Archive for 'perspiration'
Five simple tips on how to get published
Posted on July 17, 2007, by dazzer67, under perspiration, preparation, writing.
So you have lots of ideas, your creativity has gone into overdrive and you believe you can be a successful writer, and why not. The next stage, unless you are going to publish yourself (and that is not a bad idea, check out www.lulu.com), is to get your ‘book’ into the wide world. With this in mind I thought I’d share a few tips with you.
- Research your publisher. It is no good sending your ideas off to any and every publisher on the list. Find a publisher who has published similar books and also, if possible, ask them what their publishing policy is. What books do they publish, just in case you’ve got the wrong end of the stick.
- Grab the publisher’s attention. A plain brown envelope, with a neat resume and outline is very fucntional, but believe me, you need to do a little more in order to get noticed. But remember subtlety works very well too.
- Send in a synopsis and two chapters. A publisher needs to know how you write, what you write and a little about you (only because they are nosey). Send in a couple of chapters but they don’t need to be the first two, perhaps the best chapters are hidden away within your tome.
- If you haven’t finished the book, estimate the time it will take and double it. It is highly likely that you’ll miss your estimated deadline and so build in some time. Then when you send it in ahead you’ll be loved and the you’ll know how long it really takes you to write without any added pressure.
- Write about what you know. It is no good writing about the history of voles if you know nothing about them. So research what you write. There is nothing more annoying to an editor than someone writing about something and getting it all wrong.
And remember, all these tips come from me, a publisher, so get going.
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Creative lessons from a fatal windows error
Posted on June 19, 2007, by dazzer67, under creativity basics, perspiration, software.
It happens to the best of us (me) and it can strike at any time. We don’t know what causes it to happen (well perhaps someone, somewhere, knows the reason but they are not telling the rest of us) and the resolution is often drastic. I am, of course, talking about a windows fatal error. Windows won’t load, it crashes, it gets stuck in endless loops. You follow all the rescue tutorials, (printed out from work as you now have no access to t’internet at home) use all the rescue disks, (even the installation disk that claims it will either rescue the OS or overwrite any corrupt files) but still no joy. When this happens there is only one thing to do… reinstall. Well this, as you may have guessed, has just happened to me. XP went AWOL and so I had to bite the bullet and say goodbye to a hard drive crammed with… actually a lot of rubbish, which leads to this post.
Having started the process of getting the family PC back in working order there were one or two things that I had to do, or think about, which could help us all in our creative journeys. So hold on tight and let’s take a look.
- Rip it up and start again. Sometime what you have isn’t working, we shouldn’t be afraid to simply let it go and say ‘bye, bye’, however long we have been working on it. If it isn’t working, sometimes it needs to be thrown out.
- Reassess what you have. My PC was full of many programs that I really didn’t use. They had been loaded with the intention of using them ’someday’. Although diversity is needed within creativity it can sometimes hinder. Too much choice is as damaging as too little. So, do you really need to ‘waste’ time deciding the medium for your creativity?
- Do you really need it. Similar to above but more of a ‘clear your head’ attitude here. I had backed up certain files and folders but not everything. A reinstall would mean that I would lose anything that wasn’t backed up. There were one or two things that I would need to work on again but… there was a lot of junk and clutter that was simply sitting there, gathering dust and clogging the creative cogs.
- If you need it, keep it safe. We all know we should back-up the important pieces of work we do, but how often and how well do we do it? If you are a writer do you have your work in hard and soft copy and in several locations should one be destroyed? If you are a painter where are your canvases kept, are they safe from fire, flood and theft? Of course, we are limited by our resources but we should be as careful as we can be, or afford to be.
Well, I am going back to reinstalling the software that I do need, speak soon.
PS Yes I know I could also do the following:
- Use a different OS
- Not change the file system from FAT 32 to NTFS without reading all the small print
- Stick to pencil and paper
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Create like twitter? Instant creativity
Posted on June 6, 2007, by dazzer67, under perspiration.
Here’s the sob story. As can be seen from my previous post I haven’t been too well, in fact, all-in-all, I have been under the weather for about three weeks. Even when I posted the apology I wasn’t fully over the virus. Also, you can see by the lack of posts that I haven’t really been in the ‘zone’, or have I?
I currently have a document with ideas for posts that contains a good thirty or so embryonic concepts. This document is where I turn to in my process, it forms part of my preparation to create content for imaginality. This process has worked fine since the site started, and is, in fact, the underlying thesis of creativity that I propose here. However, that is not to say that you must stick rigidly to a process. The issue I was having was not with the thesis but with how I was applying the process. I was leaving all my creativity, with regard to imaginality, to one process. When I turned to the ideas document I loved them all but was not well enough to sit down and work them up as complete posts. The amount of perspiration I could expend on creativity was very little.
I was still having ideas, and the preparation had, and was, being done, so what could, or should, I have done?
One option would have been to store up the ideas and keep them safe and bubbling away until I was able to give them the effort they deserved. However, some ideas could have been expressed simply and quickly.
