Internationally Bestselling Quirky Children's Books; Adventurous Heroes Doing Good
We were live as we ventured into the strange and fascinating world of dark tourism. Spoiler: We didn’t get very far.
https://youtube.com/live/c5m-XWt4CN4
LINKS WE USED
https://www.dark-tourism.com/index.php/usa
SHOUT OUT
The sweet bit of music you here in the intro is by our awesome friend, Kaustubh Pandav.
It’s BE BRAVE FRIDAY!
Since I started the Bar Harbor Story, I’ve been getting up at 5 working on my own novels (5-7) and then doing paying work and the news blog throughout the day and sometimes into the night because town meetings are at night (7 to 5 or 7 or 11 if the town council goes long).
What does this mean?
It means I fall asleep really well at night. But it also means that I’ve been neglecting painting a bit and painting? It’s really fun. And it makes me feel good inside even when it’s terrible.
So this week, I’m making two commitments to myself to try to get a better balance (You can tell my birthday is coming, right?).
1. Paint for five minutes a day (even if it’s a little bit).
2. I started the Couch to 5K program again (much to Shaun‘s horror). I really love running. My overly flexible joints, however, hate me doing it.
And also, most importantly, I’m trying to remind myself to be a bit more brave thanks to a post of her great painting that Amy recently tagged me in. Thanks for that push, Amy.
This one I’ve been tweaking and tweaking and rethinking. But here is what it looks like today. Here is what I look like today, too: a person made up of a lot of disjointed strokes trying to create something cohesive.
I hope you all have a great Friday and weekend and stay safe and warm and well and get to choose brave rather than have it forced on you.
Xo
Carrie
My art shop is here and if you want to check out the news blog, it’s here, and if you want to check out my other blog (it’s a bit more personal as I try to figure out life and living with purpose and has week daily animal thoughts, that’s here). No pressure!
Almost every time that I go to a school visit and am asked questions or when I’m interviewed by newspapers, I get asked two things:
I don’t actually think of myself as having a ton of energy. Like right now, it’s 7:06 a.m. and I’ve been up since 5. I went to bed around 11. I’m a bit tired actually, and no, I don’t have any coffee or even tea in my system yet. I know! I know! You’re probably thinking what half of the people ask me in public events:
Just kidding—sort of.
This post isn’t actually about productivity or weirdness. It’s about ideas.
Chuck Wendig recently had a post about AI where he wrote about how so many of us think that ideas are the holy grail of writing and all creativity. People are always asking:
Ideas are cheap. They are the extras that die on the street while the superheroes battle above them. Ideas are often barely differentiated in the scene—just a mass of them crumpled by falling cars and buildings and laser blasts.
That’s the thing.
Writing and art isn’t necessarily about the ideas. Writing and art are about the craft that sculpts that idea into a story or an art piece or a song that connects to other humans on an emotional level.
Wendig writes on his blog,
“But again, the idea is a seed, that’s it. Ideas are certainly useful, but only so far. A good idea will not be saved by poor execution, but a bad idea can be saved by excellent execution. Even simple, pedestrian ideas can be made sublime in the hands of a powerful craftsman or artist. Not every idea needs to be revolutionary. Every idea needn’t be that original — I don’t mean to suggest the plagiarism is the way to go, I only mean in the general sense, it’s very difficult (and potentially impossible) to think of a truly original story idea that hasn’t in some form been told before. The originality in a narrative comes from you, the author, the artist. The originality comes out in the execution.”
That’s the magic of being a human and not being AI when you create art. The process is where the art becomes alive, where the story becomes real, where the unexpected (rather than the program) creates spark and light and joy and beauty.
AI can’t do that. At least not yet.
Part of that is about flow.
A long time ago—back in the 1980s—this guy Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was studying happiness. He gave people pagers. Remember this was in the 1980s. Then he and his research assistants would send the people messages at random times and ask how they were doing, feeling, what they were doing, etc. It sounds a bit like when your mom texts you, honestly.
