creativity

Why I write

February 7, 2016 No Comments

Why I write

First and foremost, it should be said that I have not been writing regularly for all that long. I wrote intermittently for years, usually some male was involved, and I was unable for various reasons to speak to them. Men go from being callously immature in their twenties, to almost retirement in their forties if they are not carefully managed by themselves, their partner, or their lifestyle. You have to try very hard to get your message across in the brief romantic period during their thirties when they are wondering where their life is going. Since I veer between overworking, hiding in the house and doing things for other people, this has left little time for chasing dudes. Besides which, they turned up like over-ordered pizza for twenty years until I told them that their visits were pointless. Apparently all I wanted was a decent muse.

I do not write for the purpose of gaining fame, it would be a very inefficient way of doing it. I was originally working on a social commentary about natural health, the environment, economics and how these things link with your personal liberty and level of society-led brainwashing when I wanted to speak to Wolfe He was quite possibly entirely unaware of this until after the incident with the screen, which was really intended to make up for a rather caustic and probably embarassing film I had made about the state of raw food at the time, in addition to completing a piece of work I had put seven years into.

Since then, my primary purpose was to let him know what had happened, since he was unlikely to hear about it from his moronic staff. The hazard of using ‘friends’ as colleagues is that even when they get it wrong you are likely to give them the benefit of the doubt, and I am quick to admit that I am a very odd fish at times. I doubt very much that very much has changed, beyond the girls getting younger, and I am quite sure that he has no appreciation of what I do whatsoever, unless some richer person has told him that it is kewl.

It was something that I always knew I could do, on one hand, but not something I felt terribly motivated by. I always thought I would end up in some sort of heritage career. Then again, I did not think that I would be bullied for years by my dangerously stupid sisters, nor lied about for the purposes for their gaining money at the expense of all reason and the welfare of their own mother. Everything has been a bit of a mess for more than a decade.

The good thing about it is that I am less likely to accept the shirking of responsibility for their actions on the grounds that they claim to be too stupid/not remember/not understand what they have done on the grounds that I am a bit eccentric and they do not understand what acceptable behaviour is. The fact that I am now middle-aged and considerably brighter than them does not seem to occur to them.

The latest in the family saga is that they are attempting to bully my mother, since they are unable to get to me. I have curtailed their ability to do this, and I await their next assault. To give you an example, we went away before Christmas, and despite my mother’s claim that she had a marvellous time, they are telling her that she did something wrong by not forcing me to ask their permission. My eldest sister, as I have mentioned before, is a dangerous lunatic who is obsessively driven by her vendetta against me, which has no basis in anything I have or have not done. Quite the reverse, the more I do, the more she demands, so it is much better to prevent her from interacting with me as much as is possible. My mother, assisted by me, called her four times before we went away, and she did not return any of the calls because the only thing that matters to her is herself, and how much power she imagines she should have despite doing nothing at all to earn it.

So, despite a wall of ignorance, I have the comfort of knowing that I now have approximately fifteen thousand readers of the books, and a few thousand a month on the blog, all of whom understand exactly what I am saying. This provides me with a bit of emotional reassurance. It has been very difficult to remain unaffected by this barrage of irrational stupidity.

In the event that it is fame that you seek, I do not recommend writing as a way to do it. There are far more effective ways of gathering a following. Social media is also scheduled to fragment very shortly, so in the event that you wish to make a start, I recommend that you do it very fast indeed, since Facebook is now effectively useless unless you have an enormous marketing budget and team of groupies like Wolfe, or are sufficiently dogged to sit on it all day. Twitter is heading the same way, and so new avenues, such as Tsu and other social media providers are likely to become more popular. It does not make economic sense to pump money into a format that no longer works, even when chatting to your friends. It is a shame, but Facebook is fast becoming irrelevant.

I have completed about 16 or so courses, and have another 45 or so to get through, so work is postponed until I get through that. Twisty is now absent, so I have more work to do with mother. It is very strange, but her health appears to be improving as a result of all the peace and quiet. I think that it will be worth it, when all the courses are finished and I produce some new formats. Hopefully Wolfe can be induced to take a look at it, when he is not too busy being his usual ebullient self.

creativity, motivation

Creative Funk and Blockages

January 8, 2016 No Comments

Writer’s block means that you are either processing something, have yet to experience something necessary to your development, or simply have too much to worry about. It is not something that you should ever put yourself in the position of fearing. As someone who has many creative strands to my work, I usually deal with it by using one of the others, whether that is making cartoons, games, artwork or helping other people work through their stuff.

