Stuffafizing:

Is that more or less moulding or blue molding our means of expression in contemporary online talking shops ?

While both ‘The Association of Internet Researchers’ and ‘Kilkenomics‘ – the world’s first economics festival, are in mid full swing in Ireland today, global social media and even the main evening BBC news still riffs on about Muskrat buying / slashing / controlling twitter. However please allow me to invoke archaic Northern Ireland ‘comedian’ Jimmy Cricket’s best known and thankfully long forgotten catch phrase: “and there’s more.”

Yes we’ve seen multiple tweets, ideological articles, institutional opinion posts about all that stuff, lots of them basically bemoaning the fact that Musk may:

A: Charge money for a blue tick.

B: Utterly destroy the nature of ‘discourse’ on that platform.

An image post of mine on twitter @clevercelt

But…

Anyone without a twitter account claims not to care about that little blue bird, others like me, having spent time on twitter over the last 14+ years treating it as the light weight internet toy it was supposed to be, just followed people making and sharing stuff, like an early form of ‘stuffafizing’ maybe, many of us now wonder why would we continue to give that blue mold platform thee one single and most important human commodity we each possess: our time ?

I for one no longer want to dip my brain into its increasingly corrosive stream, there was once a real sense of fun or playfulness about Twitter, that’s gone, and certainly when we learned that the new CEO just cut 50% of it’s workforce, you gotta ask where will it all lead and am I really that interested or invested in any of it..  

Over the years with influencer influxes, brands landing, blue ticks etc, the use of account data as advertising fodder, behavioral modelling, golden graph guff, the once relatively unique characteristic brevity of the place simply blue molded into just another mainstream media tool, a tool I was compelled to teach to MSc and MBA students as part of their Digital Marketing Tools Strategies…. for that I am still doing penance in my nightmares where CRM and User Funnels chase me naked through the long room library shelves full of bright meaningless icons instead of fine classic books, all the while a trail of American ladies with bad make-up keep stopping me asking for directions to Hari Seldom’s foundation room .

Regular readers, I thank you each sincerely, the exclusive few souls generous and kind enough to use your precious time reading stuff here. You each already know that up until this point I haven’t really treated this webspace as anything other than a thinking out loud or writey waffling opinion space, most often writing across what would traditionally be known in academic terms as ‘disciplinary boundaries’ with often my own comedic unfocused spattergun satire anti-techniques. I would like to thank particularly those of you who have already signed up for my irregular newsletter… so irregular in fact you haven’t got one yet.

So please allow me to announce that my stuffafizing newsletter [ sign up on the right there -> ] has actually reached a critical number of subscribers (double double digits surprisingly) so in all conscience I must now devote focused time and energy into repaying your attention and kindness there.

I will also be accepting submissions for inclusion in what will now be my monthly(ish) newsletter after December 2022 onwards. So the first one in 2023 will contain a return email to which you can send stuff you might want included or discussed or shared in the next or later ones. I will share that sort of information every couple of months so as to allow longer subscribed readers / participants a kinda first come first served sharing basis of your stuff. You can let me know in the comments if any of this is a really mad or bad idea or if there is a better way to do it while keeping everything free and free flowing.

Photo of a new dawn by Oliver Hihn on Unsplash

So going forward I’d like you folks to mould what the stuffafizing newsletter might become, obviously it won’t be about one single avenue of creative endeavour or just one topic but my head will be responsible for editing it into something coherent and hopefully relevant to what you the actual readers might want. So please spread the word to those who might care if you can.

Back to this post about the current technological fundamentalism underlying the capitalist seizure of other means of expression.


Those two current events in Ireland, AOIR and Kilkenomics have three broad intersections of audience profiles: people with enough money, motivation, and time to attend, those with a desire to network, and those who specialize in something valuable to the capitalist worldview.
Academics interested in the internet and networking in that community intersect with those who can afford to pay money to watch comedians and economists trying to out amuse each other in Kilkenny.

A single unifying thread is the accumulated or sunk costs of attending either of these events, which in the current cost of living crisis is simply beyond a significant portion of the general Irish and probably European, if not global population. My old bug bear Mark Fisher’s Capitalist realism peers over the firewall at this point to tell me this is just the way it is.

Each audience itself must be specialized… and the agendas driven by organizers and committees, not those sitting in the various types of what my dear departed working class mother would call ‘talking shops’ but the ideologues behind the organizations would no doubt categorize as world class events.

To become a successful third level academic in Ireland requires about a minimum investment of ten years in a university , and even then there are no actual guarantees, you may already even have the inside career track, since many offspring of academics, like other professions follow in their parent’s footsteps, it will still cost a significant amount of money, time, energy, and connections to establish yourself as said academic, and of course you will, like both the economists and comedians need to be highly specialized.

The non academic must absorb the cost of getting to and from Kilkenny when you may then decide to pay 31.50 euro per person to attend an average Kilkenomics session, like the one later today above called: “Distorting Reality: Media in the age of Surveillance Capitalism.”

