Poetics Serendipity

7:55 a.m. — Atlanta

listening to Lisa Loeb singing Love is a Rose

Hello, everyone. I hope all is well with you. Should you need a few minutes of escape, or a different focus before going back to what you were doing before I distracted you, we have a diversity of places in our grab bag to go.

1] The first diversion is for all of us who are lousy sleepers: How Interrupting Your Sleep Can Silence Your Doubts and Boost Your Creativity, by Brian Cormack Carr. The title may be long but we are left in no doubt of Carr’s thesis.What I found most interesting is that Carr says he was unable to carry out the exercise he describes for more than four days (rather than the two weeks called for). Even so, he saw the benefits.

The web site on which this appears, Lateral Action, is one that teaches how to make creativity work with and for entrepreneurship. I often find that its articles, with a little adaptation, work for me and my writing. The site’s curator, Mark McGuiness, is focused on productivity, and so are all of us, even if it’s a single piece of writing. Give the article a read. You can skim parts, but you’ll find some interesting points to take with you.

2] Productivity and Content Curation for the Insanely Busy Blogger — now there’s a mouthful. Again, we have the author’s thesis in the title. We have had articles from Stan and his site, Pushing Social, a few times over the years. His focus is marketing and productivity. There’s that word again. Productivity. I have learned a lot from Stan and found many useful articles for my own life of writing. This particular article is full of toys. Stan lists and gives links to all the online tools he uses. Do you like to be organised? You’ll love some of these. Do you wish you were organised? You’ll also love some of these. If nothing else the invitation is to play with web tools. Always a guaranteed way to procrastinate ;-).

Stan has gotten fancy with his website [I knew it when it was a simple thing] so there will be a couple of slide outs/pop-ups from Stan. I think there were three before I was left alone to read the piece. Going in knowing that I hope lessens the irritation with those things.

3] The final piece is short, a piece from a longer piece, Naomi Shihab Nye on inspiration. A mere three and some minutes of listening.

Go investigate. I have a cento to deconstruct for Miz Quickly. Come to think of it, so do several of you. You say you haven’t started and what’s it about? Here are yesterday’s instructions. You can catch up easily. I shall see you tomorrow for prompt sites; Tuesday for a prompt; and next Thursday for, yep you guessed it, links.

Happy writing, all.