Chatting to a friend earlier this evening, we were discussing why he does not seem to want to promote his acclaimed work. It turns out that bad experiences from his past prevent him, on the grounds that he is somehow jinxed. This, coupled with having had successful projects hijacked, has led to a creative block that has been extremely frustrating for me as the viewer, and extremely limiting for him. Despite this, he has managed several small projects, but is suffocated by what I can only describe as a sense of despondence and fear of success.

In this case, it is film-maker’s and graphic novelist’s block, rather than writer’s block. He, in common with another film-maker I have had dealings with, limits himself by not effectively working around the blockage. This is an intermittent, rather than a constant, problem, and in the meantime I take the rather selfish approach of involving him in my stuff (he does all the photography for the store, and is creating the covers for this year’s crop of books.) I feel quite bad about this, however, as his time would be better spent generating more of his own work and starting new strands, in a holistic development. You often find, on your downtime from one area that you work in, that you unexpectedly grow in a new direction.

I have many authors on my friend’s lists, and barely a day goes by that someone does not complain of being blocked, or that they feel guilty that they have not written that day. In comparison, I frequently do not write for months at a time, and feel nothing at all about it. As I have previously mentioned, Agatha Christie said that she knew she was a professional writer because she wrote things she did not like, at times she did not want to write. I have no plans to be in this position. Deadlines are helpful, but you do not become better by hammering out pulp. I am lucky enough to be feeling quite vital at the moment, but should this change, I have a game to construct and some artwork to do.

It often does not look as if you are doing anything at all, when your work is creative, and then you look back on your day and you have written a press release, researched another couple of textures, absorbed some patterns and shapes, tidied your workspace, sorted some materials for another day. If you look on your writer’s block in a similar way, your brain does need time to store information, process it, and proceed to output mode. You can try scribbling tasklists and notes to yourself in the meantime, to try to speed up this process, but it will happen by itself eventually. Mindmapping was a useful technique I used at university, and it certainly helps a lot with business plans and presentations. Plotting the thought bubbles sometimes makes things a lot clearer.

Negative events often cause you to remain in this state of blockage or funk for several years, when you could just break it down into neat chunks. I was very aware throughout this particular creative period, of what was going on, because I had seen it all before. Years ago, I might have bothered to meet Wolfe, on the assumption that there was some magical source of the waterfall of emotion, but even two years of personal misery did not deter me from the creative outcome, thankfully.

Be aware, as a creative person, that the bad things that happen to you are probably even more useful to you than the nice things. Relentless positivity is for insecure, easily threatened people that are unwilling to develop in a realistic way. The bad years, you will find, provide a more stable footing for your growth in the good ones, if you teach yourself to look on it the right way. My friend can now make well regarded film with minimal money, due to the horrific things that have happened to him. If I can just get him past this unwillingness to shout about it – there is no reason why he cannot expand on this if he wants to. It has taken probably the whole fifteen years I have known him for me to understand why he strangles himself with the hostile form of self-doubt that prevents us finishing certain projects. Which brings me to my final point – unfinished projects should not be binned – it is possible that your brain awaits a future event to teach you what you need to know. Growth is not always a smooth process, but it gets a lot smoother when you learn to protect yourself from shock, and that no material is bad material when you are a creative flower.

business, creativity, motivation, politics

The True cost of Celebrity

November 11, 2015 No Comments

The True cost of Celebrity

Piers Morgan, Tony Blair, Nicki Minaj, Taylor Swift, Gordon Brown, JK Rowling, Eddie Izzard.

These names alone will ensure that this blog entry will be read by several new readers.

The reason for this is much the same reason that people used to read tabloid newspapers. They want to be shocked by something that doesn’t actually affect them at all.

Yesterday, Nicki Minaj’s many complaints about Anaconda not being given an award, despite her having followed some formula that she had seen in Marie Claire about nudity in pop videos, were very, very significant on Twitter, aided and abetted by Piers Morgan’s counter complaint that she had not realised how terribly important his children were once upon a long, long time ago.

May I remind you that none of the people in the first row of this article wish you well, or intend to promote you or your work in any way. They are just generating publicity to line their own pockets.

It used to be referred to as being a ‘lickspittle‘, back when the general population still had a decent education. You are welcome to look this up. They distract you from the truth, so that you continue with your lives and do not take any action to better or help yourselves. ‘Spokespeople for the establishment,’ who would like to make sure that everything stays the same.