And he discovered flow. People were happy when they were super engaged in the task they were doing. People weren’t happy when they were doing nothing. They were happy when they were involved in something. Playing soccer. Playing music. Creating art. Solving a problem.
Minds were blown.
When people were in the ‘flow,’ they forgot about time, space, all the other detritus in their lives. They were focused on the now, on what they were doing. What they were doing might be writing, sports, hanging out with other humans, art, and so on… But for them the involvement was so intense that they became engaged and absorbed into it and were happy.
That might happen if you’re a reader and into reading a great book.
That might happen if you’re a painter and created something spectacular on the canvas.
The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times . . . The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile” – (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).
Lincoln Michel writes on his blog,
“The unnecessary is most necessary part of art. Art is exactly the place to let your eye linger on what fascinates it. Art isn’t an SEO optimized app or a rubric for overworked teachers to grade five-paragraph essays. Art is exactly the space—perhaps the last space left—where we can indulge, explore, and expand ourselves. If we can’t be weird, extraneous, over-the-top, discursive, and hedonistic in our art, where can we be?”
So, as a writer, flow and process, the actual act of writing your story is far more important and interesting that the original idea. What it is that happens in our minds that makes those little epiphanies, the moments where we are swept up in the flow—in the act of creating—and our prefrontal cortexes are firing on all cylinders and heading into warp drive. That’s what’s interesting.
Ideas happen everywhere. Looking at other art. Reading a book. Living a life. But process and art and writing? That is where you turn the idea into something else—something that breathes in a way that AI can’t do yet or even in a way that other people can’t do yet because it requires putting in the work so that you can get those gorgeous, beautiful, holy-poop moments.
And those moments? They’re pretty addictive.
As Wendig writes, “It’s just idea, small-i. You’re not done when you have an idea. You’ve barely even begun. The wonder is in what comes after. The wonder is in the work.”
And that’s what I wish more people talked about, not idea generators or where the ideas come from initially, but how they are shaped and formed to create a story that carries people along to somewhere new and magical, to somewhere that they might create a new and magical story from ideas that were germinated in yours. How cool is that?
More about the 8 traits for flow.
First off, many apologies, because Shaun was super naughty this podcast.
There’s a belief that if you make 90-day goals, it super charges you.
We’re going to explain that. And we’re going to give it a try.
Plus, general weirdness. Come hang out for 20 minutes.
And remember when you make goals:
Good goal: Finish first draft of Weirdos of Bar Harbor by April 1.
Bad goal: write a book.
Go after your snacks. Be all about your goal. Do you. Don’t let other people neg your goal.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/netapp/2015/02/11/90-day-goals/?sh=5af3a5526260
https://apnews.com/article/caribbean-bahamas-b7de53a43d7ed762100527dae2596723
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! It’s taking a bit of a hiatus, but there are a ton of tips over there.
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
I used to be weirder.
I know! For some of you that’s hard to imagine, but the truth is that I just sort of let my freak flag show no matter what level of freak that currently is.
This, obviously, was a bad idea when I ran for the state legislature (and lost thankfully). It was strongly recommended that I take down my blog (it was LiveJournal to give you context) so that my weirdness would be hidden from the voters.
That didn’t happen. I kept the blog up.
Pretending to be someone different isn’t the way I work.
Take, for example, the fact that I post animal thoughts on weekdays on my social media and here.
I know sarcastic animal thoughts play much better. But that’s not me. So instead it’s like a weird hybrid of worry about other humans and imploring everyone to be okay.
In The Perks of Being a Weirdo, an article in The Atlantic written by Olga Khazan, she talks about how not fitting in can sometimes make you more creative. She also has a talk about it with Wisconsin Public Radio.
Denise Hill writes in LifeHack,
“Society has conditioned us to be conformist. When you are called weird instead of hearing an insult, you should understand that you have just been paid one of the highest compliments. You have just been told that you are unique, bold, daring, exceptional, authentic and that you are special. Weird people think differently and choose to respond to the world around them differently – they own their individuality. It takes courage to go against the grain and to choose a distinct path in life.”
