Writing

Making Connections by Making Art and Making Art that Makes Connections

Most of the creatives I know instinctively want an audience. When they think about why, the immediate answers of “someone who likes my work” or “someone who buys my stuff” are natural. I mean, what’s not to like about emotional and financial validation? Bring forth the audience! But building an audience is hard. In fact, it’s something of a slog — a seemingly Sisyphean slog (which I’m experiencing first-hand as I try and build an audience for…

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Writing

The Ever-Elusive Audience

We officially launched Jabberwocky Audio Theater on the broadcast airwaves yesterday. It was exciting. It took a lot of work to get to this point — and really, the main point of the work was to share these stories with people. But, as with all creative endeavors –heck, with any endeavors that depend on public reaction to thrive– the enduring question is: will enough people be interested… enough? And that multi-faceted question is important: because we…

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Writing

Aka, Keep on Swimming

My recent project, Jabberwocky Audio Theater, is not a recent development. I’ve been working on it in one form or another since 2007. When you work on something that long that means there’s definitely breaks when you’re not working on it… and within those breaks and at those moments of starting or stopping, your doubts about continuing happily pay a visit. In one of the blogs I perpetually read, Mark Evanier has a response to…

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Writing

10 More Motivation Levers for Your Writing

Hey, it’s been awhile since I’ve done a “Motivation Monday,” so it seemed like Big Bill’s birthday was as good a day as any to get back to it. I’d caught Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2009 TED talk on writing and motivation (the video is 20 minutes, and this link also has a transcript), so when I saw an Amazon article ad for her “10 Tips for Writers,” (as compiled by Cynthia Shannon), I figured it was…

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Various and Sundry

Ikigai and What to Do Today (and Today and Today)

New years, like birthdays, are popular times to look at the year ahead and take stock at the year past, and I certainly join in as well. One topic that’s come up with several friends and acquaintances both online and off for the past few weeks has been job satisfaction as well as what to do with one’s life. My current main breadwinning gig, project and program management, has nothing to do with what I…

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Writing

Writing (and writing and writing) for the Sake of Writing

I started this site a little over two years ago — in part to just get in the habit of regularly writing and putting said writing into the world. One of the blogs I habitually read, Mark Evanier’s “News from ME,” reached its 25,000th blog post earlier this month. He decided to mark the occasion with an introspective post about why he writes the blog. At my current rate of posting, I won’t get to 25,000 posts for another eight…

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Producing Raves

You Don’t Know How Good Every Painting Is Until They’re Gone

They say all good things come to an end. In the case of podcasts and online video series, I suppose you don’t know how good a thing is until it’s gone. So it was with some sadness that I took the time to read the postmortem by Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou explaining how their YouTube series, Every Frame a Painting had come to an end. A friend and fellow fan of the series sent the essay to me and…

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Acting Writing

Monday Motivation: You Doing You Creatively

I am overdue in continuing the “Monday Motivation” posts, so I thought it’d be an opportune time to note that sometimes it’s good to just do what you’re doing and keep on doing it. Especially for those of you in the middle of the slog that is NaNoWriMo: just keep truckin’. Don’t edit, write! As “they” say, the first draft is always garbage anyway and editing is another month. One thing I thought of in…

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