Headlight in the Fog: the emergence of the Idea

This morning, my oldest daughter slept through her alarm and I had to wake her up. Poor thing, being roused in the fog of sleep when, really, she could use an extra hour of dreamland.

Looking out her bedroom window, I saw it would be another day of inversions. Despite its reputation for clean air, the Pacific Northwest goes through periods without rain or wind when the air doesn't move, leaving those of us with respiratory conditions to struggle against persistent post-nasal drip, asthma and the general malaise that comes of breathing particulate matter nonstop.

On the plus side, the sunsets are spectacular during these

inversions: rich, glowing salmon pink laced with patterns of small periwinkle clouds.

The idea of a glorious sunset forged from a cluster of pollution is nothing new. But it's a good reminder that, even when we're stuck in these awful inversions, where it is, in fact, hard to get out of bed—if the darkness doesn't get you, the pollution surely will—, it's still possible to find something illuminating in the fog.

A newly released book (Jan 2, 2007) explores the concept of emerging ideas, why some last and others don't. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, has been compared to Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point in conjuring "the secret recipe that makes an idea viral" (from Booklist, 11.01.2006).

Publisher's Weekly (1.16.2007) had this to say about the making of Made to Stick: "[The brothers Heath] start by relating the gruesome urban legend about a man who succumbs to a barroom flirtation only to wake up in a tub of ice, victim of an organ-harvesting ring. What makes such stories memorable and ensures their spread around the globe? The authors credit six key principles: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories. (The initial letters spell out success—well, almost.)"

While the focus of the book seems ostensibly to appeal to the interests of teachers, managers, parents and marketing analysts, it could be useful fodder for creatives as well. We recognize ideas as "material" or "breadcrumbs" or "gifts"—fertile drops forming the vast wellspring we dip from daily. Understanding the origins of ideas and the whys and wherefores of how some persist and others don't could be especially informing as we cobble together our own collections of ideas and wonder which to run with and which to set aside for another project.

Let me know if you've read this book and, if so, what you thought about it. I'm nothing if not interested in unlocking the keys of the Creative Universe!

Goggles into the future

I've recently discovered that I love to read blogs. After downloading a feed-reading tool off the Internet, I have been able to organize all the different blogs that I like to read by subject matter, thereby making it possible to pick and choose those I want to survey at any given time.

***Warning***

Just like computer games, chat rooms and surfing, the reading of blogs can burn up precious creative time! I keep my blog reading to less than an hour a day (closer to 20 minutes). The feed-reading tool makes it easier to keep the practice under control. But I'm warning you now, reading blogs is in no way a substitute for doing the things

you need to do while at the keyboard (or elsewhere).

That's my public service announcement for the day.

Blogs can be extraordinarily inspiring in surprising ways. Just one of the categories I file my blogs under has become a truly thought-provoking region for me. The category? Futurism.

What is Futurism? It's looking into the future and guessing what's going to happen next. These are written by or about people who may or may not get it right, but they're trying. They're taking the information they have now and making educated projections.

I originally started reading Futurism blogs because they tap into one part of my writing life, that being the world of Sci Fi/Fantasy. I'm especially enamored of speculative writing, which typically takes place in the Near Future or in locales of time and space which might be said to parallel what we understand of the word Now. I began reading Futurism blogs to get a leg up on some of the theory behind speculations.

I've discovered, since then, the value of reading about Futurism extends beyond my own interests in specfic. The very essence of Futurism is tapping into what we don't know by borrowing from what we do know. And isn't that what creativity is all about? Using what we know to invent something new that wasn't there before, thereby making it possible?

Here are a list of Futurism blogs I enjoy. [Oh, you could pick up some of their affiliated magazines as well; my chiropractor's office always has a nice selection. But the convenience and cost of blogs (free!) is undeniably more appealing!]

The Futurist: ""We know what we are, but we know not what we may become"- William Shakespeare

IFTF's Future Now: Emerging technologies and their implications for the future.
L2si: Dispatches from a rapidly changing, rapidly improving world.
Positive Futurist: Cutting edge news and information covering science, technology and the evolving world.
The Speculist: Live to see it.

