Author: William Gallagher

Write for free and you take us all down

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There is a catch in your voice when someone asks you what you do and you answer that you’re a writer. And the catch is that everybody thinks they can write. Most can’t but that’s okay, I’ll never score a goal at football or successfully tie my shoelace, I don’t beat myself up about it. I also don’t go selling my services as a shoelace advisor. But enough of the not-we advertise themselves as writers that they damage what we do. And because they cannot, literally cannot, distinguish themselves in any way but price, they go hell for leather in distinguishing themselves on price. You want a 5,000 word article for 20 cents? I’ll do you 10,000 for free.

You will never find a shortage of people foolish enough to hire people for free – it’s a core tenet of how the UK government believes everyone but themselves should be volunteers – but you could ignore that. It’s harder to ignore the line you get that writing for free will be great exposure.

The Freelancer by Contently argues this week that this could be true. The full piece is centred on Lisa Earle McLeod who writes for Huffington Post for free and says that her articles there are responsible for “nearly every major sale” her company has made. But:

McLeod recognized lawyers and physicians don’t give their work away for free. But she said her business model isn’t based on writing. Writing is a means to an end, a strategy for generating more work in other areas.

“My business model is speaking and consulting. Why wouldn’t I write for free?” she said. “Now when people call me, I don’t have to establish credibility.”

Writing for Free Can Pay Off. But Only for a Select Few – Gary M Stern, Contently.net (27 August 2014)

Let’s see her speak and consult for free, then.

New book: Filling the Blank Screen

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Thanks to your recommendations, the one hundred best articles from The Blank Screen news site have been extended, updated, revised, given a polish – and are now the new book, Filling the Blank Screen.

Filling-the-Blank-Screen_600x900

 

I tell you, it is as if the book itself insisted on being written. There is going to be a series of Blank Screen books and I am deep into writing the first one at this very moment yet Filling the Blank Screen just demanded to be done. Maybe if I could work out a better way for you to find all the best articles on this site then the book would’ve shut up a bit. But I haven’t yet, so it went on and on at me about how it was time.

Behind the thousand articles and the quarter of a million words on this site there are hundreds of conversations with people online and at the now many Blank Screen workshops. New writers at literary festivals, very experienced ones at Writers’ Guild events, I love that this stuff helps them – and I love even more that every one of them has something useful for me to steal. I mean, use. I mean, um.

Anyway.

I want you to have Filling the Blank Screen and I’d like to suggest that you read it a chapter a day. That way you can tell people it took you one hundred days to read and I either sound like I write a lot or that I’m very heavy going. I’ll take that. Bit of quality, innit? Bit of heft.

The paperback version is scheduled to be published on 12 September and doubtlessly I’ll tell you all about that then. But today the ebook version is out and it’s at a special price of £2.99 on Amazon UK. It’s also at a special price of $4.99 on Amazon US.

One thing, though. If the next 11 months gets us another 1,000 articles and another 250,000 words, you’d hope that there will be enough material in there for a third Blank Screen boo. But what would I call it? Refilling the Blank Screen?

Put your phone away and go to sleep

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photoI have very clearly noticed that I sleep better when my iPhone is not displaying a clock face all night. (I do lower the brightness, I’m not daft. I’m not that daft. Okay, I’m not that daft about that one thing.) Even so, I carry right on doing exactly that and apparently so do you.

Okay, most people with smartphones keep their phones near them at night. Okay, 95% of people in a very specific study do:

I asked staff at BuzzFeed, in a survey, if they ever fall asleep with their phones in their beds. Of the 82 people who responded, 70% said they at least sometimes sleep with their phones in their beds, and 41% said they do it almost every night.
Single people were somewhat more likely to sometimes sleep with their phones in their bed — 78% of singles and 61% of people in relationships said they at least sometimes sleep with their phones in their bed. Roughly 95% said they sleep with their phones either in their beds, or on a nightstand or floor right next to it, and only four people said they leave their phones away from the bed, either in another room or on another side of the room.

