In late 2011, a writer friend was sharing her experiences of having months of uninterrupted writing time at her residencies at the Millay Colony, Ragdale, and Yaddo. I was staggered by her impressive rates of acceptance. You probably have one of those friends, too—you know the one I’m talking about, that friend who is a beautiful writer, but who also seems to win everything? I could barely believe that she had the balls to apply to—let alone, get accepted to—several residencies, a prestigious fellowship, and publications in journals I had actually heard of.This seems another version of Linus Pauling's "The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away."
I asked her what her secret was, and she said something that would change my professional life as a writer: “Collect rejections. Set rejection goals. I know someone who shoots for one hundred rejections in a year, because if you work that hard to get so many rejections, you’re sure to get a few acceptances, too.”
David Bales and Ted Orland describe a ceramics class in which half of the students were asked to focus only on producing a high quantity of work while the other half was tasked with producing work of high quality. For a grade at the end of the term, the “quantity” group’s pottery would be weighed, and fifty pounds of pots would automatically get an A, whereas the “quality” group only needed to turn in one—albeit perfect—piece. Surprisingly, the works of highest quality came from the group being graded on quantity, because they had continually practiced, churned out tons of work, and learned from their mistakes. The other half of the class spent most of the semester paralyzed by theorizing about perfection, which sounded disconcertingly familiar to me—like all my cases of writer’s block.---
All submissions must have some Korean element in them.---
All submissions must be in an original work of short fiction or poetry and written in English.
All short fiction submissions must be between 1000-8000 words. For poetry, less than 500 words.
...
-We are a new publication, so at this time we cannot offer payment for any accepted submission. We hope that this will change in the near future.
...protecting a razor head with a binder clip or wrapping shoes in a shower cap for travel. These ingenious ideas are the result of divergent thinking (DT), or an outside-the-box approach that generates novel, creative alternatives to persistent challenges. DT drives adaptive innovation and is important when problems require a shift in perspective or the development of flexible, original solutions.This divergent thinking can be measured in one-year olds and the results are consistent when testes are repeated.
It also appears that copying others does affect DT, as related research shows that children who watch someone else with high DT tend to improve their own DT scores, while those who watch low DT behaviorsreduce their own DT.---
What other movies could be summarized in this way?🌏💧✋🕋🗡🚀🏜☀️🌡🌶💯🚱⏳🌅🌑😡💉😱😈💀💥🌛🌙🐭💥🚶🏻〰🐛️⌛️👳🙏💥😴🛌😳💥🐛💥👊⚔👑 #dune https://t.co/bXwpdYC8jz— Kyle MacLachlan (@Kyle_MacLachlan) August 16, 2016
70 percent of US mayors support making roads more accessible to cyclists, even at the expense of driving lanes and parking, according to the 2015 Menino Survey of Mayors. The 89 mayors in favor represent a bipartisan majority of mayors, hailing from cities of all sizes, that recognizes the benefit of bike accessibility projects to a city’s traffic flow and budget.---
Independent broadcasters called Broadcasting Jockeys (BJs) deliver live broadcasts to viewers, who can add them to their list of favorite channels using an Afreeca Player tool. Some channels have tens of thousands of viewers at any given time. Paid services such as quick views or channel relays allow BJs additional sources of revenue.He now records and broadcasts playthroughs of Minecraft.
Record & Stream---
The host starts the recording and each party's audio is automatically streamed to the host's dropbox account in separate high quality file
1. Productive, successful people don’t get sucked into social media.----
Being on social media—checking notifications Facebook, scrolling through pictures on Instagram, reading quick updates on Twitter, whatever—it’s part of everyday life. But if you don’t control how much time you spend on it, the hours will fly by and you won’t have accomplished anything on your to-do list.
So either put a time limit on it—set an alarm for when you need to minimize it, close the app, do something else—or only get on after completing necessary work projects. Use social media as a reward.
“Making money” here means selling more than one million e-book copies in the last five years.It's hard to be a success in self-publishing. This author sold 20,000 copies of her book in one week but (claims she) was snubbed by the New York Times bestselling list.
