This is writing

These days, the only "me-time" I get is after 1am. Which is saying something, given that I live alone. And that I'm on the bus at 6.30.

The only way I eventually get to sleep is two shots of rum, drunk with determination and in quick succession, straight from the jigger in the dim-lit pantry while the warm breeze teases the Blackwood by the window.

[promised]

[had promised myself something good would happen.

I had promised myself something good would happen.
I had promised myself something good would happen.
I had promised myself something good would happen.
I had promised myself something good would happen.
I had promised myself something good would happen.
I had promised myself something good would happen.

I had promised myself something good would happen.
I had promised myself something good would happen.
I had promised myself something good]

A book for the bath

I don't know why more people don't own baths, or take them.

Baths are the business. The problem, though, is not which cocktail to take in with you, or even how long to loll about.

The problem is which book to take in.

Bath books need to be a bit like airport novels: easy to read, with plenty of break points, but well written, engaging, entertaining, intriguing.

Recently, I solved this dilemma with a little number I bought earlier in the year, at City Lights.

Ladies of the Field is a delight. Others of my acquaintance were disappointed by the lack of backstory it contains, and the broad brushstroke approach to what could most certainly have been piercing, true-to-life encounters with dead pioneers of the field.

And to be fair, the book most definitely tends more toward feminist yarns than historically accurate biography, and I'd have to describe the chapters as "vignettes" of Victorian lady archaeologists. If you're hungry for facts, dates and times, this isn't the book for you.

If, however, you're more interested in being inspired by ripping tales of women who dug shit up in "olden" times, before motorised transport, Thinsulate or malaria drugs, and you want to read about it all in the bath, then trust me: this is the book for you.

Calling all Hipsters...

I literally couldn't believe the obvious targeting when I saw this on the ABC News homepage, so I thought I'd better document it here for posterity. 

Let me paraphrase this message for you:

Like news? Like Instagram? Like being a dork because it's hot right now? Follow us, first-world slacktivists!*

*If you're thinking, Geez, that's a bit harsh, you wouldn't be the first person to say so. I've heard it before.

[stirred]

[where the treacherous paddocks disappeared into the dark. It was just you and me and the dash lights, the headlights, the silent lightning blanketing the sky.

We didn't speak. 

We drove the winding road, slick still with a memory of recent rain. Sometimes the white line disappeared beneath the bullbar, and sometimes it was to our right. It didn't matter. We were all alone out there in the dark: not a sheep or steer broke the empty fields, not a hare stirred. Not even a kangaroo. 

Nothing.

It was as if that lonely country was ours, each skeleton tree, every bald slab of granite. Just us, side-by-side-silent, your eyes luminous beneath the lit clouds, lost beneath the]

Three thoughts I never thought I'd think

Today's produced a few wildly uncharacteristic thoughts, viz.

1. Heavens but Bring Up the Bodies is a dreamboat compared with Something Wicked This Way Comes.*
2. I think I'll listen to Eels in an attempt to cheer up after that Elliot Smith song.
3. Maybe I'll just reject all these articles and get it out of the way. Easy!

It's only Monday. The odds of my winding up in a straightjacket by Friday are looking pretty good right now. Place your bets, people.

*Yeah, that book actually killed me. I'm scarred for life. The thought of reading gives me chills now. Mantel is a fucking cakewalk by comparison.

A message on gender for startups

Tech companies love data. People in this industry thrive on it. So why are tech startups still overlooking the data that ties workforce diversity to bigger bottom lines?

This week, strangely inured as I am to the world of corporate finance, I covered for a client a seminar on workplace gender diversity.

A few facts (note, these are not new facts; they are old research that's been around for years):

• Companies that are gender-diverse outperform (i.e. are more profitable than) those that are not by 18-69%.*
• Australian companies with women directors outperform those that don't by 8%.*
• Companies that are gender-diverse tend to exhibit a broader culture of inclusivity, reflecting forward thinking, a lack of conservatism, and openness to new ideas. That, apparently, tends not to hurt profitability either.
• Many worthwhile and valuable equality-promoting measures don't cost the business anything. For example, mentioning "men and women" in a job ad has been shown to increase the diversity of applicants.

