creativity

The Best Romance Ever explained

August 7, 2017 No Comments

I have been asked for an explanation of Best Romance Ever, as it breaks every rule of the romance genre. Here are the rules of romance, from Elizabeth Grayson, although you will find I have broken every rule of every romance ever.

1) the readers care about the characters.
2) the readers identify with the heroine.
3) the readers fall in love with the hero.
4) the readers believe that the hero and heroine are convincingly united at the end of the book.

I don’t think either Sam or Kira are particularly appealing characters. One writer that had a look at Best Scandal Ever found the fact that Kira was fat and had a lot of boyfriends unbelievable due to her own weird hangups. They are interesting, but not particularly heart wrenching people. Another early comment was that referring to Sam as a womanizer was an insult. I replied at the time that it was descriptive. Sam is not a bad person at all, he just likes women, preferably briefly.
See above. Kira is a weirdo, who would rather hide in her house than attempt to disengage with her feelings. She uses them elsewhere as impetus to do other things.
Sam is not the sort of guy that anybody sensible would fall in love with. His entire life is devoted to avoiding such encumbrances. The only reason he nearly achieves romance is to improve his status.
Sam and Kira do not end up together at the end of the book. Quite the reverse. It is a comedy of manners, in which their respective nationalities plays a huge role. Kira is shy and completing a project, regardless of money or status, whilst Sam is very keen to be seen as very successful. This gives you a further insight into their characters, and is a development on Best Scandal Ever, which posits Sam as a business genius, whilst Kira is a faintly evil academic/artist who doesn’t care about people, money, or anything much apart from Sam, whom she wants nothing to do with.

So, although the principle of romance is there, there is no actual romance. All it establishes is a link between the characters, in the form of his turning up at the music festival when he is upset about the failure to sustain his romance with the famous actress. In terms of the series, it makes perfect sense, but in terms of the rules of romance, it is entirely rule breaking.

Nevertheless, men have particularly enjoyed the book, as it explains a lot about women. That nagging old fuck standing in your kitchen loves you very much, in fact, she is just busy maintaining your preferred level of boring old life. Love is not necessarily about flowers and pretty things. Sometimes it is about being extremely tough and withholding affection for wider reasons.

Some men, Sam included, misunderstand this as being stuck in a rut, or hen-pecked. So, for the more intelligent male reader it gives a measure of insight into why you would still be madly in love after thirty years, yet having a relatively grim day to day life. Best Romance Ever is my attempt to capture why your relationship unit may look shaky, but actually be performing extremely well.

There is a measure of almost autistic denial about Kira. She has little to no self-confidence, but I have forced her into situations where she copes remarkably well. She is horrified by her feelings about Sam, and yet flogs her dead horse persistently throughout the books. This in itself is more romantic than the average romance, since she has no expectations at all and does not forsee anything good or positive coming out of her feelings.

Sam, on the other hand, is blissfully unaware, and even if he was aware, would choose to ignore it, or brand Kira as insane.

Best Adventure Ever, the game in production at the moment, expands on this. Players selecting Sam as their character will get a very different experience, expressed through food choices and choices of date, than players selecting Kira and her choices of date. The romantic element between them is still there, however this piece of work is created around them rather than about them. It is really a piece about the quality of your relationships, how your looks impact/do not impact on your life experience, and how happy you end up as a result. It is also a comment about men and women generally, since Sam and Kira exemplify the ‘inny/outy’ nature of genitalia itself.

Finally, the pieces of work relating to Sam and Kira are about people who despise convention. The one thing that Sam and Kira share is that they have no real interest in conformity. If I ever put them together, I am sure their adventures together would be just as interesting, because of their opposing perception of the world around them.

I would argue that the Best Romance Ever is as the title suggests because there is no concluding ‘happy ever after.’ The Best Romance Ever, is a period of endless negotiation, therefore it is infinite.

