creativity - Ina Disguise

Improve your life right now

September 15, 2016 No Comments

Today, I am feeling OK, because I have caught up with most of my boring admin. I have also isolated two tasks which will move the entire Ina Disguise project on a notch, which I am now concentrating on. Tatler rang me yesterday, so it looks as if I will be doing that Tatler thing again before Christmas.

So, in my infinite wisdom, I have decided to make a list of things you can do right now to improve your life.

Think of something nice you can do for someone who actually deserves it. This does not mean just anybody – think of someone who has done things for you, without being asked and without thought of benefit to themselves, be that emotional or actual.
Drink more water. Before every meal, and every time you think about it.
Stop drinking tea and coffee. These drinks are associated with sitting down. You can easily sit down with a glass of water instead, which will not act as a diuretic or cause you to form sitting down habits.
Find items of clothing and objects which you do not use. Donate them to charity or sell them on ebay.
Find a free course from Coursera, Udemy, Alison, Udacity or EDX. Some of these you can complete today. This will make you feel better about yourself, and open your mind to new things.
Carry black pepper wherever you go. This helps you process fat, whatever your eating habits.
Reduce the amount of sugar and white flour in your life. This will stop you drooping after lunch or feeling lazy in the evening. Best to get rid of it altogether unless you poop immediately after every meal.
Stop assuming that people are better than you are. Nobody is. There is no such thing as infallible authority.
Look on Smashwords, free ebooks, Barnes and Noble, or the Apple store for a free book, read and review it. Authors almost never get a review from a stranger, so they will be very grateful.
If you had a reasonably good experience with a business recently, review them on Google.
Have a look at Hubpages and see if there is a topic you would like to write about. You can make money from this, and it is now a better option than Youtube.
Sign a petition.
Resolve to stop playing ‘free games’ on facebook as it is a waste of your life.
Resolve to eat more vegetables. You literally cannot get enough.
Make an appointment or complete some neglected paperwork. You will feel better when it is gone.
Spend fifteen minutes thinking about your goals and deciding what you can do in under half an hour to move towards them.
Consider your relationships. If something is bothering you that you cannot quite put your finger on, think about it carefully. You are better off without people who slow or wear you down.

After all that, you can do whatever you want. Go for a walk, indulge in your hobby, complete your day to day chores.

creativity, politics

Letter to Boris

September 6, 2016 No Comments

Dear Boris,

I don’t usually do this, but then I don’t usually make a conscious decision to pick anybody. Work is going reasonably well, and I should be up to date with background tasks in about ten days or so, which means I will be starting the new work.

In the meantime, I am concerned about your health. To save some time and energy, rather than wasting your time or mine on hints, I think you should get yourself some seaweed, some omega 3 seeds, some wheatgrass and some barleygrass. Soak the seeds every night, add some green leafy vegetables, some stevia or honey and the wheat and barleygrass, whether powder or freeze dried to the mixture in the morning. Then add fruit until it tastes reasonably pleasant. Raw cacao powder is also very good for improving the mineral content and flavour. Since you are probably being plied with over rich food constantly, please ensure that you eat a green salad with every meal. You will find that if you eat a tiny bit of the green salad before you start, your digestion will function much better. Try to choose the fish and ignore the potatoes/bread/pasta etc. Your overall functionality should improve in about a week.

I realise that it is not easy to ignore idiots at work, but you are dealing with at least two, so try to work around it. I have some proposals, which will be included in the charming book I am preparing for you. This will be released free of charge, since I am not famous, and I do not do this for money as such. (chance would be a fine thing) I will probably release it from the website, so as to retain full copyright, hence it will not have huge distribution. I do this directly for the person I am writing/making objects for rather than the general public. It is a bit quirky, but perhaps eventually I will learn to like money somewhat more than I do at present.

Usually, I have some sort of emotional event and the creativity takes over because I feel terrible. You have been selected because I was seized with concern that you feel terrible, and I would like you not to feel terrible. I hope that this makes some sense.

