TWIC: how to- list, marketing and profitable blogging

Behance (via lifeblogger), has a list of 29 ways to stay creative.  The ideas are good but not profound.  The list shines in its presentation, which is one of my weaknesses.  The list covers a few things I am good at but mostly omits the work of creativity, which is another of my weaknesses.  #29 is Finish Something. The actual work of making or writing the dang thing.

A.C.F. Crawford, author of Sailor of the Skysea, has given me his book on digital format asked me to read and review it on Goodreads.  This is part of his marketing strategy.  Many authors are now offering a few of their first books for free to build up a readership before actually trying to sell one.  Scott Sigler (Wikipedia) is the one I'm most familiar with.  Even established publishers do this now with Baen offering the first book of several series' to get people interested in their worlds. Well, Baen is using the technique to re-introduce older authors and series. I like the idea except that it means even more work before seeing that first paycheck.  Self-publishing is a scary gig.

In the above two examples, I've discussed my aversion to work.  Colin Schultz's post appears, at first, to be more my style.  He describes how he writes each blog post in one hour and gets paid well for it.  On the other hand, he had to earn his chops (is that the right metaphor?) before he was offered a blogging position at the Smithsonian.  He specifically says that nobody he knows makes money with Google Ads and Wordpress or Blogger.

The core of his post is how to be successful at science blogging and this paragraph introduces all the elements:

Now, those two goals: to be right, and to be original, run smack into the biggest and most important constraint in this kind of quick turn-around blogging: time.

TWIC: lego, groomed dogs, and lots of books

The change in Lego expressions to somewhat grimmer visages has not harmed your children.  An excerpt:

... New Zealand researchers demonstrated that LEGO faces have become much more diverse in the past 35 years, but the finding that got the most attention is that LEGO is making more angry-looking minifigures than ever before, to a point where the proportion of angry faces rivals that of happy ones. But, contrary to what you might have read, the study did not look into the effect that these facial expressions are having on children and their emotional development. In fact, the study did not involve children at all. ...
“Around 20 percent of reporters read the study beforehand,” estimates Bartneck. “The bad ones just copied what everybody else was writing.” This is unfortunate, because the findings of this study are interesting in their own right.

Happyplace.com has images of "bizarre-crazy" dog grooming.  One example.

Writing advice 1 (journalism):

2.) When interviewing for a job, tell the editor how you love to report.
How your passion is gathering information. Do not mention how you want to be a writer, use the word "prose," or that deep down you have a sinking suspicion you are the next Norman Mailer.

Writing advice 2 (sexy lamp test):

"The Sexy Lamp Test. If you can remove a female character, replace her w/ a sexy lamp & your story still works, you’re a hack." - @kellysue [Ed Yong]

Writing advice 3: self-publishers, let us know who you are.

I stumbled across the title Mad City Eats: Food Adventures in Madison, Wisconsin, by Adam Vincent Powell. ...I'm always vaguely curious who these local authors are (if they are truly "local") and what they're out there doing.But when I brought this book home, I was disappointed. I have no idea who this Adam Vincent Powell* is, and the book includes no introduction, preface, or really any kind of clue to enlighten me. The book literally just launches into its subject matter,

Writing advice 4: hard to excerpt from this one.  Two points in brief. a) be careful when your views change as you write a book so that the conclusion matches your introduction and b) be sure that people can recognize your voice from those of imagined critics.

Amazon has licences to allow fan-fiction to be sold on Kindle. Win (fan writers) - Win (Amazon) - Win (original writers).  Time for some Jedi knights to land in the Well of Souls (I'm reading some old Chalker now).

Hirschman felt that creative leaps were seldom intended but forced.  People just thought the project would be easier, then had to finish the damn thing.

 Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.

My son and I will soon be building an awesome robot!

Designed to be enjoyed by children with an adult on hand, Welcome to Your Awesome Robot provides perfect material for a fun family activity day or a kids workshop. Viviane Schwarz has illustrated hilarious comics throughout the book to explain the blueprint instruction pages, so this is just as much a story as it is a workbook.

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Link below added mere minutes after first posting!