Anaconda was not a particularly bad video, indeed for a song which must have taken Nicki Minaj all of 20 minutes to write, I am sure she put a great deal of work into it. Her public image, only partially derived from that of Lil Kim, is, I am sure, positive for many people who think that buying makeup and clothes will somehow lead to a better life for all youth, not just the outraged black youth that were so keen to avoid reading Piers Morgan’s article yesterday, branding him a racist. He probably is a racist, but that is not what his article was about, and it does not matter what you think, as long as you are sufficiently aroused to notice his name when you see it.

Do not be deceived, Piers Morgan is trying to revive his profile in America, because he would like to be on TV. We in the UK, as with Russell Brand, are delighted to oblige you with as many annoying celebrities as you care to pay. Nicki Minaj is complaining for your attention, Taylor Swift, the current darling of the establishment, already has it.

Meanwhile in the UK, we have the same sort of illusion in politics. Tony Blair is pretending to care about the Labour leader election, because he wants a right-wing acolyte party that closely resembles the Conservatives. He also wants to distract you from his charging 330,000GBP for appearing at an event for world hunger. Tony, as you can see, cares about you, and you should listen to every word he says, as he takes every self-advantageous opportunity that comes his way.

Gordon Brown, a man now so hated in Scotland that he dare not stand in his own constituency, also thinks he will up his after-dinner speech fee by pretending to come out of retirement to save the Labour Party, a Party so hamstrung by the cult of personality that nobody can make a decision until someone else tells them to.

Even well established authors are not immune from this famewhore behaviour. J. K. Rowling, an English author who chose to live in Scotland, invested heavily in trying to sway the Scottish referendum. Since then, she has continuously complained that she is not liked in Scotland. She has had many column inches, varying from how great she is on Twitter, to, em, how great she is on Twitter. She has done very well with her spare million, in terms of column inches, and potential placement on the honours list.Eddie Izzard, a rather faded star these days, also felt that Scotland was a good publicity opportunity, and so he and a few media friends came up to support Jim Murphy, a politician so dreadful that he tried to associate himself with a can of Irn Bru during his campaign. Because Scottish voters are clearly stupid according to Jim. Are we clear on this yet?

THESE PEOPLE DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOU AT ALL.

They do not care about your life, they do not care about politics, they do not care about bettering the world, they do not care what happens after they die. They are not lofty, special beings. They are here to make money and get ahead. They do not care.

Almost all the news is just a distraction to make you think you are keeping in touch with reality. You aren’t. Let me give you an example:

During Gordon Brown’s term, a news programme came on TV. Two stories were of note.

1. Children of women who stay at home do better at school.

2. Chinese people rescuing baby pandas from a flood.

Ah, I said, There aren’t enough jobs for everyone, and Gordon Brown has signed something for the UK to do business with China.

I went out, got into my car, put on Radio 4. The news came on, the first two stories were:

1. Unemployment has increased, and several thousand more jobs are to be lost shortly.

2. Gordon Brown has signed a deal with China.

This is reality. There is no them and us. There is you, and then there is the power hungry fool you voted for, bought a newspaper from, or bought music from. You need to take your wallet and give it a long hard stare.

As I have been telling you, it is all a distraction. The only person who can really change the world is you. Yes, all of you. Each of you. If anyone were to stop and think about an ideal world, this would not be it.

#youmatter

creativity, motivation

A Goal is a Dream with a Deadline

August 11, 2015 48 Comments

One thing since my family disaster in the form of both parents getting dementia has been the death of the personal deadline. I should be concerned about this, since I have traditionally been fond of work deadlines as a method of avoiding the rest of my life.

I am going to fly in the face of any motivator and tell you the truth – deadlines are no good for quality. I have got much further since I abandoned the deadline. I do things when I feel like it, for as long as I feel like it and the rest of my time is pretty much eaten up by 24/7 responsibility for my mother and her property.

The fact that I am trapped in the house by her illness and the lack of support has meant that I have no distractions in the form of looking after or enjoying myself, and so I feel I can afford the luxury of time. Some of the first batch were being thought about for over a year before they were actually completed, and I can honestly say this has made my work better.

The work went into the 3rd dimension only after a personal crisis brought about by an event outlined vaguely in Best Scandal Ever. Finding out that I cannot expect even the smallest amount of respect from a desk jockey agent when trying to help somebody basically caused me to decide that nothing mattered, and the removal of time and the restraint of ambition has meant I have all the time in the world to perfect this one thing that I can confidently say is unique to me.