If you want to find other blogs which discuss Futurism, you can search through Google Blogs, or visit technorati.com and search under the term, Futurism.

Go on, you know you wanna look!

On magical thinking and using Sabian Symbols for inspiration

The New York Times recently ran an interesting piece on magical thinking, which I think everyone should read, whether they go in for superstitions or tend to be all-logical in their thinking.

The belief in astrological constructs is hardly far afield of the subject of magical thinking. Folks study planets, read charts, interpret symbols. The mythology of the universe appears in all manner of cultural practices with so-called "magical" applications, such as tarot card reading, fortune-telling, belief in omens and oracles, feng shui and the like.

How these interests in magical thinking serve one's creative life truly depends upon what you believe. I think it's fair to say that the bell curve here takes on the classic shape: a quarter on each end devoted to Believers and NonBelievers, with a majority of folks falling along the fuller arc in the middle: people functioning with varying degrees of skepticism.

I tend to think of all the areas of magical thinking as wellsprings for creativity. Why not? There's power in possibility. Thinking "outside the box" is valued in the business world. It certainly helps to go beyond the normal parameters of one's creative life for new ideas as well. Why not turn to the established symbols and images of magical thinking for inspiration? You don't have to believe in them. You just have to be open minded.

Recently, I learned about Sabian Symbols. Developed in 1925, Sabian Symbols are phrases which define, by degrees, the meanings of the signs of the zodiac. There are 360 degrees to the zodiac, so there are an equivalent 360 phrases that represent the Sabian Symbols. What started out as an experiment between an astrologer and a clairvoyant manifested into this series of phrases that people today use to guide their everyday lives.

The symbols are simple, but evocative. For example, from Pisces you get the image of "A child born out of an eggshell" and from Aries, "A woman drawing aside two dark curtains that closed the entrance to a sacred pathway."

Without getting into the history of the Sabian Symbols or their interpretations, I think that, on their surface, these minute glimpses into the zodiac could make for some great creative prompts. Poets and painters, composers and quilters alike could find daily inspiration in Sabian Symbols.

What sort of magical thinking have you turned to? Or do you reject the notion of magical thinking? If so, what sort of magical thinking drives you to skepticism? It's worth considering. Too much magical thinking could, after all, have a chaotic effect on your creative life. But too little magical thinking could be a bad thing, too. It might turn your creative life into an airless vacuum of Reason.

Somewhere in between lies the right mix for you. Think about it. Reading this blog, today, might just be the sign you were looking for!

This just in: Creative chaos is good for you!

“Things are always best seen when they are a trifle mixed-up, a trifle disordered; the chilly administrative neatness of museums and filing cases, of statistics and cemeteries, is an inhuman and antinatural kind of order; it is, in a word, disorder."—Camilo Jose Cela

I like this quote, because it begs the question:
Can the idea of chaos ever be thought of in terms that aren't perjorative?

I think so, at least when it comes to creative living. Chaos is a lump of damp clay, a bag full of vegetables from the market, a blank page and a bazillion notes.

I look around my office now and can say this much: I live in piles of paper chaos and I still manage to write an hour or more a day. Neatness counts for some things; for the creative process, it's a secondary concern. Making is what matters, not cleaning up or tending to some other efficiency.

Here's an argument for Creating Chaos from writer Carol D. O'Dell. She knows a thing or two about the subject, having written a book about caring for elderly parents (Mothering Mother) while raising her own children, keeping alive a painter's life, moving across country more times in one year than most people do in a lifetime AND writing a novel.

I agree with her that "instability creates stability." I believe that shapeliness in art (whether writing, painting, landscaping, cooking, dancing or whatever) comes of mixing together elements until they lock themselves into the kind of form that works. It's an imperfect process, even a tad bit wasteful, but heck, isn't that the point?