Dim the lights to be creative.

“Darkness increases freedom from constraints, which in turn promotes creativity,” report Anna Steidle of the University of Stuttgart and Lioba Werth of the University of Hohenheim. A dimly lit environment, they explain in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, “elicits a feeling of freedom, self-determination, and reduced inhibition,” all of which encourage innovative thinking.
Steidle and Werth describe six experiments which provide evidence for their thesis. The key one featured 114 German undergraduates, who were seated in groups of two or three in a small room designed to simulate an office.

Update and new TWIC

I have been working at a wildlife conservation area, educating groups of children on ecological and historical subjects, for the past six weeks and doing little else. I really enjoy my work -not the paycheck so much -and still have the energy to consume internet material but not to create any.  This disappoints me and one thing I need to be creating is more job applications.  After that, I want to write.  I want to write about creativiti, life in small-town Ontario, evolution and more.  I want to write fiction, non-fiction, travelogues, political rants...

My last post showed a few examples of my son's creative thinking.  This was only a still image of his output, which is probably similar to all kids his age.  We are not well-integrated into the community yet so he fills a lot of alone time with self-guided play and making his own narratives.

At work, I've made two fairly well-received jokes and many not-so-well received.  For the former, I spoke Spanish to visitors to my workplace - they were there for CUBAree, which apparently does not involve people from a large island near Florida - and told co-workers about the huge mass of "broken, no-name ping pong balls" I was finding.  The latter joke doesn't work if you don't know that the snapping turtles of the area are laying now and raccoons are digging up the clutches and feasting (leaving behind small, white, broken balls).

All right, time for the links:
Sci Am revisits the complexity of the creative mind:

In the 60s, after extensively interviewing some of the most creative people of his generation, legendary creativity researcher Frank X. Barron came to the following conclusion:
“Thus the creative genius may be at once naïve and knowledgeable, being at home equally to primitive symbolism and to rigorous logic. He is both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, occasionally crazier and yet adamantly saner, than the average person.”

Complexity, bank tellers and artists:

Consider a hot off the press study just published in Creativity Research Journal. Edward Necka and Teresa Hlawacz recruited 60 visual artists and 60 bank officers in Poland, and administered a variety of tests of temperament and divergent thinking (one component of creativity requiring the ability to generate many different possibilities). How did the artists differ from the bank officers?
Bank officers were about as good at divergent thinking as the general population, whereas artists were amazingly good at flexibly generating original pictures and words. In fact, they were almost at ceiling! What about temperament? This is where things get really interesting. On the whole, artists didn’t substantially differ from bank tellers in their temperament. To get to the bottom of this finding, the researchers looked at the relationships between the various measures within each group.

Not entirely on topic, but if we are looking at complexity, I guess we should look at individuality.
Still off-topic but back to complexity: is genius the result of nature or nurture?

On topic again, can we research comedy?

McGraw leans on historical references, formulas, peer-reviewed studies, curious findings from his “Humour Research Lab” and good old-fashioned jokes. Just as scientists before him sent a man to the moon, this one thinks he can break whatever code needs to be broken for us to understand what exactly makes people laugh. And to do that, McGraw has tiptoed away from a long-established study of judgment and emotion and cannonballed instead into the field of humour research.

...[big ellipses here!]

“Like a magician, the comedian wants to have some air of mystery. To reveal the trick may actually hurt the entertainment aspect of it all,” he says with some sympathy. “Another thing is, to crack the humour code in some way may take this thing that does seem so difficult, so special, and make it less special in their eyes.”

The late Iain Banks left 11 rules for good writing:
Number 3, "Never give your protagonist a simple motivation" is the one I liked the best - the others were too complex for me.

My son showing the way

At a little park in Penetang, my son found a small stream and some wood to use as a shovel.  He dug a little pond that was filled by the stream.

First, he thought that frogs could use it for their eggs.  Then he decided that since it was deeper than the stream, people could wash their hands in it.

I admit I had just been filling time, waiting to get home and do stuff.  The little Guy, on the other hand, was working to make Penetang a little better.

When, Ommwriter?