Diversity can mean competitive advantage. So why aren't startups, which have a massive opportunity to basically redefine what "business culture" is, what "work" is, and what "competitive advantage" is, doing more, er, work in this area?

Examples? With pleasure. I know startups that don't really like you working from home. Why not? Because they don't really believe that you'll do work there. I also know startups that assess performance, at least in part, on the basis of hours worked, not the quality of work outputs. 

These kinds of approaches and cultures actively work against inclusivity, productivity, and profitability. As proven by research.

I also know of startups that do have an inclusive approach. But it seems incredible to me that for tech businesses gender equality is as much of an issue as it is for traditional businesses. If you're reading this and saying, "but we just don't get women candidates," I say:

• recast your job ads
• make your recruiters work for their money and provide at least x (3?) worthy applicants from both genders for any role; if they can't, interview the top two from the underrepresented gender so you can get an idea of the skills and people your talent-search process is passing by
• ensure employees of both genders are on every candidate selection panel (Yes! Panel! If you're still hiring via single-person interview, it would seem you're running your business like it's 1999.)
• ensure pay equity

...as a baseline.

Come on, tech companies and startups. The data shows you're leaving money on the table** by not championing gender diversity, and building inclusivity into your culture. And for an industry that prides itself on intellect and logic and a love of smart, data-backed business decisions, that's nothing short of embarrassing.

*If you want research citations, let me know.
**To use the popular get-rich-quick-online terminology.

Freudian slips

"I'm reading Purgatory at the moment ... from the Divine Comedy."

"I was wondering if that was what you meant."

"Have you read it?"

She shook her head.

"I've been through Hell," I said, "and now I want to get all the way to Heaven."

Over the weekend

Over the weekend, I reread The Weekend. Among other things, it made me realise how pointless book clubs are.

I love this book, but as I thought about writing this, I realised that no matter what I tell you about The Weekend, or how accurate it is, you may still hate the book. You might think it naff or dumb or light or whatever.

Book clubs must be hell for this reason: each of us has our own personal experience, and writing reflects different aspects of this, in different ways. Even two people who love the same book usually take different things from it. I tend to find this whenever I meet someone who loves a book I do: it's like we're talking energetically in different languages, although in agreement on a common topic. Strange.

In any case, there's something about Peter Cameron's writing that, until now, I haven't been able to put my finger on. I was surprised—and ecstatic—to find that on this particular rereading, I found all manner of new things in what is now a very familiar story, one that appears to be simple and short, with straightforwardly complex characters.

But what I like most about this book—about all of Cameron's writing—is the tenderness with which the author treats his characters. He forgives them over and over for their limitations, their selfishness, their brutal and touching humanity.

And in so doing, he shows us how to forgive them—and forgive ourselves—too.

The night

Tonight is The Night.

Not the night for a hot date. Not the night for a mind blowing meal. Not the night I launch something wonderful into the world.

Tonight, I'm going to finish Something Wicked This Way Comes if it freaking kills me.*

It probably will. It's already killing me via freaking. I've been reading it for weeks and weeks—months, if you want to get specific—and as I mentioned, it's both killer and freaky.

But my problems with this book seem to stretch beyond the words themselves. This is by far and away the most uncomfortable, alarming book I've ever read. The horror isn't exactly insidious, but it's not obvious either.

And yet my degree of terror seems disproportionate. It suggests that I must have read this in some crucial moment of my childhood when I was particularly sensitive to such terrors. And that raw nerve has stayed with me all this time, waiting to be hit by this second, but no less inexplicably terror-inducing reading.

I don't know. It's just a theory. But tonight I'm going to pour a rum, turn on all the lights, cuddle teddy** and finish this damned book.