This oddity was created by my father, who was also an artist and forbade me from taking up art as a living on the grounds that better art is created by people who cannot help it. It is a rather repressive way of working, but perhaps this is me breaking out of it. It also seems like a rather good opportunity to return to my academic work, which is highly relevant to you in particular.

I do have a considerable pile of work still to finish from the Wolfe collection, but this will be completed whilst I carry out the Boris experience. It does not mean my attention is at all divided, it just means that my time is somewhat limited.

I do hope that you take my oddness in the spirit in which it is meant, and do get on with those trade deals, regardless of the oppressive shit on a plate you are doubtlessly being kept on a leash for. It is extremely important.

Thank you in anticipation of your patience.

business, creativity

Product, Brand and Consistency

September 3, 2016 No Comments

Product, brand and consistency

Product, brand, consistency
OK, I have made a lot of lazy posts recently, because I was feeling a bit low due to a crap diet and feeling a bit browbeaten. I think it is time to get back on track really.
Conclusions I have drawn from the last two and a half yearsIf you are marketing yourself with no money, consistency is key. Putting yourself out there takes dedication, daily attention and perseverance. In the absence of a budget, you need to set aside about two hours a day for getting your name out. It has been said that people need to see your name around nine times now before they notice it, even if you have a shit hot product.
Books do not make money unless you have an established name. This means you either throw some money at creating a brand, or you create a cool underground product and rely on word of mouth. This means the contents of your product also need to be consistent. I am not so worried about the books, although I can spin a yarn, so to speak. I really put the books out to promote other things, such as the artwork on the cover, or the subject matter. It is a cheap and cost-effective way of making more people aware of my doing something, basically.
Cross marketing is a long winded way of going about things, but it still works to an extent. I still have three distinct groups of people interested in what I do, the blog readers, the book readers and the artwork peeps. Until I add the gamers, I do not think this is getting me far at sufficient speed.
The artwork takes a very long time, and a lot of space in my house. My eyesight is no longer perfect, which is kind of annoying, and I am already making changes to some things, like beadwork, as I know it will make this worse, so I think it will ultimately be phased out, although I still have two to three years worth of work to finish.
I am disinterested in some aspects of marketing, and even though the information is available, I do not use it. I need to pay more attention to getting my name out and improve on my strategy, which has actually been fairly successful so far.
Deadlines are depressing, and I do not enjoy them any more. I think the work is better when I do not set them, which renders me a keen amateur rather than the professional I perhaps ought to be.On a personal note

I need to be a lot less tolerant of timewasters and people who set out to obstruct what I am doing. This has cost around six years of time over the last three. If I include the time Wolfe wasted before I started this project, we can take that up to a decade of wasted time because I was weeping or worrying about people that do not give a shit about me.
I cannot afford to make myself ill with food again.
I need to get out now and again.
Sometimes it is better to stop what you are doing in order to get something off the list, just because it feels less cluttered
I need to sell some items that I have created (such as computers) in order to get the stuff I need (such as software) I need to get an Ebay store going in order to shift some wool that I will never use for anything.
I have about thirty courses to finish, and it is far more important that I do this than anything else.
It is imperative that I do the Boris Experience project, as I think he is a more deserving and appreciative case than David Wolfe. There, I said it.
My ideas are better than I think they are, and it is time I appreciated me and stopped listening to other people at all.
My health is more important than ANYBODY

Rant over for today
Priorities

Mandala carpet and Perfect Posterior finished and on Etsy
Market the screen and Honey I made you an icon from the website
Set up Ebay wool store to shift some unusable wool
Sell at least three computers
Build another two computers
BORIS!!!!!!
Best Adventure Ever
Courses

Then I need to up the marketing effort and put out a short story every week, building the youtube channel and finding an alternative audio stream since Ina has no face.

creativity

My birthday, and I’ll sew if I want to

August 18, 2016 1 Comment

Well, today (18th) was my birthday and I spent it working on the mandala, which is looking lovely. It is scheduled to take another month, but I may alter the plans a bit, depending on how it is looking when it is through this bit. It is extremely complex, and so I have to take it one section at a time. There is also a lot of overstitching, which you have to plan ahead for with a large piece of work due to maneuverability issues.