Weird people, she says, are divergent thinkers and that’s okay.
Part of what makes you weird, what makes you different from society’s norm, is often what makes you powerful. Embracing your weirdness allows you to love your own self, to be authentic, to not be fake, to not live your life as a lie.
That’s all really good stuff.
It’s also made me wonder where my goofy, weirdness went. Obviously, I’m still not normal, but I pass for normal a lot more than I used to. And I miss the Weird Carrie. The Random Carrie. The Carrie Who Just Was Who She Was.
So, here’s my weird little video from that time in my life when I used to be even weirder. I’m working my way back there right now.
I hope you’ll embrace your weird, your strange, with me, too.
Being Insecure Sometimes Is Okay
Waking up at 5 a.m. when I’m a night owl
ANIMAL MATING RITUALS ARE WEIRD AND APPARENTLY LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED IS REALLY A LOT OF BS
If you’ve been hanging out with me this past week or so, you’ll have noticed that I’ve been talking about emotional interiority in writing characters for our novels or short stories. You may have repressed it all, that’s okay. I repress everything, too.
But in case you want to take a peek at the last few posts, here you go:
Showing Your Character’s Emotions
I continue all this today!
Mary Kole also has a checklist for developing character interiority, which is here:
· “What is your character doing right now (objective)? Why (motivation)? (The why is especially important.)
· What do they hope will happen?
· What do they worry will go wrong?
· How do they feel about themselves?
· How do they feel about their scene partner?
· How do they feel about their place in the plot in general?”
This is lovely, but the thing is that you don’t really want this for every single sentence of your story. Showing the character’s emotions and inner life is important in the beginning of the story. It’s important in a chapter of the story. It’s important in a scene usually. But it doesn’t have to be in every sentence.
Where is it most important?
It’s most important in the big moments and for the big emotions.
In the picture book world it often feels easy:
Jane was sad. What a bad day she had.
But as you move up through the age groups, emotions on the page become more and more complex. A character isn’t just lustful. They are afraid of their lust maybe? They are proud of it maybe? The emotions layer on.
Storm Writing School discusses the chain of interiority through the lens of the 2017 short story “Cat Person.”
And they create interiority as a chain of events.
1. Something stimulates a response.
2. The feelings associated with that response happen before the thought.
3. Chained interiority.
He writes that this fancy word is just:
“The stimulus for interiority is usually external but can sometimes be other interiority. That is, an external stimulus might lead to an emotion and/or a thought, which in turn leads to an emotion, which then leads to another thought.”
Robert Olen Butler says, “Moments of reference in our past come back to us in our consciousness, not as ideas or analyses about the past, but as little vivid bursts of waking dream; they come back as images, sense impressions”
When that happens it can branch into:
6. Implied and unstated interiority
7. Complex feelings.
8. Indirect interiority.
9. External reaction.
10. POV character judgements.
11. Seeming
So, in this chain some things will happen, usually in this pattern, right?
Let’s start with a random tale of a Piglet betrayed by a Pooh.
Pooh bear’s face was inside Owl’s honey pot. Piglet recoiled. That was his honey pot, full of sweet honey. Pooh had told him just an hour ago that he had the best honey and given him a hug by the big tree. Will they ever hug by the big tree again?
“Are you still seriously hungry?” Piglet asked.
“I’m a still seriously many things,” Pooh said, “although maybe not so seriously.”
Piglet laughed along with Pooh even though the honey globbing down the bear’s face made Piglet’s own tummy rumble in a very unpleasant way. Maybe now, he thought, Pooh would realize that life was about more than honey and honey pots; it was about friendship, but by being jealous was he maybe hurting Pooh, too? Was life about more than friendship?
Pooh took a step back and looked away. To have been caught with his head in Owl’s honey pot like that!
Pooh gave Owl the honey pot and waddled forward, arms open. “Oh, Piglet! I am so sorry. Your face is so sad making, all frown lines and tears. You must feel terrible!!”