Still free at this location – The Best Romance Ever

creativity, motivation

Twitter netiquette and the power of delusion

August 1, 2017 No Comments

I am not all that fascinated by having large numbers of followers – I appreciate that it is important if you want to be successful but I do not think I am in that kind of market. I also find it hard to care much about crap memes and bullshit clickbait, so most of my fake followbacks are muted.

I got a message today requesting that I take a photo showing that I had switched on notifications so that a 17 year old ‘could follow me back’ – as far as I know he followed me so this was some sort of threat – anyone who uses twitter for any length of time surely knows to use unfollower tools, which are themselves faster than taking pics of notifications, so I am not sure how this policy is going to work out for him?

Am I exceptionally lucky to have been young before the internet, so that this crap just doesn’t matter? This dude has 13.5k followers, and has apparently deluded himself into thinking that this makes him important.

Speaking of delusion, I finally got around to linking up the new(ish) website to google analytics today. I keep delaying things if anybody or anything needs looking after, because apparently I prefer to over-compensate for my perfectly normal personality by doing things for other people. Ina has died a horrible death as a result, and I am not sure if she can be revived. Perhaps things will improve once I complete the games. The tenth laptop of the last year has just died, so I am investing in two this time to proceed with that. (long story, but I cannot sew next to my mother anymore, so I am kind of irate with the world. From 50k unique visitors last year, Ina is getting barely 12 visitors a month according to google.

I also looked up Wolfe’s itinerary for the year, and I see that October is the last time I am likely to be able to afford to go and pay my dubious respects for the next three years. I am too huge to do this, even if I could leave my mother for 24 hours, however even the thought that I might has caused me to drop 2lb per day for the last four days.

Rather than dwelling on how crazy this seems, I am astonished that stress really does make you that fat. When my friend was still around, I was not losing weight at all, and I am not doing anything different at present. I look younger, the weight is suddenly plummeting, and apart from the persistent lump in my chest, presumably anxiety since my mother is still at risk, I feel a lot less like dying.

This tendency to put things off in favour of other people will be familiar to a considerable number of people with a weight problem. Abusing somebody for being fat, then, effectively makes them fatter as they become progressively less important and more likely to hide from the world. Eating badly then follows because who is looking and who cares?

So, remember – social media is not real life, nobody’s opinion matters and you should not take care of everybody else at the expense of yourself. If you aren’t there, your caring for others means nothing.

I will not be going to see Wolfe, despite it being probably the last time that there is a point in even trying to see Wolfe, because my experience tells me that I will be very disappointed and probably ignored. I may play with the idea for the sake of losing a large and rapid amount of weight, but I will never be thin enough or whatever-it-is-he-thinks-he-wants enough for it to be worthwhile.

So, another chapter in the epic saga of Wolfe Ina Disguise closes without an ending. That is far better than achieving closure, when it is so self-defeating and ultimately miserable. Besides, he makes me crazy within 30 seconds of starting the pitch. A dab of me in there would be sooooooo much better. Just a thin one though.

creativity, motivation

Storytime

July 28, 2017 No Comments

Once upon a time, a man was accused of horrific crimes by his family. His wife left him, after telling over a hundred people of his plight, and went off with someone else.

Then he met someone else, whom he pretended to like in order to avoid being alone. When he told her of the problems with his family, she realised she had to decide whether he was guilty or not, despite not knowing him for terribly long. After due consideration, she decided that he was not guilty of the crimes, and despite him being very difficult, remained as his friend and helped him as best she could.

In the course of this ‘relationship’, ostensibly due to stress, he poured two pints of boiling water over her and repeatedly headbutted her shouting ‘You’re stupid, you’re stupid’ a lot. She ended up in hospital.

Oddly, she still kept in touch after this, as he was under intense pressure at the time. It was not until he did something similar to his sister that she realised that she had been used to rehearse the second attack.