Would making crab cakes from scratch be as fun if there was only one perfect way to make them? No, in fact there are as many ways to make crab cakes as there are tastes and varieties of crab. Some people like the saltine cracker method, others like to use as little binding as possible. Some deep fry them, some saute them in butter, others go for the grilled or baked technique. And don't even think of arguing for the perfect dipping sauce for crab cakes. Mustard sauce? Remoulade? Vinaigrette? Cocktail sauce with a touch of cream, you say?

The goal in making crab cakes from scratch isn't about making them perfect, in any event. It's about finding the one combination of flavors and textures that best suits your vision of what they're supposed to be. How will you know what that combination is if you don't throw yourself into a chaotic whirl of ingredients and techniques?

You can follow someone else's recipe. Sure. But don't gripe later when it doesn't work out the way you like it.

I know a woman who insists that her chicken soup recipe is the best there is. Nobody's would ever beat hers. Ha! I laugh. It's not that I wish to be competitive here, but my chicken soup recipe is To Die For. I tried her recipe, and while it's tasty enough, it's not To Die For. Does that make her wrong and me right? Does that mean mine is perfect and her recipe is not? And most importantly, is the goal of cooking about finding that One chicken soup recipe to fit all needs?

No! One size never fits all.

Creative chaos is about the experimenting that goes into making the soup or the crab cakes or the painting or the rockery or the chord progressions. While it's an inefficient means to an end, the creative life makes no laws regarding the wasting of time and materials. What artist ever gets it right the first time?

Whatever you make, you make. It's made. It may not be perfect, but it's something that can be refined once it's made. It becomes the basis for more, and better, ways to achieve the kind of result that only creative chaos can achieve.

So be chaotic. Your creative life can't breathe and succeed without it.

Some reasons for writer envy

I cited a handful of authors who I publicly admit to being envious of.

Louise Erdrich
Stephen King
Keri Hulme
Becky Hagenston
Jeannine Hall Gailey
John Steinbeck

This isn't a complete list, of course, but a sampler. Probably, it would be useful for me to explain the seeds of my envy for all of them. That way you can do the same thing yourself and thereby liberate yourself from the evil grasp of the green cyclops itself.

Louise Erdrich: I'm envious because she's wonderfully gracious and graceful when it comes to sharing her writing life with the public, despite having a much tougher personal row to hoe than I'll ever have.

Stephen King: I'm envious, not because of his money and/or fame, but because he has succeeded so well in the School of Hard Knocks. He makes a living doing his own thing, critics be damned.

Keri Hulme: I'm envious for her terrific luck in finding a collective to support her rather difficult (yet beautiful, moving and timeless) work (referencing the Spiral Collective in New Zealand and her book, The Bone People).

Becky Hagenston: I'm envious of her lovely, moving literary prose, which led to a nice collection of short stories (referencing A Gram of Mars). From my superficial, exterior view of her path, she seems to be walking the road I want to be on. Probably it's much harder and more pitted a road than I'm aware. Still, she's found her way inside my Dream!

Jeannine Hall Gailey: I'm envious of Jeannine because she has the nerve not only to take on the literary taboos of popular culture and politics in her poetry, but to do it so darned well and with such perfect humor.

John Steinbeck: I'm envious of him for living and working in a time when being a fiction writer was still considered a real job and editors worked with you on revision after revision, even for years, without expecting a New York Times bestseller out of
you (referencing his lesser known novel, To a God Unknown). Oh, and I'm envious of Steinbeck for being a damned fine writer!

Okay, now you try.

Creativity Envy

Stand-up comedian Terrence Gibbons recently talked about envy ("KEEPING THE GREEN-EYED MONSTER IN CHECK") for Ideas Factory. I felt the discussion was so pertinent to creative people that I wanted to address it here.

Maybe it's because I saw a picture of a writer friend from my past in a recent edition of People magazine. I haven't seen her, or heard from her, in several years. I know she's had some success with her YA books and just released her short-story collection. All of these things were things she was working on full tilt back in the days when we used to hang out.

