The Mark Dykeman Web Niche

Just a note that I’ve started a new side blog, Rightsizing Me!, to document my experiences with Weight Watchers.  I’ve just rejoined and I thought that keeping a blog about my experiences would motivate me a bit.  Or embarrass me a few weeks from now.  Or both.

Other than that, things are OK at the moment.  I’m done obsessing about TV shows dealing with the dead or undead. Shrug. It’s entertainment.

It seems that each TV season, and the new shows that debut during that season, often follow genres that were popular in the previous season.  In recent years we’ve seen shows that attempt to piggyback on the popularity of shows like CSI, Lost, and Desparate Housewives.  SciFi and comic books have been popular influences as well.

This year one of the themes seems to be… death and what happens afterward.  Perhaps they’re trying to ride on the popularity of “The Ghost Whisperer” and those stories about what might happen after death.  This year you’ve got a prime time show about a vampire (undead) and a man who can bring the dead back to life temporarily.  In both shows, it appears that the main characters are drawn into impossible relationships that will torture them.  As melodramatic as this could be, there’s actually more of a hook here than in ”The Cleavage Whisperer”, whose protagonist, while she seems to care for the poor ghosts so much (and everyone else for that matter), has the solid support of a husband and friends (and her bra).  At least these other two shows have some capacity for real emotional agony, so to speak. 

OK, two new shows doesn’t make a theme or trend, but it does seem odd to me that we now have three shows where interaction with walking, talking dead is an integral part of the series.  Of course, the dead are a useful plot device for many popular series (see CSI, Bones, Six Feet Under, Cold Case, etc.), but I don’t think we’ve seen so many of them walking and talking since the days of Buffy and Angel.

Maybe it’s time for zombies to hit prime time.  The question is:  what products can you use zombies to help you sell?  Pop music, maybe?

Just a short note to comment on Netvibes :  I really like the interface so far.  It allows you to organize your feeds in multiple tabs and customize their appearance.  I found it a bit weird at first, but it’s really growing on me.

Note:  apparently this is a beta version called Coriander so I don’t know if the “final” product will be exactly the same or not.

I don’t tend to use the built-in or recommended feeds/links that you start off with, although they do have an interesting way to link to your Facebook page.

If you’re looking for something a bit different than a standard news aggregator, why not give Netvibes a try?

Blog Catalog users are joining together on Sept. 27, 2007 to protest against abuse in its many forms.

I stand among you, colleagues.  Let’s all do what we can to stop and prevent abuse!

I’ve been using Bloglines for about a month now, trying to compile a list of blogs and such that I want to track. I started getting fed up with Bloglines as there always seems to be a delay in getting updates.

I’ve just tried Netvibes and so far I’m liking the interface a lot, plus the Tabs functionality. It looked weird to me at first to be arranging the feeds in a three-column format with minimal descriptions, but I’m sure I can customize all of that. So far, so good.

I really, really liked Albion (sorry, no URL), but it has the disadvantage of being loaded on your PC, which is a slight pain if you have separate machines for work and play like I do. Plus I think that I heard that Albion is no longer supported.

Anyway, a tentative “thumbs up” to Netvibes!

Overall this is a nice little blogging platform, but I just ran into one of its limitations:  scripts.  From what I can tell, WP doesn’t allow scripting unless you follow some very strict rules.  Bah.  Limits my widgets, I must say.  No neato crap from BlogCatalog like recent reviewers etc.  I’m sure there are ways to get to my desired ends, I’ll just have to look harder.

In other news, I need to get better at planning.  Much better.  And better at organizing things, too.

Apparently tomorrow is some kind of global blogging event to protest against abuse (I think).  Good topic for tomorrow I guess.

OK, supposing that I would have to name my all-time favorite bands or musicians, here’s who I would have to list:

Crowded House, XTC, Jimi Hendrix, The Tragically Hip, Sloan, R.E.M., The Beatles, The Who, David Wilcox, Matthew Sweet, James Brown, AC/DC, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Neil Young, The Rolling Stones, The Steve Miller Band, Bryan Adams, Tenacious D, The Replacements

I used to be a real music fanatic, but I was born too soon to fully take advantage of the digital music age.  I was a teenager in the 1980’s, before downloading and iPods existed. 