In Korea, I had an iMac and used Ommwriter.  It is ironic because Korea is such a Microsoft stronghold, while Canada, my current location and where I am typing this on a PC, is a far more Apple-friendly place.  Anyway, I enjoyed using Ommwriter as it is so simple and distraction-free.  With earlier versions of Windows, I found similar comfort with Wordpad.  More on that later but this is I found on the download site today, May 24:

The relevant portion is on the bottom reads, "...hoping it'll be ready in April."

That complaint over, I'll probably get the paid version whenever it does come out.
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Okay, Wordpad:  I enjoyed the simple format with the limited options: pictures didn't embed well but I could change the font and such.  It adapted to whatever size I opened it to without me playing with the margins - I like this feature because I could choose how much of the screen to dedicate to other documents.  The new Wordpad has too much stuff!

This page offers "ten free minimalist word processors"-and in the comments you can learn the difference between "processor" and "editor".

If you want the other end, uh, maximalist word processors, Scrivener seems well-loved.

Muskoka Novel Marathon

I actually bought a book (well, an e-book) of Muskoka Novel Marathon material a few years ago.  Each story seemed fine but incomplete.  Now that I see how the work was written I better understand why.

The marathon takes place in July - and nowhere on their site could I find specific dates - and writers have from 8:00 PM Friday until 8:00 PM Monday to write.  They can bring in one page (double sided or in tiny font...) of their story preparation.  Each writer is expected to have $350 of sponsors for the YMCA Literacy Program.

On Twitter today, I saw that one beneficiary of the Marathon, a one-time student of the Literacy Program, will herself be writing this year.  Fantastic.

Her story is here on video.  The MNM Twitter page is here.

I have written a lot about writing but haven't done all that much of it.  This woman has shown amazing bravery and has likely moved far from her comfort zone.  A new hero for me and I wonder if I should follow her example.

This month in Creativity

I stopped writing "This Week In Creativity" because I was spending too much time relaying tips and advice and not enough time actually being creative.   The latter part is still true but I feel better about where I am right now and see that I still have the potential to be creative.  My personal big news is that I am again employed.  I am an guide and educator at a wilderness conservation centre and love the work although I am not so thrilled about the pay.  Still, it's keeping me busy and engaged and in a position to enjoy nature while looking for long term work.

With that out of the way, here are some links of interest.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton has advice that is still relevant.  Here are eight tips for discussing controversial topics.

Scott Adams looks at the connections between creativity and mental illness.  Instead of hiding your schizophrenia, promote it on your resume!

Young-ha Kim suggests you be an artist, now!

Usually parents remember the very first time their kid lies.  They're shocked....[Mom] thinks, "Why does he take after his dad?"... But you shouldn't worry.  The moment kids start to lie is the moment storytelling begins.  They're talking about things they didn't see....It calls for celebration.

... [big ellipses here]...That's right-- a novel, basically, is writing one sentence, then, without violating the scope of the first one, writing the next sentence.

Brain training at Sci Am.  I am not sure that these games work other than in that specific skill set; I don't think there is a lot of transfer.  Still, they have their uses. More from Sci Am.   And at Nature.

Don't write an awful screenplay.

The breakthrough came when my producer said to me, “Why don’t we remove _____?” He named a very specific aspect of the novel, one of the very few things I felt I hadn’t already gutted. Without it, the story would sink, I was sure of it. “You’re insane,” I said, displaying the same genius I had when I passed on Fight Club. “The whole narrative hinges on that.” “The whole book does,” he responded. “The book isn’t the movie.”

Salmon Rushdie feels artists are in danger.

Shaun Randol: This year, PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature highlights bravery in art, politics, and our everyday lives. What is the inspiration behind choosing bravery?
Salman Rushdie: The most obvious inspiration is that we all feel it: you can’t have free expression right now in a very wide range of countries. It takes a lot of guts for writers and journalists in those countries to stand up against repression and do what they do. Russia is a case in point where, as you know, journalists have an embarrassing habit of being killed for their reporting. PEN has done a lot of campaigning on behalf of Russian journalists both jailed and in some cases actually murdered.