Of course, I'm envious. I have books and books in me and none of them are published. Is it because she's great and I suck? I don't think so. I mean, she's a fine writer, I've always enjoyed reading her raw manuscripts. But I don't think I suck. Dozens of hard-earned publishing credits reflect the opposite. I have to believe they count for something.

I think the difference between us is the same kind of difference between any two creative people. We lead different lives, we make different choices, we take different paths to get where we need to go.

This is the logical reaction, of course. The emotional one is, unfortunately, less equitable and tied up in personality.

Gibbons: "Creativity—true creativity, that is—is generally an individual affair and any creative enterprise—whether done for love or money—is inevitably a work of the Ego, the self and the individual. Envy is innate within any creative venture. In fact, it is innate in human beings, full stop. It's hard-wired into us. It's fairly obvious that a lot of your own personality is tied up in your work or creative enterprise whether it's stand-up comedy, animation, art or music."

So how do I cope with envy? I start thinking about what I can do to meet her at the same level. I don't care so much about People magazine. What I care about is getting my books into print. That has always been the goal. So I get back to writing projects that stall, I start submitting more, I become more productive.

It's not my friend's fault, after all, that my books aren't out there. It's hardly even my fault. I put my butt in the chair in the name of Writing as much as she does.

I've simply made other choices. I've been a writer while raising young children, squeezing in writing time between nursings, even. I work as an editor, creativity coach and publisher. I tend to write hard-to-classify work, and find that regardless of the impracticality of that, I enjoy it. These are choices I revel in, for they feed my creative life.

I'm on a different path, a different schedule, than my friend. She's hard-wired by both desire and circumstances to get published and be paid. I'm driven by different motivations, not nearly as interested in commercial writing and happy to dwell in amorphous literary arenas like flash fiction and magical realism. I treat my writing as a business, sure, but it's likely I take more breaks. And that's nothing to apologize for, methinks. That's my process and it has served me well even if I'm not in People magazine.

I believe we all get to the same places in our own time. Being envious of others for being at a station where you want to be can either destroy your dream or motivate it.

Gibbons: "Envy can be good because it has the capacity to spur you on to better things. If you see a work colleague doing well, you secretly admire them and want to emulate their success. Nothing wrong in that."

It's when we let envy of others worm its way into our psyches and our dreams that it can be destructive. We can fall into self-pity ("why not me?") or lose faith in ourselves ("what was I thinking?").

We can become bitter and judge an entire industry through nasty green lenses that distort our vision. I know someone like this and every year s/he seems to have further descended the downward spiral. It's sad because s/he is a fine writer who should be proud of her/his progress.

I've also seen groups of people throw down an award-winning short story author and the organization that gave them the award all in a day's work in a popular writer's forum, only to read the story for myself and find it was definitely deserving.

Sour grapes happen, sure. I've tasted them as much as anyone, but how does indulging in them move us toward our individual goals? If anything, it creates additional obstacles.

Gibbons: "[Envy] can be a force for good, spurring us on up the creative ladder, or it can be evil incarnate, chewing away at our insides, colouring our every thought and perception and bending us to irrational behaviour. At best, it makes us want to be the best; at worst it makes us want to inflict the worst on others."

This is really a sad state of affairs among writers. This notion that somehow we are all competing for the same station is wrong. If we're being honest with ourselves (read Zadie Smith's essay, "Fail better," for ideas on this), then we can move forward at our own pace knowing that as long as we keep working at this, the rewards will be there.

The fact is, even if I'm not in People magazine, I can claim dozens of rewards for having published the work that I have published: monetary, spiritual, intellectual rewards. For me, the glass is still half-full. I just need to keep filling it up.

From time to time, we need to remind ourselves of those successes we can claim. These successes are evidence of progress in the face of envious times. Use them as a springboard and we can continue moving forward as creative people.

Gibbons: "Over the years I've found only one way of dealing with my own envy of others. Shout it to the treetops, tell everyone and turn it into something positive. I liberate my envy because once it's out, it makes you feel so much better for it. If I think a comedian is good, I'm not envious anymore... I TELL people I'm envious because of how good that person is and how I'd like to emulate them. Turns a negative emotion into something positive."