Several years later, when as she knew, he turned out to be innocent he returned to her life. She was trying to repair her damaged health at the time. An on-again -off-again friendship ensued, during which he attacked her again. He was suffering from PTSD by this time, and had poor health due to the earlier trauma.

She, in the meantime had taken care of her parents, and as her family was also abusive, did not go out. He was the only person that she saw, since there was nobody she could trust at all. She was so lonely, in fact, that she fell in love with a random stranger that she had met online. Her other friends, in the meantime, had decided that she was mad to be in love with the stranger, he could not possibly be interested in her and she had always been a bit weird anyway, since she did not share their low self-esteem and yet did not appear to need other people as much as they did.

So, the man decided, he must take revenge on her. So, he turned up at her home when she was very upset about the random stranger, and announced that he would do as he pleased and bring food that she did not want into the house.

This happened twice. She had already asked him not to bring any more food, and he did it again. In tears, she asked him again. He laughed at her.

She stood in the kitchen weeping. She knew this was another assault, but she did not know why. He was, as usual very tense so she knew she either had to let him play out this scene or she had to physically remove him, which could prove difficult in front of her sick mother. She also knew that she had nobody at all to talk to, and so she let him get on with it.

Over the months that followed, she often noticed his sneer as he watched her eat and grow fatter and fatter, and wondered what all this was in aid of? He kept bringing it up, over and over again as if his behaviour was not his responsibility at all. Because he had picked food as an issue, he imagined he could do this and insist that everything he had done was her fault.

When she finally confronted him and requested the reason why he would do these things, whether he thought her life was easy, he simply said:

I did not consider you at all.

creativity, health, motivation

Mindfulness and my male brain

July 27, 2017 No Comments

Apparently the latest in marketing bullshit involves introducing stressed men to the concept of mindfulness. Mindfulness, as it turns out, appears to be the new word for meditation, or as my friend would say ‘switching everything off and concentrating on thinking about nothing.’

Personally, when I need to make space for extended periods of military ‘regrouping,’ I make something. Depending on how complicated the (usually emotional) issue is, it can take from two to six months to figure out. Switching off involves creating something.

I find the idea of making nothingness a thing a bit ridiculous to be honest, I prefer a good blow-out in the form of tantrum, followed by activity of some kind. This may seem ridiculous, since I am not really achieving anything these days, but there it is. I apparently believe relaxation is time-wasting. This, according to these articles, is my male brain talking, however I have never noticed a particularly negative gender divide when it came to meditation. It is second only to yoga for people who like getting touchy feely with relative strangers.

Speaking of time-wasting, I have declined the Microsoft contract and am working on the games instead. It took only three hours before I realised what a huge mistake I was making in terms of potentially giving up twenty hours a week to do a job comparing search engine results instead of building up Ina. There are a couple of other companies interested, so we will see if they have something less tedious on offer.

I spent years doing terrible jobs, I have nothing to show for it apart from some pretty mediocre memories. The only thing that has been good about my current predicament is that I have had time to do other things.

So, today I went to university and sorted out my campus passes to renew my research for the Boris book. I resigned, in true prisoner style, and I drank a lot of supermix. The supermix appears to have removed the giant emotional lump in my chest, which meant that I was weeping rather a lot last night. It is as big a mystery to me as anyone why thinking about Wolfe, even briefly, causes such grief.

I imagine it is similar to a former friend, who told me that he could not grieve for his grandparents, but became hysterical over some baby mice that failed to survive two months later. The difference in this case, is that I am grieving for my sick family, lost potential and lack of power to do anything about it as long as I am the best option for taking care of my mother. I am terrified to leave her side at the moment as we have been under such scrutiny for the last couple of months.

I also purchased some Gynostemma pentaphyllum and some rosehip, with a view to promoting some AMPK. Since I cannot afford the extracts, we shall see if the combination helps with promoting youthful cell renewal. Nearly bought some Griffonia seed, but I think it can wait a while as my problem appears to be low dopamine rather than low seratonin. I am quite the fan of Durk and Sandy.

creativity, health

About thinking positively

July 26, 2017 No Comments

I have to be honest with you, memes like this drive me insane. Especially with that stupid name tagged at the bottom of it.