I used to play my acoustic guitar and try to do horrible renditions of songs that really needed electric guitars.  I used to play the crappy old bass that I bought… unamplified, mainly because I didn’t own an amp.  I bought drumsticks and used to beat them on whatever I could… but I didn’t own any drums.

I played instruments in middle school, mainly flute and tenor saxophone.  I was getting pretty good at flute when I changed to t. sax.  I never got very good at the sax because I didn’t practice enough.  I finally quit band in grade 10 and gravitated to the guitar shortly thereafter.

I do own a digital music player.  It can probably hold about 80 songs, as it has less than 100 MB of memory.

I almost never use the darn thing.  Never think of it.

I’m not quite sure why I’m writing this post, other than the fact that I’ve been listening to “Don’t Dream It’s Over” about twelve times in a row now and it was either:

• write the post
• or scream.

But I do love that song.   Hauntingly beautiful, as they say.  A friend once had the sheet music for piano, which included the guitar chords.  I tried to learn the song, but I couldn’t quite get it to sound right.  Years later I discovered that the lads actually slowed down the instrument tracks, so it’s about half a tone flat and a bit sluggish compared to the way it was actually written.  Brilliant move, though, because the recorded version evokes a sense of melancholy and loss that would be lost without the techno-friggery.

Music is one of the purest expressions of emotion, from the anger of punk; the passion of opera; the happiness of… um… well, a few bands.  I’ve always found the electric guitar particularly adept at emoting.  Listen to Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland album sometime to really hear a guitar wail and cry.

It’s funny how the guitar-noodler became obsolete.  Was it Nirvana that finally put the nail in the coffin?  Or did musicians just get too lazy to shred?  Maybe it was the increasing use of electronic music, with the preponderance of rhythmic sounds, repetitive melodies, and throbbing bass, turning dance floors into zombification pits, that gradually pounded the “ee ee ee” of the 80’s guitar solo into nothingness.

I dunno.  I don’t miss the blow-dry headed, spandex-bound axe-wielder all that much… but I fear we’ll never hear another Jimi again.

“If I don’t see you again on this world, I’ll see you on the next one, and don’t be late…    DON’T BE LATE!”   Voodoo Chile (Slight Return), the Jimi Hendrix Experience

I’ve had the weekend to decide.  The new Digg just isn’t going to work for me.

I’ll be an occasional visitor at best.

So it goes.

How many times have we started into writing or creating something… anything really… and then stop short because we think, “Oh, why bother?  Someone must have already done this before?”

It’s been said that there are a finite number of plots used in fiction.  It’s also been said that there are no new ideas, period, and that we are just reusing old ones over and over again.  There is nothing new under the sun, including this very sentence.

Popular entertainment recycles creations on a regular basis, especially the ones that make money.  Movie sequels are a favorite attempt to recapture the magic of a previous success involving similar characters and situations (e.g. Star Wars, Star Trek, Batman, X-Men, Spider-Man, Shrek, etc.)  Remakes or re-imaginings are also popular at the moment (Superman, Batman, several 70’s TV shows, and the venerable Star Trek franchise (the little devils in Hades must be ice-skating on formerly flaming lakes.))

There’s a parallel within the world of branding and consumer packaged goods.  Just think of words like new, improved, ultra, plus, prime, extra, super, plus, mega, reformulated, and energized.   Virtually any major consumer packaged good (food, drink, shaving cream, toothpaste, shampoo, detergent, to name a few) goes through a cycle of renewal by adding new adjectives to make the product seem fresh and exciting once again.  The product itself can evolve over time, but it’s the marketing, packaging, and naming that changes moreso than your breakfast cereal.  Corn flakes are still corn flakes, despite the tweaks, unless they’re now made of soybean and three dozen chemical additives (but, scream the marketers, they are still Corn Flakes!)

So what the hell does this have to do with writing or the art of creation?

If you believe that there are a finite number of plots which have already been used countless time, you might be tempted to shut down the word processor and start doing something more fun, like surfing, gaming, or disinfecting your toilet.  It can be very hard to create stories that aren’t derivative of some other source.

