TWIC: a job in arts, paleoart, cliche, Johnny Cash, telling stories

Considering a job in the arts field? Ryan North has some words for you:

This is half the comic. Follow this link for the rest.
---
The scientific Paleoart of Dr Mark Witton. A screen shot (click to embiggen):

---
Greeting cards and cliche.

Greeting cards serve as a reminder that it is often with the clichéd and the ordinary that the fabric of language starts to unravel, and the pulse of life – that which will always remain beyond words – begins to bubble up from beneath

---
I have long been shy about my voice. When speaking something I think important, I deliberately deepen it. I very much suspect it sounds silly but it seems less silly than my normal reedy tones. Here is an article about Johnny Cash's voice just appeared.
---
Ani Alexander interviews Dr Tom Curran about telling stories.
---

TWIC: anatomy, money, schedules, self-loathing, secrets, note taking

Need to understand human anatomy? Via Quora.

---
Emerging writers vs those who make $100,000 a year.

Finding #2: Indie Publishing is a Viable Pathway to Success
We wanted to know if there was any correlation between how an author was published and whether or not it got them to the 100k club. The results were pretty surprising to us. Of all 100kers none were purely traditionally published. To be fair, only about 5% of overall respondents were solely traditionally published (James Patterson did not take our survey), so traditionally published authors didn’t make up a big part of the surveyed audience, but none of them were in the 100K club.

---
The New York Times tells us to schedule time to be creative.

---
Internet headline writers hate themselves.

In many non-public industries, success is like hide-and-seek. Companies find an advantage—a secret sauce, like the Coca Cola formula or a Netflix algorithm—and guard its secrecy at all costs. But web journalism is a radically public business, where writers can see what headline tropes get retweets, which stories blow up on Facebook, and which companies finish the month with the most readers. This business isn't like hide-and-seek. It's like Sardines, the derivative game where one person hides (e.g., under the sink), everybody else tries to find and join them, and the last person who doesn't see the clump of people in the kitchen is the loser. That's web journalism. Ruthlessly maximizing audience means figuring out what's working—for you and for everybody like you—and doing it over and over.
Writers are caught between the commercial instinct to maximize attention to articles that they've spent lots of time writing and the aesthetic instinct to not hate every fiber of their very being after they write the headline and press the publish button.

---
Hide secrets in your writing.

How to hide secrets in your story
The true aim of hiding secrets in your story is to give the reader autonomy – to give them reason and motivation to investigate your writing and engage with it on the deepest possible level; one where you’re no longer around to guide them. Because of this, there are actually a couple of ways to hide your secrets. 

Codes and ciphers

...Dan Brown’s Deception Point includes a series of letters and numbers on its last page, offering readers a code to solve. Using the book itself, the codes can be translated into individual letters, which can then be placed into a five-by-five square to reveal the message [redacted - follow the link if you really care] 

... 

References and clues
References and clues are a less direct way of engaging the reader, but can be incredibly satisfying in their own right. Books like The Eyre Affair and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen populate their stories with characters from famous works of literature.

...
Context and hindsight

Context and hindsight are the most natural ways to seed secrets into your story. When, for example, the reader learns the true identity of Fight Club’s Tyler Durden, earlier scenes take on new meaning, and a second read-through renders familiar scenes in a different, transformational light.

...

Secrets and lies

... 

The theory is a patchwork of throwaway moments, strange comments, and interlinked details, and it’s unclear whether it will ever be confirmed or denied in the books themselves. In a series built on myth and intrigue, it’s a tantalizing possibility – a treasure trail that invites fans to think back and interrogate scenes, even as they wonder how it could come to a head in the future. If the theory is true, it’s a masterclass in how to hide secrets in your story, and it never needs to be resolved to have value. There’s as much enjoyment in piecing together a behind-the-scenes story as there is in seeing a theory turn out to be right.

---
Modern Busy Town.

Image shrunk greatly, to see full size, follow the link.
---
One trait I kinda/sorta share with Gates and Branson. We take notes. At the link are five tips, from which I have removed the details from, leaving below only the titles:

1. Create your own system. ...
2. Write down your thoughts immediately.
3. Expound on your thoughts later.
4. Store your notebooks for future reference.
5. Review your archive regularly for patterns or associations. 

Semi-related: I have been rereading Kim and reading Bayonets to Lhasa as research for my steampunk novel set in Nepal. Mostly, I've been using my Kindle's highlight feature but I should be writing down my notes and remarking why I found them interesting.
---

Bowie's process

Word count

Jan 11: -- 
my God, how have I left it so long?

---

First, the iron would be mixed with nickel and heated to.... Okay, not Bowie the knife maker, although such ideas led me to this (Note, as always, and so also with other images in this post, I have shrank it somewhat.  For a full-size image, follow the link.  For a somewhat larger image, click the image):

I don't mean to make light of David Bowie's passing, but honestly, I never owned an album or CD of his.  Of course, I know Major Tom and his, "We can be heroes" song - that was him, right?

Still, I naturally have respect for the man and his work.  How did he remain relevant for 50 years? What was his process? From Stephen Collins.

Good to know.
---
Many science fiction authors of days of yore believed the future would be one of ease for the everyday man.  Okay, at least one author did.  It seemed so obvious that I just accepted it.  Boingboing looks at why this probably won't be the case.  See also Humans need not apply (Youtube link).

The future is difficult to imagine. I am at home in Ontario.  Well, I am at my mother's home, which feels like home when I am in Canada.  I looked at and threw away a lot of old papers, including my elementary school report cards.  I didn't want my son to see how terrible a student I was.  One thing that caught my eye was the low marks I received and commentary on my terrible spelling.

Nowadays, does spelling matter?  For important documents, I use spell check.  For informal docs, notes and chats, bad spelling is a sign of comfort with the other party - "I'm so relaxed in your company that I don't have to overthink my conversation."

Still, I somehow am more relaxed in theory about spelling but spelling errors still leap out at me when I read a book, so it has some value.  A more notable and common group of errors involve grammar and word choice.  They're, their, and there. "My family aren't..."  Spelling seems to be an easy problem for computers to solve; grammar less so.  How will education change to address this?  Will people simply change in their tolerances?  In teaching ESL, I simultaneously note every absent 'a' and 'the' and find I have no trouble understanding the text.  If it doesn't degrade understanding, perhaps the new frontier of tolerance will be grammar variance.

Does my reader(s?) have any predictions for the future?  Actionable ones we can make money on or even include in art so we look like prophets in ten or twenty years (or five)?
---
Periodic Table Battleship. Via Boredpanda.
--
Traveling as I am, I find it difficult to listen to podcasts.  This discussion with David Ben looks like it would be interesting.  Ben's personal website is here.
---
ESL teaching time savers.  Gotta say, this link is the least related to my blog's topic.