Let me tell you a story about positive thinking, and how complicated it gets.

If you particularly want the background to this story, I am sure there are plenty previous posts on it, but to cut the preamble very short:

Seven years ago I was huge, even bigger than I am now. I was extremely ill and I have an old video somewhere of my sounding rather drunk, although I had stopped drinking several years before. That is how damaged my liver was.

One of the old boyfriends, that I had been very fond of at 16 or so when he went off with someone else, randomly decided that he wanted to see me. I panicked, as he had posted a picture of himself at 18 online and I assumed that like me, he looked pretty much the same apart from weight.

So, I decided to create a database of health options for losing weight and solving the health problem, still undefined, that was causing me to be exhausted, covered in psoriasis, enormous and basically struggling with my workload, which at the time, since it was just after my father, best friend, and uncle’s deaths, was considerable.

I had created an exhibit for Patrick McGoohan online, and his family had been kind enough to acknowledge it, which was basically all I had going for me at the time.

In the course of researching my database, I came across Wolfe, and as I worked on my exhibit, laughed over several of his videos. The database then transformed into an academic treatise on how obesity became desirable to Western economies, how much you are manipulated emotionally into following standard behavioural pathways, and how to rebel with a view to a more ecologically friendly version of capitalism. Naturally I assumed that Wolfe would be interested in this.

When I went to his facebook page, I was surprised to find him actually on it. Over the next several weeks I was warily cheered up somewhat (I won’t go into it, but he can be very entertaining in his own way) It got me through an extremely stressful situation when my family was stabbing me repeatedly in the face for looking after my mother. Apparently if they are selfish, everyone has to be selfish. Having been told to give up any idea of a family or future to take care of her and my father, I do not know why they then decided they wanted me dead or destroyed for actually doing it. That is the reason for Ina Disguise. If I had done anything under my own name it would have been destroyed by now.

Stupidly, I put together a film offering quite an extensive critique of him and Durianriders, using the footage of my transformation thus far, with three months of research into 801010 and the superfood approach thrown in. Unlike Harley, I am well aware why different people have different nutritional requirements, and unlike Wolfe, I just do it for a laugh.

He blocked me, and the rest is history. I was broken hearted, although I did not quite understand why at the time, and it was probably three years later before another ex came to visit bearing cake.

I am still of the opinion that if there was a person I should have been with it would have been Wolfe. I staked my remaining six boyfriends on it, and it is not a source of regret. Too bad, how sad.

The reason I am writing all this down is because of this notion of ‘positive thinking.’ I was sufficiently positive to take care of myself briefly, because I thought that I deserved better from life. I did not. When I determined that I did not, there followed a titanic struggle to decide if I really wanted to be healthy and extremely lonely on a permanent basis.

It isn’t as if anything in my life went the way I wanted it to. I was obsessed with work, and my parents’ illness, alongside the economy and my inability to appear mouldable enough for your average (very average) employer, rendered that a non-starter after my education. I wanted children, and I failed to meet anyone because I have not had a social life since 2003. I wanted to use my education to write a great book, and in the course of my musings on Wolfe, I determined that nobody would be at all interested in reading it unless I had an established name, or offered sufficient entertainment.

So, the struggle became a case of – if I think positively, I am stupidly in love with someone I never really want to meet and I stay healthy on that basis but nothing actually changes. If I allow myself to be broken by this, I do a lot of sewing, give up writing anything weighty and either way I carry on taking care of my mother. I was running out of time to have children anyway, and I never see anyone, so it was not as if anything was likely to change.

However, being in love is not useful. It uses up a lot of capacity which is more helpful for doing other things. If you allow it to run its normal course, there should be a period of hatred, and I was not at all interested in hatred. I blow hot and cold as a matter of course, and that course has not altered.