The Wolfish tank is being tiled at the moment, and I am thinking about starting back on the enlightenment portion of the project shortly. Wolfish is next up after the mandala is complete, but will take quite a lot of time, and I will have to find a bicycle for Harley, as he is in the tank too.

Writing has stopped as I am waiting for some cables to see if I can scrape the books off the old hard drive, which cannot be started by conventional means. So this time I had to research data recovery. Interestingly, I found that data recovery is not all that complex, and there are quite a few things you can try before resorting to a data recovery company.

Wonders will never cease, the only person in the world who actually remembered my birthday was Wolfe, who apparently chose today to unblock me from Twitter. Why this would be I do not know. I can only assume that there is some sort of Twitter fault, or he is looking for some amusement from my timeline. Either way, he is unlikely to change his past MO, and so I can look forward to a pretty freaky conversation with a random stranger which makes no sense at some point in the future. This is unlikely to get us very far.

It is odd that Boris comes across as a very kind person, despite his political affiliations. I will be working on Lucifer Ogilvie as a priority because of this. Best Adventure Ever is best left until I have completed this work, and by the time I have finished it, I will have some handle on what the artwork for Boris will look like. So far, the only thing I know is that the colour range is a lot more subtle, and the work a bit more technical. Boris’s mother is an artist, so I trust that he can be relied upon to be a bit more understanding than Wolfe was. I also have a bit of mathematical work to do for Lucifer Ogilvie, so this will be fun.

My apologies to regular readers for a spot of scattiness here and there in the last few posts. I get little sleep because of the worry of mother, and this seems to be affecting a few things. I will be working on this, along with my depressing lack of self care, over the next few months. It is no fun being stuck in the house all the time, but feeling ill does not improve it.

Should you see an ad on twitter, it is because I am experimenting a little to see if it is any more effective than facebook or google. I am not expecting much, but I will let you know how it goes.

I have made no progress at all on the marketing or coding side of things so far this year, but once the sewing is out of the way I will be on it.

creativity, politics

Life hacks for Amos Yee

August 15, 2016 No Comments

This post is for Amos, since I notice he is wasting his time with a bunch of social enquirers and not applying himself to actually learning anything. Moral relativism is a fucking bore.

Here are some free philosophy books. I recommend at your age, that you skim through these fast, but get a broad understanding. You will be able to find most of Plato free online, I recommend you start with this as he is a very clear and simple philosopher. Once the pegs are in place, it is far easier to hang the other philosophers on the pegs. Go to Aristotle next, then Hobbes and Locke. After this, do what you like. I recommend that you read at least two History of Philosophy titles to get a broad overview of where you want to go from there. There are a variety of options, from what you are saying you are most interested in moral philosophy and basic political philosophy.

Gutenberg free philosophy

Open Culture free philosophy

28 Sites With Countless of Free Philosophy Ebooks

After this, get a basic understanding of the the three greats, Durkheim, Marx and Weber, but do not waste a lot of time on sociology as it is for pussies.

Free Sociology books

More Free Sociology books

You seem to be reasonably bright, so from here go for an introduction to economics. A-level will do for starters, again there are plenty of free texts online.

Apart from this, you actually need to earn a living, and my feeling is that you would like to do this by expressing yourself. Bullshit Performance Art is not going to cut it, so you will want to write a book, or improve your scatty blog at some point – I recommend, given your age and capacity for sponging up information, that you immerse yourself in programming languages, graphics and 3d modelling and shoot for making your first game in four years or so. This will be a far more effective way of getting your point across to a far greater number of people, and as you are likely to need to hide given your location, should enable you to make a living from anywhere with a fairly low profile. Again, you can get started on this free of charge. Start with Javascript and C# and work from there. There are plenty of free tools if you look for them, so do not be tempted to throw money at it.