The above blurb is interesting, it does say and ask: “They use behavior modifying algorithms, mass data capture and surveillance to sell behavioural information to the highest bidder and spend billions avoiding oversight and regulation. How do we fix this ? “

Well as one of the individuals without the means to swan up and down and around kilkenny, I might start by simply buying a book at one third the cost of entry to the session discussing it. But then is this economics or the business of show, more likely its just more media business.

One of the articles in the latest edition of the journal of media business studies contains the wonderful keyword “Bandwagon Heuristics’.

Obviously heuristics are mental short-cuts, rules of thumb, anyone who has studied interaction will probably have encountered these specific ones. Jumping on a bandwagon means mimicking or piggybacking the actions or opinions of others, one of the major issues I have with how the internet has developed in these last 14 twitter years is that, despite the shift to mobile and A.I. etc it is no longer a truly unique medium, it has, as all media do, subsumed the worse of old media and all the capitalist implications that brings, the monetization of the internet has seen the same age old techniques again replicated, just in an online environment, do what your competition does, set up right next to them if you can, offer what they offer only try to add value or reduce costs, the build it and they will come is replaced with build it for free, hook them and then monetize it..

The internet is no longer economically flat, nor has there been the proliferation of unique nodes once envisaged, the influx of money has ensured sameness, the inventor of the capitalist production line Irish American Henry Ford you can have it in any colour once its black remains the bedrock of consumerist choice, on and off the internet, the fallacy of personalization and choice is still smoke and mirrors over the old media business models, there is no longer equal access or the encouragement of a critical mass of polymaths, only specialized media paywalls and gateways being erected for specialized people, the promise of the long tail broken as each potential node becomes monetized and controlled by capital in its various forms, the latest twitter stuff is just an overt example of it and it is now far from the original.

The means of production is owned by capitalists, the academy is also owned and run by capitalists, society has never been this in thrall to finance and the markets in it’s history. The 2008 crash which saw capital and finance become embedded in almost every modern state apparatus has continued to skew and pollute society as a whole. In my view now the only real way to discuss these matters is to take back the means of expression from the capitalists and refuse to buy those tickets or stay in those specialized lanes. Knowledge should be free to all at this point in human development, everyone should have the opportunity to express themselves freely, for free… without the fear that the money men will intrude and buy everything up to control it.. I am reminded of the conversation between Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut where Heller tells Kurt that he has something the rich don’t have… enough.

Above the current projected budget, expenditure, and profit projections to cover the obviously extensive stuffafizing newsletter.

TAKE BACK THE MEANS OF EXPRESSION.

To writers failing to scale their own ironic mountain.

Many applaud ‘go easy on yourself’ writing advice. More embrace the ‘keep it simple’ or ‘read Hemingway and try to do what he has done’ suggestions. Whatever else you decide to do as a writer do not try to be a perfectionist, has ironically proved popular elsewhere.

Don’t try to make a cold mountain out of your creative molehill as that creates more questions than answers for a writer.

Taa da me new member page over on Medium.

What prompted me to write this blog post was a medium story about the topic of avoiding the perceived pitfalls of perfection, a very popular post that popped up on my screen over the weekend, it had received sixteen thousand claps of endorsement and over 150 glowing comments of approval on Medium since being published there in October 2020. I just paid to become a full member of Medium last weekend so I was exploring the platform further than I had previously, despite initially joining it around the time I finished writing up my PhD (2013/14) I only now forked out the annual 50 yoyos fee to get greater access as a medium member.

The particular medium story advocated against perfectionism but also stressed that smart people should beware of their fear of success. It claimed sometimes smart writers write and write and write because they simply can’t bring themselves to stop.

They just love writing.

There also seemed to be a kind of undercurrent running through that story that smart people (or at least the ‘too smart’ friends of the author) aren’t really that smart because they hone, perfect, fundamentally overwork, over complicate, maybe even actually overwrite, and thus the implication is that if that is smart reading you on medium then you as a writer are ultimately doomed to fail to live up to your own obviously ridiculous high standards.

This fella comes into this post,
do you know him ?

From the positive responses to that post the writer herself rightly should be applauded, she had obviously and successfully persuaded readers that her ‘cold mountain’ theory is not only acceptable, but it is also completely true, and thus utterly valid as a method or approach for any would be smart writer seeking or reading writing advice on Medium.

Medium has ‘Disqualifying story types’ that it regards as in breach of their internal distribution standards. The first of which is, no stories about medium. Thus while I would have liked to write this piece over on Medium their other rules also clearly state I am prohibited from writing a medium story as a response or rebuttal to another medium story.

Despite in my view it being completely obvious that the very popular post I had just read demanded a response, just as obviously justified by their own rules, just not a response on medium. Fair enough, here we go.

The post began with the Author’s story of ‘a too smart friend’ who couldn’t finish her PhD, however the writer came to her aid by explaining her own ‘cold mountain principle’ which proved with certainty that sometimes smart people need ordinary friends to tell them to stop being that perfectionist, and/or to take their work and give it to literary agents, since that is what had happened with cold mountain author Charles Frazier apparently, when he wouldn’t stop writing his book, a friend just gave it to an agent. And then the book went on to become the blockbuster I was just about to order. Which is all again even more fair enough one must suppose, I hadn’t previously read cold mountain, so me being me, I tabbed over, ordered it there and then, had a faint memory of reading that the Oxford educated author Rachel Cusk had said or written something similar about a friend suggesting and then insisting she publish a book, and then I went back to reading the cold mountain post on Medium.