Anyway, as you can see by the website I took option 2 and developed Ina. Apparently she is fairly stylish. Nothing that I wanted to happen is going to happen in my life, and this is regardless of meeting anyone or changing my perception of anything. All that remains is the small things, and perhaps that is just as well.

I am sure that some people would say I have achieved a lot over the last four years in terms of self-development, and I am sure that is the case. My friends would tell you that I have always had a masterplan of some sort that I am working towards. I get side tracked a lot (an example being the computers to Gambia project) but I always finish things eventually. Is it useful? Probably not. The book I would have written when I met Wolfe would have been, but considering that it was a labour of love, it would have been a waste of my time as even the one person I wanted to read and use it would not have done so. Had I been thinking positively, I would have wasted years of my time on maintaining my health in order to have a longer period of extreme poverty in later life, and for what? Trying to impress yet another unimpressable boy? What on earth is useful about that?

So, I have to say, I am not a fan of endless positivity. Had I taken the positive route I may well have been beautiful by now, but there would have been nobody here to look at it, and I don’t spend a lot of time looking in the mirror. I would also have been stark raving bonkers to remain in love with somebody that repeatedly blocked me even for asking a question about his charity. As it was I pursued that line of thought for far too long, although Wolfe has had some small benefit out of that.

I am unusually clued up about why people respond to him the way they do. I took a variety of lines of investigation into the emotional triggers they are experiencing. Apart from the fact he has made a niche subject extremely entertaining and courted as much controversy as possible to attract more attention to it, which personally I regard as a stroke of genius, some of his speaking techniques have led to considerable leakage in his commercial catchment, besides the errors that everyone makes on a similar trajectory.

So, although nobody is interested in this knowledge apart from me, I have got to the end of that line of enquiry. I am left wondering why I would spend 8 or 9 years bothering to sort this mystery out. I am still rather entranced by the methodology, but I didn’t have the time for this really. It gave me something to think about apart from the horror of finding out my family were quite so vicious, and it got me through a difficult time because of the sheer distraction of weeping about something else.

In terms of myself, I still don’t rate myself highly enough, and thinking positively is not something that is likely to help. Positivity involves hope, and hope is not useful when it has already gone.

business, creativity, motivation

Introduction to Ina

May 26, 2017 No Comments

Introduction to Ina

This week, I decided to launch myself a bit more seriously, in preparation for the finished Boris pieces, which I think are the start of a more revealing art period. Several of the sites would like me to write a regular blog, and so here is your handy introduction to Ina Disguise.

My father, also an artist, always advised me to do anything but art, since producing artwork for money is not the happiest of experiences if you like to express anything. Therefore, his reasoning was avoid art in order to produce better art. This led to my becoming a habitual over worker, as I took him at his word and worked every hour I could to avoid doing any artwork for many years.

Ina Disguise came about as a result of my inability to have a conversation with David Wolfe, a natural health promoter that I wanted to talk to about some academic work I was doing on eco-economics, marketing and behavioural economics. I managed to connect with him briefly on a few websites, but he only seemed to want to talk trash and pretend to himself that he is very clever. I am not sure why he does this, because apart from his lousy writing and a murky past, he actually is very clever.

As my family were trying to use abusing me as an excuse to rob their own mother, this came as the last straw and I became very unhappy, despite having just lost about 160lb and looking unusually hot that year. Therefore, after spending several months fighting off the urge to eat myself into oblivion, I started sewing, which is a habit I had previously formed whilst avoiding horrible and hurtful people and recovering from failed love affairs. If you cannot have the relationship, you might as well have a nice carpet out of your misdirected emotions.

Since he had blocked me from actually speaking to him, after it transpired that I was unusual in seeing through his many disguises online, I then wrote Best Scandal Ever in an effort to appease and inform him why I was buttering him up in the first place. Best Romance Ever followed, and, since I am of the opinion that keeping one’s brain balanced is rather important, I spent the time that I was not writing doing a lot more stitching.

