Creative Blogging Round Two: Arts and Entrepreneurship Edition
Last week's post on creativity was mostly about the personal side of creativity, talking about both engineers and artists. I want to touch on the economic side of creativity, and talk some ideas about what the Internet means for creativity in a city like Tacoma. The Internet is Really Really Great (for creativity) Consider this hypothetical, but very common, example of why the Internet is great for the arts and creativity: An artist wants to sell her art as greeting cards, posters, t-shirts, etc, to make some extra income. She can use the web as a virtually unlimited and virtually Read more…
From the Comments! More on Creativity
I want to highlight a comment from Lance Kagey on the previous post. He talks about both the engineer and the artist and the wide spectrum of creativity. His brother, an engineer who spent hours dreaming and imagining new ways to build integrated circuits. And he talks about the artists, who spends their time over a hand-cranked press creating posters once a month. Both the dreaming and the doing are on the creative spectrum. Small excerpt: When Tom Llewellyn and I started Beautiful Angle we had a specific conversation about trying something new. "If we could take money out of Read more…
A Long Post About Creativity
Last Sunday’s panel on creativity was part of the programming for the Tacoma Reads book, The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind. The panel was very good: how creative people worked, why they worked, what they got out of it, etc. What was lacking is that which I think lacks from most discussions of creativity: a real investigation into the spark of creativity. It lacks because it’s so hard to quantify, and it’s so situational. So, I think I’m going to turn this into Creativity Week here, and try to get a post a day up about it. I’ll talk about Read more…
Catching up
The Lake! We had a really beautiful Saturday at the lake cabin with family this weekend and then a nice Easter brunch Sunday (though the weather was obviously not nearly so nice). It was great to be back to the lake. I dipped my toes in, but it was still far too cold to think about going in. I read a lot–magazines, books–and looked after our niece and nephew as they played in the sandbox. All in all, exactly the restful recharge I'd wanted. My Google Reader Experiment A couple weeks ago I posted that I'd removed Google Reader and Read more…
Some interesting happenings in the self-publishing world
These last couple weeks, there have been two things that have really caught the attention of publishers and author. 1) Amanda Hocking. She's 26, and she's self-published 9 novels to the Kindle. As of this month, she's sold more than 1 million books that way. Even at $2.99 or less per book, which is what she's charging, the general assumption is that no publisher could offer her a better deal than what she's getting from Amazon. 2) Barry Eisler. He's a New York Times bestselling author, who writes spy thrillers. He turned down a $500,000 advance from a publisher in Read more…
It’s Friday I’m in Love!
You see, it was all building to that headline. 🙂 Anyway. It's been an interesting week. Quite good, really, despite a lot of different things pulling on me this week. One especially cool thing to report: I'm writing a long article for the Carleton Voice, the alumni magazine about my alma mater. If you want a good example of the truism "it takes 3 years for a business to make money," this is a perfect example. I pitched the magazine a story idea on March 30, 2008 (gmail saves everything, which is how I know). The idea was filed away Read more…
Wednesday too
Big day! Lots to do, so a short morning post. I recently read Seth Godin's new book Poke the Box, which is about the importance of tinkering, poking, and playing with ideas. But even more than that, it's about the importance of starting. Initiating. When I spoke in front of the Entrepreneur class at UWT in January, that was my message to them as well. People think the job of an entrepreneur is to come up with ideas. It's not. It's to start things. Poke the Box was a good reminder to myself of the same thing I'd told the Read more…
We are a world of readers … McSweeney’s on global literacy
At the signing of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, nearly 60 percent of about 3 million American adults could read1 but in the following 19th and 20th centuries, literacy rates in America grew rapidly. In 1870, almost 80 percent of 38.5 million Americans were literate and by 1940, almost 95 percent of 131 million citizens could read. Now, nearly 294 million Americans of about 300 million are literate and most children can read by the time they’re six or seven. According to the Census Bureau, 25-34 year-olds are now the best educated group of Americans: nearly 58 percent have some Read more…
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