A letter writer to Dear Cary on Salon asks why isn't he a TV sitcom writer yet?  He discusses some of what he has done to lay the groundwork and how much debt he has wracked up in the process.

 Is it possible to find success in my career while working a career program? I can’t shake the feeling of having to “graduate” before I can move on. And also, in your opinion, how many programs is too many programs to work?

Cary offers reasonable advice that I, not having any income or reputation riding on the answer, find too mild. It sure seems to me that he is too busy trying to possess accreditation or outside validation before actually doing the work.  The letter writer, in my opinion, is thinking too much like a university student and not enough like an apprentice who learns by doing.

In another Dear Cary letter, a woman (maybe I'm being too hetero-normative, the writer writes about a man and is in a marriage, so I think it's a she) finds a man work turns her on creatively and romantically.  She worries about herself-control and her marriage. Cary responds in part:

Well, pour it into art. That’s one way. Pour it all, all your soul’s craziness, all your excesses, all your incomprehensible and frightening passions, pour it all into art. Use therapy and exercise and swimming and writing to keep yourself together. You are not these things; you are the container. You are the vessel, the host, for the world’s movement through you. Read Jung. He will remind you. Read his “Psychology and Religion.” And meditate. And find a window in your house where you can sit and be this other person that you become in this man’s presence.

Be that person. Also, and most important: bring that person — that other person that is also you! — into your marriage. Be that person in your marriage.

I may have to read more Cary letters.  A brief read of the advice doesn't encourage me to value its content.  Now, creativity is not recipe-following and none of the research I have done suggests it ever will be, so advice will always include, "meditate and carefully consider your problem" rather than, "Do this, then that."  I'm finding more and more that I am a logical person who likes following guides or flowcharts and doesn't like "meditate and read Jung" as advice.  I hope the letter writer finds the advice more fulfilling than I do.  In my defence, I am willing to read more Cary to see if I accept his point of view rather than shut it out.

Self-publishing is no fun

 Recently, on the front page of the Times, there was an article about how David Mamet is publishing his next book by himself. David Mamet, who doesn’t need the attention, gets the front page. The rest of us cannot even get replies to our email.

If there is one positive thing about this self-publishing business it is this: You separate the wheat from the chaff among your friends and acquaintances. Who is willing to lend a hand and who cannot wait to abandon you? Who will nudge someone they know and get your book to them and who just won’t even acknowledge your desperation or is laughing at you behind your back? Some people have been remarkable, others’ names are now forever etched onto my Eternal Personal Shit List. I have a Facebook friend — I’ve never met her — who works at a not-the-Times newspaper who’s been amazingly supportive; there’s someone I know via Goodreads who told me that Amazon has some sort of print-on-demand capability and has guided me through the process; ... And so on. But for every one of those, there’s a cold stare, a frigid shoulder and a turned-up snout and probably a fair amount of feigned — or real — gagging.

I cannot wait for those people to ask me for help one day. Because you know what I’m going to do?
I will help them as best I can..

Newton worked on creating a universal language with a rational set of rules.  There may be ideas here for the next Tolkien wannabe creating the next Elvish language.

We need a new metaphor for 'using different approaches'.  Nat Geo "Thinks outside the box on exo-planets"

The article discusses how current thinking, that planets containing life have to be rocky ones within a limited zone around a sun, may be too limited.  I think the writer is going where Arthur C Clarke went decades ago in his sequel to 2001, a Space Odyssey. The book, I think  it was 2010, described a moon of Jupiter as having the necessary conditions for life.  The Nat Geo article discusses greenhouse gases and posits the sweet zone around the sun as extending ten times Earth's orbit out.

School kids build a car that is set to race a Lear Jet.

Sci Am asks if Science Fiction writers can inspire the world to save itself.  They seem to be discussing Neal Stephenson's plea for Science Fiction writers to Go Big, Be Positive, that I wrote about a year ago.  Hey, I scooped Sci Am!

Also at Sci Am, using adversity to fuel creative efforts. 

Finally, How to be a better friend.  I can't say it relates to creativity but it about friendship so it can't ever be wrong to discuss.