TWIC (11)

Why waste a skyscraper by placing it in a city?  The evolo 2013 skyscraper competition has yielded some great great entries. The polar umbrella looks cool and may actually work ...someday.
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Jeez, don't even think of mousetraps!

 the Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative, with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, put out a call for a better designed, more pleasure-inducing condom. The challenge is to make an experience-enhancing condom that will make men and women go weak in their desire to have protected sex! For the good of humankind!

The Gates foundation wants you to build a better condom.
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At least these people are writing.
Salon looks at 9 fan-fic stories based on Game of Thrones.  Their picks can be found at the link.  All 608 (currently) can be found here.

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And with this post, I formally give up posting news about other people's work and research.  Expect a lot fewer posts here.  I will still post when I feel I do something particularly creative- current projects include April Fool's Day, an Easter Egg Hunt for my son and a hopefully scathing review of a creationist book a friend has driven me to read.  Remember, I am a creative-ist, not a creationist!  Anyway, my own personal creative production has not markedly increased while working on this blog so I need to find other ways to grow.  I still want to be creative; perhaps now I will be creative rather than merely think about it.

TWIC (10)

Bestseller authors aren't swimming in money.

This past summer, my novel, “Broken Piano for President,” shot to the top of the best-seller lists for a week. After Jack Daniel’s sent me a ridiculously polite cease and desist letter, the story went viral and was featured in places like Forbes, Time magazine and NPR’s Weekend Edition. The New Yorker wrote one whole, entire, punctuated-and-everything sentence about me! My book was the No. 6 bestselling title in America for a while, right behind all the different “50 Shades of Grey” and “Gone Girl.” It was selling more copies than “Hunger Games” and “Bossypants.” So, I can sort of see why people thought I was going to start wearing monogrammed silk pajamas and smoking a pipe.
But the truth is, there’s a reason most well-known writers still teach English. There’s a reason most authors drive dented cars. There’s a reason most writers have bad teeth. It’s not because we’ve chosen a life of poverty. It’s that poverty has chosen our profession

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More on money and writing.

In Money Matters, creative people discuss what they’re not supposed to: the intersection of entertainment and commerce, as well as moments in their lives and careers when they bottomed out financially and/or professionally. The artist: Neal Pollack appeared in the national consciousness as part of the talented group of writers and editors that gravitated to McSweeney’s, Dave Eggers’ publishing empire. In 2000, The Neal Pollack Anthology Of American Literature—a collection of satirical pieces centering on the fictional “Neal Pollack” persona, a larger-than-life spoof of macho world-beaters like Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer—became the first book published by McSweeney’s publishing arm. (The book was later re-published by HarperCollins.) A satirical rock novel, Never Mind The Pollacks, followed in 2003, and was followed by 2007’s Alternadad, a memoir about his experiences raising his son. Alternadad generated tons of publicity and human-interest stories about hipster parenting, in addition to generating interest from the television and film industries. But the book’s sales failed to match its buzz, and television and film adaptations didn’t pan out.

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Writing for SyFy Channel. One suggestion of many:

It will probably be expected of you to have a romance plot or two in the movie along side the disaster/giant creature/giant creature disaster.  Given what else you're going to have to fit into your movie, and the time you have available (two hours, less commercials) you're not going to have time to do these in any sort of depth.
Thus they will be superficial and your primary objective is probably going to be making it so they seem less superficial than they actually are.
You don't want it to seem like, "I just threw in a romance because it was expected," even if it's true. Especially if it's true.

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Their next step should be designing a better mousetrap.
A new NYC design contest takes aim at new payphones and comes up with ideas that are self powered and  expand far beyond mere telephony. The winning design is here.

The NYFi features two interfaces and a simple touch activates the height sensitive interactive zone on either face.  Two models of the NYFi are proposed: a ten foot model for commercial and manufacturing districts and a smaller model for residential and historic districts where payphones have not traditionally been permitted.  

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Science Writing advice from Roger Highfield.

What do you need to know to write well about science?Whatever the subject, angle, tone, length or style, your story has to tickle the fancy of your readers and maintain their interest to the very last word. The aim is not to impress a professor with your knowledge, amaze your mum or to get something off your chest. Think hard about your intended audience. They may be ignorant but they are rarely stupid. They have all kinds of interests and preoccupations and, when it comes to getting their attention, these are the best places to start. Remember that they always have better things to do with their time. If you don't grab them with your first sentence, you might as well give up.

