R&R

Supportive Girlfriend (or was it Unsupportive Girlfriend?) told me that I have to take some time off. I'm not allowed to shatter my health, my will to live, or my sunny fucking disposition. I started to explain about "Blogust," and how I needed to make 1650 hits a day or we weren't going to make it and how we were already over two thousand page views behind, but she kind of did this thing where she transformed into her version of Psychogaladrial, and told me to take time off or she would become as terrible as the dawn.

I don't even know what that means. I find dawns rather calming. But I was not about to point this out, however.

I already love her and despair.  What more does she want?

Silly Girlfriend, I don't really get days "off" anymore. The Contrarian is about to learn to crawl. Superheroes are terrible at cleaning up after themselves so there's always a mess at The Hall of Rectitude. I write every day even if I'm not specifically blogging. But what I can do is use today to work on some things I've been putting off (and maybe use the extra time to do a load of clothes and mop the floors--because that's JUST like a day off, right?) So today I'm going to update some of my links and menus and pretend I'm not really working so that she doesn't kill me.

So here are some sundry items:

I've been meaning to point you all towards a blog and a book that I have added to the Folks Worth Checking Out menu. The writer is a friend's father and he's been diagnosed with leukemia with a low chance of survival.  Selling the book he'd written was always on his bucket list, and he seemed out of time to wait on traditional publishing, so he took his dream into his own hands. (Good for him! Traditional publishing has some serious problems even if you DO have the time to wait.)  His book, Swallow The Sky is available through Kindle. I don't know much about it other than that it's a space opera. (There was some confusion with the friend in question about getting a free copy but I finally just bought one today since it's so inexpensive.)  If you want to know more about it or him, you should check out his blog. The book is only three dollars and there are free chapters if you want to see what you're getting into.

I will resist really playing that cancer card by telling you how the optimism from getting to see his dream come to life has helped him through the first round of chemo. (ETA-I hear he's up to about a 2/3 prognosis now!) I certainly wouldn't mention that and then reiterate that it's only THREE dollars, and you get a book you might end up enjoying. Nope. Totally not going to be that manipulative.

OG has gone back to her monastery in the land of salsa and omelets. But her influence lives on and apparently when she "walks the wind" she can move pretty quickly and is never too far away from Oakland in spirit. So she has been added to the Cast and Crew officially.

I'll also be taking time to update a few lists and menus that have been falling into disrepair, and finishing up this stack of thank you notes that has actually GROWN in the past few days. Plus tomorrow's hate mail is going to be epic, and I'm trying to get some really good articles whipped up this weekend.

Sharing is Caring. Link Pimp.

This strangely random picture perfectly compliments
this strangely random entry.
(Wouldn't it be funny if this were TOTALLY copyrighted?)

I'm giving y'all a quick link pimp today because I usually take Tuesday's off, but this week I had some news to share.  I'm still working to bring you the next installment of my creative non-fiction, and tomorrow's Mailbox from an evangelical Christian, among others, should be...interesting.

But before I share a couple of links that writers might appreciate...

PLEASE VOTE!!

I'd ask you all to take a moment to go down to the bottom left where you can see the sleek, black poll there with the radio buttons.  It'll take about ten seconds and it will help me a lot with deciding where to allocate my writing spoons.  I can't keep up this pace (not for two dollars a day) AND write lots of fiction AND teach classes AND be a housekeeper AND be Uncle Joey from full house.  If I were making $1000 a month, I could cut some of that other stuff out, but I'm about $950 short.

Did I mention there's a bacon option??  There is totally a bacon option.

I'll probably take the poll down tomorrow or Saturday.  And I will be disappointed if the results are as close as they are now.  I was sort of hoping for a clear winner.

Stephen Spielberg says the movie industry is about to implode.  Pay close attention to what he's saying though.  Sound familiar?  It should.  Echos of this are happening all throughout the art world.  Yes, even in writing.  And this is pretty close to what the music industry has already gone though.  Niche markets are important, and they are being ignored in favor of the broadest possible marketability by mega-industries.  But niche markets are starting to gain popularity through back doors.  Which isn't entirely unrelated to....

Self-Published e-books reach 20% of market share. In case you don't know market share is money being spent, not what's available out there.  That's a fifth of the money spent on genre being spent on self publication.  This is not a flash in the pan, my friends.  And as a friend pointed out when I posted this on Writing About Writing's Facebook Page, crap has always existed in published works.  All this has removed is the gatekeeper and what they (with their largely homogeneous bias in taste) think is crap worth shoveling out because it might sell, and literature worth putting out even though it might not sell.  Self-publishing is removing their opinions from the matter and letting the readers decide.

Also...I told you so.

Links of Spectacularly Awesome Awesomeness

Links!  Get it?
Never mind....