I had previously amassed art materials with every spare penny from every job I had had since being told that I had to give up everything for my parents as nobody else in the family would ever be willing to do it. Currently two of them are sitting idle with pensions whilst I am unable to earn my own.

Anyway, within a year of putting my work out in public, GQ had got in touch, which has been an enormous encouragement, and my work has now been in Tatler several times, and last month I realised an early ambition and managed to get a spot in World of Interiors. I cannot tell you how much the girls from these magazines have helped me at what has been a very rough and ego bashing time.

So now I work in batches, usually five or six pieces at a time, and I have released several batches over the last four years, with varying results. Some of the pieces are more popular with other people than me, but my experiments have taught me a lot. Scale is a great tutor, as is ensuring that you are spoilt for stock volume in raw materials. As with writing, the ideas you would like to have only come when you have indulged the ideas you initially think are merely basic.

Wolfe taught me a lot about marketing, allowing yourself to express even the most rudimentary ideas, on the basis that most people cannot manage that and will show some interest anyway. There is simply no point in waiting until you are good enough, because if you don’t practise and attempt things, you don’t develop the stamina, skill and confidence to get to the good stuff. One of my pieces, Raw Sex Object, took seven years to complete, and I am not even interested in selling it because it is really a giant sampler.

Anyway, Wolfe has never understood that I am not trying to kill his career, and I cannot be bothered explaining it to him, so I have now embarked on the Boris adventure, as I perceive Boris to be a far more settled and confident person who might actually appreciate my amusing coded communication skills. I shall lavish attention on poor Boris until I presumably focus on a very serious person, such as the Pope. In the meantime, enjoy the artwork.

Ina

business, creativity

The most expensive handbags in the world

May 20, 2017 No Comments

Mouawad’s 1001 nights Diamond purse $3.8 million

I rather like this one, it at least has an interesting shape and took 8800 hours to make. I am not up to spending that amount of time on one piece quite yet. It is gold, encrusted with several thousand diamonds.

2. Lieber Precious Rose bag $92,000

This one at least has a great shape and structure. Again with a couple of thousand precious stones, if you like pink I am sure it is great, and will have taken a long time to make.

3. Chanel Diamond Forever $261,000

This is a tedious bag, for tedious people who want to wear that all-important logo. Unimaginative and a waste of a fine crocodile.

4. Hermes Birkin by Ginza Tanaka $1.9 million

This is a beauty and is also very practical. Less tasteless than the Chanel, and yet still having that all important bling.

5. LV Tribute patchwork bag $42,000

This looks as if it is begging to be a counterfeit bag that you can snap up in poundstretcher. Beyonce apparently got suckered into actually buying it. I think Beyonce should be asking me to make one for her. At least there would only be one if she did.

Urban Satchell Louis Vuitton — 6. Urban Satchel Louis Vuitton $150,000

Seriously, next time you clean out your handbag, just get some E6000 and stick the contents to the outside of the bag.

7. Marc Jacobs Carolyn Crocodile handbag $38,000

This bag is so ugly that I am not sure I have words. If you actually like this, please send me all your money so that I can save you from yourself. Try a market stall in the average small town and you will find nicer bags.

This is a small selection of the hundreds of bags that cost about the same as a house in the UK. As you can see, money does not buy taste.

business, creativity, motivation

Looking for Work

May 16, 2017 2 Comments

Every so often I wonder if I am managing, and I look for additional work. Tonight, since my mother has at last returned from hospital, I looked for work from home.

I have a fair amount of experience working from home, not just because of my lack of interest in social jostling. I worked from home for some time as my parents illnesses progressed, and so I have an unusual level of insight when it comes to work from home jobs.