So much for your standard motivational garbage then. A disaster of rejection has led to me finally doing what I probably should have done in the first place – ignore everyone and do whatever I feel, whenever I feel like doing it.

creativity, politics

Learning from idiots

August 11, 2015 360 Comments

The recent use of idiocy in the USA to keep Donald Trump in the media, and overspill back in Scotland, is not the only thing which has caused me to ponder the value of being an idiot. Given that in terms of my emotional attachment to Wolfe, I too am a kind of professional idiot, I am now pondering the value of idiocy.

Trump has taken some minor financial hits in the last couple of days, Oman and Scotland have reported third party business losses as a result of his shameless self promotion and moronic self-regard. I wonder if he calculates this on a profit/loss basis? For a person hailed as a business expert, if he has not done this, then perhaps he makes his living shooting his mouth off and having other people use the convenient pun of his name for their own purposes. It would make more sense if people were looking at each other across the boardroom table, rolling their eyes and signing away fortunes on the basis of having the word Trump on the side of a building.

The spectacular headline that Trump would have made more money doing nothing, makes me think that running your mouth is an outstandingly popular activity in the idiocracy that is the USA. Certainly the examples we are shown here in the UK indicate that the American rich are similar to the lower middle classes, in terms of the glorification of self interest and lack of perceived duty and humility, something which I have always felt made us much stronger as a nation in the UK.

Recently, of course, we in the UK have taken to inviting foreign money to bolster the luxury market and conceal the fact that economically speaking, our government does not even remember the simple economic principles of Maggie Thatcher. Yes, she dictated that it was a good idea to kill off unsustainable nationalised industry, but nobody in the current government seems to have put this together with encouraging small to medium sized business, proportionately enormous employers, with enhancements to investibility and encouragement of the general population to risk everything replanting the economic garden by starting small businesses.

Perhaps we should have a Chancellor that can count, with a memory of thirty years ago so that he does not miss this crucial detail. Instead he is starving the poor in order to fund crappy and equally corrupt Labour PFI policy damage and fund his cronies in the defence industry, whilst everyone apparently sits at home and wonders why their respective riots are not reported on the media. We in Scotland are well aware that the media is suppressing information from little England. For the benefit of the terminally stupid Conservative voters, sitting in their ‘Alright Union Jack’ properties – try looking up DEMONSTRATION SUPPRESSED BY THE MEDIA and you will find a list of unreported action by students, anti-war protesters, people protesting the starvation of the disabled. We are being treated just as badly as the Americans in terms of the assumption that we are all too stupid to care that we are led by people too knuckle-draggingly dumb to be allowed out of the cocaine room at the private members club.

At this point in my life I am of the opinion that we should take this as a sign that no matter our history or our previous lack of confidence and motivation, we should take matters into our own hands. We need to find ways around the problem in terms of making use of things like crowdfunding, social capital and our own good ideas to regrow our own gardens. If you have harboured even the shred of a dream, have a look at how to make it work on a basis that the silly boys in Westminster cannot interfere with.

Likewise, my inability to make love work for me, no matter how much work I pour into expressing myself, should tell me that love is just not for me. I should give up on drilling my way through a shell of self protective superficiality and forget that Wolfe is actually a perfectly functioning and rather frightened person wrapped up in a blanket of bullshit. I should move on to someone that presents a facade of emotional competence, and wait for the inevitable conclusion that nobody knows what they are doing and it is all futile. I should not waste my time recovering from bad experiences, instead being aware that life is short, and since there is no actual truth, I might as well role play my way through the traditional markers of age and time. I should not make any effort to communicate. I should make distinctions between global politics and the vagaries of my own emotion. I certainly should not mix the topics, in case I confuse people determined to sleep their way through life and put full stops on it where none exist.

Perhaps what we should learn from idiocy, is that all progress is futile, because sooner or later, someone who prioritised money or power over knowledge decided that we just don’t matter. Nothing matters at all in fact, apart from making sure that we get more jelly beans from life than the idiot next to us.

creativity, motivation

Introversion improves Confidence

July 11, 2015 71 Comments

Do you ever find yourself saying what you think people want to hear? Do you cringe at what you have said and wonder why you felt you had to say it? Are you the hardest worked life and soul of the party you know? Do you regard yourself as over-reactive and try to compensate with over-generosity or putting even more work into making people like you? Do you ever fall victim to ‘running your mouth?’ If you answer yes to any or all of these things you may be an extrovert introvert.