Cold Mountain the Novel, i.e. a picture of it.

“You’ve probably heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which explains why incompetent people think they’re so smart. It’s where we get that saying, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

A direct quote above from the much applauded Medium post.

I was really thrown by that statement, but continued to try to get through the article, the rest was reasonably well written in a grammatical sense, but that quote stuck, supposedly from Dunning-kruger, it began itching at me, the rest of the article seemed to try to speak to any readers who wished to be told: it is alright to be smart you, but it is better to be smart you as a non perfectionist, your work only has to be okay because as the bottom line (of the article itself) even said, ‘your version of okay is already mind-blowing.’

The just okay medium post is very successful, psychologically subtle in respect of supporting the aspirations and ambitions of would be smart writers who can’t or now won’t do perfection. However in my own personal view the article is so obviously flawed and really unhelpful specifically to any smart writers who are currently stuck in their own version of perfectionist nirvana, specifically those writers without a not so smart friend to take their perfectionist book to an agent.

As I’m sure you know the studies conducted by Dunning and Kruger were only completed and popularized in the early 21st century, specifically when they became available online in the academic journal ‘Advances in Experimental Social Psychology’ in June of 2011. Chapter five – The Dunning–Kruger Effect: On Being Ignorant of One’s Own Ignorance.

My picture of the writer above is one of my early writing heroes Alexander Pope, born in 1688 who died 278 years ago in 1744, he was a master of the heroic couplet, the son of a draper who produced mock epics, satires, and perfectionist pastorals, all in the early eighteenth century.

His great work ‘The Dunicad’ was a satirical assault on the shallowness of his contemporary literary foes, however it is from his poem ‘essay on criticism’ we receive these lines:

A little learning is a dang’rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

It is obvious these 18th century lines are a direct appeal for thinking writers or poets or writers on medium to drink deep of their subject, meaning at very least know what it is you are writing about and what might have nothing to do with two twenty first century social scientists.

As someone who successfully completed my own PhD I was blessed by first doing an MA. The MA as a post graduate research degree had an entire semester of research methods, that is generally how writers within academia are trained, you are exposed to methods that allow you to trace the sources of specific elements of knowledge, to ensure truth, veracity, it prevents you from proffering an opinion that is not factually nor academically valid and getting likes that are an insult to anyone who has actually done a research degree.

So if you are a smart PhD student (like that story author’s friend at the beginning) yes you will be thrown into a deep web of facts and references, within a matrix of knowledge and information that could theoretically see you spend the rest of your reading life lovingly researching, unbinding, weaving and pulling at those threads and connections to create a valid, informed opinion, like an eighteenth century, Scottish tartan weaver, near blind from the light of privilege blinding your every thread.

So yes theoretically you might never get around to finishing the writing up of your thesis. That fairly remote possibility is just one reason of many reasons why at least one intramural supervisor is appointed to each PhD or MA candidate, to offer professional supervision.

Institutionally there is a limit of ten years placed on PhD students. Academia is all too aware that you can fall down a rabbit hole of PhD (or even MA/MSc/MBA) perfection very easily.

Now I can read an author like Malcom Gladwell or similar who successfully combines popular psychology and contemporary storytelling in their non-fiction. I can also sit here overweight watching the utterly mesmerizing consummate ease with which many elite athletes balletically exert themselves physically within a field or on a pitch.

What is clearly visible to me in their exquisite movement is the result of many invisible years of training, dedication, practice, knowledge, perfectionism, failure, strain, injury, recovery, and focus. It is that very hidden from view perfectionism that gives rise to truly exceptional human performances, on track, field, or on the page.

Vince Lombardy Trophy

In a similar vain to Pope, the American Vince Lomardi is often famously quoted as saying “show me a good loser and I will show you a loser.” but the second half of his quote is also rarely offered: “But show me a gracious loser and I’ll show you someone who will always be a winner.”

Perfectionists from my limited knowledge of them, and I have the utter privilege of knowing a few, are simply not adverse to that proverbial losing, they are in fact gracious losers, many of whom become those unseen always winners of Vince Lomardi.

To my knowledge perfectionists seek to create something that reflects their true level of practiced ability, they know and understand that they can create something exceptional and that is why, the very idea of someone else’s just good enough, is never ever going to be good enough for them or me, even though I haven’t had a clap anywhere thank God.

Because the author brought up their ‘effect’ theory I will include another actual quote from the author David Dunning describing it:

“Their deficits leave them with a double burden—not only does their incomplete and misguided knowledge lead them to make mistakes but those exact same deficits also prevent them from recognizing when they are making mistakes and other people choosing more wisely.”

David Dunning..

Here I pause simply to wonder what might have happened if both Charles Frazier and the author’s PhD friend had each been left alone, to their own individual perfectionist devices and not subjected to interventions ?