I have watched carefully over the years, as home working went from quirk to fad to increasingly preferred option, and I see that I am not the only person who appreciates the lack of commute and lack of conversation involved in working from home.

Glassdoor is a good site to look at for reviews of home working options, as is the student room in the UK. You will tend to find the reviews via your search for the company you intend to work for on Google. I recommend this before you even think about applying for that underpaid source of vital income online.

People per hour has improved enormously since its previous incarnation, and Odesk has now become Upwork. As long as you are willing to put in the extra hours on the pitching processes, these are invaluable if you need to supplement your dwindling income.

Homepage-new

Clickworker is also very useful and can generate you income from all your gadgets if you are so inclined. There are a few sites that do similar hit based work, such as Mechanical Turk if you can be bothered going through the irritating process of registering for American tax.

http://www.lionbridge.com/careers/

Lionbridge is a good direct employer, and an increasing number of successful direct employment models are now available to you if you feel working from home is for you.

I have worked for about five or six different online employers over the years, and with the exception of Ipsos Mori, they have been very good. To be fair to Ipsos Mori, they do try to create a good opportunity, but as with so many companies, internal problems make them rather miserable to work for, reflected in their poor employee reviews. I cannot emphasise the importance of checking before you apply for information from ex employees enough.

So, yesterday JT Coxx advertised a free seminar on my Facebook timeline. The enticing advertisement said that there were too few female motivational speakers, and naturally my interest was piqued, being something of a motivational speaking connoisseur. I duly checked the reviews, to find that JT Coxx is considered worldwide to be an abrasive, arrogant scammer who creates free seminars to con people out of hundreds and thousands of dollars. This theme seemed familiar, given the descriptions I had previously been given of the boiler room tactics employed by David Wolfe. They are cut from similar cloth, being in the voice-of-yesteryear Tony Robbins punch the air market.

Sadly, I decided not to bother with the free seminar from JT Coxx. The quality just wasn’t up to much, and I cannot afford to squander my time and money on Wolfe. So, my conclusion tonight, when reviewing the working from home, hiding from the world options, was

Why am I looking to write blog posts and copy for other people for button money, when I should be developing my online presence?

Which in itself, of course is a motivational statement – why be a follower when you can be a leader? The pay may not emerge for some time, if ever, but far better to position yourself as a predator rather than prey, whether you are grazing stock, in the form of an employee, or prey in the form of the horror of being an actual customer!

So, there hangs the crux of the matter. Rather than concentrating on the Zig Ziglar school of not being a moaner, don’t put yourself in the position of having something to moan about – avoid irritants where possible. Separate yourself from the idea of being an employee, and instead strategise ways of freeing yourself from the whole paradigm. If you must be employed – seek out miserable jobs to remind yourself why you are looking elsewhere for inspiration. That is the key to being a great employee after all, playing a role that you despise as well as you possibly can under difficult circumstances.

I think in order to progress, I will release the existing work on audible and work on hubpages. The carpet is needing my attention once I have my mother in a more stable state of health. Thereafter I will keep a closer look at the world of employment, to remind myself why I really need to get a move on to avoid it.

creativity, motivation

Writing Development

May 14, 2017 No Comments

Writing Development

As someone who has always been told that I tell a good story, it is one of the few things that I am fairly confident about. I am wildly undisciplined, I rarely redraft before publishing, and as a result I have to go back and read things I have put out months and years later.

I have found, however, that the blog has been very helpful in building this confidence, and in forming a writing habit. Having said this, I took a look at Reality Check this evening, and was horrified that emotional topics put me in a frenzied panic which renders me almost unreadable. Mandatory Equality, on the other hand, is a fun read which took little time to make a complicated point.

I have not achieved very much over the last 4 years or so, apart from 11 books, 3 art collections and the beginnings of two computer games. I am very glad that I have not achieved very much.

