Category: Writing

Beauty in Art is the Reverence of God

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I’ll try to give my broadest, most robust theory behind beauty in art: Beauty in art is the iteration of God’s creation. Yes, this is Platonic. When a painter paints a portrait of a beautiful woman, he is iterating God’s creation directly. If he is painting a woman that is born of his own imagination, he is painting an iteration of the concept of female beauty, which is revealed through God’s creation. This extends to music. Beautiful music is a display of the perfect mathematics that underly God’s creation – an ordering of pitches over time according to mathematical relationships.…

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Family – Align Your Priorities for Creative Output, part 4

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Family One of the most prolific composers of the Baroque period, Johann Sebastian Bach, had a total of 24 children across two marriages while being the music director at five churches at once. I bring this up because our society is full of messages that a fulfilling career and family are at odds with one another, when they aren’t. I’ve known musicians who tour extensively, all over the world, and who still have families. Active military personnel, who are often deployed for long stretches of time, still have families. If your own family is something you really want in your…

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Money – Align Your Priorities for Creative Output, part 3

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Picking it up from yesterday: Let’s take a look at some of these life obligations and what they mean for somebody who has a desire for high creative output. 1. Money Personal finances, for most people, are something that can only be ignored at perilous risk. We live in a world where we cannot provide for all of our needs, so we must earn money to pay for most of what we consume. Even a stay-at-home parent has to carefully manage a budget to ensure the needs of the family are met, even if the duty of earning the income…

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Obligations and Focus – Align Your Priorities for Creative Output, part 2

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Picking it up from yesterday: Obligations and Focus When it comes to ordering your priorities for creative output, or even just life in general, I find it helpful to consider what things are obligatory, or unavoidable if you want to maintain your health, sanity, happiness, and integrity. These obligations will change according to where you are in life. For most people they break down into: Money Family Health Creativity and Purposeful activities Leisure and Hobbies Social time Life/household Maintenance You can’t really avoid any of these totally. You have to have money to live. You have to take out the…

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The Attention Economy and Alternative Publishing

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Great thread here to spark this article: I sell my books a variety of ways – Amazon, all other alternative direct sales, and through patronage on subscribestar. The problem with building alternative platforms or alternative methods of artist support is not, and has never been, the difficulty of actually programming or organizing such a venture. The problem has always been attention. Building alternatives to Amazon to sell your books is largely putting the cart before the horse. In fact, it is more like building a cart while the horse is still being trained in Arabia. Also, there are dozens of…

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Align Your Priorities for Creative Output

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Life is full of demands. Life is full of obligations. Life is full of temptations. Life is often too full of things that each of us wishes to do, and the time during the day is too short to get it all done. The speed of modern life doesn’t help, and it is all too easy to find oneself caught up in the cacophony of urban activity and feel completely drained every day. This is the reality of limited time and unlimited wants. When it comes to figuring out how all of it goes together, I have found that priorities…

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10 Ways to Make Your Protagonist Likable

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I’ve cautioned in the past regarding making a protagonist in a story a “Mary Sue” type of character. In short, you don’t want to make a character that lives out your own power fantasies and to whom the plot offers little resistance to the character’s overwhelming power. It’s good to avoid characters like this, but sometimes writers tend to go too far in the opposite direction, creating wimpy, base, or unlikeable characters that the audience doesn’t really care about. In order to avoid having a character feel too super-powered, they instead make them weak or detestable. This is not wise;…

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Romance Writers Implode

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Corporate cancer has afflicted the romance writers: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/01/08/romance-writers-america-cancels-awards-program-writer-racism-controversy/ The saga continues. This time, the entire organization has folded back on itself, much like something that is frequently described in the tomes of the membership. This won’t end well, of course, but we must also ponder: What exactly is the point of a professional membership organization like the Romance Writers of America, anyway? Is it a trade union? If so, it’s a shambling corpse in the newpub landscape. Is it for author support? Clearly the constant harassment and infighting doesn’t serve that purpose. They cancelled their awards, so they are clearly…

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On Being Prolific

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What does being prolific actually mean? Usually, it means that someone is outputting a great deal of something: a prolific writer, a prolific musician, a prolific painter, etc. I’m a bit different, though, in that I tend to split my productivity among several pursuits: writing books, writing blog content, recording informative (and hopefully somewhat entertaining) videos, recording music, and raising children. Yes, we often do not think of raising children as part of productivity, but it certainly is. Your progeny is in many ways your biggest legacy, and is also one of the biggest contributions you can make to your…

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Social Proof

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“Social Proof” is something you NEED to become familiar with. It’s essential if you are going to be doing any kind of marketing. What is social proof? Basically, it’s this: Other people think this, therefore it is likely to be true. If you are thinking straight away that this is a logical fallacy, just hold your objections. I’ll explain how social proof is different than an appeal to popularity. Social proof is a very fast method of judging initial likelihood of truth – A filter, more than “proof” in the logical sense. This is in the realm of induction, obviously.…

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