My Writing Life By Olivander

Creative Challenges are great for shaking up the routine, forcing you to be creative every day or every week, and flexing those imagination muscles.

What is a creative challenge?

National Novel Writer’s Month is probably the most ambitious and famous creative challenge: write a novel in a month (November). The idea is to challenge yourself to create something and to silence the inner critic by putting a time-limit on the project. NaNoWriMo is fantastically popular for such an ambitious project (some authors have even turned their ‘crappy first drafts’ into published novels). But extreme novel-writing isn’t for everyone.

Other creative challenge stipulate that you create every day for a year, or on a certain day of the week or the month. Maybe you share it, maybe it’s private. It might involve public accountability (posting online) or it could work on the honour system. Sometimes there are forums, sometimes events, and sometimes it’s just something you commit to.

Tips for Taking Part

• Decide on your own version of the rules before you start – if you miss a day of a monthly challenge, can you forgive yourself? Do you have to make it up? Do you quit?
• Revise your rules as you go along – these challenges are meant to help you foster creativity, not become a chore. If, half way through, you realise it’s not working, or you’ve already got what you need, you can change your rules or drop out. If you need to be more strict, make more strict rules.
• Do connect with other people taking part – they can inspire you, keep you honest, and cure some of the isolation artists often feel
• Don’t get sucked into too much online chatter – the point of this creative challenge is to free you to create more, not find another place you can waste time
• Make it a priority – most of these challenges take commitment for a small amount of time. (NaNoWriMo takes up a lot of time but only for a month. Project 365 commits you to a daily creative act for a year, but it can be as little as a few seconds a day.) Make the most of the challenge by making it a priority. You might have to drop something else during the challenge. (That’s why it’s called a challenge). If you have to skip your daily Simpsons rerun to free up half and hour for creativity, is that too high a price?

Here are a few creative challenges, but please comment with details of others you have heard about.

For Writers

100 Words.net
www.100words.com/about.php

One of my first and favourite creative challenge sites. Write 100 words a day for a month. No more, no less. It is surprisingly challenging, doesn’t take up great wodges of time, and still keeps you on the look out for inspiration every day.

National Novel Writing Month
www.nanowrimo.org/

The big daddy of writing challenges: write a 50,000 words novel in November. Why November? Because the originators thought it was a good idea to do this in a month with a long weekend built in. (I might have voted for one with a holiday that didn’t have lots of social obligations – Memorial Day, perhaps, or President’s Day – but I guess they were young and unmarried at the time).

NaBloPoMo – National Blog Posting Month

http://nablopomo.ning.com/

Like NaNoWriMo, this challenges writers. This time it’s a blog post a day. You can join the network at ning.com or just post in your own blog. Each month has a theme and you can email the creator to be added to each month’s blog roll. I found some good blog friends by browsing the blogroll one month.

Script Frenzy
www.scriptfrenzy.org/eng/whatisscriptfrenzy

Write 100 pages of scripted material during April. This one has sponsors and prizes.

Writers’ Weekly Quarterly 24 hr Short Story Contest

http://www.writersweekly.com/misc/contest.php

Write a short story on a given topic in 24 hrs. This contest has a $5 (US) entry fee and takes place every quarter. First prize is $300. Limited to 500 participants and it usually fills up. The next one is April 24, 2010.

For Visual Artists

Illustration Friday

http://www.illustrationfriday.com/index.php

This was probably the first creative challenge I was aware of online, and I’d guess it has been running for at least a decade. They provide a weekly word/theme, you illustrate and send them a thumbnail and a link to your illustration. There are forums and interviews and lots of great art to look at.

Project 365

http://365project.org/

Take a picture every day. Photography site Photojojo has this article to help.

A Photo A Day
http://www.aphotoaday.org/

This one is actually a mailing list and a blog, with a picture chosen by the editors every day, but you can submit yours and keep your fingers crossed.

Art Every Day

http://creativeeveryday.com/art-every-day-month

Inspired by NaNoWriMo, Leah Piken Kolidas decided to declare November Art Every Day month for artists. She has a nice Rules (That Were Made To Be Broken) section, which appeals to me. Join her!