He was apologizing and being all nice again. Piglet knew that Pooh felt bad for his betrayal; he could tell by the extra tremor in his obviously wobbling voice and how he seemed to be trying to shoo Owl away via a hand movement behind his broad, furry back.
Pooh’s arms wrapped around Piglet in a sticky hug and his belly was soft against Piglet’s face and it seemed—for just that moment—that maybe he could possibly stop eating other animals’ honey. Or maybe that was just Piglet’s own mad hope.
1 Something stimulates a response.
Pooh bear’s face was inside Owl’s honey pot
2. The feelings associated with that response happen before the thought.
Piglet recoiled.
3. Chained interiority.
That was his honey pot, full of sweet honey.
4. Memory.
Pooh had told him just an hour ago that he had the best honey and given him a hug by the big tree.
5. Future and imagination.
Will they ever hug by the big tree again?
6. Implied and unstated interiority
“Are you still seriously hungry?” Piglet asked.
“I’m still seriously many things,” Pooh said, “although maybe not so seriously.”
7. Complex feelings.
Piglet laughed along with Pooh even though the honey globbing down the bear’s face made Piglet’s own tummy rumble in a very unpleasant way. Maybe now, he thought, Pooh would realize that life was about more than honey and honey pots; it was about friendship, but by being jealous was he maybe hurting Pooh, too? Was life about more than friendship?
8. Indirect interiority.
Pooh took a step back and looked away. To have been caught with his head in Owl’s honey pot like that!
9. External reaction.
Pooh gave Owl the honey pot and waddled forward, arms open. “Oh, Piglet! I am so sorry. Your face is so sad making, all frown lines and tears. You must feel terrible!!”
10. POV character judgements.
He was apologizing and being all nice again. Piglet knew that Pooh felt bad for his betrayal; he could tell by the extra tremor in his obviously wobbling voice and how he seemed to be trying to shoo Owl away via a hand movement behind his broad, furry back.
11. Seeming
Pooh’s arms wrapped around Piglet in a sticky hug and his belly was soft against Piglet’s face and it seemed—for just that moment—that maybe he could possibly stop eating other animals’ honey. Or maybe that was just Piglet’s own mad hope.
And there you go! Interiority as a chain in action. If you check out the Storm Writing School link below, you can see some elaboration on those steps.
Happy writing! And say hi in the comments if you’re into it.
https://www.stormwritingschool.com/cat-person-interiority/
Yep. It’s Valentine’s Day so we are talking about how you need more than love to be happy and fulfilled. Or here, let’s rephrase it: It’s not necessarily love that makes you happy and fulfilled. And that’s what we talk about this podcast. Plus, giant pandas take each other hostage to court and giraffes have a lot of water sports.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
Loving each other is way more important than fighting over who is alpha or blaming each other. Also, hug people when they come home and wag your tail as much as possible.
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! It’s taking a bit of a hiatus, but there are a ton of tips over there.
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
A lot of people set goals or resolutions and not all of us complete them. This is especially true about resolutions where only about 9% achieve them.
Sometimes that’s about a fear of failure. It becomes such a big fear that it keeps us from moving forward.
You have to fail to succeed.
There’s a lot of belief out there that if you fail at something, that failure labels you, defines you.
This episode we talk about the strategy to get your goals and also about a six-year-old boy who hid in the basement and ordered $1,000 of Grubhub on his dad’s cell phone one night.
And also a woman who started breathing at a funeral home.
Don’t let anyone call you anything you don’t want to be called especially if they are calling you a failure. Go after your goals and don’t worry about the ridicule.
https://apnews.com/article/oddities-detroit-michigan-business-5ade1109c559a09d42190f3a2b7ead42
https://apnews.com/article/new-york-state-government-7caaefc9d212da3556e4c163a7a29f6c
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/28/tony-robbins-use-this-4-step-strategy-to-achieve-any-goal.html
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.
WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It’s pretty awesome.
AND we have a writing tips podcast called WRITE BETTER NOW! It’s taking a bit of a hiatus, but there are a ton of tips over there.
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