We Can’t Stop Sleeping With Our Phones And We’re A Little Anxious About It – Hillary Reinsberg, Buzzed (25 August 2014)

I’m just not sure it’s a problem. I pop my iPhone onto its stand each night and I have this conversation with Siri:

Wake me at 4:59am
Wake me at 5:01am
Switch on Do Not Disturb
Open Awesome Clock

Awesome Clock is the curiously no longer available app that lets me have that clock face on my phone all night. (Gorgeously, you just swipe down and it dims, swipe up and it brightens. Love it.) And the bit with two alarms is that for some reason my iPhone will occasionally fail to make a sound if I ask for one. I set two and it works.

But the key thing there is probably that Do Not Disturb. The phone is on but unless you’re someone I’ve said is important enough to get to me, you don’t. Mind you, in case you’re reading this and thinking both that you thought you were important to me and yet I didn’t answer last night, your getting through my phone is no guarantee of your getting through to my skull. And I did dream about you last night, so you got to me on some entertaining if not very useful level. Hello again. What did you want to say?

Sorry? You want the link for the full Buzzfeed piece? It’s no trouble.

Germany looking at banning work emails after office hours

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That would be similar to the moves in France where workers could carry on getting all the emails they liked but managers should get a rest.

The following quote comes via Google Translate so I’m sorry for its quality but it is at least a thousand times better than I would’ve managed with a dictionary. This is Germany’s labour minister Andrea Nahles responding to a question this week about whether employees could be protected from emails while on holiday:

Yes. That is my goal. I have made sure that the test of an anti-stress regulation comes into the coalition agreement. There is an undeniable relationship between availability and duration of the increase of mental illness, now the have also recognized the employer. We have to also scientific evidence. Nevertheless, it is a challenge to implement this law quite sure. Therefore, we have the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health commissioned work up sound, whether and how it is possible to set load thresholds. We need universal and legally binding criteria before we prescribe the establishments something. 2015 to present first results.

RP Online translated to English by Google

Good luck with that. But if France is going this way and Germany’s looking at it, you can bet it’s going to come up in the UK. I don’t think it’ll be the deciding issue in the next general election, but stranger things have been.

I’ve given you secret and malicious intelligence information. Apparently.

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I use this so often. And I’ve mentioned it to you in a piece about searching for specific email addresses. If you type this into Google:

“omnifocus”

You get an awful lot of results. If, instead, you type this:

omnifocus at williamgallagher.com

Well, okay, you still get an awful lot of results. But you’re telling Google to solely and only and specifically and exclusively search my williamgallagher.com site. Now, Google doesn’t exactly do that. First it searches me, then it searches everywhere else like it always does. But those first few entries are on my site.

I do go a little further. I’ll search a site like that and if I’m looking for a screenplay, say, I might specify that I want “filetype:pdf”. That returns only PDF results. Fine. It cuts down a lot of time searching but apparently that’s a problem:

Malicious cyber actors are using advanced search techniques, referred to as “Google dorking,” to locate information that organizations may not have intended to be discoverable by the public or to find website vulnerabilities for use in subsequent cyber attacks. “Google dorking” has become the acknowledged term for this malicious activity, but it applies to any search engine with advanced search capabilities. By searching for specific file types and keywords, malicious cyber actors can locate information such as usernames and passwords, e-mail lists, sensitive documents, bank account details, and website vulnerabilities. For example, a simple “operator:keyword” syntax, such as “filetype:xls intext:username,” in the standard search box would retrieve Excel spreadsheets containing usernames.

Malicious Cyber Actors User Advanced Search Techniques – Intelligence for Police, Fire, EMS and Security Personnel – 7 July 2014

You go through a range of reactions to this, don’t you? Like a typical man, I preen a bit at the idea that searches I do every day are ‘advanced’. I don’t fully understand the term ‘cyber actor’ but it sounds exciting. And then you get called a dork. Google Dorking is such a new term that there isn’t a Wikipedia page about it. (There is this and it seems a nice place to visit.)