Do not waste your time discussing alternative forms of government year after year as it is really not useful to you. Far better to explore the world as it is, armed with useful tools for labelling and looking at it.

Apart from that, well done, your videos are not boring, however you will want to grow out of that shit relatively soon.

Ina

creativity, economics, motivation, politics

Broad Brush Thinking

July 5, 2016 No Comments

Broad Brush Thinking

I have cleared 15 ton bags of garden rubbish from my garden in the last month. Not that the garden was a jungle, it is just a large garden, consisting of three lawns, around 35 trees, 4 shrubberies, a large scale rockery and what seems like a mile of mixed hedging.

Occasionally over the years, my friends, whom as I have mentioned are all male, have stopped by to help, which invariably causes great merriment as their ideas about gardening are somewhat different scale to a person trying to manage a large house and garden without spending money on contractors.

The flatulent pedant, as he is known in my memory, recounted a tale of a two week war with his mother about a weed on his 4 square metre patio before he saw my garden. Another ex took a full afternoon to present me with a square metre of perfectly weeded rosebed, and another likes to tell me that I should pave the lot. It always makes me laugh, this variety of approaches to life and thought.

Obviously, dealing with something on this scale when you have limited time, you have to organise your time effectively. At one point I was working 6 days a week at the bank, researching for the government, and conducting corporate interviews by phone whilst decorating and taking care of this garden, all with no assistance and a great deal of criticism from the rest of the family. Any spare time was spent making lists of things to do, their level of urgency, and the likely time of paint or varnish drying so that I could then schedule hoovering, mowing or chopping whilst waiting for other things to be ready to progress. In fact, the Sheep in Wolf’s clothing collection was started whilst I was conducting research from home, since the interviews were by telephone, nobody could see that I was sewing whilst working, hence my time was used productively.

You learn a lot about strategy from all this. Many people have the luxury of never having to learn about strategy, time management or having to accept a margin of error they would never consider if they did not have this level of workload.

So, to get to the point, debating detail is not effective for a broad brush thinker, who is likely to be more interested in the overall structure of the problem. A broad brush thinker is likely to become a large scale strategist, whereas a ‘devil in the detail’ expert is what you require when you have already determined the shape of the problem at hand.

It hugely surprised me, when I was working on a (personal) three dimensional economic project in 2009 or so, that the economists I wanted to involve in the problem did not understand what I was talking about. After much messing around, I finally found a physicist in France who understood exactly what I was saying, who told me that basically I was a car designer, trying to explain myself to a crew of mechanics who wanted to know the specifics of the problem. I desisted with the project at that point, since I felt it unlikely that I would find a crew willing to spend months experimenting to achieve something on my say-so. Such is the problem of the broad brush thinker. We have great ideas, but without the means to carry them out via a team of detail mechanics, we may not be much use. When it comes to tackling improbably large projects however, we are exactly what is required for the job.

It struck me last week or so, when despite the screamingly awful Leave Campaign in the UK, I felt very concerned for poor Boris, that I now recognise and resonate with other broad brushers without even realising it. (Wolfe was a broad brusher too.) I wonder how many more I can find, if I look around? And will my own capacity for grand strategy ever achieve anything useful or be given an opportunity for useful endeavour? So far it seems to have done little for me apart from ensuring that I become extremely bored with small problems and making sure my parents’ family is taken care of.

I cannot help the way I think, any more than someone who imagines that their love of following rules or sticking to tradition despite the disadvantages can help the way they think. I get a lot more done, and require less in the way of help, especially in situations where the way forward is not always clear. This does not mean that you end up with a precise result, but you do get a result.