It is an absolute truism that talent alone will not see you through. We live in an era of a multitude of incredibly erudite and clever writers brimming with talent, sadly many of whom are still flipping burgers, teaching, or writing marketing copy while yes lesser talents manage to prosper in the market and online. The writing market is still supersaturated, okay will simply never cut it, unless you are already independently wealthy, very well connected in some manner or already supremely content in your own okay Dunning-kruger medium sized skin.

It is a fact that most professionals prefer to work with actual talent, they also want to work with actual talent that will work as hard or even harder than they will.

Most professionals I know presume that if you are a fellow professional with talent, then you will also put in the additional required hard work too. Here again despite the high quality bar of required humility and work ethic there is an oversupply in the commercial market, there are thousands of already talented writers who are fully prepared to work harder than anyone else, a truth that is simply a given within certain parts of the writing industries.

Certainly with respect to screenwriting what differentiates those who get the gig and those who don’t is: the smart hard worker is also real, and by real I mean that the hardworking actual talent also lives in the real world, knows those quotes and their ramifications in their entirety, and then some.

“Don’t ever confuse genuinely smart or incredibly talented people with ‘voraciously ambitious‘ people.”

I made my opinion above a pullquote to emphasize it.

Lots of would-be writers make that mistake, they see writers working, working, while they merely work on the assumption that it is their talent that is driving that other writer.

Incredibly ambitious people seem to always succeed, many often do as some level, ambition will certainly bring you to places, both high and low, if it is your main motive force.

Being in the right place at the right time can be all the opportunity an ambitious person requires, luck, brass neck, or simply the powers of persuasion that arise from unbridled ambition may do the rest. But can such success on someone else’s terms really constitute success for an ambitious person?

“Incredibly talented people are secretly terrified of this, too. They think if they sink an enormous amount of time and energy into something and it doesn’t pay off with early retirement or a Nobel Prize, then their life is over, and they’ll never make anything again.”

Above is my second and final quote from the medium article.

We have all encountered smart individuals whose ambition is much larger than their actual ability. Again the above assertion from the story is simply not supported by my own experience of highly talented people, first attempt in learning (fail) is often how rejections or revisions are framed, all writing is rewriting, failure is a paradigm of progress in all software development, you must break things apart to really understand them, that allows you to move forward, incredibly talented people whom I know accept that drafts, rejections, failures, set-backs, are all part of the overall process of learning about and perfecting their chosen craft.

If you are serious about acquiring the skills needed to succeed in your chosen profession then failure must become your friend too, in that second half sense of the Lombardi quote I used above. You need to become an occasional gracious loser to ensure that you are always a winner, specifically with regard to your own writing life, never straying close to the sun ensures you will never be burned.

I would tentatively suggest that, if at all feasible, writers should take a short professional pottery course if they want to understand the difference between overwork and perfection. Perfection like pottery making itself, has several stages, with most of the initial ones involving complete immersion in the art itself.

Ambitious people will often see skills or mastering the craft as merely a vehicle to get them to a destination called success.

It is a truism in my life that I personally learn more from failure than I do from success, (you must have learned a hullava lot by now then I hear any remaining reading cynics among you say) if we succeed we sit back and feel good about that success, perhaps begin to see or dream of further or future success.

When I fail, as I inevitably do, I must conduct reviews, autopsies, if it’s a project we pull apart what happened, what exactly I did, to discover what didn’t work or why it didn’t work.

Screenwriters and Video game writers know this process more than most I feel. Seeing what you consider to be perfection fail, be shot down unceremoniously, has a whole different quality of learning to it, when compared to the advocated ‘just good enough’. The scale of learning is disproportionate since we must learn at level of psyche (or soul). That Dunning-Kruger Pope conflation feels like a supreme learning moment that simply passed the non perfectionist just okay medium author by.  

From my perspective the story of Charles Frazier can also be summarized as: Charles wrote four published books one of which became an astounding commercial success. If he had been left alone by his agent knowing friend, how many successful books might he have written without the consequent external commercial pressures brought upon him by the early phenomenal success of that first one. I also wonder just how different that final PhD thesis destination would have been, and how the consequent Doctor  might have felt, if all that Dunning-kruger mountain stuff had been left out entirely of her academic journey.

For me it is that creative writers journey not the destination nor output that brings joy for a writer in love with writing. Those who don’t have that writing gra are simply not yet equipped to understand that.

The more sophisticated and complex, the deeper and richer the internal creative landscape for this writer. I welcome readers, they are rare and I completely cherish each one that gives of their time to read what I write, but obviously the writing must come first, otherwise what’s to read ?

It was one of the smartest people this planet has ever seen, Albert Einstein who coined one of my favorites: “Things should be made simple, but never simpler.”

We would never presume to tell a nuclear scientist nor a neurosurgeon that their work, if they think it is okay, is obviously good enough.

Why would anyone consider offering that kind of advice to a writer ?

And why would sixteen thousand readers applaud it ?

Leave that cold mountain for the valleys of perfection, be the best you can be, and then be better, strive for perfection if you can.

Special Agent Alert… No Time to… try ?

“The name is Bond… Basildon Bond”…

Said the UK comic actor Russ Abbot back in the 90s referring to a highly reputable stationary brand, and his character, the said comedic TV secret agent.