TWIC 8

I changed computers and am now somewhat comfortable with Windows 8.  During the move I lost five or six links and so have missed (at least) a week.  Um, TFWIC (These Few Weeks In Creativity) begins now!

An excerpt from  25 THINGS WRITERS SHOULD BEWARE

The act of writing is awesome. The business of writing is, nnnnggghyeah, less so. Sometimes this thing we do seems like frolicking nude across a minefield while some shady assailant fires paintballs at your crotchparts. It’s hard to know which way to step. One wrong move and you’ve given some scam-artist all your copyrights or granted some publisher the right to tattoo its logo above your father’s ass-crack. We inkslingers have to stay frosty lest we get skuh-rewed.
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1. MISINFORMATION
The Internet is awesome because it’s all like HOLY CRAP ALL THE INFORMATION EVER, but it’s also less than awesome because it’s all also like HEY WHOA CHECK OUT THIS MOUNT FUJI-SIZED PILE OF HORSESHIT. Here on the Woven World Web, truth and bullshit are given equal time to parade around in their 1s and 0s; what that means for the writer is that we will encounter a mix of Genuine Information, Anecdotal Evidence (aka “Artisanal Data”), and Bold-Faced Deception. You’ll hear things about publishing or self-publishing or agents or contracts that fall into one of those categories but they all pretend to be in the category of Genuine Information even when they’re not. Always ask: “Is this true?” Then use your digital detective skills (and question-asking skills) to suss out the reality. (Please see yesterday’s post on the subject of dispelling misinformation. Pay particular attention to the comments.)
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25. A LACK OF EDUCATION ON YOUR PART
Finding the truth and vetting information and making the right choices is all on you. No agent is perfect. No publisher is untarnished. No self-publishing prospect is an Easter basket of puppies and kittens. You must get educated. You must stand vigilant against the rampant heinous fuckery out there. Don’t trust me. Don’t place all your trust in the hands of anyone. Ask questions. Seek information. Look for the pearls of truth in the oyster-spooge of opinion. Be smart. Protect yourself. You are your own best defender against all the nonsense.

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Part of the above list of hazards for writers deals with bad agents and vanity presses.  Here is another warning about a new vanity/established press.

bad news - risk for new authors
"Hydra's deal is much, much worse than the one you'll get from a real DIY option like BookBaby or CreateSpace or Lulu, where you only pay for services you want, keep 100% of your profits, and assign no rights at all to the "publisher." It's got all the downsides of a DIY press, and all the downsides of a traditional press, and the upsides of neither."

UPDATE: March 16
\Changes to the Random House contracts.

Based on strong criticism from writers' groups, authors, and agents, Random House has decided to make major changes in its digital contract. Allison was kind enough to share these changes with me. 

So far as I can tell, the changes look good, more traditional and generally better for the author.
via Boingboing
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Laura Helmuth gives one bit of advice.  So do others; dig around.
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Do you need background noise to help you concentrate?  How about coffeehouse noise?
As a university student with attention and concentration problems, I found that playing the same long-play tape helped.  I do feel pity for my roommate who ended up hearing the same Doug and the Slugs music every night!  Apparently, some people need more random noise than music provides and perhaps the coffee house blend will help them.
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Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling
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Know your audience when you want to help or build something for them.

"How did you decide to select a business model in which you treat the poor as customers rather than recipients of charity? And do you believe this to be a faster way out of generational poverty?
 Giving things away is hard to do on a large and sustainable scale. Selling products allows us to scale much faster. People who are trying to survive can't afford to wait for traditional giveaway programs that may or may not find their village. Selling our income-boosting products at prices villagers can pay allows us to invest in and grow a sustainable distribution network that gives rural people access to even more products and services.
 When we treat people as customers--not as recipients of charity--they have the ultimate power and choice to decide whether they want to buy what we're offering. As a social enterprise, we don't decide what people should get. It's up to them to decide.
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 The foot-operated irrigation pump is successful because it provides small-plot farm families with an extremely affordable solution to their daily problem of drudgery--hauling water to their crops. (It was like going from doing six to eight hours a day of back-breaking work hauling water to two hours instead on a "stairmaster.") With improved efficiency in daily irrigation, farm families could then spend time expanding their plots, growing more diverse and high-value crops, extending their growing season or spending time marketing their produce and getting better prices--all of these add up to dramatic boosts in household incomes of $200 to $300 per season. The extra income allows them to feed their family, buy school supplies, keep their children in school, and buy inputs for the next crop without going into debt."