These are authors who seem to have had a lot of success on Amazon, so it’s interesting to see them trying to create their own channel for connecting with readers and selling books (via “price promotions,” etc.) to them---
Turns out, there was a story up there. And man, did it end being crazier than I could have predicted when I started. Once again, my writing skills weren't nearly up to the task of telling it, but that's the whole reason you have to keep writing: to get better. I didn't outline a damn thing--not at the beginning. I like to use outlines once I get a story well under way, to help me stay on track, and don't do any really intense outlining until the very end of a story so I can tie everything together and deliver a satisfying ending. I like the creative freedom of starting with a blank slate. And, as I dug in on this marathon writing experiment, I had only one guiding idea.---
In the first incarnation of Under the Wall, I had explored the idea of a loving cat with telekinetic powers, abilities which prove to be the only thing that enables the tiny but valiant feline to save his family from an evil madman.
During one of my teaching internships, my mentor had us create books we read to children from the Boys and Girls Club. I still have my construction paper book with my poor drawings. My artistic abilities didn’t matter to the kids who were just excited to have someone spend time with them. Our learners have the power to greatly impact others with their creations. This holiday season we can get them to create digital books that help others. Fortunately, several free web tools and apps help students quickly and easily create and publish digital books. Keep scrolling to access my bookmarks of free web tools and apps for creating digital books on any device. I’ve included some ideas below and a slide presentation with tips and resources to get students creating digital books that help those around them while learning.
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Additional Tips and Ideas---
Have students map out their books and create outlines
Students will need to conduct research and curate their research
I recommend these tools and apps for students of all ages: Little Bird Tales,
Storybird, Toondoo, StoryKit, and Book Creator. Find more in the book marks below.
Get students to help you create a digital textbook. You can use tools like Google Docs or iBooks Author. Find examples of student created textbooks in the presentation above. Some impressive examples are these iBooks by 5th grade special education students (http://bit.ly/1eiMdLq), the interactive field guide of created by 7th graders (http://bit.ly/1eiMnCu), these German student iBooks (Ischulbuch.wordpress.com), Google Doc books created by English language learners in Argentina (Datenglish.blogspot.com.ar), the WordPress Living Textbook by middle school students (Livingtextbook.aaja.org), the history book created on a Wiki (Dgh.wikispaces.com) and the geography and science textbooks created by 3rd graders using Livebinders (Livebinders.com/play/play?id=203663).
* You can always come home again, but that doesn’t mean you’re moving backwards.---
* There is never a bad time for a pun.
* There’s also never really a good time for a pun.
* You might as well just stay braced for a pun at all times, and ride them when they come with as much grace as you can manage.
* The fact that you can replace ‘pun’ with ‘disaster’ in the last three rules says a lot about the human race.
The paper shows a link between artistic engagement and the genes underlying schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. To be sure, the effects are really small (the genes explain less than 1% of the variation in artistic engagement), and the results do notmean that if one has a mental illness they are destined for creativity (or that creative people are destined for mental illness). Nevertheless, the results are consistent with other solid studies showing there is a real and meaningful link between the schizophrenia spectrum and artistic creativity (see here, here, here, and here).
4 Blank notecards. There are even greater possibilities from a deck of blank cards. You can make your own custom Top Trumps deck (Top Trumps is known in the US as “What is that card game school boys play in England again?”). Or create an entire new game using a framework like Dvorak.5 Overflowing handfuls of dice is a powerful feeling. Like being an ancient deity that can roll the fate of an entire civilization! That is why there are so many dice here. They put a firm stamp on the tool box as made for games. But dice are useful beyond randomizers. All these different colored dice can be used as game markers, and the pips as indicators to the strength or health of the die unit. Like DiceWars in the real world.6 Play money and coins. Nothing abstract about this faux moolah. It feels great to have a stack of cash in hand as a meter of game success. And, more than chips or play money, plastic gold coins are the gold standard of game currency. Gold coins can spin a theme towards pirates or fantasy. They have a presence and heft beyond their plastic patina.7 Poker chips. These need not be proxies for money in a game. They make great counters, turn markers, or modifiers for other board pieces.