With double ohhh Daniel saving the post covid box office with no time to die, conversely there’s never been a better time for Irish Writers to grab some real agents to figure out what to try.

Writers tell stories, especially from our own experience, it’s who we are and what we do.

Creative artists and narcissists are also top of our talking self / tellin’ ya tree while queued along branches we can find actors, musicians, producers, directors, screenwriters, playwrights, with the would be barefaced poets hanging onto the very bottom leaves.

Although as Friel so expertly observed there is usually a private and public personae involved with writing, waiting, and wanting. Show the one you need to show.

Yes we all agree that this is completely appropriate behavior for those working their way upwards within a hits based industry that is known itself as “Show” business.

Our show business has a long established Venn diagram intersection with our tech biz or technology industry, an intersection growing larger each year. Thus along with ‘traditional’ show business professionals listed above, excellent contemporary VFX supervisors, sound designers, game developers, narrative designers, coders, digital producers, VR, XR, platform executives and digital rights holders are among those offering their show n tell, interviews, or those of us partaking in ubiquitous zoom seminars or group meetings.

While compelled by life to multitask I virtually attended the aforementioned online event this morning, organized by The Writers Guild of Ireland and the BAI, in the sound company of that most rarely spotted species: Professional Working Agents.

The key takeaway from listening to all three professional agents, and it is the core of any success in any industry really, is that relationship building is paramount.

Among many years ago I supervised an MBA thesis on remote teamwork and newly developed tools being used to facilitate it. Anyone like me who has worked in theatre or computer games development, let alone TV development or education, understands the true value of cohesive and coherent teams and the truism that relationships are at the core of all truly successful collaborations. Having key relationships are…… key, yes that’s true.

Thus as espoused today, for many writers their first key relationship is with their agent.

bowl of freshly picked blackberries
Pick away but ideas, like Heaney’s Blackberries ,don’t stay fresh.

Kelly, Giles, and Peter, offered clear insights into the agent – writer relationship today, and attendance was certainly worthwhile for their good humored and professional candor, their sharing of proven experience and opinion. I underlined and offered that hypertext link in my text above to contemporary VFX supervisors, as it offers a link to an excellent article on the real life experiences of Chris MacLean & Mike Enriquez both VFX supervisors, while making their amazeballs AppleTV series ‘Foundation’.

The main overlap in both these professional success narratives is the importance of genuine professional connection.

What we’ve already known in Ireland for years: it is whom you know not what you know (i.e. once you have also attained the requisite levels of professionalism and skills) that gets you in the room. You almost must have already earned (or paid for) the right to be there, to be there. (Is there an echo – have you left your speakers on while you’re trying to use your mic ?)

Writers must also have earned the trust of those who guided you to, or allowed/invited you into, that room, that is if you are to have an actual career in writing or show business. The best way to earn trust is not only be that good person, a hardworking nice person, but the one that delivers. Being able to type and use a computer may also help too.

Cat Painting in Library
Different people can view various writers, the Internet, and ‘Digital Art’ very very differently.
Thus obviously it can be very risky using a term like ‘digital writer or artist’ to introduce yourself.

Part of some modern difficulties in early dealings with certain contemporary producers (apart from their refusal to show me their bank balances) is most know sort of what they don’t want, although every single one does want the next big thing. That dilemma for the writer can be solved with the spec script, for all the reasons insiders already know. Although among my highly classified experimental WIP at present is a very traditional screen adaptation of a biography, could just be easier to mash together a whole new format of screenplay and label it novelty, who apart from those french loopo writers seriously considers restraints are really creatives releases ?

In terms of any such writers’ novelty, the new, or innovation, a slack novel is no longer a surprise, I’ve historically created various stories in Basic, Excel, Tiddlywiki, Twine, Flash, C, Javascript, Bulletin Boards, various social media platforms, tools, watched the 1 million penguins from the inside out while doing a formal MA in Creative Writing & New Media, prior to earning my PhD in Creative Writing & Digital Literature, creating highly innovative pathfinding works that no one ever sees anymore unless there’s some far off obscure exhibition. New technology won’t pay a writer’s bills unless you are being paid to teach those experimental aspects of our ever evolving craft, a craft seemingly broadening and deepening into the future as more and more people convince themselves they can be brilliant writers just by doing a six week course ?

Alvin Toffler wouldn’t make a good agent, as most new technological writing formats or literary forms are to the current mainstream publishing industry as haute couture is to high street (second hand) mass market clothes shops. While there may always be some academic venues and literary aficionados supporting a small amount of cutting or bleeding edge work, few can make a living from creating it. The book industry is an international industry like the meat industry.

That second mouse’s cheese is not all the sweeter were a writer to assume they could learn from the technological mistakes of others, but erm nope, simply not true, but you’ll have to buy my next book to find out exactly why and what this sentence really means. Now.. enough with the humor already, seriously….

The core of any work is the work itself, and the work itself must always be it’s own reward.

If people ask you to do work ,and you trust them, enough to build a relationship, then there is potentially some kind of more there beyond the work, but it begins and ends with the work in the first and every instance.