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Know your location when you decide to help or build something.

"His first project--what he calls a "seed to cultivate a new type of urbanism on water in African cities"--is a floating school. The three-story structure is 108 square feet at its base, and 33 feet high. It sits on a flotation deck made of 256 used plastic drums. And the body is all wood, which is sourced locally. The idea is to keep things relatively cheap: Adeyemi estimates it will cost about $6,250.
The building is designed for about 100 students (aged 4 to 12), and has its own power system based around solar panels on the roof. There is rainwater harvesting capacity, and the school has its own toilet--something unusual for the area."

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Does this drug enhance creativity?  Scientific American investigates.
Video (with the following caption):

"The drug Levodopa is designed to increase dopamine levels in the brains of Parkinson's patients suffering from tremors. A Tel Aviv-based doctor reports that it also boosts the creativity of patients taking it."

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All the good ideas have been thought.  Is there more for me to discover? Or to write about?

"Only 1% of all writing on the internet is great writing, and even that is an “embarrassment of riches”.
Great writers produce great writing, and the bad ones cannot be rescued.
His golden rule is: the writer is everything. And a corollary: the publisher (with a few exceptions) is nothing.
We live in a world of ideas and they are not restricted by source or medium.
All of the above taken together paints a rather depressing picture for young writers. The honest truth is that the market we’ve entered is full of great writers who produce ever more great writing, leaving ever little time for us to find a readership for our work. Despite the difficulties, there are some ways to overcome these huge hurdles."

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Write for free?

"The fact remains that if you have things to say that you think are worthwhile and nobody is offering to pay you to say them, you ought to say them anyway for free. If enough people agree with you that those things are worthwhile, it just may lead to something"

I read another article about not writing for free and beware of giving your content to for-profit groups but it didn't make the move.  That article and the one linked above don't really conflict but naturally caution is needed in choosing what you give away.
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Limitations encourage creativity.

"Phil Hansen has tattooed bananas, drawn a portrait on stacked Starbucks cups and created a Jimi Hendrix portrait out of matches, which he then burned. In other words, he isn’t the kind of artist who feels bound to paint on canvas.
So how did Hansen happen upon such fascinating methods? By embracing a major limitation — a hand tremor that made it impossible for him to do the pointillist drawings he loved.
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The power of limitations has been a real theme so far this conference. Why do you think this hasn’t traditionally been a part of the conversation about creativity?
I think due to the economy, we’ve been running into a spike of constraints while at the same time being more culturally fascinated with creativity than ever. One of the speakers, Danny Hillis, said “It’s hard to get people to focus on plan B when plan A is working so well.” Now we are in a place where lots of “plans As” are no longer working. Being forced to reevaluate is allowing us to see this connection between limitations and creativity that has always been right in front of us. Within this process, we are bringing curiosity back — curiosity about new possibilities that we hadn’t explored when plan A was working so well. And we are discovering better alternatives, as I’ve witnessed here from a lot of speakers so far at TED."

twic (7) Happy Darwin Day!

I follow Boingboing and nearly daily read Cory Doctorow opine on copyright issues.  Some time ago, Freakenomics got into the discussion with Who Owns the Words that Come Out of Your Mouth.  I hope I can quote this section:

DUBNER: Coming up on Freakonomics Radio: What is the going rate for a word once written or spoken aloud by Winston Churchill?
SINGER: I used 3,872 words of Winston Churchill’s in the book. And that cost me £950, which is roughly 40 cents a word.DUBNER: Hello, British copyright law! And, it turns out, Barry Singer is not the only one who doesn’t like it:
Rohan SILVA: We were having a coffee a few years ago with Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and they said to us that they’d been looking at the intellectual property regime in the U.K., and they thought that they actually couldn’t have started Google in the U.K.

