Category Archives: What I learned This Week

What I learned this week – July 29, 2011

Posted on by Bill Chance
Pulp Cover

Gratuitous Pulp Paperback Cover


Kurt Vonnegut

Eight rules for writing fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

— Vonnegut, Kurt, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1999), 9-10.

But I’m not complaining! You know why? Because the cardinal rule of dealing with negativity is: Don’t complain about negativity.

—Nathan Bradford, How to Deal With Negativity

It’s a shame my children are grown, because now, I finally have an instructional video on how to properly read them a fairy tale. Actually, if they had had the Internet when my kids were little (we had dialup…) I could have simply played this to them. Mounted an iPad on their crib (oops… no Flash… – mounted an Android Tablet on their crib) and let them watch to their heart’s desire.

Pretty good, huh. Still, though, I think it needs more cowbell.

Pulp Cover

Gratuitous Pulp Paperback Cover

What I learned this week, July 22, 2011

Posted on by Bill Chance
Hakuna Matata

Hakuna Matata

Goals are important, but they are only metrics. A goal is useful for making sure you are on the right track, but it doesn’t work very well for motivation. To get where you need to go, you need to concentrate on the journey. If all you look at is the final goal, you will be overwhelmed and will fail. Look at the next step. If you enjoy the journey and are able to make yourself take that next little baby step, always, no matter what, then you will be unstoppable.

If you put the water bladder in your hydration pack upside down, you will get thirsty very quickly.

A prime lens on an SLR produces a picture that is sharper than one from a zoom.

With today’s tools, the idea of waiting for approval from the minions of a multinational sounds as lazy and self-defeating as a band that won’t burn CDs until they get a major label record deal. Just as musicians have to know their way around a sound board, writers need facility with the layout and design software used to create books, the ins and outs of formatting for ebooks; they need design sense enough to guarantee that their book looks good inside and out.

We used to wait passively for the pearly gates to open and then gratefully pass our manuscripts through to hallowed ground. In music and in books, those days are gone forever. And good riddance.

—- With Traditional Publishing Dies the Passive Writer-Victim by Leonce Gaiter in the Huffington Post

The problem is that these are all goods and services, …, and goods and rights are not the same things. People tend to concur upon rights …, and they do not depend upon others to supply and pay for their rights. With goods, there is always a political argument: about the value of the good, who is to get it and who is to pay.

from A Fling with the Welfare State, by Noemie Emery

If you want to be on the cutting edge – you have to be prepared to bleed.

What I learned this Week, July 15, 2011

Posted on by Bill Chance

While I don’t share her enthusiasm for a certain morning cable talk show (though I did enjoy this bit of hilarity very much) I really like Peggy‘s Friday blog entries – Things I Learned This Week. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. I have no problem in blatantly ripping off her idea.

The Wave that Washes us all

The Wave that Washes us all

What I learned this week:

Procrastination caused by fear… I thought I was done with that, but I’m not. I still must say to myself:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain
— Dune

Markus Zusak said – Failure has been my best friend as a writer. It tests you, to see if you have what it takes to see it through.

With proper hydration, the most brutal heat can be dealt with.

Too much habanera sauce – while not a good thing in all respects – will clear out your sinuses very quickly.

From a Blog Entry – Global Weirding Coming At Us All, by Walter Russell Mead (read the whole thing)

Except for some entrepreneurs, mavericks and renegades, our technocratic elites are mostly a bunch of rule followers and incrementalists.  They got where they are by scoring well on tests, manipulating the platitudes of conventional wisdom a little better than the next guy and by pleasing their supervisors.
…
This is almost exactly the wrong way to raise leaders for tumultuous times. …  We are producing legions of promotion-hungry bureaucrats and narrow specialists with no knowledge of or interest in the tumult and chaos that inevitably rises up in times like ours.  We then place them in large, bureaucratically run institutions and expect them to deal creatively with the unexpected, the revolutionary and the totally new.

I can not say it better.

Kingfish is better fried than grilled.

Wankelfish

Wankelfish