Throughout the ’90s, I worked as a nightclub DJ. No, it wasn’t all duff-duff and techno. My realm was underground and alternative rock, with plenty of black, studded leather. Beat mixing The Offspring into Joy Division isn’t easy, but it’s possible!
Read more ...
Writers are a solitary breed. We hide in dimly lit rooms, our features cast into dramatic relief by the flickering monitor light as we continually tap tap tap our RSI addled fingers against besymboled (is that a word? It is now!) squares of plastic. This is where we live, undisturbed (if we’re lucky), only rising and engaging with the wider world to make a sandwich or reheat old coffee from the gargantuan pot.
Read more ...
Have you ever known someone who gives a pet name to their car and talks about it as if it was a real person? If you’re like me, you think they’re slightly kooky for imbuing a pile of machinery with a personality and building an emotional attachment with it. But many businesses continue to expect all their customers to be equally illogical by expecting them to form relationships with a brand while only providing them with automated machinery in return.
The number three recurs again and again throughout writing. Whether it is in the choice of words to create a pleasing sentence or the wider structure beneath a script, the number three seems inescapable as a stylistic and structural choice.
Read more ...
I’ve known for sometime that sometimes the more constrained you are, the more creative you are forced to become. In writing, this can only be a good thing. Give me a deadline, give me a strict set of guidelines, give me an inflexible word count and together they will force my creative thoughts into places they otherwise wouldn’t go.
Today, The Sydney Morning Herald ran an article discussing how some businesses are taking disciplinary action — including sackings — against employees for comments made on Facebook and Twitter. This hammered home the central points of yesterday’s post.