I think the onus is on the people who put classified or confidential information on their computers. Let them shut out searches like this. Especially as apparently it’s a bit easy for them to do.

But hey, if anyone asks where you learnt how to crack NATO defence secrets or whatever it is, you point them right at… um… anyway, is that the time?

Watch this

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I did leave computers because they are ditchwater dull but just occasionally you get little moments of human interest. My absolute favourite was in the run up to the release of the iPad. There came a moment when for some reason everyone thought Apple would call this new device a slate. It’s a good name, it’s typically Apple in that it’s somehow better than the then usual term of tablet and sounds like they’d thought about it.

Maybe they did, I don’t know. But instantaneously, every computer company making anything even resembling a table began calling them slates. You’ve forgotten this because it stopped at about noon on April 3, 2010 when the iPad was unveiled. But for those brief weeks, it was funny watching companies like Microsoft dropping the word slate into any conversation they could.

Right now, things have ramped up a bit. Rather than dropping the word ‘watch’ into any chat they can, firms are releasing actual watches. Smart watches. Watches with smart bits in. But it’s still the same issue: Apple is now expected to unveil a watch very soon and rivals are trying to get there first. At this point, if it doesn’t reek of desperation it does at least pong a bit.

I’ve no idea if Apple will ever bring out a watch and I’ve no idea whether the latest rumour that it will be announced on 9 September is any more accurate than the myriad previous rumours.

But two days ago, LG released a teaser video saying that new watch was coming. Now the 9 September date is being whispered about more loudly, LG’s just scrapped the wait and gone straight to unveiling it.

LG-G-Watch-R-2

Shrug. Whether you like Apple or don’t, you know one fact already: while Apple would tell you the price and do its best to be able to say “Available today”, other computer firms don’t. The LG G Watch R – seriously, that’s its name – will be out in some places in the last quarter of the year and that’s when you’ll know the price too. There’s also not a bean about the other big question over smart watches: the battery life. Not true. There is a bean. The battery in the LG G Watch R will be a 410mAh one. I don’t know how to translate that to how long does it bloody last?

It’s a smartphone running Android Wear, which means you’ll need an Android phone to get any value out of it. And if I sound down on the whole thing, that would be because I am. The first mockups of what a round-faced smart watch would look like were just gorgeous and I wanted one on sight. Now I’m shrugging at the LG G Watch R – I just enjoy trying to type that name from memory and seeing how many corrections I have to make – and that makes me shrug a bit at the whole smart watch idea.

If Apple does bring one out, I will look at it. Apple gear has been very good for me and I will look at it. I don’t know if I want to buy one, but.

Why a routine stops you being routine

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How to sculpt an environment that optimizes creative flow and summons relevant knowledge from your long-term memory through the right retrieval cues.

Reflecting on the ritualization of creativity, Bukowski famously scoffed that “air and light and time and space have nothing to do with.” Samuel Johnson similarly contended that “a man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.” And yet some of history’s most successful and prolific writers were women and men of religious daily routines and odd creative rituals. (Even Buk himself ended up sticking to a peculiar daily routine.)

Such strategies, it turns out, may be psychologically sound and cognitively fruitful.

The Psychology of Writing and the Cognitive Science of the Perfect Daily Routine – Maria Popova, Brain Pickings (25 August 2014)

Okay, I’m listening. Prove it.

And Popova does. Just please skip right on to her full piece as it is a simply absorbing piece that flies so quickly that it disguises just how much information is in there.

The creator and the audience: the irony of Star Wars

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Okay, it is occasionally argued that the reader or viewer knows more about a piece of work than its writer. Bollocks. I’ve been told by reviewers that my Doctor Who dramas are unquestionably, undoubtedly, certainly based on things I’ve never actually heard of.

But.

