Everyone always talks about confidence in believing what you do. I remember once going to a class in yoga where the teacher said that, spirituality speaking, if you believed that you had achieved enlightenment you have merely arrived at your limitation. I think that is also true in a practical sense. Deeply held beliefs of any kind prevent you from being open to experience, which is why I find all firmly held ideological positions questionable. It makes me nervous when someone believes too deeply or too much. I think that being skeptical and questioning all deeply held beliefs is essential.

Yep.

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Ten Things I Have Learned(MiltonGlaser.com)

I Shall Wear Midnight, a young adult novel, was launched in central London at midnight on Tuesday, but, as has been the way throughout a career that has so far produced 50 novels (38 of them set on Discworld) and generated more than 65m book sales – Pratchett is already 60,000 words into the next book.

And for the last two and a half years, ever since he was diagnosed with posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of Alzheimer’s, and lost the physical ability to write, he has dictated those words into voice-recognition software. At first, in fact, he talks to me about the machine as if I am a machine (which is not entirely unwarranted: there is a tape recorder sitting on the table between us). “… And the nice thing is, contrary to what you might initially expect, comma” – we both burst out laughing – “yes, sorry about this, full stop.”

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Terry Pratchett: ‘I’m open to joy. But I’m also more cynical’

I really like this sample critique that Larry Brooks did for a writer. This is a service that Brooks provides, and I’d say that it’s a valuable one, especially if you don’t have anyone who your letting really dig into your work for you. And I think it’s rare that you’d find someone willing to go this far into your stuff in your own backyard.

Read the critique and analysis. Imagine how hard it must have been for that writer to endure the tearing down of his work. The repeated “you have potential” just wouldn’t be enough of a warm fuzzy to offset the systematic dissection of his story. But I guess the lesson is that you need to be able to get kicked in the face, smile, and really try to see how that kick was actually helpful in some way.

And I think that the writer being analyzed would agree that this document is very helpful.

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An Intimate Look at One Writer’s Feedback

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Stuff No One Told Me

Part of the issue is that I just don’t have the time or the material to put up the sort of table that I want at this point. But the other part is that I’m just not that comfortable with self-promotion yet.

So I pay special attention to articles like this one by Alex Mathers of Red Lemon Club on getting over your self-doubt in order to get done what you need to get done.

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How to Smash Through Self Doubt to Become a Better Self Promoter

I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That’s the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they’re allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it’s a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.

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Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A new idea or unfamiliar fact will provoke a reflex to do something: to research the term, to query your screen “friends” for their opinions, to find alternative views, to create a bookmark, to interact with or tweet the thing rather than simply contemplate it. Book reading strengthened our analytical skills, encouraging us to pursue an observation all the way down to the footnote. Screen reading encourages rapid pattern-making, associating this idea with another, equipping us to deal with the thousands of new thoughts expressed every day. The screen rewards, and nurtures, thinking in real time. We review a movie while we watch it, we come up with an obscure fact in the middle of an argument, we read the owner’s manual of a gadget we spy in a store before we purchase it rather than after we get home and discover that it can’t do what we need it to do.

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Reading in a Whole New Way

I’ve been meaning to link to this for a long time. Jack Cheng’s “cash-growth-love triangle” is an interesting attempt to help you graph and visualize how fulfilling the things you do are.

There’s a certain joy that comes from doing what you love, getting compensated for it and constantly learning new things in the process. Your goal should be to maximize each experience and try to cover as many new areas of the bigger triangle as possible.

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Terrific voice actor. One of my favorites.

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Audio Q&A: Peter Cullen, the Voice of Optimus Prime, Talks Transformers, Mario and More

Interesting walkthru from Nate Piekos, a very inspiring creative pro.

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How I made the HAUNT HAVEN logo!