It all comes down to approach, your ability to prioritise, your willingness to get the job done. A detail oriented person is fabulous when you approach the end of a task, but they are as useful as a chocolate fireguard when you are creating something new. You cannot add the bells and whistles before you have something to hang them on.

So, before you create your masterwork, always draw the sketch. Before you add the embellishments, create the scheme. Before you list the tasks, determine the problem. All of this takes careful thought and a willingness to stretch and bend your reality. Once you have done all that, then you will have a good idea how to present the tasklist in order to solve the problem.

creativity

Mandala Magic

June 16, 2016 118 Comments

So, mother is in hospital, and this means I am running about, crazily doing all the things I have no time to do when she is at home. I do not know if she will be returning, but I have created a self contained annex in case she does as her children have shown no signs of ceasing the usual poor behaviour and attacks. It is much safer to put a locked door between me and them, meaning that she will have to live in another part of the house.

In the meantime, I have taken delivery of another pile of materials to move onto the next phase of Sheep in Wolfe’s clothing, which will set the section up for future additions in the same style. As I said, I am extremely bored with Wolfe, so I am starting a new collection, which is antique inspired, whilst I await the next muse, or muses, to appear. The plan is to expand the Short Misadventures section with people from the public volunteering to muse for new pieces, which should be interesting. I will need youtube videos, personal bios and possibly an interview with these people, but beyond that it can be fairly superficial. This will be next year or so, after I have completed the artwork and books for Wolfe, and kicked off the Ballantine collection of antique stuff. Plenty of time for a press release and more extensive campaign to advertise the opportunity of having your name on a piece of artwork/story etc.

Tonight, as part of my finale grouping for the basic Wolfe collection, I have been researching Mandalas. Wolfe probably likes mandalas. If some big hairy guy made one for him, he would probably become extremely excited and say how far-out and marvellous it was. Since it is me, he will say absolutely nothing, which has become extremely boring. I have learned from my research so far, that I do not like mandalas. I do not like foot jewellery, I do not like knitted bikinis, I do not like hippy artwork, I do not like anything about this scene at all. But Wolfe probably respects Mandalas, so I will make him a mandala and call it Dipshit Hippy Crap. This is entirely in keeping with the rest of the collection and I am sure I will enjoy it slightly more with the perversity of putting work into something I have no interest in at all.

Trying to sort yet another 900 balls of wool is extremely tiring when you have to grade it into shades in your studio, knowing full well that you won’t see much of it for months as you are busy on other things. The more arty the collection becomes, the more impractical and stupid you feel doing it, but in terms of development, the more you do, the more you want to do, so on a personal basis, it is still worthwhile.

Am very much off writing the blog at the moment, as I am too worried about my mother and since I am anxious, I like to combine eating badly with sewing. I hope to have the book finished soon, but I will probably put a new artwork on the cover, so it may be delayed depending on what feels right.

The game will also still go ahead, but I have to get through the next few weeks the best I can, which means a lot of anxious sewing and planning for potential disaster in the form of yet more personal attacks from the family. I also have to think about income streams, so things are a bit up in the air.

creativity, health, motivation

The ego and creativity

June 7, 2016 No Comments

The ego and creativity – Wolfe’s kiss farewell

Today I had an extremely offensive conversation with one particular friend. He has some very strange ideas about creativity, so I am going to address these ideas very slowly, in a format that he is very welcome to absorb in a space where he cannot commit an assault.

There is a chasm of difference between developing an idea, and developing a marketing strategy. We can see from our television channels that shooting for the lowest possible denominator in the hope of viewing figures is not the way to achieve quality. We can also see from many arthouse movies that self indulgence does not always produce something that you would want to watch.

My friend, who makes arty movies which he does not bother to market, likes to prevent me from speaking at all by attacking me verbally whenever I try to explain to him that he has his priorities a little confused, making it impossible for me, as an extremely patient and understanding friend, never mind anyone else to work with him.