Just a quickie today.  I'm still trying to catch up from time woes that I mentioned on Monday, and the unscheduled post I wrote this weekend.

I should probably be doing more link pimps here.  There's a lot of good stuff out there.  Of course, some of it I want to shamelessly steal for my own articles, but there's still enough left over that I couldn't pilfer in a lifetime.

So you should totally check them out...before I "disappear" this post and pilage its contents some day when I can't think of anything original to write.



Why Fiction is Good for You- There's a real question about the utility of storytelling.  But humans are storytelling animals.  Find out why fiction is good for you.

9 Arbitrary Ways to get Your Writing Rejected-  Some of these are very random (like a protagonist carrying around a battered copy of Dostoevsky) but some are worth being careful of in one's own writing (like lots of description early on without an action in sight).

10 Life Enhancing Things You Can Do in Ten Minutes or Less- I'm a firm advocate that good writing comes from stepping off the merry-go-round of this insane culture's pounding distraction of artificial urgency.  Take a moment and remember that you really aren't defined by the features in you car...or even your car.

What It's Really Like to Be a Copy Editor- Just because I don't like people who are obnoxious about prescriptivism doesn't mean they're wrong.  (Just insufferable.)  But unless there's an artistic reason for breaking a rule, you gotta trust people who dedicate their lives to this stuff.

25 Reasons Writers are Bug Fuck Nuts- A hilarious list of reasons that writers are completely bat-shit insane.  And I laugh about it because if I don't, you'll notice that my voice is wavering and my eye has begun to twitch.

A Potpourri to Inspire You

Shakespeare would have written over 50 plays if it weren't for Facebook.
Yes, of course they didn't have Facebook back then.
I just wasn't sure you'd even know what Friendster was.

There are, of course, some truly miserable writers out there, and some of them are (or were) absolutely incredible writers.  I like this quote not because it has a happy dog, happily happifying the happy landscape.  But the actual text seems more inclined towards seizing life by its soft parts and not letting go.  Writers might not all be happy, but most of them do know how to drive like a guided missile towards opportunity.  So if someone leaves a metaphorical gate open around you....well, you know what to do!

Kindles aren't going anywhere.  People mistake the medium for the message.  The "smell of books" crowd have ignored the figures that Kindle book sales are up to 15% of the market while simultaneously wondering why their sales are down 15%.  However....all that said, books aren't going away in our lifetimes.  And they do smell kind of good.

Book Snippets.  A simply charming collection of short excerpts from books the Snippets author is reading (or read) that she posts each day. What a capital idea--useful to any writer who wants to be able to go back and take a look at the sentences that take their breath away. No author uses anything but the same 26 letters and 14 pieces of punctuation, and taking a look at how to combine them into something magical is always worth a moment or two. http://booksnippets.tumblr.com/   I always find the careful attention to a single breathtaking sentence to be particularly inspiring.

There is a question, especially in America, about the "utility" of art. A long recession, as long recessions tend to do, has many "more pragmatic" people wondering about anything that has no "practical value." Don't you listen to it for a second.  Art changes the world. It has done so before. It will do so again. It is doing so now. Don't ever forget this when you're wondering why you're turning yourself inside out for something that probably won't ever make you enough money to live on. Art is its own reward.

Conquer the shit out of yourselves, writer peeps!  Conquer the absolute fucking shit out of yourselves.













Meet a fellow blogging peep (who has nothing to do with this Michelangelo quote). That Blond Mom is the blog of one of my old high school friends who has been a journalist for years. It's mostly a personal journal, but there is some intersection with her career as a working writer that I find very insightful. Though journalism is a shrinking field and a changing field, a writer could do worse than to cut their teeth on the regimented discipline of daily deadlines, the sense of official but not overly formal that makes print media generally an agreeable read, and the ability to do revision practically on the fly. Plus there's something to be said for those writing careers that offer a steady paycheck. Nothing cuts down on the romance of being an artist like having to sell your plasma. http://thatblondmom.com/

Let's let Ray Bradbury take us out by talking about writing persistently.

[Do you want to be featured in potpourri along with a few words from me about how awesome you are? Do you know a great writing link that I should share? Please send it to me at chris.brecheen@gmail.com, and I will post it along with a shout out singing your praises (unless, of course, you don't want one). There are four caveats to this. Please read them before you send me stuff. If I've posted anything that you feel is your creative effort in any way that you are not okay with, please just ask and I will take it down if you wish or preferably give you credit and a link back to its source.]

Potpourri: Teh Bestest of Elsenet

Potpourri 2.0!  In which I am more careful about copyright and try not to post boring shit that no one will click anyway.  

I need a distraction.
I think I'll write about my lunch using 140 characters or less.

The only rules you need!

Except for these other, more-different rules!