For Musicians

The RPM Challenge -Record an album in 28 days, just because you can.
www.rpmchallenge.com/content/view/844/1/

(Write and) record an album of original music in February. 10 tracks or 35 minutes of music. The creators say (and I agree) “Don’t wait for inspiration – taking action puts you in a position to get inspired… February will come and go whether you’ve joined in or not, but do you really want to be left out? ”

General Creativity

The “Create Every Day” Challenge

http://creativeeveryday.com/creative-every-day-challenge

Choose your creative outlet, use (or ignore) the monthly theme, browse the work of other participants, listed in the sidebar. From the site: “This is a low pressure challenge, with the idea of bringing more creativity into our lives. I will not be the creativity police. I hope that we can all find ways, simple and grand to express our creative selves. Have fun with it!”

Related posts:

1. Creative Challenges
2. Working Writers – Scalzi and The Big Idea
3. On The Other Hand…

My Better Breakfast quest continues. Mr Kellog may have had a point (we do need more fiber in our diets) but his cereals just don’t cut it as a morning meal for me. The carbs burn off and leave me hungry. The sugar makes me sluggish. I need protein! I need ‘no hunger’ breakfast recipes. I also need to lose weight. So here’s my latest Better Breakfast Recipe:

Eggs make a good breakfast food: they are quick-cooking, protein-packed and satisfying. But I get really, really sick of the taste of eggs.
So I came up with this scrambled egg recipe. You’d barely know there were any eggs involved, but you get 1-2 servings of veggies and all the protein you can handle before noon!

INGREDIENTS

1 tbsp butter (you can use a low fat alternative if you like, but I’m using a little butter. It’s natural and tastes good and satisfies my body’s need for a little fat)

1 egg, scrambled or two egg whites if you’re watching cholesterol/fat  (buy free-range eggs. They taste better, although that might just be the absence of guilt…)

Spash of milk

1/4 cup salsa (I use organic, medium or hot. Your taste may vary)

1 big handful of baby spinach, washed (if you don’t like spinach, throw in some other soft, quick-cooking veggie for added virtue)

1/2 cup black beans, rinsed (I used organic black soy beans which I bought by accident, and really liked)

A few shavings of Parmesan cheese  (because I love that umami taste. Use a potato peeler to shave a few thin slivers off the block)

METHOD

Heat your butter (or wimpy non-fat cooking spray) in your frying-pan/skillet of choice. I use a small, thin non-stick omlette pan. Medium heat, don’t let the butter burn.

Mix an egg with a splash of milk. Pour into pan. Allow to cook for a minute, until you can see that it’s starting to firm up at the edges.

Turn the heat up and stir like crazy until the egg is mostly cooked, but still looks kinda moist.

Toss in the spinach, stir until it starts to wilt.

Throw in the salsa and black beans, give it all a stir and allow to cook through.

Serve on a nice side plate, with shavings of Parmesan arranged artfully on top. Get yourself a cloth napkin and some water in a crystal wine glass.

Sit down and enjoy.

TIME

(Prep: 2 mins; cook: 3 mins; eat: 2-3 mins) 8 minutes

GOOD STUFF

Protein from eggs, cheese and beans, 1-2 servings of veggies with associated fiber, vegetarian (though no vegan, obviously), small portion, enough fat to tell your body to stop whining for it.

WW Points: 6ish

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2. Fried Potatoes
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I bet you have books all over the place: by your bed, in the kids’ rooms, in boxes, in the basement…So how are you ever supposed to remember which of the Captain Underpants books your kid already has, or which Patricia Cornwell you’re missing?

[Skip to the bit where I tell you how to use your iPhone as a barcode scanner for your books]

LibraryThing.com is a wonderful solution. You can list all of your books here, with a mimumum of effort (enter the title or barcode number, even the author’s name, and up will pop a listing that you can click on. It lets you add as much or as little detail as you need: from tags and categories to the date you bought it to where you store it, to the dates you started and finished reading it!). You can add books as you go along and always have a record of every title in your house.

The problem with LibraryThing is that, unless your parents set up an account for you at birth and assiduously updated it, you’ve got a back-collection of books that needs to be added to your virtual library.