An extrovert-introvert is basically an introvert who chooses to appear as an extrovert. This may be for a variety of reasons. Work was mine. Head chefs in particular, may think that they are necessarily loud, big personalities who dominate the space they are in because it is expedient for the purposes of getting the job done under pressure. eg. Gordon Ramsay, Marco Pierre White etc. Some of the best chefs I have met, however, were actually shy, quiet people who worked to greater technical specification and gained more respect from the art itself. eg. Anton Mossiman, Andrew Fairlie.

I remember when I was very young, saying that I could not cope with any more crowds as I was getting tired from having to be six or seven people. Quite apart from the callow and impressionable youth, I was expressing my introversion. Living in a very large house, I had always had the luxury of several hours a day with no-one bothering me, which I would spend reading or making things, since music was frowned upon, but that is another story.

If you frequently find yourself beating yourself up over stuff you have said or done, it may be time to admit to yourself that you actually prefer your own company and spending some time ALONE. It is almost certainly better for your health than constantly tripping over an overactive tongue, and may save you future problems with your existing relationships. I certainly found that after I became a recluse, the people who wanted to see me badly enough to seek me out, were doing so to get some sort of guidance that I had no idea I was providing. You are nearly always stronger/brighter/quicker than you think.

After ten years away from my old friends when travelling, I was astonished to find that the vast majority of them had done nothing apart from seek validation from each other since I had left. This seemed to me to be very sad. Now, as an unashamed introvert, having distanced myself even from them, I achieve a lot more and am better rested and considerably more confident than I ever was as a bad tempered, brusque chef who was always in charge.

It is wise to conduct a cost benefit analysis, and figure out if you can squeeze yourself some time alone. Make it a priority and find out who you really are. I can tell you that almost all of the time, you are better off without the advice of even the most well-meaning friend, and you are certainly better off without the warped role playing advice of your family.

creativity, economics, health, motivation

Economic Raw Food for the Brain

March 11, 2015 No Comments

About a fortnight ago, a tearful young lady had put a message up on facebook complaining that she was tired of being disposable, that nobody had any feelings anymore and she did not feel that she could live like that.

I very quickly replied that her generation had been brought up for a transient existence because transience is good for the economy, and that if she expected to change anything, she was just going to have to rebel. She did not reply. A good example of this symptom of the Western economic disease is one of IKEA’s campaigns, which entreated the viewer to get divorced and buy some furniture. This is a fairly advanced gag for the European market, but an important one.

I am sure this phenomenon, of personal disposability and the need to continuously upgrade yourself, started during my generation or even earlier in the USA, but in the UK even people two years younger than me show a marked difference to people of my own age. The sublimation of cultural influence is so finely tuned now, that even 20 odd months make a difference. Where I got much the same post war creative children’s programming as my older peers, I noted as far back as the 1980s that colours in newer TV shows were more akin to sales signs and children were being discouraged from actually making anything in favour of showing off another purchase. I was met with dismay in the 1990s when I made a serious complaint to the BBC about it.

It is very sad, and very bad for fulfilling personal development that we are now training people to despise menial jobs and assume that the answer to all ills is to purchase happiness. It is equally sad to destroy the sense of commitment that, despite sacrificing a sense of day to day contentment, provided people with the stability required to move beyond Candy Crush Saga, to discuss more important things and perhaps volunteer to do something about them instead of assuming powerlessness. Being serious is now considered to be something undesirable and unattractive. People like this poor girl feel that their emotions are somehow unacceptable, and that feeling anything renders them worthless. Compare this with even fifty years ago, and you will see exactly how much you have been manipulated.

Post 90s babies may not even have access to people who remember when it was OK to have feelings and make lousy Valentine’s cards (or whatever else) for each other as it now seems to be desirable to throw the elderly into a care home. Boys are now deprived of the company of their fathers, fixing broken items or inventing new ones, because the traditional skill level has been depleted for the benefit of the Political Economic Paradise we are so fortunate to live in. Now they are supposed to jump into the second car and buy something new to keep somebody somewhere (else) in work. All so that your government can show you another couple of percent growth and keep you voting for them. You can also count yourself responsible for perpetual war and student loans, since these are also part of the economic machine that is running out of steam.

I, perversely, count myself lucky to be in a position to show you exactly how much you have been conned. Time is money – no, money is time, and time is worth a lot more than cash to you if you know how to use it effectively and have sufficient motivation to do something with it. Nobody is powerless, and nobody is worth more than you just because they are good at extracting cash from their employer or anybody else they do business with. Don’t ever let anybody tell you otherwise, stop comparing yourself to them and stop worrying about what people might say if you actually care about something. You may well surprise yourself.

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