There is this thing with Star Wars. George Lucas keeps fiddling and he says that the original version was unfinished. He says that all his fiddling is making the movie into the film he always wanted it to be. I could be alright with that. There’s a song called Anchorage by Michelle Shocked that I adore and later on in her career she changed a couple of words. I found that very hard, somehow, but it’s her song and that’s it.

Except some of Lucas’s fiddling is juvenile.

He’ll take a scene and fill the background with CGI aliens that are distracting from the dramatic purpose of the moment and are sometimes just crap anyway.

Then he’ll go all Old Man’s Attitude on a scene. Originally, Han Solo is cornered by a baddie and kills him. Han is therefore a bit interesting, a bit less squeaky-clean than most of the characters, a little bit more than one-dimensional. And, most of all, his enemies are serious. Later we’re going to hear more about them and it’s more and more of a thing. But in the subsequent versions of the film, the baddie shoots first. He does so because Old Man’s Attitude says decent heroes don’t shoot until the baddie has. Lucas is fussed about the word decent whereas I am fussed about the word hero: because the baddie shoots first and we want Han to survive the film, the baddie must miss. From about a pixel away. Baddie is therefore ridiculously amateur and unthreatening.

That’s what you want: baddies who are unthreatening.

All this comes up now, though, because of a news story in The Atlantic that features someone called Harmy who has spent years recreating the original version of Star Wars from the various versions. You literally cannot buy the original film now but over the years there were Laserdisc and VHS versions and the like that are being scraped and utilised to rebuild the movie as it was. Fine.

I appreciate the craft and the determination. I wouldn’t if Lucas’s changes weren’t so often truly, deeply poor but they are so I do. What really interests me though, is that The Atlantic has also got this quote:

People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and if the laws of the United States continue to condone this behavior, history will surely classify us as a barbaric society…

Today, engineers with their computers can add color to black-and-white movies, change the soundtrack, speed up the pace, and add or subtract material to the philosophical tastes of the copyright holder. Tomorrow, more advanced technology will be able to replace actors with “fresher faces,” or alter dialogue and change the movement of the actor’s lips to match. It will soon be possible to create a new “original” negative with whatever changes or alterations the copyright holder of the moment desires. The copyright holders, so far, have not been completely diligent in preserving the original negatives of films they control. In order to reconstruct old negatives, many archivists have had to go to Eastern bloc countries where American films have been better preserved.

That’s George Lucas making a speech to the US Congress in 1988. The Atlantic points out that this was to do with the then hot-topic of bastards colourising black and white classics. The Atlantic says:

Some argue that here Lucas was railing against outsiders being able to alter a directors work, not against directors being able to update their own pieces. Which raises the question of who truly owns something like Star Wars—a huge cultural phenomenon—once it is unleashed. Lucas addresses that in his speech too. “American works of art belong to the American public; they are part of our cultural history,” he said.

I think the word you’re looking for is ‘busted’.

Read the full piece in The Atlantic and learn more about what drives this Harmy.

Intentionally awkward office furniture for writers

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With shelves that are a little out of reach and a chair that requires balancing, the idea is introduce a “bearable discomfort” to make life a little less smooth–and a little more healthy.

This Deliberately Inconvenient Furniture Forces You To Be Active And Not Just Lie On The Couch – Adele Peters, Fast Company (26 August 2014)

Right. I’m thinking that I might be able to solve that “shelves that are a little out of reach” design by pulling the bloody things closer. But:

French designer Benoît Malta, by contrast, is creating products that are purposely a little less convenient, so people are forced to get up more often. And even if they stay seated, they’re forced to sit in an active way.

“Domestic activities are less and less physical,” says Malta. “I decided to work on different typical daily situations like turning on a light or reading email on a computer, and I tried to design objects that modify our habits and try to engage the body differently in everyday life.”

Read Peters’ full piece for photographs of example designs including a chair that you have to balance on rather that flop over. I don’t expect to flip over it either.