For serious fully committed writers, before agents, producers, publishers, deals, or any kind of show or business the work comes first. For this writer the first key relationship is with the work. All other relationships are business and thus are negotiable.

The modern WGI, which was once upon a time ‘The Irish Screenwriters and Playwrights Guild’ when I first joined many many years ago, will be making today’s meeting available to members in due course, I hope you all find the time to have a look and listen to the three agents from the UK.

Children celebrating on a race podium.
Success and Achievement are both personal and entirely relative in terms of actual reward.

All writers Are readers – publishing is not writing.

Future Nature Nurture (Post Pandemic Poem by me from May 2021)

Welcome again to my little wholly independent corner of the writing, and therefore reading, world.

On this really sunny day here in Ireland, I re-read this illuminating interview with the amazing Margaret Randall and was compelled to share it with friends, readers, fellow writers, website visitors and (later) students.

In my view, the print books business here in Ireland often short-changes many of it’s customers or ‘real life readers‘ by really pushing and promoting that whole ’emerging’ and ‘up and coming’ writers paradigm, it feels like it may often be more about securing and promoting contracted (owned) talent than actually curating careers or offering genuine diversity to a reading public.

Current commercial strategies also sell these fixed agendas within an industry of cultural gatekeepers to the aspirants facing the very barriers to entry that industry erected. As I write here often, (or did for 20 years before the site got spammed out of existence) the book publishing and distribution industry is simply not ‘the writing life’ it is only (with a few rare and valuable exceptions) about commerce, money, and profit.

Margaret’s recently released Memoir I read.

I don’t want to offer spoilers here to Margaret’s interview so the links here should be enough for now, suffice to say I will be including some of Margaret’s work in my up and coming playshop sessions and I will be asking participants to read this interview as part of our discussions around memoir and technology, and the contemporary writer’s online life.

Stuffafizing should be up and running soon.. thanks to those who have already signed up.

“My word” #blibloading ; joy for twitter wreaders and not the usual social media epistles at dawn.

I created the hashtag and neologism ‘#blibloading’. There was no word to describe the act of downloading other people’s pictures of their books, allowing for checking them out and deciding whether any of them are must reads.

Perhaps only writers or true bibliophiles will understand that urge, (or sentence) and ‘my word’ blibloading could itself not be invented before 1996 prior to the www. Yes the phenomena of @bookshelfporn obviously exists but that’s a lot more impersonal and concerns a lusty aesthetics for book filled shelves, rather than a singularly gawking online snapshot into other people’s photographed reading or book buying habits.

‘My word’ was always a gentle expression of surprise I associated with English upper and middle class friends.

Not that I actually have any.

The word on the interwebs was that it promised improvements in information and communication democratization, long and longer tails of niche pursuits and some heretofore sharing of interests, however obscure, as not merely possible but crucial for ‘a web based newer form of communication’.

The early friendlier net already did remediated letters, scrolls, epistles, notes, memos, etc, in various electronic formats via listservs, bulletin boards, etc, but social media platforms of today better facilitate speedy synchronous exchange either night or day, or yes, even at dawn for that matter..  but only if we embrace such new purposes and altered uses.

Yes questions arise; If you can’t judge a book by its cover could you judge it by a social media account or a couple of its tweets ? Traditional or mainstream interests have swamped social media such that much of its true human value potential appears lost in impure pursuits of profit and profile. I mostly use social media to connect with writers and coders, artists, etc whom I want to learn from or more about. After an initial flourish I culled my FB connections down from 4K to 1K or so, I’ve kept my linkedin at around 1.5K but as @cleverelt I follow almost 4K people on twitter and will probably continue to follow more as I encounter them. I don’t use any of my social media as marketing tools as I to date have had nothing to market… or promote….

Others certainly do, and like Laurence O’Bryan (@LPOBryan – @SeeNewBooks ) appear to be making a fantastic job of it. However some wonderfully talented writers have come relatively late to these social media parties and as a consequence have had to sit back with small follower numbers while watching other strategy savvy social media makers stride center stage, brand in hand, selling books, raising their profile and the profiles of others, while others stuff schedules and scatter content, garnering and gathering large follower numbers proffering a valuable blend of virtue signalling and semi-soft sell. To them too I sincerely say ‘fair play’.

“We know cream always rises to the top, but sometimes it can curdle before getting there.”

Me (To some writers still waiting in the twitter wings)

Work not promoted by the mainstream publishing houses and their controlled promotional arms may not reach these long tailed parts a friendly personal social media can. Irrespective of their various accounts, money, media, people, and brand guises, most of my own book purchases come from recommendations from fellow writers and friends across social media, those with whom I am (& feel) connected.

I am not sure that it’s still there, but there was a notice backstage in the lyric theatre Belfast that spoke to me about relationships between writers, artists, actors, creators, performers and their supporters and friends:

“Please do not ask for passes for your friends, if they won’t pay to see you….. who will ?”

Lyric Backstage Notice

I recently followed the writer @andrewhankinson over on twitter and bought two of his books which are next up in my reading pile (see the image below). As you do, I flicked through the newly purchased books, basically because Bibliosmia always beats unboxing . Unlike flicking through older shelved books which may hold earlier secretly stashed cash from another era (We wish).