Today, it was a possible sit com that became impossible to even conceptualise, because he imagines that finding a marketing person that will make the magic exposure problem go away is more important than developing a product. This means that you cannot even develop your idea sufficiently to make it worthwhile, never mind discuss it to the point that you get any actual work done.

I have previously tried giving him simple open ended tasks to complete alone, with the idea that if he is left to complete something himself, I will not be at physical risk, and he will gain the satisfaction of moving a project on a stage. Even this has resulted in such a strong stress response that it is not possible to get anything done, and so two projects so far have had to be abandoned. He then likes to tell me what he thinks I asked him to do, which is nothing to do with what I actually said, because he was not listening in the first place.

Now this problem is caused by stress. In particular a fragile and super-stressed ego, so today I tried using myself, and then Wolfe, as an example of how other people work. In my case, as money is not an issue at present, I like to spend one third of my time on the piece of work, and two thirds of the time allocated on marketing the piece of work, whether this is over a month, a year, five years really does not matter as long as I have the time and space. Therefore there is a fairly consistent flow. For someone like Wolfe, for whom money is very important, he spends maybe 5 minutes out of an hour doing the work, and 55 minutes out of the hour telling the world that he has done the work. This can be done by passive or direct means, but whether you believe him to be a loudmouth Yank or not, he is certainly more successful, in a very niche market, than anyone else.

You cannot market a product that cannot exist due to temperament. In order to market thin air, you have to be a convincing person with a track record of actually achieving what you set out to achieve. Your cheaply made arthouse movie can do this for you, if you actually bother to develop your skill to the level where you are presenting something watchable. In order to do this, you have to consider the wider public rather than trying to sell yourself to a ‘marketing person’ who probably doesn’t exist.

700 people a month look at my artwork on the website. I maybe tweet it twice a month to achieve that, the rest of the hits coming from the relatively unrelated blog. This is a good use of time, develops my writing ability and expression, and gives me time to dream up more complicated versions of my work. I picked up a lot of information from Wolfe in this respect. Worrying about what people think of you, or failing to promote yourself is not useful to you. Insulting your friends by preventing them from helping you and telling them repeatedly that their views are irrelevant whilst they try to give you the information that you need is also not useful to you, as they will simply stop trying at all.

A master of an art is not an egotist, too frightened to input feedback. Very much like a British academic, they will listen to the most obscure information related to their interest area in an effort to improve quality, improve audience figures, expand their area of interest.

In my case, since my work is usually produced when I am wounded in some way, annoying me is what usually gets you a piece of work in the first place, which is why Wolfe was such an excellent candidate. He lacks understanding or respect for other people, however, which is why it is now more interesting to me to find some fresh meat.

I cannot help my friend with the knot he has tied himself into. I am just not putting myself in that position again, which means conversation is now likely to be severely limited. If I acted towards him the way he behaved this morning, I would now be in hospital. The great pity is that I doubt a single word I said went in, and so nothing will change.

If you are a creative person, bear in mind what I have said. Even if you do not like your work, it is important to either bin it or promote it to allow others to feed back to you. Otherwise you could find your passion drained by circumstance, and unless your spark is as self-healing as mine, you could end up bitter, hostile and unable to access your own genius.

Thank you David, for being careless, rude and a bit sexist and stupid. Without you, none of this would have been possible.

The post The ego and creativity – Wolfe’s kiss farewell appeared first on Ina Disguise – Author.

creativity, motivation

Tired of the dislikes, Wolfe.

June 5, 2016 No Comments

It has been nearly ten years, since my mother’s stroke, a month before my father died. I have reached the end of my productive adult life as a female, in terms of having a career or having a child before it is too late (not physically, I am unlikely to trust anyone enough to procreate before the time is up, given my slow burn mentality.)

I frequently cry about this, I pretty much started crying as soon as I saw Wolfe. Not for the obvious reasons, just the polar opposite, confident male version of me. These are not all good qualities, given the errors in plain sight etc. He makes me feel very battered.