...BONUS INGREDIENT: D20 Something that was not at the Dollar Store that I would add to the ideal game design box is a set of polyhedral D&D dice. There is something magical about the shapes and colors. When first encountered they are understood, yet completely from another world. Consider putting a full set of D20 type polyhedra in your gift kit.Via Boingboing
The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness is a documentary which presents a year in the life of Studio Ghibli and its famed director, Hayao Miyazaki. The year in question was a particularly interesting one during which Miyazaki announced his retirement.The trailer for this documentary is available at the link above
According to evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller,creative displays in humans are analogous to the peacock’s tail: they serve the function of attracting mates by serving as indicators of mental fitness (cognitive functioning and personality).---
Extending this argument, personality psychologist Gregory Feist made a key distinction between applied/technologicaldisplays of creativity (seen in modern domains of technology, science, and engineering), andornamental/aesthetic displays of creativity (seen in modern domains of art, music, and other aesthetic domains). According to Feist, ornamental/aesthetic forms of creativity– which play on our evolved perceptual functions and evoke strong emotions in the perceiver– were shaped primarily by sexual selection pressures and are therefore more likely to receive a sexual response than applied/technological forms of creativity.
Sometimes, too, he shows himself adept at the why-oh-why column now a Daily Mail staple. Why is handwriting so awful these days? Why are so many foreign words supplanting perfectly good English terms?
He had a gift for the arresting opening line. To wit: “Rudyard Kipling was the only popular English writer of this century who was not at the same time a thoroughly bad writer.” Or this: “There is one way of avoiding thoughts, and that is to think too deeply.”
Responsibilities:Find stories that make people who don’t care about science sit up and take notice---
Always be reporting: Strive to get exclusives, from places where no one else is looking
Pitch early and often -- and be willing to regularly spitball the other reporters’ ideas
Work quickly
Work on more than one story at a time
Methodically fact-check every draft
Understand basic statistics (or have a statistician on speed-dial)
Requirements:A proven track record and great clips of science reporting
Proven ability to turn complicated/subtle/contentious ideas into clear and lively prose
Must have specific beats that you’re not only interested in, but have a track record of covering well
Genuine enthusiasm for reporting, even when it’s annoying
A critical, skeptical eye for hype / baloney
Love for and excitement about the internet
When is the Hour of Code?---
Anybody can host an Hour of Code anytime, but the grassroots campaign goal is for tens of millions of students to try an Hour of Code during December 8-14, 2014, in celebration of Computer Science Education Week. Is it one specific hour? No. You can do the Hour of Code anytime during this week. (And if you can't do it during that week, do it the week before or after).
Why computer science?
Every student should have the opportunity to learn computer science. It helps nurture problem-solving skills, logic and creativity. By starting early, students will have a foundation for success in any 21st-century career path. See more stats on Code.org.
How do I participate in the Hour of Code?
Sign up to host an Hour of Code event here and start planning. You can organize an Hour of Code event at your school or in your community — like in an extracurricular club, non-profit or at work. Or, just try it yourself when Dec. 8 arrives.
I’ve had a few requests for details about how I paginate my print books, so here goes. Below you’ll find a 50-minute video of me walking through my pagination routine. It’s not quite everything, but I show 95% of what’s involved for a few sample chapters. From there, it’s just a matter of repeating the steps throughout the book. Once you do a few of these, it comes very naturally. You’ll also find that the process speeds up with practice.---
I brought the same Nicole to every project, and every time I started a new project I was prepared to become a professional children’s theater director or project manager or indie musician or whatever it was.Dungeons and Dragons can protect your creativity and imagination.
And I’d say I was reasonably successful at many of these potential life paths. Hard work, persistence, and natural ability does get you pretty far.
But it was only when I ended up on the writing path—and I did “end up” there as a fluke, when I started looking for ways to make extra money between indie musician gigs—that I realized my work felt different than all of my previous jobs.
The French Situationist author Annie Le Brun, in her 2008 book The Reality Overload: The Modern World's Assault on the Imaginal Realm, suggests that information technology is causing blight and desertification in the world of the imagination just as surely as pollution and global warming are causing blight and desertification in the physical world. We are gaining the ability to communicate and hoard information, but losing the ability to imagine.I think the fear of electronics killing unstructured play and imagination is overblown, the newest form of "kids these days". But maybe there's something to the value of collaborative imagination, where a group works together to visualize and understand the bizarre.