Why? Having read Reality Check, a particularly personal story which is very patchy and a severely abbreviated history of the last twenty years of family life – I have stuck rather too closely to the ‘write what you know’ hypothesis and was too horrified to do the story justice. When I think about the ideas I have for the forthcoming Lucifer Ogilivie in comparison, I am having far more elegant and interesting ideas now BECAUSE I AM WILLING TO GIVE MYSELF THE TIME TO THINK IT THROUGH.

This is the problem for anyone embarking on a career of self expression. It takes time to take yourself seriously enough to determine a good direction to go in. Rushing it just ends up with a sub-standard product. Self expression requires self development, and that takes dedication and selfishness. Otherwise you might as well consign yourself to a lifetime of mediocrity.

So, if you want to write, first take yourself seriously enough to take your time over it. Edit at least once, and give yourself space to move on and then look back. Don’t market like mad too quickly, because chances are your next work will be a development on the last. As with artwork, your crap idea will develop with time into what you really should have done in the first place, so you need to be willing to make mistakes and admit to them.

This is harder than it sounds – and it takes failure to humble yourself to your craft. I read other self-published work all the time that will never get anywhere without an editor. Again, a matter of taking yourself seriously enough to put the time, work and possibly money into.

For example, I took a look at the art carpets available online – I am almost ready to go to market as a carpet maker after twenty years of making, and sometimes not making, but thinking about, carpets – this is because I know what direction my carpet paintings are to go in, because my idea was always to be the Tiffany, or the Faberge of carpet makers. Carpet making is my thing, but it is not so great that I want to be grafting away at putting hundreds out. Far better to perfect the art and put out ten good ones.

Several mainstream art sites that I looked at last night had people that should not have bothered marketing their carpets at all, in much the same way that many books being pumped out are not ready.

You do have to balance this, however with what you want to write – a writer that wants to market a product will have the capacity for increased volume of less intense work, such as David Wolfe. A writer trying to create a cult like following willing to pay for more expensive retreats, such as Gabriel Cousins will, however need to put more time and thought into creating an ethos. Likewise Jilly Cooper, who must write at a fearsome pace to put out work that badly constructed, needs less preparation than Chekhov.

So, to conclude – to write well, decide who you are and then write badly. As Aristotle says, if you wish to acquire a virtue, first pretend to have it, and eventually you will.

creativity

Work Update

May 9, 2017 2 Comments

I have no idea why I associate Boris Johnson with rock pools, but apparently I do. At least four of the pieces I am working on associated with Boris are related to rock pools. I have a carpet, a box and a trunk on wheels, a small table all with rock pool tendencies.

Wolfish, one of the remaining David Wolfe pieces, is swimming in a coral reef in a tank, but apparently in my head Boris is all about rock pools. Perhaps the psychologists could have a think on that one. It is probably something to do with sex, although I am not aware of it. Most of my work is related to emotion rather than sex in terms of whichever form things take, but the colours are usually a give-away in terms of the sexual element.

The furniture progress has been slow but Jemima Khan is going to be spectacular, Iain Duncan Smith is a lot of work, and Theresa May is yet to get off the ground due to lack of funds. Darius Guppy is on pause as he needs a lot of sanding work.

I am starting to get psyched up for the book, so I will be doing some reading shortly in anticipation of Lucifer Ogilvie. Not to be too cynical about it, but it would help a lot if Boris likes it, so I hope I can at least persuade him to read it when the time comes. My ideas seem to be developing somewhat, so hopefully it will be a funny and clever take on Conservatism through the eyes of the alternative Boris.

The games are on hold at the moment, I managed to salvage them from yet another broken computer. (my cat is very fond of computers, which is why I seem to go through five or six laptops a year, although she does not seem to share the same love of the PC).

I am seriously considering a short story about racism, since whoever manages such things has successfully persuaded us that protecting our own rights involves maligning other people’s. Mind your Language, a programme which is usually denounced as racist in the UK, is massively popular in India and Pakistan.

« Previous 1 … 23 24 25 26 27 … 30 Next »