I did wonder, for a long time, whether there was envy involved in my interest in him. I also wondered why, as someone considered very knowledgeable by even my drinking buddies, I would seek what would be considered to the untrained eye a ‘himbo.’ These people would not understand as I do, the amount of time and commitment Wolfe has had to put in to make his extensive knowledge of natural health look superficial and effortless to the jaded European passing interest eye.

I have been horribly bullied since childhood. I wondered, as a child, why I got on better with my teachers than I did with my own family. I remember at ten or so, having to leave the room because my sisters were shrill, inane, and extremely nasty.

Last week I tried to notify one of them of my mother’s impending operation. Her response was that this was not good enough for her. She only really sees things in terms affecting her. The fact that she had already had a letter explaining the operation had escaped her, because apparently my ability to write frightens her. Were I to describe a summer’s day, she would find it weird and patronising.

So, as you can tell, I am not dealing with brains of Britain. My mother used to tell me I would have to look after them after she was gone. I thought this was very odd, given that I was a small child, and they were ten and sixteen years older, and consistently nasty. Now I am less surprised. My mother, herself pretty unpleasant until her stroke, was identifying the stronger party.

Being strong sucks, however. You get dumped on, everyone expects you to cope on your own, and they think it is quite alright to attack you over and over again. I am a bit fed up, to say the least. I have had to say to her, in all seriousness, that either I have to now demonstrate some form of parental discipline, or she will have to go into care as I am not safe from my own siblings, who have proved themselves to be greedy, dishonest, extremely nasty and extremely ruthless in their pursuit of role playing power points and financial entitlement.

I did not take care of their parents for reasons of power-mongering, but this is what they have always been so scared of, and which is now a horribly self-fulfilling prophecy, and the only way out of it, it seems, is for my mother to live elsewhere in case they want to visit. (in my brother’s case, the visits are now every five months, so this seems like an expensive waste) I am not sure that I see a way out, other than our moving so far away that they cannot visit at all, and this would be complicated by my mother’s progressing illness, leaving us open to further legal attacks from her own children.

So there we have it, the opposite of a go-getting, driven, confident and rather slutty male, is a shy, harried, equally loquacious but somewhat different female that gave her life away for a family who neither deserved nor appreciated it. I have distracted myself from misery, by investing myself in amusing my opposite, who remains unamused.

I do realise that part of the reason that Wolfe hates everything is to let me know he has seen it so that I can take it down, and I also realise that I am insufficiently worthy of note to really affect him at all, but it still pisses me off that I could not even manage to get a sensible conversation out of him in the first place. He spotted me, and then apparently made several incorrect assumptions, based on erroneous ideas about worth, purpose and interest.

I just wanted one thing to go right. I wanted one thing to be appreciated and used appropriately, and I wanted to make something of a life that had already been taken away.

You could say that something else was created, but whether it is worthwhile beyond comforting a few thousand other emotionally scarred people, I don’t know. At least it got me writing in the first place, I guess.

It is unlikely that my family will notice that they have messed up until they have lost everything. It makes me very sad that other people cannot even let my mother die the ways she wants to, and that I am becoming less committed to fighting them. Being strong sucks, and being kind sucks even more.

creativity

Describing Yourself

May 24, 2016 No Comments

Getting your ideas across is a complex process, especially when you have an incoherent concept that you are in the process of rendering coherent.

I have only made any effort to go public at all because I (and even this sentence is a struggle to write) felt I had touched on something that Wolfe either did not understand, or had made a life choice not to understand, and for some intangible reason it was very important to make sure I made as many efforts as possible to get it across to him. Not so much a matter of getting my claws in, as opening a door for him and letting him do whatever he wants with it. In addition, there is a smattering of potentially valuable knowledge scattered throughout if one chooses to pick it up. Most of my feedback has indicated that people take the emotional hit, and depart satisfied without really examining why they feel better, but this is a sign of success as far as I am concerned.