The whole post -or listen to it as a podcast here - is interesting and Winston Churchill was a remarkable man, but the content is important to anyone who includes realgia in their writings.
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Daniel Fincke discusses writer's block at Camels with Hammers.  He also has been so busy that it has interfered with his blogging.  I know how he feels and want to get back to blogging daily.  Soon.  From a Fincke post on his schedule:

I’ve missed blogging a ton. I suffer something analogous to withdrawal when I don’t write every day. Tonight, soon as I get minimally settled at the new place, it will be time to make Camels With Hammers a daily blog again. Thanks to countless of you for your patience, loyal readership, and personal support these last few months. Please come by every day this week. It encourages me to write more!

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See Darwin's creative process in action.

These two drawings, separated by 22 years, are a perfect illustration of the creative process in scientific thought. On the left is the first ever evolutionary tree, and on the right is Darwin’s final tree from On the Origin of Species.When he sketched out this first tree, Darwin had already spent years coming up with and expanding on his idea of transmutation (what we call evolution). I think about this drawing as a proof, a way to visually evaluate what he had been mulling over for so many years. He used this figure to take a bunch of independent thoughts and pull them together to address one big question: how do the species we see today relate to species that existed in the distant past?

The author goes onto further detail, emphasizing Darwin's "I think" written at the top of his first drawing.  The man had the idea, the flash of genius, but needed time to test and adjust it before considering it complete.

twic (6) Surprises is not settled yet

  I am currently in Penetang, Ontario, at my mother's home and the place I will call home for the next year.  I am here with my son so that he can attend a Canadian school and improve his English.  I am also looking for work: I am not sure what I should be doing here.  On the one hand, I don't want to overwhelm my mother so I should be home outside of school hours and so need a part time job.  On the other, if I find satisfying work that offers a sufficient salary, we will stay and my wife will emigrate and join us.

I am looking at getting a new computer while I am in Canada and am interested in Acer computers.  By happy coincidence, my mother has one and I am typing on it now.  I like a lot about it but all Acer notebooks seem to have tiny left-side shift keys.  \i have learned to compensate somewhat but \i frequently type "\" then "i" instead of "I".  The weird thing is that this computer has two "\" keys, one next to the left-side shift key and forcing it to be the same size as any normal letter key.

Anyway, this is not my computer and I am not eager to spend too much time searching or researching.

Two contests for you:

The Toronto Star's short story is in progress!  This story won last year.  The contest started in early January and finishes on February 24.  I just learned of it but will attempt something for it.

For K-bloggers, write about your weirdest travel experience.

The rules are simple: write a story (in English) about your most unusual or bizarre travel experience in Korea. No more than 500 words. A photograph from the incident, or of some of the aftermath, is recommended (but optional). Preference will be shown to positive stores or those that encourage travel. Send your stories to me – chrisinsouthkorea AT gmail DOT com. Deadline: 11:59pm Korean time on February 20th, 2013. The top three stories will be chosen by Groove’s editor Matt Lamers, myself, and the founders of Travel Pants Korea, Angel Moreno and Daniel Kim. The three stories will be read dramatically for a YouTube video, and the winner voted on by you. Voting will be from the 25th to the 3rd (one week), with the winner being declared on March 4th.

At Boing-Boing are two posts on patent-trolls.
Games Network claims to have patented the phrase "Space Marine".  Apparently, they plan on going back in time to charge Doc EE Smith for his use of Space Marines in his Lensmen series -which I think finished in 1954.
If you are a podcaster and have suffered from patent trolls, these people want to hear from you.

Author Rudy Rucker discusses Bogosity Generators.  Science fiction writers need a scientific sounding explanation for futuristic tech.  Faster-Than-Light travel?  Warp Speed.  A way to generate enough power? Dilithium crystals.  Instantaneous communication across interstellar distances? Try the Ansible.

These tools demonstrate the difference between fantasy and science fiction.  With fantasy, the explanation can be as simple as 'by magic', while some, possibly bullshit (Rucker's word), technology should be cited in science fiction.

The Bogosity Generator is NOT bullshit however.  The limits the author forces upon the invented tech often drive the story.

An excerpt:

When you’re thinking about the explanation, it’s like you’re reading an instruction manual for some cool new device. Admittedly, you yourself are writing the instruction manual at the same time that you’re reading it, but the manual is not a complete fabrication—it’s constrained by having to be logical, concise, intellectually appealing, internally consistent and, to a certain degree, externally consistent with some cherry-picked facts of science.

