Since Contentpalooza kicks off tomorrow (or at midnight, actually), I thought I’d round up some resources that will help you come up with ideas for your own content creation efforts. Warning! Procrastination has many guises. Don’t get so sidetracked by researching brainstorming techniques that you don’t write. If your goal is 50,000 words, you want to write:…
We’re 10 days away from Contentpalooza On November 1, I’m kicking off a personal challenge of writing 50,000 words of content in 30 days, in parallel with NaNoWriMo. I plan to write a year’s worth of blog posts (52 at about 500 words each is 26,000 words) plus a manifesto, a workbook, an eBook draft, guest…
Writing has taken over the world, have you noticed? It’s everywhere, and until we evolve a more pictorial means of communication than language (and I think we will…in like 500 years) writing is the cornerstone of our communication. What is world-changing writing? To me, world-changing writing isn’t just for revolutionaries, dissidents and rabble-rousers. Writing so…
I have approximately three weeks to pull together 30,000 words of an ebook I’m writing for the very successful Digital Photography School blog. I’ve known this project was coming for the better part of a year, but I found out the exact production schedule just after returning from LiftOff and a week before heading home…
200 pages later It’s an odd feeling, to feel utterly exhausted and yet recharged by such an intensive creative effort as NaNoWriMo (if you don’t know what that is, click here). I imagine it’s the same bittersweet mix of finishing a marathon — spent, but thrilled with the accomplishment. NaNo gave me many gifts, only…
I’m over 10,000 words into writing my book, and I hate it. It’s day 4 of the quest for 50,000 words. Uh oh. I realize that this is the first of many sticking points that will separate the women from the girls. This is the one time that stickiness is not a good thing. I…
Confusion Do you know what you want to say? Do you know which problem you’re trying to solve? Here’s the paradox of writing: we often figure out what we’re saying by writing. Though some people process better visually, auditorily or kinesthetically, we all need to process. It’s the old saying “the path is made by…
In the late 19th century, a German physiologist named Herman Helmholtz began to describe distinct phases to humankind’s creative acts. Why this became the work of a physiologist I would love to know, but nonetheless he described three distinct stages and named them saturation, incubation and illumination. As the 20th century progressed, other researchers and…
It’s time to write it. As Thomas Edison so famously said, genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Well, don’t feel like you need to be a genius to write an eBook and I would give inspiration more credit (at least 20%). The truth remains that you can only judge the merits of an idea…
Restaurants are very hierarchical places. There is the front of the house, which is the domain of the maître d’ and his waiters. The back of house is the kitchen, ruled by the Chef. Roles are very clearly defined. Your eBook is like a tasty entrée, and you will play three roles in its creation:…