I have, periodically, lugged a pile of books to my computer and typed in their information but that takes a lot of time and gets a little dull. (Data entry is fine when someone’s paying me, but when it’s eating into my actual reading time, I get a little cranky).

LibraryThing sells a cuecat bacode reader for $15 but I’ve never managed to get around to getting one ¹, and anyway, it needs to be hooked up to your computer, so no cat-like roaming around the house nosing into corners with this feline.

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to just stroll around your house, pulling books out of nooks and crannies and scanning them right there and then?

Well today I discovered that I can use my iPhone as a scanner to upload my titles to LibraryThing.

How? How? Tell Me How!

1. Download the iPhone app Red Laser for $1.99. It uses the iPhone camera to take a picture of the barcode and stores the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) that is built into the barcode. [click here for detailed instructions]
2. Email the list of stored ISBNs to yourself then copy and paste them into the “paste text” box on the import page at Library Thing. [click here for a tutorial]
3. Sit back and watch as LT.com adds the books to your library (it puts them in a queue so there is some waiting, but hey. It also combs out duplicates as it goes through, and adds all the bibliographical data, so let’s not get too picky!)

Pros: Oh the time it saves! And it feeds my little techno-geek heart with glee to ‘bleep’ the barcodes and see them show up in my Library.

Cons: the barcode scanner can be a leeettle temperamental. I’m working on figuring out the best combination of lighting/distance/karma.

Related posts:

1. Using The Red Laser Barcode Scanner to Add Batches of Books To LibraryThing.com
2. Red Laser Barcode Scanner for iPhone
3. Calibre eBook Management Software

1. Buy the app, if you haven’t already. (It’s by Occipital, and it costs $1.99 in the app store.)

2. Run the app. Select the little lightning bolt in the bottom of the screen, to start the scanner.

3. Before you point the phone at anything, flip the little switch at the bottom of the screen that defaults to “multiple off” (this will make the process faster. If you do not do this, the phone will stop and try to look up every item as you scan it. What you really want to do is simply collect a list of barcode numbers. ‘Multiple on’ mode does that.)

4. Now grab your book and flip it to find the barcode. Turn it so that there is no glare or shadow on the barcode and hold the phone a few inches away from it. Position the arrows so that they bracket the main part of the barcode. They should turn green. Now hold still and the phone should chirp or beep or buzz, to let you know it has scanned it. A series of numbers will appear under the picture, which should correspond with the numbers under the barcode. ¹

5. Scan your next book. You’ll hear the beep/buzz (depending on whether or not your speaker is on) and the numbers under the picture will change.

6. Repeat this as often as you like (I would recommend doing a trial batch with four or five numbers the first time).

7. When you’re ready to stop, click “Done” on the bottom left of the screen. This takes you to a list of ’scanned items’.

8. Click on the ‘arrow in a box’ logo that means ’send me somewhere else’ on your iPhone. Then, email the list to yourself.  (this step is necessary becaus I could not find a way to simply copy and paste from this screen).

9. Open your email program, find the new email, and copy all the text from the body. DOn’t worry, Library Thing is smart enough to realise that the list numbers before each barcode number can be ignored.

10. Open LibraryThing.com’s upload page ². Paste your list into the “paste text” box, press ‘grab’. Go and do something more interesting while LibraryThing.com looks up all thei nformation and adds your books to your library. It puts them in a queue, so it’s not instantaneous, but they will be added. (It also allows you to add a batch of tags at this stage, so its not a bad idea to scan all your mysteries together and all your kids’ books in a batch).

Related posts:

1. Unleash Your Inner Librarian – LibraryThing? Meet Red Laser’s iPhone Barcode Scanner
2. Red Laser Barcode Scanner for iPhone
3. Customer Service Emails

You know when you’re walking around with a friend and you see a cool new toy? What do you do?

You point at it.

“What is that?” you say, quickly followed by, “And where can I get one?”

If your friend is the guru of all shopping gurus, she can probably tell you where to get it, who has the best price and exactly when it will go out of style.

If you friend is like me, she’ll go, “Umm, I do not know. Let’s look it up online.”