Anita M King's Writing Window Holy fuck!  What a gloriously majestic metric assload of totally fucking free free-writing prompts!  I've seldom seen anything so fucking awesome as this.  Fuck!  You would easily pay a shit ton of money for quality fucking prompts like these if they were at some shitty fucking bookstore.  Well fuck that shit.  Here you don't pay a fucking thing.  Fuck, that's awesome!  Plus, as if that wasn't fucking reason enough to visit, there's a blog and shit too that talks about totally fucking awesome writing shit.  This puts the FUCK in fucking awesome, my friends.  Someone could free write for like two fucking days straight and never finish!  Fucking sweet!

Also, there's a friend who now owes me a dollar.  Over twenty in a single paragraph!

 Sappy as hell, but still kind of nice.

I've seen this everywhere.  Please contact me if it's a copyrighted image.

This was 80% of the conversations I had with my fellow Creative Writing program students at SFSU.  I wish I were kidding.  I really, really do.

Oglaf.com
Bigger image.  More comics that are just as funny (or funnier).  Check it out!
(No seriously, check it out or I'll be asked to remove the image.  Totally NSFW though.)

I'm into Ted videos in a way that probably is a little unhealthy, but this one is especially good for writers.  Amy Tan wrote The Joy Luck Club and Saving Fish from Drowning (which is totally speculative fiction by the way as it is narrated by a ghost).  And apparently there actually is a literal answer to the question of where creativity hides and it's "quietly within my duffle-bag for twenty minutes without making a sound."  You'll have to watch to understand.

[Do you want to be featured in potpourri along with a few words from me about how awesome you are? Do you know a great writing link that I should share? Please send it to me at chris.brecheen@gmail.com, and I will post it along with a shout out singing your praises (unless, of course, you don't want one). There are four caveats to this. Please read them before you send me stuff. If I've posted anything that you feel is "yours" (or "your client's" --eeep!) please just ask and I will take it down if you wish or preferably give you credit and a link back to its source. Most everything here is some kind of meme, so it would be quite difficult for me to do proper attribution.]

Three Last UberGeeky Words of Warning About NaNoWriMo

Happy Halloween/Parentalia/Samhain/Summer's End everyone!!!  Here's hoping you don't eat too many peanut butter cups and fun-sized Butterfingers.

I've gotten a lot of hate mail about my NaNoWriMo article.  I've also gotten a lot of love mail.  One Creative Writing instructor of several years says that he's afraid to say anything bad about the event but praised my courage.  I'm pretty sure it was real.  Maybe.  NaNo gets people very excited.  Sometimes even the guy saying "be careful; I just want you to still be a writer on Nov 1st and not a self-hating smear on the wall" can get steamrolled by those "you've-lost-the-faith-my-brother" robe-wearing fanatic types.

And now I have an evil clone who is going to be doing NaNo himself.

I'd like to give you all one last word of warning in geek language since the overlap between geek and Nano-enthusiast is pretty high.  In fact, the overlap between geek and tends-to-overdo-things is pretty high in general.

This is an awesome article about losing weight and getting fit.  How to Finish What You've Started This guy is a colossal geek*.

So here is my last word of warning about doing NaNoWriMo--especially to you new writers--using Steve Kamb's terminology of a finite willpower pool.

1- NaNoWriMo is a powerful boss monster.  If you haven't spent some time back near the starting village killing Enraged Spuds and Koboldlings to build up your willpower pool, this boss monster will likely be too much for you.  In other words, if you have a good habit already of writing every day, NaNo is probably doable, but if this is your first attempt at sitting down and wordsmithing for hours a day, you might want to think about smaller goals.  1667 is the magic number and that is going to take most people three or four hours.  You might have that time to spare on paper, and it might even seem doable for the first few days, but most people don't realize quite what they're getting into.  I know NaNo might sound like a great way to get started, but it's very similar to someone starting their fitness regimen by running 27 miles before doing Couch-to-5k. And maybe you CAN defeat it, but you don't want to get smug on day two.  You still have the neverending middle Phase, and the All-This-And-Thanksgiving final attack sweep to go.

Don't get cocky.

2-Will you be fighting anything else this month?  Okay, let's assume you are pretty sure you can handle NaNo.  Either you've been writing daily for years or you just have the sheer hubris to ignore the advice of seasoned vets about how hard it is.  Is it going to be just you and NaNo?  Or are other things going to jump into the fight.  A lot of boss monsters are doable until they call in six adds and it turns into a not-the-awesome-kind of gang bang.  Is your family coming for an extended visit this Thanksgiving?  Anything major happening at work?  Are you going through some shit with your family? (Or in my case...) Is someone in your house having a baby?  If so, you're not just going to be dealing with NaNo. You might want to think about the wisdom of doing it THIS month since a lot more than just NaNo is going to be sucking up your willpower pool.  There are a lot of other months, tons of other 30 day blocks, and NaNo will certainly be here next year if you just have to do it at the officially sanctioned time.

