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.
...
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.

TWIC (I've forgotten what number)

Time to clean up some browser windows I've had open for more than a week.  Ah, really, I do find this stuff interesting and do feel this stuff is useful but my first sentence is entirely accurate: I'm doing this today simply to clean up some desktop space.

Bill Watterson with Advice for Cartoonists.  His advice was written into a comic made in his style.  wonderful stuff.

Writing.com  I'm still not sure what it is but parts of it remind me of Figment, a site that sends writing prompts and ideas every few days.

Write, forget yourself.  This simple advice given to help writers not feel too self-conscious.

Scalzi writes about Gwenda Bond who writes about the torturous path her novel took from idea to print and how each revision was different.

Artists who kept their day jobs.  Kurt Vonnegut sold cars.

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Regarding my personal creative efforts, I have written perhaps a thousands words on each of two stories - one about psychic university students battling psychic mafia and the other a steam punk story currently set in Nepal.

Also, I forgot eating utensils on my trip to Algonquin Park so I had to carve new ones. Simple but functional:

I'm a little fearful, but mostly tired

I have three or four blogs, each focusing on individual subjects, and haven't posted in any of them for around a month (quickly checks this blog's output and finds a post from Aug 20 - c'mon, it was a short one).  Mostly, I've been trying to enjoy summer and keep my son busy enough not to drive me crazy.

The biggest productivity-killer for me is putting him to sleep.  He insists that I lay down next to him until he falls asleep.  Then I find myself so comfortable that I choose to stay there.  I often get up in the middle of the night but feel more like an consumer of internet content rather than a producer.

Anyway, I follow Margaret Atwood's on Twitter and she linked to a Terrible Minds post on the four fears that inhibit writing.  They are 1) Fears about a lack of talent, 2) Fear about feedback, 3) Fear about publication and 4) Fear about being judged.

I have to say that most of my published writing is in in-house magazines for the universities I worked at in Korea and I didn't have much fear about them.  I am proud of this article but in the hard-copy version there some odd editing and image placement choices that my colleagues kindly blamed on the magazine staff rather than me.

Now that I have am facing a higher bar regarding quality I am feeling the fears listed above.  I especially like the advice for dealing with the fear of being judged:

This makes your writing suck. The absolute best work you have in you is always going to be the stuff that’s closest to your heart, the stuff that’s absolutely the hardest to let another human being read. It’s risky to show people those deep and true parts of yourself, but life is risk. Look that fear in the eye, spit it in the face, and then write more effing words.

Does the right side of the brain power creativity?

In a recent article, Scientific American discusses how the sides of the brain work together to express creativity.

Instead, the entire creative process– from the initial burst of inspiration to the final polished product– consists of many interacting cognitive processes and emotions. Depending on the stage of the creative process, and what you’re actually attempting to create, different brain regions are recruited to handle the task.

Importantly, many of these brain regions work as a team to get the job done, and many recruit structures from both the left and right side of the brain. In recent years, evidence has accumulated suggesting that “cognition results from the dynamic interactions of distributed brain areas operating in large-scale networks.”

The networks are described in more detail in the article.

The only movie making guide you'll ever need.

Save the Cat is a guidebook to making blockbusters that offers incredibly specific advice and appears to have been used in many movies.  Jurassic Park, a personal favorite, is noted as one that had similar parts but not the correct order.

I am not praising this book, by the way, merely pointing out how formulaic movie making has become.  Not at all like Casablan...oh, wait.

Here is the list of events and when they should take place - apparently one page equals about one minute of screen time.

a song a day from Damn Sight Radio

From a Busan co-worker:

If you don’t already know.. I’m writing and recording a song for every day of 2013 and posting them here.  This is the 203rd song so far.

It’s about the cast of Saturday Night Livelosing at least 2 of its strongest members.  I think Jason Sudekis is leaving too

Steampunk festival in Coldwater

It's on August 10, at Coldwater Ontario.  I hope to be there for the morning, and possibly with a few guttersnipes in tow.
Facebook page.  Coldwater Event calendar.

In a similar vein, Orillia's Museum of Art and History has a Steampunk exhibit.

So, what is Steampunk?
Squiddo says:

Over the past thirty years authors have been trying to combine the past with the present to create the 'modern' steampunk. This involves manipulating the Victorian industrial era with futuristic inventions largely run on steam. As a sub-genre that is still growing in popularity it is hard to know what elements are "necessary" for a story to be considered steampunk.

Squiddoo focuses on three main points.
Language (Cockney and Victorian), Industrialization, Historicism


One Nanowrimo wannabe says

Air pirates and air ships are a big one! I'm personally a big fan of air ships. :) This isn't necessarily a literary steampunk thing, but goggles are very much a staple of steampunk costumes and aesthetic. As are gears on clothing and such. I use this to a slightly humorous affect. The gears on clothing in one of my WIPs has no purpose beyond the fact that the society finds it aesthetically pleasing and pretty, and people that dress up in steampunk nowadays do. People often use something called called "aether" in steampunk media that's sort of a vague thing. In classical beliefs (and the 19th century), it was thought that aether was some sort of substance that acted as a medium of transition of electromagnetic waves.
The thing about cliches and tropes is, they are cliches and tropes because they /work/ if you want to write in air pirates and what have you, go for it! Own it and make it your own.

This quote is from 2012, so this person might now be a Nanowrimo completer,

unlike me, who remains a wannabe.

Steampunk Canada has more info.

TV Tropes has suggestions on how to write Steampunk:

"Steampunk", of course, suggests steam-driven technology, so you will need to include this in your story. In a broader sense, steampunk also usually refers to a general attitude and aesthetic around that of the nineteenth century, incorporating the styles and fashions, attitudes and politics. This means, of course, that your story will either be set at some point within the Industrial Revolution or the nineteenth century, an Alternate History which spun off from this point or another world which is based on these stylings....Steampunk tends to run on Rule Of Cool; in actuality, a lot of steampunk technologies (particularly those which attempt to replicate modern technologies such as the computer) would have been massive, consumed unsustainable amounts of fuel and would probably have ultimately been unworkable (there's a reason in real life the human race switched from steam to oil and gas). This, of course, does not mean that your story cannot work — it does, however, mean that you need to make sure you get the reader's Willing Suspension of Disbelief on side. In general, as it's such a fantastic genre, the audience will accept quite a lot — but this does not mean they will accept absolutely anything.Steampunk is also an aesthetic. Technology affects the world around us in great ways, and a world based on steampunk technologies would be quite different in terms of politics, attitudes, fashions, etc. You need to keep this in mind; your reader will not be convinced if you simply transplant modern society with a slightly steampunk makeover.

I attempted my own list of tropes or requirements for Steampunk before I began research so lets see how mine compares:

• Steam powered engines: train, dirigible, ornithopter, etc
• Above, either biomimickry or loud, clanky, dirty, dangerous massive machines
• Victorian settings, styles, classes: nobility travel with huge amounts of luggage and servants,combination of guns and swords, repressed emotions and sexuality, flowing booze and copious amounts of food
• Brass, steel, leather, wood construction, goggles and gears
• Magic or Magic/science - Mesmer's hypnosis, Frankenstein, ouija boards.

Added the next day:
Boingboing reviews a book on Steampunk Device making.  Amazon link here.

Added March 14, 2014, Steampunk 101.