A handful of writers I have long envied:
Louise Erdrich
Stephen King
Keri Hulme
Becky Hagenston
Jeannine Hall Gailey
John Steinbeck

Some are famous, some are not. I admire them at least as much as I envy them, and probably more so. Which is to say I am going to let them be my guides.

Finally, if you feel the ill winds of envy blowing upon your psychic or creative landscape, go back and look at your goals and dreams. Honestly.

Is it important for me to be in People magazine? Frankly, I haven't even looked at a People magazine in something like 10 years; I only ran into this one because I forgot to take a book with me to the hairdresser's. So what does it matter that my friend is in there and I'm not? Not a wit. The truth is, I'm happy for her. It's the right place for her to be, and not a place I actually ever planned to be.

If that's not poking out the green eye of envy, I don't know what is.

Chicken Soup for the Writer's Sinus Infection

I've done some writing today, even with a splitting sinus-infection-induced headache on this, probably the driest winter day we've had in Seattle (following light snow…light for my neighborhood, anyway). The fantasy novel is almost complete, but my head is also rather baked!

How does one get writing done in the face of illness? It's definitely more than a mind over matter thing, for me. One of the things that helps me, besides sleeping, is that I make my own homemade chicken soup, which is one of those folk remedies that stands up to science.

Mine's not a hard recipe, otherwise I wouldn't bother. I don't even have it written down, but it is rather intuitive, which is to say, you just add however much you like of the various ingredients:

Saute onions, garlic, shallot and celery (and sometimes carrots) in olive oil. (I love garlic and shallots, so they're mostly what I use. I also use both the ribs and the leaves of the celery.)

Pour in some chicken stock (one carton, preferably organic).

Add bay leaves (3) and some boneless, skinless, chopped cooked chicken (preferably from a roasted chicken or a chicken you've cooked down yourself on the back burner).

Season with salt and pepper, add some other herbs (I like using a dill mix I have on hand).

Let it simmer a bit.

On another burner, boil water for kluski noodles.

When you put the noodles in to cook, add more chicken stock (one carton) and heat the soup stock.

To serve, put a scoop or two of drained cooked kluski noodles in the bottom of your bowl, ladle stock with chicken chunks and vegies over the top of it all.

Serve with toasted or warmed sourdough bread and butter for dipping.

I boil the noodles separately and keep them that way until everything has cooled down because the kluski will soak up all that sinus-soothing soup if you add it to the stockpot and you'll have cup o' noodles instead of soup.

I also drink ginger tea with honey to keep my head clear, and ice water with lime wedges during the day or with snacks.

[Yes, that picture above is a rendering of me at the moment I discovered I'd have kids home from school yet again. Since the 2nd of January, I've had only one day when both kids were in school, both were healthy, and the weather behaved. Notice how the icepick in my brain (above) seems to have rendered me unconscious? I'm just too exhausted to be upset about it anymore...]

Okay, admit it, you can find all sorts of reasons NOT to write (or paint, or compose)

Here's a great article about creative procrastination from the Creativity Portal. From article author, Cynthia Morris:

"…there are other things that make it easy to avoid our writing. When you do find time to write, these other demons loom up to prevent you from doing the work. Time is just your best fake excuse—to avoid writing and the fears that lurk in your writing zone."

So 'fess up: what's your favorite excuse for not writing? It'll require some personal mining on your part, but once you shine your lamp on your excuses, they suddenly don't look so darned untouchable.

My favorite excuse? I have three, actually:

a/ I'm too tired to write well.
b/ I have client work that needs to be done first.
c/ Something to do with caring for the kids. (Could be anything.)

I have practical solutions for all of these, of course:

a/ Write anyway.
b/ Put in a half hour of writing time before client work, then put in a half hour after.
c/ Write when the kids are in school, or doing homework, or on play dates.