3-Do you have time to rest between encounters? NaNo isn't technically one long battle. It's thirty medium sized battles of 1667 words. (For most this is between three and five hours.) And you probably have a life going on between each of these battles. Most of us can burn the candle at both ends for a few days--maybe even a week--but then it really starts to get to us. Do you have a full time job? A family that needs your attention? Other obligations? If you've crammed everything into your schedule in such a way that NaNo only technically fits as long as you jump up from it and rush to do everything else....you're probably going to burn out a little more each day as each encounter saps you of a little more of your willpower pool. If you're cannibalizing every moment of free time to do NaNo, then you go into each new session only with that willpower you have left over from the last session, and with no recovery time. By the end of day three or four you will be in desperate need of some downtime. (And not to harp on this, but downtime is important for creative types.) Just a bit of time to relax and call your own.  If your schedule can't accommodate NaNo AND some time to recover from each day of NaNo, you have probably made it a little too full.

And you know what. I'm not going to be a negative Nancy once the ball gets rolling. I don't want to discourage you from writing. If all these things are good to go--or you just don't care and you're going to try it no matter what anyone suggests--then believe my sincerity when I wish you the very best of luck.

*How do I know this?  Because his website is called Nerd Fitness.  (That was my first clue. ) In this article he describes how willpower is a finite resource like in a video game.  (Second clue.)  He uses the idea of playing video games to describe how to lose weight without overextending yourself.  (Number three right there.)  Don't attack too many "bad guys" at once.  Don't attack a "bad guy" before you've had a chance to recover.  And don't attack something that's too powerful for you. (At this point I was fairly certain.)  Of course he's talking about losing weight, but the concepts could just as easily apply to writing.

Folks Worth Checking Out

Other Blogs I Write For
NOT Writing About Writing- A blog where I share some of my more personal, political, and non-writing thoughts.
Ace of Geeks- [This blog is on a indefinite hiatus]
Grounded Parents- [Retired, but several articles remain.]


Friends Worth Visiting

Book Snippets- Microblog with great quotes from great books
Anita M King's Writing Window- Blog of a fellow writer.  Lots of good creative prompts here.
That Blond Mom- Blog of a friend, journalist, and working writer.

Going to See a Man About Some Flame

[I had this entry written.  I even POSTED it.  Then something went wrong.  I noticed a grammar mistake (which means it was a day ending in Y) tried to fix it, and then my whole post disappeared and proceeded to "Save Changes" on the blank version.  So let's try again.  I think I still have most of the images, but unfortunately, I only remember three of the links since I delete the bookmarks as I post them, and I can't remember what all I posted yesterday.  ~sigh~]

VACATION!!! 

On Thursday, I'm going to Burning Man, so the entire staff of Writing About Writing is going to take a few days off.  I will try to keep posts going up until Wednesday.  After that, we'll lock up the building, shut down all but emergency power, and everyone will get a few days off.  I debated using the scheduling function to put some posts up while I was gone, but since people rarely come here until/unless I cross-post in a few places, and I won't be around to THAT, I figured just taking the few days off made sense.

I probably won't be back until Tuesday.  Trying to leave the event gets crazier every year as 60,000 people bottleneck down into a two lane road.  Last year the exodus was six hours for people trying to leave at typical times, and even though we drove out of camp at 3 in the morning, we didn't even drive off the desert and onto the road until well after sunset.  So this year we may not even try to leave until Monday night, possibly even crazy-ass-early on Tuesday.

So the entire staff will be taking the time off.  Yep, there won't be a single person here to prevent any shenanigans should it occur.

Potpourri-

This is an awesome Ted video.  Basically they build a computer program that could track certain strings of words that exist in the five million or so books that Google has scanned.  By analyzing these strings of words, they are able to glimpse really interesting things about society.  Plus the dude is a total geek, so he makes a bunch of sci-fi references during his talk.  Extra props for doing so at a Ted convention.

The One Sentence Story Archive: While I doubt that many of these "stories" would impress my old Creatie Writing Professors, they are pretty neat to look at.  Some of them really do have an identifiable arc with a climax and a denouement.

Eight Things Everybody Ought to Know About Concentrating: For some of is it's not the elements of craft that are the issue, it's not the grammar, it's not the writing, and it's not really even the creativity.  Our issue goes even deeper to a simple difficulty with concentration.  Here are some paint-by-numbers tips worth giving a try if concentration is difficult for you.














100 Reasons NOT to Go to Grad School:  This is actually a blog, and the author is only up to #85 so far.  One of the things that struck me about many of these reasons is that they would actually be magnified by a Creative Writing MFA.  Not that there aren't reasons to get one, but it's really important to understand the reasons not to.