I am in the process of widening the net, in terms of publicising Ina Disguise, in preparation for the completion of Best Adventure Ever. I see that for many sites, the blog posts themselves are too personal, too opinionated, and do not contain as many pictures as they should. Everything has to have a kind of reader’s digest uniformity, for many sharing sites, and I stick out like a sore thumb, as per usual. My lizard self tells me that I should edit, rewrite and add pictures to fit in with this ethos and get my work out, and my actual self tells me I would be losing my USP. As an advanced reader, headlines and pictures actually put me off, when reading, but I see that this is another example of my being out of touch.

Somebody very kindly interfered with my Alexa ranking, and has replaced my keywords with ones which are less to do with me, and more to do with getting me more hits. Thank you to whoever it was, as they have rendered the website much more attractive to search engines etc and have increased the value of the website by quite a chunk. I am not sure what the intention was, but I got a nice surprise when I saw that it had been done and why.

I am quite happy to write articles separately from the blog, I have managed to get quite a bit of material down now, so it is not a huge hardship, but I think it is best for the blog to be the blog, for good or ill. Journalistic stuff is really for a separate section, so perhaps I should insert an invisible page and stick them there. I will let you know how this process goes, but so far the products page has raced up the leaderboard overnight due to the large pictures, so I surmise from this that large pictures are what people are responding to. In the meantime, I am going to get the blog up on youtube as it is, before I start editing if this is necessary.

So now I have the problem of describing my work again.
What is Ina Disguise all about?

Joining the dots in terms of your intellect, your emotional state and your ability to convey your ideas is not something that is really encouraged in Western society. There are many good reasons for this, the main one being that you can trap yourself if you do not keep these things separate, and things like your magnum opus being abandoned for several years because of being stupidly in love with a stranger happen. A bit like choking on a smoothie when you have had bad family news.

If you can manage to pull it off, however, it leads to far more engaging and arguably important work. You are only as good as your level of passion, and your need for connection and engagement. Expressing a rather primitive interruption of this flow has been a major feature of the work so far on the Sheep in Wolf’s clothing project.

On the plus side, it meant that taking something traditionally used for another purpose – I made rather advanced textural pieces in two dimensions prior to this unfortunate episode, as can be seen with Saxophone, and On the Beach, but it was clear to me that two dimensions just were not enough to satisfy my visual communications in relation to Wolfe. This has led to a kind of naive sculpture which also means I have strayed into the realm of interior decor and fashion, which has been rather fruitful in terms of encouragement from appropriate interest groups. I also quite like the fact that there is no real reference point. This makes me challenge myself more, since I am the explorer in my current creative field.

In terms of the books, I notice that although I have written at some speed, spilling whatever I have to say out as it comes to me, that I have approached them in the same way one approaches a philosophy essay. There are several possible readings you can make of the same book, and you get a consistent number of points each way. Superficially, they are just rather entertaining cartoon stories, but you can pull different things from them depending on how you read them. So I think we can safely say I picked on the right muse on this occasion. Time will tell if a decent reviewer picks up on any of it, since I am still very lazy with marketing. We are at the point where I need to put a week or two into expanding the audience however, so this is what I am doing as I work on the next collection whilst listening to programming lessons.

Describing what you do is immensely important to your creative work. A good bullshitter is often far more successful than a moribund master of the arts. Finding a more mercurial person to devote themselves to the bullshit side of things is, therefore, invaluable for most creators. Twisty often likes to tell me that I need an agent, but Twisty is himself the world’s worst for not promoting his work, so I think perhaps he needs one more than I do.

To conclude, any spare time that you have left when creating needs to be spent on exploring the world of marketing, especially if you want to keep your overall costs down. I am fortunate that the magazines devoted to the rich and famous came to me, but not everyone is that lucky. Be shameless. Be positive, and do not allow your own cringing to grind you down.

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