Until now the non-shopping-gurus among us have been limited to typing text into text boxes to do our online searching. But no longer.

If you have an iPhone and the Red Laser app, you can point your phone at the product’s barcode, scan it

and let the web tell you where you can get it and who has the best price.

(You may still need a fashion-forward friend to tell you if it’s trendy or lame, however.)

Is That All There Is?

Isn’t that enough?

But no, there are more applications than just comparison shopping.

My favorite way to use this is to scan barcodes from the back of all the books in my house and list them all at LibraryThing.com (no more wondering if I have this title or that, when I’m at the bookstore!)

The designers of Red Laser have provided developers with the tools to use their technology in any way that their dirty little minds can come up with, so I’m off to find out what else I could be doing with my new barcode obsession.

Ciao!

Related posts:

1. Unleash Your Inner Librarian – LibraryThing? Meet Red Laser’s iPhone Barcode Scanner
2. Using The Red Laser Barcode Scanner to Add Batches of Books To LibraryThing.com
3. You Know You're A Stay At Home Mom When…

I’m taking on one of the many, many myths about what will happen in the US if we have health care reform. Just one, but I think it’s one of the two or three most powerful and it says:

“If we change the system we’ll end up having to pay more.”

But how much do you know about how things work today?

Last month I had a sore throat. I went to my doctor. I paid my $25 co-pay. She swabbed my throat to check for strep, put the cotton swab into a little plastic dish, checked the reaction and said, nope, not strep. The sample did not go to a lab, no-one pored over it for hours analyzing it, and she told me that it often misses strep anyway, if it hasn’t developed sufficiently.

Three week later I got a notification that my insurance company was being billed over $70 for that test ¹.

Luckily I have extremely generous health coverage courtesy of the Evil Big Pharma company that pays the bills around here.

But What If I Didn’t Have Good Coverage?

Back when I was first in the US, I went to a new doctor who recommended a series of tests “to establish a baseline” or something like that. I’m a good, obedient girl who assumed that doctors do what’s best for their patients, so I held out my arm and let him drain some of my blood.

Then my insurance company declined to cover the costs.

I freaked out and called the doctor’s office in a panic ². They made sympathetic noises and sent me a revised bill for a token amount that was likely much closer to the true value of the doctor’s time and efforts. It was still an unwanted dent in the budget, but more than that, I was disturbed by the casual dishonesty of it.

If the test costs $30, why are you billing my insurance company $140?

As it turns out, this is standard practice.

The whole medical community (hospitals, specialists, general practitioners) understands that you have to get what you can out of the insurance companies when you can…and when you can’t, well, you still treat the patients who can’t afford you, using the cushion of money you built up by treating the ones who can.

You see what we’ve done here?

We’ve created a system where the only humane thing to do is commit insurance fraud.

Let’s be clear: I don’t mind subsidizing the less fortunate. I really, really don’t. I think it’s my duty and makes me more human, humane and decent. But I hate that it’s done dishonestly.

So what, if the insurance companies are getting scammed?

1, And I know I might sound hopelessly old-fashioned for saying this, but I believe this institutionalized fraud is bad for the soul, or, if you prefer, bad for the moral character of the people involved and the society as a whole. If you are training people to ignore the Jimminy Cricket voice that is chirping in their heads “You’re using someone else’s money to pay for this”, then you are training people to squash that voice in less altruistic moments too. Maybe I only use my cell phone for two business calls a month, but what the heck it’s easier just to claim the whole bill as a business expense on my taxes. It’s not that much money when you look at how much the government collects… Or, even worse: meh, everyone’s doing it.

2,  Less importantly but still significant: current practices drive up costs for everyone, making insurance more expensive for people who can afford it and inaccessible to people who don’t have a few hundred to spare for the premiums every month. Five years ago, my co-pay at the doctor’s office was $10. Last year it was $15. This year it’s $25. And my insurance company covers fewer services today than it did ten years ago.

And that’s without any reforms.

I can afford it now, but there was a time when that large a fee for every doctor’s visit (with a family of four it adds up) would have been a serious hardship.

If health care reform makes things ‘more expensive’, I say so what? It’s going to happen either way.

