In a recent podcast workshop, a social media strategist said, “Just because you build it doesn’t mean anyone will hear it.” Today I spent the morning writing a report on podcasting with that thought in mind. Here’s a summarized, abridged version of Erik Deckers’s list of questions to ask your social media expert:
Does your social media consultant avoid using Twitter?
Okay, the 30 poems in 30 days challenged hasn’t been completed yet and I found my next assignment (if I chose to accept it). Rachel Berger, a graphic designer in San Francisco, wrote short writings inspired by paint chips. Read some of her samples.
Somewhere around day ten or eleven I fell off schedule. A lot of distractions and stress hit me like one tsunami wave after another. Last night I caught up with a binge writing session at a local bookstore. While having lunch (if a bagel and coffee qualify as a lunch) this afternoon at a cafe, I read through what I wrote last night and discovered some emotionally raw lyrics. Some of it is so personal it is not accessible to a casual reader. A closer investigation of the poem sketches reveal a controlled form providing a vehicle for anger. Whereas a poetic rant is the literary equivalent to vomit or oil gushing from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, an angry poem attempts a focused avenue for venom much like a fire hose targets the base of a fire. Not all the poems composed last night are angry poems; only a couple. However, the angry poem sketches I composed shift from formal to informal dimeter (an example of dimeter is “The Robin” by Thomas Hardy or the use of dactylic dimeter in Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”). I wonder if editing the poems with longer lines, maybe like Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” or Ginsberg’s “Howl,” would change the tone dramatically.
This takes me back almost a decade. But this morning I had to scan an illustration. The only machine in the office with a scanner is an old beige Power Macintosh G3 minitower with Zip drive. Because the machine is an antique it doesn’t connect to the network. So I dug up an old 100 Mb Zip disc, scanned the illustration using Photoshop 6.0 (it took two scans because the image is larger than the 8″x10″ scanner bed), transferred the art files to Power Mac G4 minitower with Zip drive, stitched the two scans together using Photoshop CS, and emailed the art file to my MacBook Pro.
The question you may be asking right now is why all the trouble? Good question:
The scanner is so old it doesn’t have a USB connection.
Last week I received five direct mail envelopes from five different magazine publishers. Only two of those magazines have I actually had subscriptions (guess which ones). That means those two magazine publishers sell my name to other publications with similar demographic audiences.
This takes me back almost a decade. But this morning I had to scan an illustration. The only machine in the office with a scanner is an old beige… read more »
Bonhoeffer Biographer on Bonhoeffer Trent Gilliss, senior editor
A listener from Greenwich, Connecticut (who asked to go unnamed) picked up on Shane Claiborne’s reference to a German Protestant theologian who participated in a failed attempt to assassinate Adolph Hitler during World War II:
“And Dietrich Bonhoeffer who has been a good teacher for us on community, he says, ‘The person who’s in love with their vision of community will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community everywhere they go.’ And I think that that’s something that’s held us together is not just to fall in love with a movement or a revolution, but to try to live in radical ways and in simple ways.”
But, this speech by Metaxas at a Socrates in the City lecture on April 9, 2010, the 65th anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s death, serves as a great introduction to Bonhoeffer’s life. Heads up: the introduction is humorous but long; if you want to cut to the grist of the talk, start at the 14-minute mark.
If you’re stuck in a traditional media organization where executives thing Twitter is something birds do or look blankly at you when you suggest posting videos to Vimeo, then check out Mashable’s tips list.
1. Share Content
2. Curate Conversations
3. Engage Audiences
4. Promote Your Presence
5. Customize the Experience
6. Track Everything
You’ll find links to all sorts of social media tools and resources.
Then cut out the middle man. Apparently that is what Scott Kurtz, of the popular webcomic PvP. His reason for leaving Image Comics (notably the fourth largest comic publisher in America) and Diamond (the primary distributor of comics in the U. S.):
Sales through brick-and-mortar stores are declining and online sales are increasing…
Well, I could have told him that. Almost all the books I’ve helped authors publish have been released online exclusively.
Stepcase Lifehack posted some tips to improve your writing including: “Befriend a dictionary” and “Keep a little notebook for moments of inspiration” as well as seven other useful tips to… read more »
Stepcase Lifehack posted some tips to improve your writing including: “Befriend a dictionary” and “Keep a little notebook for moments of inspiration” as well as seven other useful tips to improve your writing. I personally enjoy the quotes from famous writers — especially the quote by Joseph Heller: “Every writer I know has trouble writing.”
As stated previously, Deborah offered a challenge to write 30 poems in 30 days. So far, I’ve been able to keep up with it in spite of a summertime cold and an urgent freelance job that evolved into a larger project than I anticipated. Still, the discipline of writing a poem a day, or at least a poem sketch a day, has proved to be rewarding in and of itself. Two benefits have come out of this exercise so far:
the generation of new material and
brain dumping stuff that’s been cluttering my mind.
At least one poem sketch so far helped articulate something I’ve been struggling with for a few months. Forcing myself to write at least once a day brought that struggle up from the subconscious and allowed me to form it into a personal poem. Somewhere in my reading I came across a poet, or writer, that said writing every day, even if it’s only for your own eyes, is good practice in writing content for others. My writing professor at the university encouraged students to write a novel for yourself first. Even if the novel is intended only for you, it is worth writing it. And sometimes it may find audience elsewhere.
Coffeehouse Junkie 