It can be a soul-shattering experience to learn that you weren’t the first person to write about a specific topic.  Let’s say you have a great idea about how to make the world’s best cup of coffee.  In your zeal to share this with the world, you write a passionate, informative article about your own special coffee making technique, and you post it on your blog or send it to a magazine for publication.  You did it!  You bask in the glow of acheivement after a job well done.

The next day, whilst doing a Google search on the same topic, you discover, to your horror, that someone else had virtually the same idea two years ago and it was a big hit back then.  Over the next week, your article gets noticed… and dismissed as being old hat and boring.  You shake your head, pour your coffee down the drain, and vow to never act so foolishly again.

This is the time when a creator has to stare inward and come to grips with the awareness that they aren’t as clever, talented, or as original as they had thought (this time).  So they have a decision to make:  stop creating, or else try again.

If you want to try again, but you lack the self-confidence or the will to stumble back down this challenging path, here are some thoughts that might help you move forward:

Very few people realise their vision on the first attempt.  The right combination of skill, knowledge, and chance rarely coalesce for the novice:  usually at least one of these three is missing on the first attempt.  It’s a common and normal occurance.  Do some searching on the terms “Thomas Edison” and “light bulbs” to get some idea of how many attempts may be needed to acheive success.  But when the light bulb finally goes on, so to speak, oh it’s sweet!

Copying someone else’s creation will tend to happen more often than we’d like to admit.  There are six billion living people on this planet and a whole lot of dead ones whose remains are parked here.  It’s extremely probable that multiple people can be pursuing similar visions at any given time or at some point in the past.  This suggests to me that before you depart on your creative voyage, do some research on the topic to see if anyone “got there first”.  That may prevent some long-term disappointment while also providing you with valuable information.

Look for differentiating factors that only you can provide.  What are they?  Simple:  your perceptions and your experiences.  J. Michael Straczynski (I’ll refer to him as JMS to avoid the possibility of misspelling his name), creator of the science fiction TV series Babylon 5, wrote a column about writing for comic books that had a very powerful comment about creation:

What a writer sells is, ultimately, his or her unique point of view. When you go out of your way to buy a short story by Ellison or Vonnegut or Bradbury, or a comic by Wolfman or Loeb or … Millar, you are buying it because you want to experience the way they see the world, to hear the stories that only they can tell. Nobody can write a Harlan Ellison story like Harlan Ellison. Nobody can write a Jeph Loeb comic like Jeph Loeb.

And nobody can write the story you are going to write as well as you can.

Every writer is the unique consequence of all the days and years and experiences we all accumulate over time. Anything run through that filter is going to come out as a unique creation, a unique voice. And that’s what editors want…to see how you see the world.

Your ideas, knowledge, and experiences may not be original, but they are authentic.  They really happened, you experienced them, and they made you feel or think certain things.  If you can convey that sense of authenticity in your creative work, you do not need to be original.

I think JMS’s concept is the only sane path forward for a creator.  Your unique formulation or presentation of the idea will be what people ultimately read and enjoy.  Just remember that the consumer is savvy and has limited patience for BS.  If you take a box of Tide, call it Ultra Tide and put it in nifty new packaging while touting it as “a revolution in powdered detergent”, but you don’t improve the basic Tide formula, you’ll eventually have a lot of angry customers.  Similarly, if you write a story that you call “a fresh new approach to space opera”, but you copy the basic plot and characters of Star Wars, it won’t be long before you’re reviled (and deservedly so).

Don’t worry about treading down the same path as ten thousand other creators.  Describe that journey with honest, authentic thoughts and feelings and it will seem like you’re on your own unique journey.  And you will be, because it’s in the land of your own fertile, creative imagination, where no one else can ever tread unless you lead them there.

As I complete this Brain Broadcast, I’m very aware that other people have probably written about this topic with more skill, experience, and creativity than I have.  If I believe what I’ve written, I know that it’s likely to be true.

But… I’m the only one who can write it my way and that’s the value that I can provide to the world.

You can, too, if you really want to.  That’s what I believe.

Man, Jericho has turned out to be a good series.  Wish I’d watched it from the start.

 I heard that it will be a mid-season replacement this year, with seven episodes on order.  Can’t wait to see it.  It will be on my must-watch list, along with Heroes and possibly Lost (where I always seem to be one season behind…)