[Do you want to be featured in potpourri along with a few words from me about how awesome you are?  Do you know a great writing link that I should share? Please send it to me at chris.brecheen@gmail.com, and I will post it along with a shout out singing your praises (unless, of course, you don't want one).  There are four caveats to this.  Please read them before you send me stuff.  If I've posted anything that you feel is "yours" (or "your client's" --eeep!) please just tell me what you would like me to do.  Most everything here that doesn't have an embedding code within its source is some kind of meme, so it would be quite difficult for me to do proper attribution.]

Potpourri, Poll's Product, Plus Persuasive Petitioning and Plentiful Possibilities

It's a perfidious ploy to practice parallel patterns of patter play to persuade participation, but people's predilections produce a predictable passion that are proximate to the particular prowess for such pizzaz.  Plus....it's pleasing.

Blogsational!- Lots of blog news--I'll try to keep it as short and sweet as possible and get on to the potpourri.

Broke 9000 pageviews yesterday.  Since I started putting things up on Stumbleupon the 1000's have been coming every few days.  I can't believe how amazingly things are going.  I know it's small potatoes, but I'm up 100% from a month ago and 500% from two months ago.  Y'all take my breath away.

Well, it looks like I'm going to Burning Man!  I've been there ten years running, but the cost seemed prohibitive this year.  Then an angel from on high gifted Supportive Girlfriend and me some tickets, and it looks like we'll be there after all--at least from Thursday through the weekend.  I might be able to figure out how to make the scheduling function work, but what is more likely is that Writing About Writing will take a break for a few days. I'm sure some B.M. themed entries will be showing up both before and after.  If I had LOTS of readers, I would utilize the scheduling feature, but right now my page views are almost entirely dependent on my cross-posts to G+, Facebook, Livejournal, and Stumbleupon, and it would be a shame to have four articles that got no traffic because I wasn't around to pimpify myself.

What is Burning Man?  What a great question!
I shall now write a fifty thousand page article next week as an answer.
Aren't you so glad you asked?

So...here are the results of the poll about structure vs. spontaneity.  Clearly I need to figure out how to distribute bacon through the internet...spontaneously. So while I have accounting try to work bacon-focused R&D back into the W.A.W. budget at only 40 cents a month, I will work on putting up another poll soon.

The worst part:....there wasn't actually even a comment on 8/3's entry. ~sigh~

So even though I vaguely remember something from my Math For Liberal Arts class about sample sizes or standard deviations or something, I'll totally assume that everyone who voted represented an accurate sample.  You can look forward to a LITTLE less structure and a little more Oh My God, Krook Is DEAD!!!  (It'll take some mighty fine nerds to get that one without Google.  Are YOU up for it?)

Really not how I want to come across.
Really.

Debbie Downer Time- Every six weeks or so I'm going to tell you guys there's a donation button over on the right, and I'm going to feel REALLY dirty while I'm doing it. But Unsupportive Girlfriend is going to make me get a "real job" if I can't monetize writing, so I'll let you know it's there. It's right above that awesome, and totally-not-photoshopped picture of me and it uses Paypal.  I'm not begging, but it's there if you find yourself with hundred dollar bills pouring out of your pockets and the sudden realization that WAW has provided you countless hours of entertainment, you could make a writer's month with only a dollar or two.  Also, there are lots of ways you can help a writer try this newfangled method of "going for it" that don't involve cash.  You can turn off your ad-block for JUST my blog.  (I'm not asking for clicks, and I could lose my blog if I did. I'm JUST saying you might turn off the adblock.) The ads are for cool things like self-publishing, MFA programs, the latest sci-fi books, and video games.  Of course, sometimes the ads are for Special K....and in Spanish, but crawler bots make mistakes too!  Maybe you see something interesting.  Or...you know....maybe you really like mucho mas K Especial para el desayuno.  Either way...that would help.

You can also help me get out into the blogoverseonetosphere by sharing any articles you might like.  I really like Stumbleupon since it matches interests with surfers in a non-random way and gives me a long slow trickle of hits on my more popular articles.  (You have to sign up, but after that it just takes a click, and it's pretty damned cool if you haven't tried it already.  Seriously.  It's a lot of fun!) But really, any media where you give me a shout out is awesome.  I'm still just getting started here.  Some days I'm still happy to break triple digits, and I average about ten cents per hour of work at the moment, so any signal boost of ANY kind would be awesome, especially if you go back to one of your favorite oldies and give it a shout out or a "like"/"+1"/"stumble".  I don't want to be a total whore about this; I just don't think most people who don't run a blog themselves understand just how much even a single "Like" or "+1"button (or ESPECIALLY sharing) actually DOES make a difference.

Okay, enough of the NPR telethon stuff.  I won't make you go through that for another six weeks or so.   I'll take a quick shower to wash out the stench of sellout from my pores and you guys ponder this next question.