When you get a really fine explanation for your bogosity generator, it’s no longer the case that your story tells a lie . If the explanation is really cooking, the lie tells your story. Yeah, baby. That’s where you want to be. It’s a variation on a carnie grifter saying: “Don’t run the con. Let the con run you.”

It sometimes happens that an author invents the bogosity generator before deciding what it’s supposed to do. You might dream one up early in a novel simply because you know you’ll be needing some explanatory device sooner or later, even if you haven’t quite yet decided what kind of weirdness you’ll be needing to explain. Or you’ll have a nice mental image for a funky bogosity generator, and you go ahead and describe it without even knowing what it does or how it “works.”

Lego Ceationary

My son and occasionally play Creationary, a Lego Game.  The game can be fun and I like making things with the little guy but there are some problems.  Before I get into them, here are some things we made.  I have included two pictures of each item with the card and die in the image.  I have posted each picture twice; in the first picture I have obscured the card image so you could guess if that interests you.

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Alright, I hope that was fun.  So my two problems with the game, and they are minor, are age-appropriateness and culture specificity.

I don't know how much my Mars Rover looks like the image, but either way, my son didn't know what a Mars Rover was.  Similarly, there was a Concorde image and my completed product looked either like it or a Space Shuttle.  My son has never seen the Concorde and doesn't remember if he had seen a Space Shuttle.  The Concorde last flew in 2003, two years before my son was born.  I just can't imagine the target audience for this game being born in the '90s and so able to remember such a craft.

My in-laws live on a farm and are farmers.  There is no red-walled barn with silo in the country, I think.  This is a minor complaint because I do think Lego's target audiences are North America and Europe.  Besides, my son made a good elevator, having ridden in one about once or more a day all his life, while his American cousin has probably been in fewer than a hundred.

A more common complaint is the small number of parts.  There is wonderful variety in the blocks but unless you want to go very minimalist and  abstract, you will probably not complete your structure in the intended color.  I am willing to import parts from other Lego sets - notably the older, only-squares-and-rectangles sets, but I worry about migration of the the game's parts away.

We had fun, we didn't keep score and we built some things together and some simultaneously. 

TWIC 5 (more meat, slightly fewer links)

At Linkedin, Rita King discusses the legacy of Hedy Lamarr, the most beautiful woman of her time, and also a remarkable inventor.  King lists five things Lamarr can teach us about innovation.  I like them all but feel I shouldn't copy the lot.  Here are the first two:

1) Take risks. Hedy fled her country and husband in 1937. “It was his game to keep me prisoner,” she said, "It had been my game to escape. He lost.” On the trip to the United States she landed a Hollywood contract. She also gave herself a new name, Lamarr, after the sea, La Mar.
2) Collaborate. Five years after her film debut, at a dinner party in Hollywood, she met an avant-garde composer and shared her idea to protect US radio-guided torpedoes from enemy interference. She left her number in red lipstick on his windshield so the discussion could continue. The pair patented the invention and presented it to the United States Government for a “Secret Communications System” to help defeat Hitler. 

Via Veronica at Canadian Atheist.

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I have just finished Ted Kerasote's Merle's Door.  In addition to being one of the best 'life of my pet dog' stories I have ever read (and it really is, and much more), the reader gets a few peeks at Kerasote's writing process.  At the start of the book, he lives in a cottage and has an office in a trailer several hundred meters away.  He 'goes to work' every day and puts in solid hours.  Later, after he built his own home, the commute was not so long, but he appears equally dedicated and disciplined.  Indeed, he shows great physical fitness discipline as well.  to compare Kerasote and myself, we both enjoy wilderness activities, but while I enjoy a few hours a day, one or two days a week, he puts in solid outdoor workouts every day.  I like camping in good weather and he likes camping in all weathers.

I dream of being a writer and he does the hard work of actually writing.  I am impressed.

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I have just finished teaching at a two week ESL camp for middle school students.  it was very tiring but also satisfying.  At the camp I met a fellow teacher who also sculpts bronze.

Jason Mehl is an interesting man, even aside from his art.  He is supremely flexible, putting his foot behind his head while standing on the other foot.  I have not seen him practice rock climbing but he sounded sure, competent and competitive when discussing the subject.