I’d rather it happen in a way that made health care more accessible to everyone.

I’d rather have less money to spend on plastic cr*p for my kids, and know that someone with a pre-existing condition who works two 30hr a week jobs ³ can actually go to their doctor when their condition flares up, and they won’t have to spend their off-hours researching the cheapest treatment options or the ways they can get into debt to cover the costs.

There’s a world of difference between ‘not being able to afford to go to Aspen twice this year because the government increased taxes on the fabulously wealthy to cover the health care costs of the stinkin’ poor⁴‘ and ‘not being able to sleep because I don’t know how I’m going to pay my child’s medical bills’.

Really.

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Why Twitter?

For me: mobility and cost and immediacy.

Most people seem to use computers to tweet but it was conceived as a way to share text messages with a bunch of friends easily.

My family are all in a different country and a different time zone. Posting little 140 character questions and updates that can be read by the whole family means that we can keep up-to-date even 3,000 miles away and 5 hours out of sync. And I don’t need to log on to my computer to do it.

My sister-in-law lived in yet another country for the first 8 years I was part of her family, and we spoke briefly at Christmas and maybe birthdays and it was always a little awkward because we knew so little about each other.

Since we’ve started tweeting, I know how she spends her day every day and now we chat about the things that matter to us. I’ve discovered she has a great sense of humour and, last month, when she had a car crash, I knew about it and was able to check that she was OK (and maybe offer a little support) while she was still waiting for the towtruck to arrive. My mother and sister-and-brother-in-law (not related except through my marriage) trade one-liners and discuss trends. My own sister, who went to the same University as my sister-in-law, has talked to her more through Twitter than they ever did at university (where they were aware of each other but never talked).

And sometimes it’s just fun. I was able to follow 2010 as it broke around the world.

And yes, if you’re a Facebook person, you can do something similar with status updates. But Facebook is designed to allow you to talk only to people you know or knew.

While you can protect your tweets, you can also allow anyone who wants to follow you. I’ve had conversations with business people and celebrities I would never have dreamed of emailing. I landed an interview with a corporate bigwig and Tweeter, simply by asking in 140 characters, and promising to be similarly brief in the interview. I bet you if I had emailed him, my email would have been lost, or ignored, or put aside until such time as he could compose a nice email reply. But tweets are immediate, brief and easily acted upon on a whim.

(I know, it seems crazy that email is now too formal, or too much work, but so we go)

What If I Don’t Want The World To Know When I’m Going To The Store, But I Do Want My Family To Know?

Why not keep separate accounts?

I have a personal account that only my family and friends can follow, where I tweet every day updates and comments. I also have a business profile that is open. Anyone can follow my tweets and I follow lots of celebrity business people as well as people in my own field and people I come across who are just plain entertaining or informative. I have a third profile that I use to follow celebrities and other people I don’t know. It’s my voyeuristic little guilty pleasure and I don’t check it all the time, nor do I want to, so I keep a separate account just for them.

Having all these different profiles allows me to be free with personal information in my protected account (“The house is empty: come on in, burglars!”), and professional when I want to be seen that way (in my business account) and goofy, with guilty pleasures (like the fact that I follow a bunch of sci-fi actors and occasionally send them gushy fan-girl comments that I’d rather keep my family and friends from mocking me about.)

As Simple or Complex As You Need It To Be

One of the great things about Twitter is its simplicity: 140 characters, delivered by phone or to a simply-designed webpage. But that’s also a downside: it’s not very powerful. You can’t filter the people you follow, or sort tweets, or hide tweets…but luckily there are lots of enterprising software boffins out there who can’t resist tweaking and making something more complex, to suit their own needs. As a result, there are tons of programs you can download (mostly free) that allow you to sort through your Tweets, or look up all mentions of a specific keyword, whatever you want to do. Tweetdeck is the acknowledged power-user program, I also like Tweetie for my iPhone and have used Twitterfox/Echofon as an add-on for my Firefox browser (although I had some problems with it forgetting my accounts). I’ve also used, and quite liked Seesmic on my computer, which is a lot like Tweetdeck, because it lets you see multiple accounts all at once.