What do you think are the best books in the Speculative Fiction canon?

You can have any definition you want for "best."  Most foundational.  Most literary.  Most popular.  Funniest. Whatever.  I know a thousand of these lists exist online.  I want answers from YOU.

*Please answer here.  A lot of my friends who know me put answers in the places I cross-post like on the G+ thread or Facebook, but it's tough to keep track of them all.  My blog is undiscovered enough to support anonymous comments (until that becomes a problem) so you don't even have to sign up for anything to throw me your opinion.

*Please limit yourself to 5 books.  We can all come up with an endless list of good books.  What's tricky is when we have to think of the really really best ones.  Because then we start to think about why.

*Depending on how much feedback I get I'll make a poll of books I haven't read.  (If I get a lot of feedback it might have to be only the titles that show up in multiple lists or most frequently.)  Anyway, you guys vote on what book I should read.

And I will break out my A game to lit analyze that badboy.  I will analyze the shit out of it.  (Hmmm...maybe that's not the best turn of phrase I could possibly use in that context.)

Potpourri-

I'd like to give a shout out to one of my friends who is a professional freelance writer, Shannon Hilson, and her blog The Creative Cat.  This is a really insightful blog about the trials and tribulations of freelance writing--both the highs and the lows.  I've never met her in meatspace but I've virtually known her for going on six years, and she's paid the bills with writing that entire time, so she's a consumate professional to the every definition of the word.  Her blog was an eye-opener to me in a world where writers are dying to whore themselves out for the tiniest exposure.  I highly recommend it to anyone who might be interested in freelance writing or who thinks that writing is writing is writing, especially if you are of the mindset that that if you're doing sales copy or web content, at least you're writing.  Her experience might surprise you.

Book hangover is a problem I've never had.  But I do sometimes take a ten minute after finishing one book but before starting another.  I often eat something savory.  Like chili-cheese fries.

Mmmmmmm.  Chili-cheese fries.

Excuse me just a moment.

Here are the "Walked into a bar" jokes that English nerds REALLY want to see.




50 Creative Ways to Make Your Blog Popular is not particularly creative nor will it make your blog all that popular.  It might make your friends hate you a little bit though.  Seriously, this should have been titled The Same Ten Decent Pieces of Advice that Everyone Has Been Posting Everywhere On the Net And You've Already Read Plus 40 Things I Came Up With in the Five Minutes Before I Started Typing.  (Though that might not fit in the title field.)

Don't worry.  I'm totally not going to cry that this post has been viewed over two hundred thousand times.  I'm NOT!

The tears are from the onions in my chili-cheese fries, okay?

You've totally read this joke before.  But have you read it in handwrity-font with a purple background?
I think not.

If you're going to be prescriptive about grammar, you might as well not half-ass it.  Ryan Gosling won't let you down.












A writer with skill and talent possesses a phenomenal power to articulate with skill and grace what others can't.  As the Chik-Fil-A debacle went viral over Facebook, and people started posting all kinds of articles and memes that were unkind (at best) and usually the worst sort of human demonstrations of how not to be empathetic, two articles by someone both Christian and gay shone like a beacon through all that BS as a demonstration of what kind, compassionate, but also CLEAR writing can do.

The first article about how hurtful it is that people actively support CFA.
The second article about the response he got that Christians don't hate gays.

This is not how life works.
But when someone comes to a gaming convention, and plays in a 1920's LARP wearing a school-girl outfit with a six inch skirt, it's fun to imagine that it might be. 

[Do you want to be featured in potpourri along with a few words from me about how awesome you are?  Do you know a great writing link that I should share? Please send it to me at chris.brecheen@gmail.com, and I will post it along with a shout out singing your praises (unless, of course, you don't want one).  There are four caveats to this.  Please read them before you send me stuff.  If I've posted anything that you feel is "yours" (or "your client's" --eeep!) please just tell me what you would like me to do.  Most everything here that doesn't have an embedding code within its source is some kind of meme, so it would be quite difficult for me to do proper attribution.]

Creativity Themed Potpourri

Blogalicious News!  Hits are way up from the "Stumbleupon effect."  I've already gotten 700 more hits than last month, and it's only the 11th.  (Though I'll admit that 550 of those hits came from the night I discovered Stumbleupon and put up a lot of old entries, but still...it's the 11th.)  Writing About Writing is totally turning a corner.  From "totally obscure blog that only my close friends know exist," to "totally obscure blog that only my friends and eight other people know exist"--so it's a very exciting time for me. 

This also means I'm frantically trying to get things up and running on the Reliquary.  I feel like I'm entertaining guests before the downstairs bathroom has been completely refurbished.  Look for some product reviews and more glossary definitions to help flesh out those lists in the coming weeks.  Plus more fiction, part II of the Skyrim as Literature review, and a couple of bits of goofy fun, are on their way soon.

