Facebook is getting ready to announce its foray into location-based services, according to reports. Maybe they'll be able to answer the question, "What's the point?" I'm a Foursquare addict, I check in to locations regularly when I'm out and about. And I have absolutely no idea why I do it.
AllThingsD's Kara Swisher shares details of an invitation she received for a Wednesday Facebook news event. "[A] multitude of sources indicate that Facebook will finally be rolling out its new geo-location offering," she writes.
The event comes as Foursquare enters the "big three" of social networks, alongside Twitter and Facebook -- at least, according to the San Francisco Giants. TechCrunch's MG Siegler shares a photo of the San Francisco Giants' scoreboard at AT&T Park, listing three social media addresses for the team: Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare.
The Penny Dreadfuls, a six year old fiction writers workshop, is looking for new members. We're semi-pros at fiction; five of us have been published professionally, but pro credits aren't necessary. We meet monthly to critique each others' work and help each other improve. Our focus is mainly on genre fiction -- SF, fantasy, mystery and horror -- but we're open to mainstream fiction too. If you're in the San Diego area and looking to join a writing critique group, let me know at mitch@mitchwagner.com.
Cleese says you need to carve boundaries in space and time where you can be creative. A boundary in space is a place where you won't be disturbed, and a boundary in time is a period in which you are committed to occupying that space. If you're a powerful person, you can sit in your office and tell your assistant to block all interruptions. If you're not powerful, you can just go to the park.
I started my own career in daily newspapers, where I worked in newsrooms, big open spaces without any interruption between desks. I learned there to be creative in the midst of chaos, and I've continued that to this day. I work alone in a home office now, but I have IM and Skype open all the time, and I take frequent breaks for Twitter, Facebook, etc. This is the environment in which I'm most creative now. Might I be more creative if I was more disciplined about blocking out distractions? Maybe.
On the other hand, maybe I'd get nothing done at all. Joseph Wambaugh, who writes crime novels about police, started out as a police officer himself, writing in his spare time when he was off duty. After he had a novel hit the bestseller lists, he built himself a Southern California mansion with a writing office overlooking the Pacific Ocean. He had great swathes of time in which to write -- but couldn't get any writing done, because his mind just wasn't structured to be creative while concentrating.
Similarly, fantasy novelist Glen Cook worked an assembly line, and wrote his novels a few words at a time in the seconds between widgets coming down the conveyer belt.
My efforts at novel-writing require a different kind of creativity than my everyday work, and so I try to take a different strategy. I set a deadline for myself of writing 250 words a day. In practice, that comes out to 250-300 words. It doesn't take long, but it seems to be about all that I can do. If I try to do more, I fear that I'll end up doing nothing at all. I tried doing 500 words a day, and it was exhausting. I think my subconscious mind is planning the day's fiction writing during the 23+ hours of the day that I'm not actually writing.
By the way, my breaks for Twitter, Facebook, etc., are less frequent now. I found I was taking them too frequently, and now I run a desktop timer that goes off at three-hour intervals, allowing me to take a social media break. I wish there was something I could do about email, some way I could automatically separate important email that requires immediate attention from normal email that can wait a few hours. The problem is you don't know until you look.
Cleese also says that the skills required to be good at something are the same skills required to recognize you're bad at that thing. This explains Hollywood, he says, because so many people making movies don't realize they're bad at making movies. It also explains why managers and teachers often stifle creativity.
Ira Glass, host of National Public Radio's This American Life has a different perspective. He says when we start out being creative, we know exactly how bad we are. The problem for most people starting out being creative is "getting through the suck."
When we start out on a creative effort, whether it's writing science fiction or cooking French food, it's generally because we love that thing. More than that, we're passionate about it. We have very refined tastes in this area, we know extremely well what's good and bad in science fiction or French food (or what we think is good or bad, which comes down the same thing). So we try to create something, and our refined tastes tell us immediately that our first effort is terrible. And we're right -- it is terrible. But the only way we're going to get any good is by being persistent, "getting through the suck." Which is hard, because every step of the way our very refined sensibilities are telling us, rightly, that what we're doing sucks.
Robert A. Heinlein, author of Stranger in a Strange Land and more than 60 other books, was the greatest science fiction writer of the 20th Century, with an influence that went far beyond genre boundaries, according to William H. Patterson Jr., author of the new Heinlein biography.
During my interview with Patterson for my podcast, Copper Robot. I asked why Heinlein was important enough to rate a fat biography, 22 years after his death. “It's not because he was a science fiction writer,” Patterson said. “He was an influential public figure in a lot of ways that people inside the science fiction community let drift out of consciousness.”
It's occasionally useful to queue up an email for automatic sending in the future -- birthday greetings, early-morning mailing list updates, warnings to Doc Brown to wear his bulletproof vest. I've been playing with two tools that let you create e-mail today for delayed delivery.
Boomerang is a Gmail add-on, and LetterMeLater.com is a Web-based service. Both services are free. Boomerang requires a download and install, LetterMeLater works entirely over the Internet.
Boomerang for Gmail, which is currently in beta, runs as an extension on Firefox or Google Chrome and adds a big "Send Later" button to the top of your email compose window.
In the comments on my earlier post on Heinlein, race, and diversity, I’m taking heat for my assertion that Heinlein was enlightened by the standards of his day, but often falls short by the standards of ours.
I was speaking specifically of the Heinlein of 1946, who wrote Rocket Ship Galileo (which both Charlie Stross and I apparently misidentified as Space Cadet). But throughout Heinlein’s career he displayed a mix of tolerance and celebrating diversity, alongside some ethnocentrism and sexism.
Telegraph.co.uk: “They were once the future of travel. Now, more than 70 years after the Hindenburg crash, engineers are designing a new fleet of airships.”
Seems like I’ve read a version of this article every couple of years for the last 30 years. This time, the articles say, engineers have licked the problems and made giant airships practical and safe. I’d love for it to be true. But I’m skeptical, simply because I’ve heard it so many times before.
[W]hile working on the novel that was to become Space Cadet, Heinlein warned his agent that the inclusion of an ethnically diverse cast was not only deliberate—it was non-negotiable, and if an editor requested the removal of the Jewish character, Blassingame (the agent) was to take the book elsewhere.
This is the letter Heinlein wrote to his agent about his wishes (from Learning Curve, the new Heinlein biography):
I have deliberately selected a boy of Scotch-English pioneer ancestry, a boy whose father is a German immigrant, and a boy who is American Jewish. Having selected this diverse background they are then developed as American boys without reference to their backgrounds. You may run into an editor who does not want one of the young heroes to be Jewish. I will not do business with such a firm. The ancestry of the three boys is a “must” and the book is offered under those conditions. My interest was aroused in this book by the opportunity to show to kids what I conceive to be Americanism. The use of a diverse group . . . is part of my intent; it must not be changed. . . . I am as disinterested as a referee but I want to get over an object lesson in practical democracy.
This is all admirable, but let’s keep in mind what’s missing from this cast: Asians; disabled people; non-Americans of any kind; lesbians, gays, and the transgendered; Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, or representatives of the other major world religions. Heinlein’s book was enormously ethnically diverse in that it included the full variety of American Judeo-Christian boys.
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