There’s a lot more that you can do with Twitter (automated tweets, hashtags, link shorteners) but we’ll save that for another day and another post.

Why Not Buzz?

Well, I talked about Buzz on the day it came out and before it became clear how silly Google had been, compromising people’s privacy the way they did. I didn’t see the need for another social network (for me) but it may be that we all migrate to Buzz eventually. For now, I’ll keep Twittering.

Related posts:

1. Google Buzz, Huh?
2. Using The Red Laser Barcode Scanner to Add Batches of Books To LibraryThing.com

Buzz sprang into the world recently, a new service from Google that kind of replicates the status update part of Facebook and kind of replicates Twitter. Everyone is, a-buzz about Buzz (good naming, Google) because it’s from Google, even if they’re not sure what it does, yet.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t find Google does a very good job of explaining their new things and why I want them.

So What Is Buzz?

Harry McCracken over at PC World has a good analysis of what Buzz might be all about and what it might do.

Mashable has a good article about what Buzz actually is, and what all the bits of it do (their rating: “lots of potential, but not a ton of substance [yet]“).

Here is Google’s announcement

and here’s the video, which I didn’t find awfully helpful…

The ever-helpful Lifehacker has this hack for turning off the status updates Buzz pops into your mail interface without turning off Buzz altogether

The Buzz on “Buzz”

This punter(if you can get past all the advertising and find the article) thinks that Buzz is a ‘Real Twitter Killer’. Unlike me he thinks that Twitter has a lot of problems that need fixed (you can’t edit posts, you can’t post pictures, the 140 character limit). But…Those are some of the reasons I like Twitter so much!

This Self-Professed Google Fanboy compares Google’s auto-selecting-email-contacts-for-Buzz to being forced to socialise with his neighbours…in his apartment. Which kind of works…

@dblume says this will just lead to more fragmentation — something with which I cannot disagree. I can’t follow everyone everywhere. I’m going to choose my friends based on where they hang out. Which is sad. I’ve enjoyed the wider social contact with old friends and new that came from everyone being in one place.

And this guy sums up the whole thing nicely:

Related posts:

1. Why I Use Twitter
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My friend Susan and I are running our own private diet club, which involves picking the weight-loss method that works best for each of us and checking in every week with a weigh-in, analysis of the past week and plans for the next week.

We’ve just completed week 3 and it’s proving very helpful. Her progress has been faster than mine, but since she’s my friend and not a total stranger at a meeting I am happy for her, not jealous.

And, because I like this kind of thing, I’ve installed a little progress meter.

Weight lost

: 3 / 22 (12%) ¹

My progress has been, well, progressing. I feel good, I KNOW  I’m healthier, and I’m pleased that I’m making my life better for myself

I’ve set myself an initial goal of losing 22 lbs, which will get me out of the “fat girl” BMI category.

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1. Happy Holidaymaker
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It is so refreshing to rediscover life through the eyes of a child.

Especially my slightly twisted children.

Today’s Stories From The Boys’ Blog:

1. How Urban Legends Start

I’m listening to A and G playing with a big cardboard box.

They’re pretending to mail themselves to Disney World.

For now, A is sealing his brother inside the box.

“Tape me!” says G.

“With real tape or Duck Tape?” asks his brother.

“Duck Tape.”

“Noooo!” cries . “That’s the WORST kind of tape!”

“Why?” G’s voice was slightly muffled.

“Because it’s Duck Tape. They make it from real ducks. They kill them and turn them in to tape!”

—

While I was typing I heard A scurry off downstairs.

Then I head G explode out of the box and scurry after him crying,

“Nooo! I was joking about the tape!”

I guess he thought A was off to murder some ducks….

2. Watch Out, God’s Finger Is On The Button

After prayers tonight G (aged 4), betraying his guid Scots Presbyterian roots, said,

“Julie,” (he’s very informal), “I think God is remote-controlling us.”

Predestination? At 8:14 on a Friday night?

I didn’t feel like getting into a theological debate, but I fear the thousands of dollars we’re spending on a good Free-Will-And-All-That Catholic Education might be money down the drain.

Heavens!

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