real life attempts at sarcasm and humour I must admit are also weird and unnatural. One of the discussions here is on that subject:

Crafting believable dialogue is tough. But here’s one piece of advice that will make it easier: Characters should say things we wish we had said. What does that mean? Remember Elmore Leonard? His dialogue is a great example of this notion. Leonard’s characters don’t speak like anybody in real life. And that’s very important indeed.
Good dialogue does not mimic natural speech. Regular chit-chat is boring and pedestrian. It’s filled with too many “Ums” and “Ahs” and overstocked with superfluous details, social niceties, and fluff.
An example. Say our protagonist (let’s call her Jane) is meeting another character (Bob, who is secretly in league with the main villain) for a drink at the local. Jane’s determined to confront Bob about his double dealing. Here’s what regular speech might sound like:

“Hi Bob. How’s it going? Um, I haven’t seen you in a while. You well?”
Bob looked up from his beer and said, “Oh, hi Jane. I wasn’t sure when you were coming, so I ordered a beer already. What can I get you?”
Jane thought for a while. “Um, I’ll just have a soda thanks. So… What have you been up to?”
“Not much. A little bit of this and a little bit of that, you know..” ...

And some of the less natural, better version:

Jane sat down and waved away the waiter.
Before Bob could say anything, she said, “So Bob, I ever tell you about my uncle Richard? No? Yeah, well he died last year. Upstate.”
“What do you mean, Jane? I don’t—“
“He spent most of his life in solitary, Bob. Terrible thing, solitary. Makes a man wish he’d made some different choices in his life. Like maybe not selling out his buddies to the highest bidder. My uncle, he got put away for treason, Bob. Treason.”

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Describing what you see in Rorchach's ink blots seems like a creative enterprise. Here are some details on the blots.

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Asimov on writing:

6. The Secret Sauce
A struggling writer friend of Asimov’s once asked him, “Where do you get your ideas?”
Asimov replied, “By thinking and thinking and thinking till I’m ready to kill myself. […] Did you ever think it was easy to get a good idea?”
Many of his nights were spent alone with his mind —
I couldn’t sleep last night so I lay awake thinking of an article to write and I’d think and think and cry at the sad parts. I had a wonderful night.
Nobody ever said having ideas was going to be easy.
If it were, it wouldn’t be worth doing.

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To outsiders, thinking about design often seems a pretty but unnecessary option.Or at least, I often think of it that way and hope there is a group called 'outsiders' that consists of more than just me. The recent mix up at the Oscars shows why design concepts are important. Full size image and all three advantages to the new design at the link.

3. Emma Stone’s name is bigger than the title, “La La Land,” because she is the winner of this category. The winner should be the most emphasized thing on the card with all other information, like the film’s title, in a smaller or a less thick font...

Apparently, the announcers were given the wrong award envelope and that wasn't immediately clear. The 'after' image shows a different set of priorities - the name of the award ceremony is not nearly so important because everyone involved knows where they are.
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A chart book from India has better art work than mine but looks similar to grids of images I have made for my ESL classes.

Meant to teach children good behavior, and to assist their reading skills, these inexpensive posters were plastered everywhere by local printers.

Here is my favorite image:

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