I literally cannot get my head around what it must be like to be a child or teenager now, raised in a completely digitized world -- where fantasy and long reverie have given way to the instant gratification of electronic media. There can be no innocence or imagination or wonderment in the world of Reddit, Pornhub and 4Chan
Not to go all twitter-rage, but this is just sad, really. A limiting, fearful-of-the-imagination world view. http://t.co/ieHIWaO3aF
— Guy Gavriel Kay (@guygavrielkay) June 5, 2014
Kay is talking about Dawkins' disapproval of fairy tales (probably the same link at Kay provided).Reading fairy stories to children is harmful because it instils a false belief in the supernatural from a young age, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has warned.
Speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival, Dawkins, a prominent atheist, said that it was ‘pernicious’ to teach children about facts that were ‘statistically improbable’ such as a frog turning into a prince.
He also claimed to have never believed in Santa Claus, knowing that the figure who turned up at his house at Christmas was his parent’s friend ‘Sam.’
Dawkins, who is professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University, is promoting his new memoir ‘An Appetite for Wonder’.
As a creative person (and everyone else, really), there are two… and only two… reasons why you should work for free:
...You never, never, never, EVER do it for the exposure. Doing it “for the exposure” is the preferred method of flimflam artists and IP thieves for getting your work. I’d say denying these creeps should be the first priority but that’s just the cherry on the sundae. Also, the only exposure you get is as a chump who will work for free.
- It’s part of your online business plan. You’re providing free content in the hopes that your readers will visit your online store. (Webcomic method) Or that their clicks will be enough that the advertisers will give you a lot of cash. (YouTube/ Adsense method) So while you are providing free content, you are not working for free.
"B.F. Skinner found that intermittent, or random, rewards lead to more robust behavior....gamblers play on the slot machines for hours, waiting for random payouts. This principle can be sued to enhance creativity by giving intermittent recognition for creative work. Consider using surprise rewards for creative contributions, or randomly giving special perks for particularly innovative ideas. Knowing that at any time there could be a wonderful surprise as a reward leads to enhanced creative work." (P123, location 1414 of 2717)I don't know Skinner's work but the example of slot machines suggests one is rewarded for simply being there, rather than performing novel work.
"Consider using some prompts that really stretch the imagination... How would superman solve this problem? How might you solve this problem 100 years ago?
Come up with really wild ideas... How might you do this on the moon, for example. "
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I wrote these 25 commandments as a panic response 15 or more years ago to an invitation to do some media training for a group of Elsevier editors. I began compiling them because I had just asked myself what was the most important thing to remember about writing a story, and the answer came back loud and clear: "To make somebody read it."Ultimately, there's no other reason for writing. Journalists write to support democracy, sustain truth, salute justice, justify expenses, see the world and make a living, but to satisfactorily do any of these things you have to have readers. Fairness and accuracy are of course profoundly important. Without them, you aren't in journalism proper: you are playing some other game. But above all, you have to be read, or you aren't in journalism at all....3. So the first sentence you write will be the most important sentence in your life, and so will the second, and the third. This is because, although you – an employee, an apostle or an apologist – may feel obliged to write, nobody has ever felt obliged to read.
4. Journalism is important. It must never, however, be full of its own self-importance. Nothing sends a reader scurrying to the crossword, or the racing column, faster than pomposity. Therefore simple words, clear ideas and short sentences are vital in all storytelling. So is a sense of irreverence.
"The word itself originates in mid-19th century France, where printers would assemble time-saving blocks from the most commonly used word combinations. Fountain [the author of the book on Cliches being reviewed] hews to that broad definition, and his A-Z of shame embraces buzz-words and bromides as well as adages, truisms and idioms. From “affluent society” to “zero-sum game” they are all, he argues, either redundant, vacuous or overused to the point of meaninglessness."
2. An unmade bed has no negative measurable impact in eternity. An unfinished book probably does.3. We will feel much better, and be much less distracted dealing with mundane tasks, important as they may be for the quality of our lives, if our calling is tended to first.More, and discussion of his points at the link.
..There's no shame in working in your skivvies, though. Victor Hugo used to get undressed and have his valet take his clothes away. Be proud; just know that it's not pants you've got on. Now go back to work.
You Are the Left Side of the Brain |
You are a logical and orderly person. You have a system for almost everything in your life. You like to stay busy, and it's important that you stay on task. You prefer to do one thing at a time. You are rational and detail oriented. You love to analyze, and you have a head for numbers. You are also good with words. You love to read, and you've been known to write well.At least I have some skill with words. |