Still, these are the things that plague my writer's momentum. But thinking them through into a solution phase has made it easier for me to keep on board with my daily writing ritual, so that I make my commitment to my writing life about 85% of the time. So maybe I don't get in that 5 hours a week; maybe it's just 4.25 hours. But that's still 4.25 hours (and about 7700 words). It counts, all of it.

Picture credit: Pam Taylor

Ode to Daguerre

Photography history lesson:

168 years ago today, Louis Daguerre announced the discovery of a new photographic process called Daguerreotype.

Here's the best image I've created since the New Year. A digital shot I played around with using one of my picture editors. The subjects are cutouts from Christmas cards past, which we magnetize to our refrigerator every year at the holidays. (Let's hear it for recycled decorations!) I thought I'd play around with contrasts and color, see what sort of image resulted. I like this one best of all the experiments.

Thanks, Louis D., for your experiments, which now allow us endless possibilities in photographic imaging.

Creative Domesticity in 4 parts

1. Just say No to the idiot box!

Sick children in the house all week remind me of things I used to do as a kid to pass the hours and take my mind off my misery. Early experiences with mind over matter, no?

One of the things I used to do was draw a Miss America pageant. Fifty states, fifty head shots, fifty different hairstyles, facial expressions, makeup jobs.

After a full day of rendering beauty pageant contestant faces, I'd pass the drawings over to my family members, who would pick their top ten. From that we'd cull the finalists. From the finalists, we'd select our top three, and from that list, we'd rate winner and first and second runners-up.

My daughter ran her first ever Miss America pageant last night. It was a dead heat for first place between Ms. California and Ms. Louisiana (isn't it always a dead heat between them anyway?). Ms. Colorado came in a respectable third place.

See? There are other things to do besides watch TV when you're sick!

[My other favorite subject for drawing? Aliens and their spaceships. What they have in common with beauty queens, I cannot say, unless that's just the influence of old episodes of The Twilight Zone on my worldview (remember that episode, where the beautiful woman was trying to get plastic surgery to repair her "disfigurement"?). ]


2. And speaking of the idiot box and all its mutant cousins…

With a background in media communications, I can't help but be conscious of our daily media message bombardment. It strikes even when we aren't paying attention, which is, actually, most of the time. It requires a power outage to get people to notice how much they are used to the barrage of information they have to filter and process on a daily—wait, make that minute-by-minute—basis.

How that affects our creative lives—and the creative lives of our children, who own the future—depends a great deal upon how well we can manage information overload. Sometimes it simply means turning things off. Sometimes it means using media.

Media professionals are trained to understand how it all works. By "it," I mean the manipulative communication complex (i.e. public relations, publicity, advertising, marketing, "damage control," polling, demographic science, campaigns, initiatives, and the like).

Add to that the fact that, aside from being a media professional, I'm also a GenXer (label be damned), and it's irrefutable: I was born a child of the contemporary media landscape. GenXers were the first to have video games, MTV, children's television, personal computers and everything that's come after all that. Let's just say, we are not afraid to program our VCRs.

Now that I have my own kids (who know darned well just what I mean when I say the idiot box), my approach to media consumption in the household is a tad bit different than my parents.

Observe:

Then: The first thing I did after school in the mid-70s was turn on Huckleberry Hound and Wally Gator. Sometimes I'd switch it up and watch the Flintstones, and if I was really lucky, there'd be an ABC After School Special on. Bonus! Weekends were for the Brady Bunch, old movies, more cartoons, hours and hours of TV viewing at night with the family. In fact, when I felt like drawing or reading or writing after dinner, I was resoundingly chastised for not spending time with the family (who were all living up to the as-yet-to-be-used term, couch potato).

Now: The first thing my kids do after school is grab a snack and do their homework. The "no screens" rule applies Monday morning through Friday afternoon: no video games, computer games, Tamogochi, Pixil Chicks or television before school or directly after school. One hour max after dinner of any or all of these combined. Friday night is family TV night with programming sanctioned by the parents and de-commercialized by Tivo. Saturday and Sunday, do what you want until 10am, then it's away from the screen and back into Real Life. Oh, and no Internet without a parent doing it for them. Period.