July / August To be read short pile..

In some senses blibloading is Twitter meeting Tsundoku I suppose, but serendipity and synchronicity are wonderful aspects of modern creative life. For someone like me who has spent much time and energy with technology and creativity mostly framed formally, theoretically, academically, or seen through some sort of pristine professional practice lens, in a pandemic world, honest human connection and the hairy edges of existence blend better into authenticity when the elements of luck or chance intrude.

I have been working on a couple of commissions lately and I am looking forward to writing about those and other activities. Like so many others I lost someone close to me during the Covid 19 pandemic, and normal service has simply not been resumed, I doubt it ever will. I want to write something about the incredible connections between two of the books above in the respective images of six covers and the seven in a pile, I will do that if I ever get the time to.

Finally do feel free to comment, I get lots of comments, mostly Spam, which now has it’s own uses for me, but I do enjoy genuine comments.

as they increase, once they hit the hundred+ (spam) comments, it’s time for me to write another public post..

I’d like to thank those of you who have kindly already signed up to my (ir)regular newsletter that’s about all sorts of stuff…. It is something that I am finally getting around to working on alongside all the other abnormal creative stuff, I’ve called the newsletter:

Stuffafizing

https://clevercelt.substack.com/p/coming-soon?

 

Documentary Review: The Road to Vrindavan

Entertaining while ‘engendering’ a vital debate about education.

The time limited link to watch this documentary is here:

Previous portrayals of the poor, street, and slum, life of places like Bombay as depicted in Shantaram, the 2003 novel by Gregory David Roberts, and perhaps like the novel itself, first appeared as an illuminating western perspective until it became quite obviously incredulous and lacking genuine context, even for fiction. The welfare of India’s poorest young girls is a topic the west and east have little discussed but still mostly disagreed upon.

This was most notable perhaps when the late polemicist Christopher Hitchens published his book “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice” in which Hitch criticized her efforts to alleviate the suffering of Calcutta’s poor and claimed, outside his assessment of her character, that those efforts since based in religious dogma and motives, ensured that the wretched situation there was actually compounded by such interference. Hitch went on to explain that the one thing that has positively changed life outcomes for poor young women is ensuring that they have sovereignty over their own bodies. The long and arduous route to that societal shift in the subcontinent of India must obviously traverse education.

A snatched still from a single moment of the journey in the documentary.

The Road to Vrindavan begins with its creator Ravi Chambers understanding that immersing himself in even the planning of the central arduous journey at the centre of the film may somehow echo his previous unintended exclusion of those most dear and closest to him, as he acknowledges the effects on others of his other journey to Vrindavan as a Hare Krsna monk twenty years previously.

Jeff Gomez has in recent years articulated the shift from Campbell’s heroic journey to concepts around shared storytelling, the collaborative creation of story universes to inclusive, transmedia, and an expansive equality inspired ‘collective journey’ this very personal documentary film by necessity requires a sort of simpler immersion in the individual threads of our collective imagination.

Interviewees along Ravi’s fund raising and fact finding journey introduce terms like ‘significant importance’ and ‘authentic’ with respect to Indian Culture, Indian Tradition, and the defined roles assigned to men and women in their society. Ravi conducts his interviews with a forthright sensitivity and perhaps because of the subject matter, the obvious emotional, intellectual, physical, and maybe spiritual investments he’s making in this documentary this ensures it becomes a rich tapestry of all these elements, from the natural splendour of the countryside to the sprawling human hubbub of various urban spaces, to fresh faces of young girls each of whom has her own individual special story, the vibrancy of colour, the texture of personality and ultimately the exploration of possibility.

Just as with the ideas within it, the film itself expands its intellectual, theoretical, and ultimately sociological breath to broaden the question beyond simply the education of young girls, it does so without ever resorting to becoming academic or abstract, issues with inheriting the wisdom within tradition, societal evolution without inherently damaged historicity swamping progress, become developing backdrops to the imperative questioning at the centre of the documentary.

Here I must confess my personal connection to this story as I am a long time family friend of Ravi’s parents, but this story while about cultural, societal, gender, community, and broader questions, is ultimately about these personal stories, and the relationships between them, it is about men and women, parents and their children, what is acceptable to us as individuals and as parts of our communities, what are our responsibilities to each?

The Road to Vrindavan is a timely and very well produced reminder about individual and collective bravery, gender roles, rights, and gender sensitization at a time when violence against women is on the National agenda in India. Unlike that book Shantaram, the truth and authenticity of ‘The Road to Vrindavan’ increase as the documentary itself evolves, ‘be inspired films’ has delivered a film really worth watching and certainly a documentary very much worth discussing. Go watch it and Enjoy…

Sharing an unsolicited Linkedin Secret….

Thank you for your unsolicited confidential message xxxxxx,

Rather than simply delete your message, I thought it might also be ‘nice’ to respond to you personally here on linkedin first, before deciding whether to post my reply below publicly on my own timeline or elsewhere, as a kinda critique.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…. it’s secret…

I’m sure at one point this whole thing sounded like a really good idea in that room, I can tease using scarcity and exclusivity appeals via simple (& cheap) personalized direct linkedin message, invite a broad cross section of connections and filter later using three (reinforcing) questions to build community via our promise of exclusive value, intimating that my actual bog standard value proposition is so really good it needs to be ‘secret’.