I still would love guest bloggers if you want to write something for W.A.W.

Please keep sharing and "Liking" and "+1"ing and "Stumbling" and feeling dreadfully guilty that you haven't chipped in a dollar or two into the tip jar yet.  Writer Chris is trying to make a go of it in an industry where technology is changing things faster than the industry can keep up, and he needs all the help he can get.

If you know me, you know that I could watch every single Ted video ever made and not feel like I'd wasted even a minute.  I know many of them are pithy and laymen and condense complex issues down into 20 minute speeches, but I love them so. This is a particularly good one about creativity.  

This is a really good article on 30 Tips to Rejuvenate Your Creativity.  The advice is good, ranging from everything to not being a workaholic to ignoring work if you're not on a deadline to overdoing it on caffeine once in a while.













Actually, I'm not real sure about creativity under deadline. It doesn't seem like that's when the fresh ideas come, it seems like that's when the work comes--when you finally have no choice but to pick from the ideas you've come up with and get moving.  But if you haven't ever done any creative work, it's one of the worst times.  Seems a new study might agree with me in this article, 6 Myths of Creativity.  I'm not sure about the article's every point, but it does seem to draw into question some of our conventional wisdom about creativity.

John Cleese talking about creativity.  If you have a little over a half an hour (39 min), I would highly HIGHLY recommend it.  There are a lot of really great ideas in here.

[Do you want to be featured in potpourri along with a few words from me about how awesome you are?  Do you know a great writing link that I should share? Please send it to me at chris.brecheen@gmail.com, and I will post it along with a shout out singing your praises (unless, of course, you don't want one).  There are four caveats to this.  Please read them before you send me stuff.  If I've posted anything that you feel is "yours" (or "your client's" --eeep!) please just tell me what you would like me to do.  Most everything here that doesn't have an embedding code within its source is some kind of meme, so it would be quite difficult for me to do proper attribution.]

A Laughter Themed Potpourri

If you haven't seen the Hyperbole and a Half about the alot, you really must go read it right now.

I tried to embed this funny movie about how to avoid repetition, but it didn't work.  That is to say I cut and pasted the embedding code and then gave up.  As those of you who remember "the arrow" from yesterday's poll post may have begun to suspect, I am not the most Uber McSuperfly when it comes to computers.  (By the way, you should totally go vote on that.)

If you've never seen The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks, you're missing out.   The name says it all. 

Celebrity Impersonation Shakespeare.  Do not drink soda while watching.  (Not. Even. Kidding.)

       

   

[Do you want to be featured in potpourri along with a few words from me about how awesome you are? Do you know a great writing link that I should share? Please send it to me at chris.brecheen@gmail.com, and I will post it along with a shout out singing your praises (unless, of course, you don't want one). There are four caveats to this. Please read them before you send me stuff. If I've posted anything that you feel is "yours" (or "your client's" --eeep!) please just tell me what you would like me to do. Most everything here is some kind of meme, so it would be quite difficult for me to do proper attribution.]

Political Potpourri

The SHOWDOWN Results- On Friday, July 27th as Chris Brecheen was leaving work, he spotted Leela Bruce across the foyer.  Her eyes narrowed, and the manager of building maintenance was actually lifting his radio to tell everyone to transform the amphitheater into Thunderdome when Leela gave a tiny, almost entirely imperceptible nod, and the whole staff at Writing About Writing gave a small but collective sigh of relief since the guy that signs their paychecks wasn't going to be killed on Monday.


Blogtacular News!--Not only will I reach 6,000 total views today (provided I get at least 6 views ) but as you can see here, I'm going to have the most page views in a given month for July!  [ETA- And I DID!!!!   6000!!!!  WOO HOOO]

Not pictured.  If you mouse over May, it has 1197 page views, and as of this writing July has 1199.  (March is only 1164)

In June I stopped posting every day, and you can see how things went down (751), but they've crept back up, and are still growing.  Considering that this is the first high traffic month that didn't involve me forgetting not to track my own page views (March), putting up a picture of myself and asking for feedback (May), and where I didn't post every day, it's an extra good bellwether.

I know it's chump change in the Blogoverse--some blogs make 6000 hits a day on days they don't even post, but watching that number keep creeping up makes me happy.  Thanks to all who have given me props on FB or G+ (or anywhere else) +1'ed posts and generally made this possible.  You guys are awesome with awesome sauce, a side of rad, and a tall frothing glass of bitchin.  (Plus some Fucking Epic for dessert.)

On Monday you can expect to see some actual fiction going up.  Plus the last few changes to the "ground floor" that I've got planned next week.  Also, I'm going to break down and start tagging (sigh), so that it's easier for people to look through old entries.

I'm still hoping to get some guest bloggers up in here.  If you want to write a piece on Writing About Writing (even if it directly contradicts something I've said), I really want to hear from you!


