Some great stuff about storytelling and writing near the end.
writing
During most of the third week of October I'll be in Toronto, so I'll miss most of the Vancouver International Writers Festival from Tuesday Oct. 16th to Sunday the 21st. (Vancouver festivals seem to pick four-letter .org domains starting with v and ending with f for their websites, but somewhat surprisingly, viwf.org is available.) I will try to make the Saturday and Sunday events, though. I know some people who are going to some of it while I'm gone, and they have a tendency to document well the events they attend, either in words or with pictures. The festival's website is spunky, powered by Drupal no less.
“You feel compelled to speak, yes, but you also desperately want to be heard, so much so that you risk being misinterpreted, intercepted by your employer, stolen by some craven college student, roundly ignored. The danger is a central part of it.”
“Writers on the Internet don’t know how good they have it.”
After two months of not writing for Just a Gwai Lo, I still haven't come up with anything important (urgent!) to write about. Quality control needs improving, and the best idea I could come up with was to hire an editor. Which would mean, in essence, paying someone to tell me what to write about.
(How many blogs are edited in the traditional sense? With assignments, deadlines, correction, feedback, rejection? Has the nature of editing and roles of editors changed because of blogging? Are individual editors relevant anymore that we "crowdsource" the process?)
While on 'hiatus' here, I've written about floorball and other topics at Urban Vancouver, and kept posting to improvident lackwit (Heckhole, Lord Palmerston, Crazy Town, and today, Tiananmen Square). I thought about news that matters to me: it needs to be local, match my interests without perpetuating tunnel vision, be "actionable" and allow me to "add value" to it, among the other features listed in Dave Pollard's piece on continuous environmental scan. I successfully pursued outdoor exploits, regained if not my figure then at least a better outlook about it, created about the same, which is to say not a whole lot, moved from del.icio.us to Ma.gnolia, kept up with Twitter, Vox, NowPublic and Flickr but gave up on Facebook, at least for the moment.
Sharing still doesn't feel as meaningful as creating, though. So what's a person who doesn't feel very creative to do? At least be grateful that the flow of work email shows no signs of letting up?
Amber Simmons on writing for the Web.
John Scalzi crunches some numbers (though he admits there may be insufficient data and that he and Cory Doctorow are outliers).
"Even if the original motivation owes more to commerce than art, once chosen, a nom de plume can be liberating, taking a writer to places that might have remained unexplored."
I get accused of being a writer all the time.