All this to introduce the idea of media literacy. I am agog at the legions of parents who simply do not acknowledge this as part of their job description. You can't blame them: my parents had no media literacy and I turned out just fine, right?

Wrong. The world has changed oh-so-much. Parents must provide food, clothing, shelter, love, and safety for their children. Media literacy is part of all of that, especially if what you wish to nurture is creativity and independence. And what parent doesn't want to nurture that?

Parents simply must have rules, and many do. We do. We have friends who are even more strict. Some folks don't even have television sets. But just as many don't have rules. Some don't care. And some do care but don't know where to start.

Here's a solution: UNESCO has published a free new media literacy guide as a downloadable PDF file. Check it out. The 185-page booklet, "Media Education: A Kit for Teachers, Students, Parents and Professionals" should get the ball rolling.

UNESCO has done a good job of outlining what it is that we are all facing in a media-heavy world. They start with the basics, the history and technology of media, and move from there.

What I found most helpful in the section set aside for parents were these objectives, namely:

Parental (self-) Training
Gathering Information on Programmes
Identifying Family Portraits on the Small Screen
Analyzing Images of Children on TV
Discussing Violence
Talking to Children About Advertising
Evaluating TV Education Styles
Supporting and Protesting

This, followed by some relevant discussion about how families and schools can interact to better understand and process media. The conclusion to this section is straightforward:

"What can and should be done to turn the relation with television and the media into an enriching experience is rather vast and depends on the active participation of all of us. It doesn't only depend up the media themselves or other entities."

Once you become aware of the goals and techniques of the mass media, you'll see the world in an entirely new way. You'll be better for it, and so will your kids. And everyone's creative lives will be better for it, as well.

3. Another soapbox, while I'm on the subject of media absorption:

The book-loving world is abuzz with news that libraries are starting to replace all their classics with popular works. If classics don't continue to be checked out, they'll be dumped and replaced with current titles, so goes the message from the Fairfax County Library System in Virginia (read the Washington Post article).

I'll keep my soapbox comments to a minimum here but urge you to go check out your favorite classics in your own library to ensure they earn their room and board; otherwise, someone else who might be looking for a new favorite classic might come away empty-handed. It would be a shame if that someone was you, or your child, or your grandchild, now, wouldn't it?

4. Finally, some housekeeping:

If you like this blog, nominate us for a Bloggie. Nuff said.

RE: Thievery of ideas: con or compliment?

Recently I ran across a delicious recipe in one of the major food magazines: a vegetarian-friendly corn-stuffed chili pepper. It was a recipe so well-tuned to my palate that, in fact, it might have been one of my own creations from back in the days when I developed recipes for the food letter, American Harvest.

I think, in fact, it was. I used to send copies of my food letter to that very food magazine back in the mid 1990s, hoping they would shine their spotlight on American Harvest and send me tons of new subscribers. (They never did, but I got one column inch in the food section of The New York Times.)

Now, I don't think I'm such a brilliant culinary genius that I could concoct something that has never been made before. And corn-stuffed chilis are nothing all that new. I essentially took a favorite dish of my own—chiles rellenos—and made it without the eggs for an article in American Harvest, which proferred a meatless, pro-whole foods theme.

The recipe I found in the major food magazine was exactly the same as mine in its ingredients, right down to the cotija cheese in my recipe. Only now are we able to find cotija cheese in the ingredients list for recipes in major food magazines. It's one of those supposedly hard-to-find products that usually requires a special editor's note.

The method of preparation was the same, in essence, though worded differently. The serving size? Same.

How does one react to this?

Okay, from my last post you know I like to share creative efforts in the name of making the world a better place. And I don't mind sharing my own recipes. I don't even mind if a friend of mine or a subscriber to the now-defunct American Harvest makes the recipe and doesn't credit me. It wasn't about me, making that recipe. It was about making a meatless relleno for my readers.

