Microfinance and Indie Writers

Food for thought…

John Walters

I pay my bills by ghostwriting Internet articles. This morning while my youngest son prepared for school I was doing some preliminary research for my first article of the day. It concerned the microcredit revolution begun in Bangladesh by Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank, and how microcredit is now being implemented in America to help low-income entrepreneurs start or continue their businesses.

I read a few articles, and then I took a break to walk my son partway to school.  I don’t really have to do it; the school is close and he is well able to go the distance alone, but we enjoy the walk together in the morning.  It was beautiful outside.  The air still held a hint of coolness but the sun was warming things up.  Birds were singing and the colors of the early summer grass, trees, and flowers were sharp and clear.  My son turned…

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Huxley vs. Orwell: The Webcomic

An interpretation…

Biblioklept

Stuart McMillen’s webcomic adapts (and updates) Postman’s famous book-length essay, Amusing Ourselves to Death, which argues that Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future in Brave New World was ultimately more accurate than the one proposed by George Orwell in 1984. (Via).

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sunset 4 jun…

Pàdruig's Woven Words

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Meanwhile, 300 years ago…

Having to some extent shaken itself free from the cramping influences of monopolies and State interference, the output of the English printing press at the commencement of the eighteenth century had almost doubled that of thirty or forty years before, and presses were now at work in various parts of the kingdom…

p229, A Short History of English Printing 1476 -1898, Henry R Plomer 1900

Oblique Strategies…

A neat contemporary execution of an idea dating from 1975 which is designed to help when ideas cease to flow…

http://www.oblicard.com

Formatting Poetry and Lyrics for the Kindle

May be useful…

LiberWriter - Friendly, Easy Kindle Publishing

In many cases, people get worried about the formatting of their Kindle books when they shouldn’t be: it’s best to keep it simple and let people focus on your writing.  The default format provided by the device is something Amazon has tested with numerous people in order to make the default ‘just right’.  Of course, there are technical details like a table of contents and navigation that are trickier, and do merit a bit of attention (LiberWriter makes them very easy, though).

However, poetry and lyrics don’t work very well unless they’re laid out with the line breaks in the right place, and visually distinct from the rest of the text.  You may also want to write an attribution at the bottom, which should also stand out.  Here’s how to quickly and easily format a poem or song lyrics in LiberWriter, as well as the generated HTML, for those…

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Virtual St Kilda

A slightly different example of digital storytelling…

Island Voices - Guthan nan Eilean

The Virtual St Kilda exhibition is up and running at Taigh Chearsabhagh , and the “mystery voice” is now revealed as that of regular Island Voices contributor, Archie Campbell , who also prepared the Gaelic version of the bilingual introduction. The project is headed up by the St Andrews University Open Virtual Worlds research group, working closely with local groups in Uist.

The exhibition gives you hands-on interaction, via an Xbox controller, with a digital re-creation of the St Kilda of the 1880s. You can walk around Village Bay (or fly over it!), exploring inside and outside various buildings. Clicking on various objects will take you to additional information, and the project is further enhanced by additional video work with island children offering imaginative interpretations of scenes and stories, ably facilitated by Mary Morrison – to whom Island Voices followers need no further introduction…

The film below was edited together…

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pabaigh/pabbay…

Another of my ‘eyePoems’…

Pàdruig's Woven Words

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eBooks and the expansion of self-publishing…

 

In a piece, Self Publishing Is Going to Just Get Bigger, Embrace It, on his ‘Brave New World‘ blog, Martyn Daniels explores the expansion of the market for eBooks:

“The world has changed and the true democratisation of creativity is upon us and this has been enabled by the internet and means that we can all write, make videos, take pictures, create games and make music. Forget the quality issue the fact is that this explosion of material is changing the way we now create, develop, market and value stuff. This genie is not going back in the lamp and we now have to realise that there will be more not less and that new consumer values will change all and that the creator rewards will be different.”

The true extent of this ‘democratisation of creativity’ is clearly open to debate, but new forms of relationship between creator and consumer are inevitable and should be embraced and explored…

 

 

Just Imagine: Poetry and Aesthetic Embodiment

“Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous material; instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings.”