That’s an old 1960’s advertising trick but hey that was 60+ years ago..

I can call the initial linkedin message ‘a confidential message’, to set tone and general expectation to message recipients.

I then basically create a standard linkedin group to help form a community which we can later migrate to our own branded platform and then monetize.. we will have plenty of time to come up with better branding, simply: Secret… XXXXX XXXXX group… is initially cleaner.. until we get some additional creative talent on board..

We could later do a hot takes handbook on our success building the group. Group content can also be repurposed with our new branding.. it’s a digital playbook waiting to be complied..

We could use the hottakes handbook as clickbait reward for newsletter sign up, it can be one pillar of our broader content planning.. inbound strategy dev is underway.. what about an infographic ?

One central omission from your initial collateral and your thinking xxxxxx is that to many human beings Secrets can be a damaging psychological phenomena.

Since before whispers were invented, secrets have caused suspicion, misunderstanding, disinformation, guilt, lack of trust, betrayal, in our current post truth age, where disinformation is causing unnecessary and major political, medical, and personal, difficulties for a whole range of people and societies globally, why would any genuine thinking person want to be involved with some cheap social media ‘secret’..

Why would anyone in their own proper mind be enticed to carry additional and unnecessary psychological weight ?

FOMO ? – STFU !

Does any ‘normal’ individual really want to receive a completely unsolicited ‘confidential message’ ?

In normal circumstances I would just delete both buckshot marketing message and the connection but with all the crap currently in our world, seeing this kinda stuff from a Harvard educated CMO, a consultant, is honestly disturbing.. I need to point this cheap trickery out.

I was blessed to bring three sons to adulthood, one of the main tenets of my parenting was to have no secrets, to advise my children that yes each person could and should have personal stuff that is their’s alone, and they correctly have the choice about what they share with others.. or what they don’t.. but never be forced to carry a secret for someone else.. anyone who would ask you to do that, really needs to look at their own motivations and expectations.. and the worth of that secret, before asking you for a reply..

That final bottom line (doorknob) NLP attempt in the message:

“And remember, it is our big secret 😏”

is simply infinitive wrong..

Having written the reply above to the message below, I decided to post it here for my regular readers instead rather than dignify the unsolicited message with any form of response, I chose to leave it unanswered… and deleted the connection who sent it.

BELOW the Text of the original Message with clear redaction so as to avoid unnecessary embarrassment. and below that again an image of my desktop with the message with lots of colorful redaction to protect other identities..

Hi, Michael!

You have received a highly confidential message 🔒

I see, you have experience and expertise in the XXXXXX area, so I thought it would be nice to give you an invite to our Secret XXXXXX group.

As a member of our group, you will have full access to: •

XXXXXX-oriented courses

•Fascinating interviews with XXXXXX experts

•Most recent XXXXXX news

•Quizzes, questionnaires and polls

•Discussions of pressing problems with XXXXXX leaders

•Funny XXXXXX jokes and memes

This offer will be valid for only some days, as we have a limited number of invitations.

If you want to be one of the lucky ones and get into our group, let me know about it, and I will send a short 3 question brief to make sure you can join.

And remember, it is our big secret 😏

I am starting to write a regular newsletter which is (hard to believe I know) more opinionated, considers more topics than presented here, in hopefully more detail with additional links of interest and references, that is if enough people sign up to it.. its about all sorts of stuff…. so I’ve called it:

Stuffafizing

https://clevercelt.substack.com/p/coming-soon?

Double Digit Trouble (1st Draft)

Happy New Year, bye bye double digit 2020…
Edited Version..

Two fingers to this year 2020
When my loving mother passed
And all that economic talk of plenty
was exposed as rich men’s lies at last
our fifth world war, after drugs and terrorism,
became a virus of normal people’s frontline heroism
politicians proved their lack of worth, dumb death 
of wisdom
disinformed, cerebral malnutrition from a spin filled 
kingdom
we the people look to each other and our burning 
earth around us
that us, this we, these common people, locked down, 
look up only to see
that double digit trouble becomes our starting price
of being frank and free
fingered fear and trepidation visited upon each nation
as a global planning spree
of dumbing down, rising prices, complex processes 
reducing critical capacity
inconvenient truths dismissed, slandered silenced 
theories of silly conspiracy 
don’t fall for them vote for me, vote, vote often, 
believe you have a voice, a choice
between the corporations and my mini me, 
the nanny state supported on all fours
by those who set the ceilings and the floors, of wealth,
access, and growing successful fear
that keeps you near, believing friends or enemies 
among their economic rubble
but when you burst that bubble, 
only then begins their real double digit trouble

I am starting to write a regular newsletter which is (hard to believe I know) more opinionated, considers more topics than presented here, in hopefully more detail with additional links of interest and references, that is if enough people sign up to it.. its about all sorts of stuff.. so I’ve called it:

Stuffafizing

https://clevercelt.substack.com/p/coming-soon?