Howefitz Blog

I’m a big fan of Seth Godin‘s blog, conveniently called Seth’s Blog.

Seth recently wrote a post called The non-optimized life.

If you haven’t seen his blog, you wouldn’t call it optimized by any stretch of the imagination. He rarely posts a picture, and when he does it is only to illustrate his point.

He doesn’t allow comments and he doesn’t use excessive links.

He’s a busy man, and it’s a wonder that he blogs at all, let alone daily.

He uses social networking in ways that maximizes his exposure without wasting his time.

I’ve been experiencing a bit of the old writer’s block lately. In search of ideas, I remembered a writing seminar I went to a couple of years ago that was hosted by Orson Scott Card. He said that his favorite response he’d heard from a writer when asked ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ was from Harlan Ellison, who would reply, ‘From you, that’s why you don’t have any!’

So, in that spirit, here are a few quotes that I’ve dug up about ideas and the aquiring of them:

As we look to a bright new year, many of us are looking back at the year we just had. Then we look forward to the year ahead. I am doing the latter with a vengeance. This does not come without the required retrospective, however.

The past year has been very busy for me. I moved twice, continued to try to sell my home in Missouri, worked overnight and days, considered a second job, started several blogs, discovered Facebook and Twitter while growing increasingly impatient with MySpace, and somewhere in there tried to figure out how to get family and ‘me’ time.

As Saturday drew to a close, I remembered that I forgot my staple Friday feature, Fiction Friday. Oops. Well, what with the Thanksgiving holiday, my step daughter’s birthday on Wednesday, and Black Friday, I didn’t exactly have time to create a brand new story. So I’m digging back into the vault and dredging up a story that only a few eyeballs have seen. I had submitted it to Asimov’s, but was told it wasn’t the right fit at that time. Oh well, maybe it will get some exposure here and you will enjoy it.

Without any further ado, I give you…