Potpourri-

The person who has it in his mind that he will write to engineer better human beings is a despot before he writes the first line.

-Richard Bausch

Though the week's thesis of the wisdom of avoiding politics has been more about the pursuit of partisan and direct politics through the political engines of the day and that one can be political, even very political, without being involved in politics or conjoining oneself with those who govern (or intend to), it is important never to lose sight of the fact with a more broad definition of "politics" a writer is always political, and must be political.  For the writer engages in one of the most political activities ever.  The spread of new ideas.

Romy Clark, Roz Ivanič explore this idea in their book The Politics of Writing.

George Orwell, who wrote at a time when structuralism was seen as maintaining the status quo and a linguistic form of the fallacy called Begging The Question, goes so far as to say that language itself is political in his essay Politics and the English Language.

So we've been quoting Richard Bausch all damned week since his words are emblematic of the issue of writers and politics.  Here is what he actually wrote on the matter.

Eschew politics. The person who has it in his mind that he will write to engineer better human beings is a despot before he writes the first line. If you have opinions, leave them out of the workplace. If you have anything worthwhile to say, let it surprise you. The writer John Gardner once told me, "If one of your characters makes a long speech filled with his deepest held beliefs, make sure you don't believe one word of it." I think that is very sound advice. You are in the business of portraying the personal life, the personal cost of events. So even if history is part of your story, it should only serve as backdrop. The writers who have gotten into trouble with despots over the shameful history of tyranny did so because they insisted on not paying attention to the politics except as they applied to the personal lives of the people they were creating. They told the truth, in other words, and refused to be political. The paradoxical truth of the matter is that a writer who pays attention to the personal life is subversive precisely because he refuses to pay attention to anything else. Bad politics hurts people on a personal level and good writers report from there about the damage. And the totalitarians are rightly afraid of those writers.  --Richard Bausch

From the larger work which I've seen titled as Ten Commandments of Writing, Letter to a Young Writer, or simply as Dear Writer.

Image Credit: The Contrarian

[Do you want to be featured in potpourri along with a few words from me about how awesome you are?  Do you know a great writing link that I should share? Please send it to me at chris.brecheen@gmail.com, and I will post it along with a shout out singing your praises (unless, of course, you don't want one).  There are four caveats to this.  Please read them before you send me stuff.  If I've posted anything that you feel is "yours" (or "your client's" --eeep!) please just tell me what you would like me to do.  Most everything here that doesn't have an embedding code within its source is some kind of meme, so it would be quite difficult for me to do proper attribution.]

Potpourri

State of the Blog-  The big news was 5,000 page views this last week.  Woo hoo!  I've also picked up enough readers that starting to put up polls might be useful to get feedback on which features work and which don't.

June was down from May, but that's because I stopped writing regular updates on weekends. The fastest, easiest way to get hits is to post updates daily, but you get into a quality/quantity signal/noise issue, and the burn out factor can be pretty high.  Hopefully I'm taking W.A.W. towards more "short controlled bursts."

I wrote out ahead of myself last week, and that's the only way to fly.  The writing was better, the editing was better, and the pressure to write and post was far less.  Unfortunately, I cannibalized my lead time when I went to Texas to see my mom, so I have to start over on that.  Once I have a week or two of lead time, I will work on putting some fiction up here.

Big things are coming.

Potpourri-

That's a whole lot of whup ass to risk ignoring.

This is an amazing Ted that cuts to the core of connection, empathy, and compassion.  This isn't about art particularly, but it is about all the things upon which art and humanities are based.  Her ideas about being seen leading to vulnerability are particularly poignant to young writers struggling against tidal waves of rejections when they first try to be seen. I knew I would love it in the first two minutes when she said: "Maybe stories are just data with a soul."

Vulnerability as the birthplace of creativity: powerful stuff.

It makes me think of how many writers say when you're writing the best stuff of your artistic career, your heart will be pounding because you are afraid.

I could watch this twice a day and be a better artist for it.

These are years old, but always good for a laugh.  The Worst Analogies Ever Written in a High School Essay.

Grammar rules you can ignore.  Those are my favorite kind!

Pixar has 22 rules of storytelling that are absolutely brilliant.  You may find Pixar's storytelling to be a little formulaic, but most people need to learn the basics before they think themselves above it.

[Do you want to be featured in potpourri along with a few words from me about how awesome you are? Do you know a great writing link that I should share? Please send it to me at chris.brecheen@gmail.com, and I will post it along with a shout out singing your praises (unless, of course, you don't want one). There are four caveats to this. Please read them before you send me stuff. If I've posted anything that you feel is "yours" (or "your client's" --eeep!) please just tell me what you would like me to do. Most everything here is some kind of meme, so it would be quite difficult for me to do proper attribution.]