But on the other hand… might the major food magazine simply have lifted the recipe, thinking a/I would never notice or, even worse, b/I would not have the resources to sue or prove copyright infringement?

It's hard to prove copyright infringement on recipes after all. The unspoken rule of the industry is this: make 3+ big changes to a recipe and it becomes yours. Big changes include substantial alterations of key ingredients, use of altogether different preparation methods, the addition or subtraction of ingredients.

On the other hand, there are ethical lines to be drawn. You can't really double a recipe and call it your own. You can't use its text word for word. You can't just eliminate the salt and pepper and call it good. By substituting savoy cabbage for bok choy, are you really making the recipe your own? Be honest.

Anyway, should I mind that a major food magazine might have used my recipe without permission? I only mind that they didn't ask permission, I suppose. I would have asked them to give me credit. No need to talk greenbacks here. A byline would have been just peachy. Otherwise, I'm rather flattered. Who wouldn't be?

Though I'm not surprised. It is, after all, a good recipe.

I'm curious: What would you do?

Recipe forthcoming

TIME didn't get it quite right

Now that we've got that Resolutions business off our desks (a GOOD thing which can nonetheless move swiftly into navel-gazing territory, if we're not careful), it's time we creatives started mixing up a collective batch of problem-solving whup-ass.

To wit:

The best way to be ready for the future is to invent it.
—John Sculley

The most effective people in the new century will be those who understand and thrive in a world of chaos. They do not believe the world is actually "chaotic" because the old laws of cause-and-effect still apply. You still get results based on intelligent action and focused effort. But they understand we live in a world that "seems" chaotic and they thrive on it.
—Dr. Philip E. Humbert

Are you 21st Century Capable?
—Larry Quick

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
—Albert Einstein

The last few years in the US have been enclosed in a steadily shrinking, lightproof and soundproof box of culture paralyzed by fear. Of the government. Of "evil." Of differences. Of technology. Of corporations. Of the Other.

Behold 2006, for in this year, that very fear seemed to have trickled out of the box. In fact, in retrospect, we may very well wish to christen the year 2006 Our Year of Leaks.

Something is oozing out of our collective consciousness. It leaked out at election time. It's been leaking out in popular films, theater and literature in the form of magical realism. The transient nature of Bush appointees and re-appointees might be thought of as a case of dry rot in progress. Heck, evidence of leaks on the web even impressed the folks at Time magazine, who assigned You the Person of the Year.

Though really, it's not you, or you over there, or even you back by the bookshelf. It's Us.

For all the doomsayers' predictions about a chaotic 21st century, I can't say that I'm pessimistic about the future. I think it's because I'm a creative person. And there are plenty more where I came from, a hopeful, amped-up legion of chaos feeders who live to mold bad energy into good bread, great art and grand movements.

Creative people don't see the world in such adversarial ways. There are the easy challenges and the hard ones. There are always going to be bad things that will happen to good people, while on the other side of the planet, miracles will continue to spring from the unexpected.

And what about chaos, anyway? Chaos begat feminism. Chaos begat the civil rights movement. Isn't the metaphor of the diamond pressured from a lump of coal illustration enough?

Creative people know how to use energy (good, bad, ugly, or just plain Jane) to produce and to be productive. Materially. Spiritually. Culturally. Intellectually. We've all got a jar of chaos in our cupboards just waiting to be thrown into the pot with the rest of the leftovers.

So let's get crackin', folks. There are plenty of us packing creative muscle, and the world outside the box has a bazillion groovy Sudoku-like problems to ace. Let's not allow the execution of Saddam Hussein last weekend be the only means to an end out there.

We can do better, but only as long as we think in terms of Us and not you.

January 1 advice for writers who want a productive year

From Snopes Urban Legends Reference Pages

"Make sure to do—and be successful at—something related to your work on the first day of the year, even if you don't go near your place of employment that day. Limit your activity to a token amount, though, because to engage in a serious work project on that day is very unlucky."