I am still quite an outsider in most art forms and this description of his work first left me mystified:

My sculptures describe an oppositional relationship between man and the world as a force that is somewhere between an offensive and defensive action. Space and material are used to show tension and change using the language of erosion, decay,and growth processes.

He later describes what this means in some detail and I somewhat better understood what he was talking about.  As I say, I accept what Mehl wrote here and feel I 'get it' to some extent, but these convoluted phrases seem common in abstract art.  Is there a school that teaches 'artybabble'?  Is it really possible to read the above and understand it immediately?  Is it really possible that abstract sculptors really think these things before going to work?  I am not describing only Mehl, who I consider a friend, but such artists in general.  If it were me, and I had made a flowing sculpture with cool protuberances and varying from matte to gleaming, would I feel compelled to create a such a written description afterwards?

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Master your Domain. Also at Linkedin, is a description of how two masters of their craft work.  The two masters are Comedian Jerry Seinfeld and Sushi chef Jiro Ono.

Hmmm.  Another list of five.  This time of practices shared between the two.  Here are the first two:

1. Never stop practicing (there is no perfect)Jiro has been preparing sushi for over 70 years; Seinfeld has been a stand-up comic for over 35 years. Both are widely considered to be among the best in the world at what they do, and yet listening to them, one comes away with the impression they will never be satisfied. They are constantly practicing, honing their work, and seeking to improve.
As Jiro describes it: "All I want to do is make better sushi. I do the same thing over and over, improving bit by bit. There is always a yearning to achieve more. I'll continue to climb to reach the top but no one knows where the top is."
Seinfeld explains:
“If I don’t do a set in two weeks, I feel it,” he said. “I read an article a few years ago that said when you practice a sport a lot, you literally become a broadband: the nerve pathway in your brain contains a lot more information. As soon as you stop practicing, the pathway begins shrinking back down. Reading that changed my life. I used to wonder, Why am I doing these sets, getting on a stage? Don’t I know how to do this already? The answer is no. You must keep doing it. The broadband starts to narrow the moment you stop.”2. Sweat the detailsThere is no detail too small. Jiro serves sushi differently to left-handed and right-handed patrons, and once required an apprentice to make egg sushi 200 times before it was deemed acceptable. Seinfeld relentlessly iterates how to word a punchline. As the profile on Seinfeld describes it:
"Seinfeld will nurse a single joke for years, amending, abridging and reworking it incrementally, to get the thing just so. “It’s similar to calligraphy or samurai,” he says. “I want to make cricket cages. You know those Japanese cricket cages? Tiny, with the doors? That’s it for me: solitude and precision, refining a tiny thing for the sake of it.”In this regard, their approaches are highly reminiscent of Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive at Apple, where obsessing over the smallest detail is not just part of their design ethos, it's core to the company's DNA.

Here is my problem with the latter Seinfeld example.  First off, I loved the sitcom, I bought one of his books and when I see an article about him, I typically read it.  I am by no means a hater.

However, while the following sounds admirable in theory, ""Seinfeld will nurse a single joke for years, amending, abridging and reworking it incrementally, to get the thing just so.", in practice, it means he repeats he repeats what sounds like old material a lot.

Quoting Patrick Graham's review of Seinlanguage:

After watching the show and listening to his standup act, reading SeinLanguage was a bit redundant. The reader will not find very much new material in this book. Most of the jokes come from his standup act, which inspired scenarios in the TV show.
The jokes are funny and I always laugh, but I picked up this book hoping for an insight into Jerry Seinfeld's life. All I found was a series of jokes about different topics, most of which I had already heard.

Perhaps the jokes were incrementally better, and played better with new audiences, but I suspect he didn't have many new audiences after Seinfeld took off.

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I note a theme through two of my three subjects today.  Mehl, Jiro and Seinfeld are working for approval among the cognoscenti, not the neophytes of their art-form.  I did not discuss Jiro's art previously, so let me take a minute here as an overall example.  Having lived in Korea for more than a decade, I know a little of eating sushi and sashimi.  I have also watched my more experienced father-in-law eat fresh water sashimi with pleasure.  For me, even after several meals a year, what I most note is the soy and wasabi dip.  The fish flesh remains a blank canvas to me.