Recently I have got involved in Twitter, where you can post up to 160 characters via instant messaging, mobile phone or the web. The creative aspect of Twitter is wonderful, especially with regard to ‘less perspiration’. You are limited in what you can say; you can prepare it, have an inspirational idea but you can’t go beyond the limit of the expression. I have seen similar ideas on both facebook and the new Zooomr iteration, and the net buzz around Twitter is considerable.
So next time you have an idea, think about how it needs to be expressed. Does it need to take ages and a lot of effort, using the best materials and top software, or can it be handed over to the rest of the world in a short, simple and less strenuous manner. Sometimes it may be a good idea to think like Twitter.
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Go on, you know you want to
Posted on May 18, 2007, by dazzer67, under perspiration, quotes.
“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come”
Victor Hugo
Sometimes when the creative idea arrives you really don’t need to do much at all, apart from going with the flow.
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Introversion, the blues and James Bond?
Posted on April 25, 2007, by dazzer67, under inspiration, links, perspiration.
There is a great post over at David Seah’s blog in which he relates some personal thoughts on how his productivity has recently been affected. The link is at the bottom of this post, it’s a great read. However, it also got me thinking on a couple of issues that he raises.
He mentions the ‘blues’ being an issue when trying to be productive. That is certainly the case. Feeling down doesn’t lend itself to getting things done. But it is quite good when it comes to inspiration. Think of all the great songs that have been written about that negative range of emotions, and all the other art created at those times. The key here, is being able to capture those feelings in order to ‘create’ something when the right time comes. I’ll be looking at the right capture tools in a future post (that’s the near future).
David also talks about scheming with others. This struck a deep note with me. My personality type is ‘introvert’ and so sharing and scheming with others is a big energy sapping time for me. However, the importance of it for being creative can’t be measured. Bouncing ideas off others and developing them in a brainstorm can be wonderful. It is what Steven Covey calls the sixth habit, ’synergy’. When you work on an idea with another person, you get more than the sum of the two parts.
There is a lot more in David’s article and a wonderful metaphor regarding James Bond villains too, so take a look from the link below.
David Seah : Motivation, Villainy, and Double Takes
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Is your art really that bad?
Posted on April 11, 2007, by dazzer67, under perspiration, quick tips, quotes.
Picture it, you’re in the ‘creative’ zone, pulling together your masterpiece; pouring out soul into your art… and then you take a step back, look/listen to it and think, ‘that’s rubbish.’
It is all to easy to throw away what you’ve done, becasue you don’t think it is good enough. Perhaps it isn’t the best that could be done, perhaps it does need some more work, perhaps it isn’t great. But it is something that you have created.
At these times, why not use the following quote from John Cage to question whether it really is rubbish.
‘The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful is why do I think it’s not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.’
John Cage
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Stephen King ‘On Writing’ quotes from 37 Signals
Posted on March 26, 2007, by dazzer67, under links, perspiration, writing.
Those nice peeps over at Signal vs. Noise, the blog from 37signals who brought us some wonderful Web 2.0 tools, have posted a nice list of quotes by Stephen King. All the quotes are nice and helpful for writers of all sorts of material.
What is even better is that the comments list below contains even more gems for writers, this is blogging and community led synergy at its best. So if you want some writing tips from one of the most successful writers of modern times follow the link below.
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Realising creativity by leaving your bed unmade
Posted on March 19, 2007, by dazzer67, under creativity basics, perspiration.
I am often drawn into discussion when a new piece of ‘modern’ art is thrust into the limelight, or should I say ‘post-modern’ art, or perhaps we have even moved beyond this, I am no art historian. I am refering to pieces of art such as Emin’s bed , but it also goes back further. The ‘print splatters’ of Jackson Pollack or the blocks of colour by Mark Rothke . The discussion is something like this, in fact it is exactly like this…
‘I could have done that, left my bed unmade, spilt some paint on a canvas or painted large squares of colour’
My response is always the same, ‘perhaps, but you didn’t.’
Without wanting to go into any deep discussion about what is and isn’t art, I want to focus on the one fact that is true here, the process, the actual expression. These pieces would never have been done unless the artist, and I do use that word, hadn’t decided to express their creativity.
The same is true for us. We can have lots of ideas, many thoughts and countless dreams, but unless we actually sit down and express them they will remain unrealised. Currently you and I may not receive many thousands in commission to create an installation in a famous gallery, but there is nothing stopping us from being creative except ourselves.
Go on, you may not want to spill some paint, colour some squares or leave your bed unmade, but do something to realise your creative potential.
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Writing tips over at Copyblogger
Posted on March 8, 2007, by dazzer67, under links, perspiration, writing.
There is a great post at Copyblogger that will come in useful for writers everywhere, 5 tips for writing well as proposed by Ernest Hemingway.
Ernest Hemingway’s top 5 tips for writing well.
The positive point stands out for me. Often as I write I find myself camparing things in this manner.
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Nanowrimo
Posted on October 6, 2006, by dazzer67, under perspiration, preparation.
Nanowrimo stands for National Novel Writing Month and can be found here. Basically you sign up and attempt to write a 50,000 word novel (novella?) in the month of November, along with a whole bunch of others who are wanting to do the same thing - visit the site as they explain it much better than I can.
You’ll either love the idea or hate it, depending on your personality type, however, if you really need a little push to get writing then this could be just for you (and all the others who sign up).