*Yes, that *is* a man drinking lava on the cover. Not tea. LAVA.
**Kidding. I think. Man, maybe I better start looking for a teddy.

Short copy smart-arsedness

It began with LOLCATS, then swamped tumblr, and now produces services like capn.me.

The human capacity for smart-arsed remarks literally knows no bounds. Witness that the web is fast becoming little more than a repository for and endless sea of hack snaps topped or tailed with yet another bon fucking mot, and you'll be forced to agree.

That description makes it sound easy. If you think that's the case, take a look at this post, for example, or this tumblr blog (written by a copywriter), and be swiftly disabused of your delusions.

Hilarious captioning isn't exactly rocket science, but it does take some adroitness with language and, well, humour, as well as taste—restraint is key.

If you're the kind of person who thinks 140 characters is an unworkable limit, try captioning. If you think you're a master of the witty one-liner, try captioning.

Me? Knowing full well that (as I informed The Designer last week) short copy is my shortcoming, I'm not trying captioning. In fact, I'm staying the hell away from it. But if you see, or make, something as witty as this, send it to me.

P.S. As an imageless addition to this post, see this title. Oh, humour.

A decent infographic

Okay, you want to see a good infographic? I got one for ya.

It's from New Scientist's 21 April 2012 issue. I'd link to it, but I can't find the article online. It was from a piece called "New Moons" by Stuart Clark. (Yes you can click to make it bigger!)

Questions? No, I didn't expect any. What's to ask?! This is how to make an infographic, people.

Rules for infographics

Often, I have to review "infographics" as potential website content. Through many tedious hours of such reviews, I've arrived at these tenets for what I believe makes a good infographic.

1. Delete the words. The info should be in the graphic.
2. Cut out more words. I don't care if you like them. This thing's meant to communicate pictorially, bub.
3. Reduce that reduced word count by, oh 70%. If you can't, you need a new designer. Or to just stop writing so damn much yourself.

These are my expectations when viewing an infographic:

• No. Reading.
• Single- or double-word prompts/labels are okay.
• The design should communicate the message entirely.

I'm not kidding. Too hard-arsed? Maybe.

I'm now trying to find a designer who I can make an infographic with, so we can prove that a near-zero-tolerance approach to verbiage in this communications format is not just a good idea, but is actually achievable. If you are such a designer, let me know.

Everyone's a writer

There's a common misconception that if you know how to speak a language, you're a writer.

There's an enormous amount of condescending bitching about this undertaken by writers.

It's certainly counterproductive to have someone who's not a writer override your recommendations without responding to your rationale. It's also fucking frustrating.

But in most cases, the rewriting stems from a difference of opinion on a subconscious level. I'm finding this is particularly the case with clients who haven't trained in marketing—by which I mean they're thinking primarily about saying stuff, rather than thinking about what matters to their audience on the whole, and at this point in the communication.

When this kind of client wants to change a copy line, I ask them what they want to change it to. Then I pull out the the key message of their revised copy line and give it back to them.

"So, you want to talk about features here, not the benefit to the customer?"

"This line says 'global experience'. The line you're suggesting says 'affordability'. What do we want to say here?"

Call me crazy, but this shuffling and debating and recasting is one of the best bits for me. Often, trial and revision is the only way to get to what the client wants. Also, they often have a perspective of their audience and their dream position which is inarticulable but for trying and retrying copy lines.

And often they have great ideas.

In a world where conceptual communicators are few and far between (and by that I mean my own world, not an objective environment), this argy bargy is key to making the creative process fun (as well as, oh, meeting the client's expectations as well as the audience's needs).

Writing isn't about turning out golden concepts, perfectly finessed. It's not a race to the best. It's about pitching concepts and seeing how well they communicate—to your client, in the first instance, and to their audience in testing. it's about building on those initial ideas with them to make them better, more targeted, clearer. It's best when it's collaborative.

So that title's a bit of a deceit. Everyone's not a writer. But most of us have something that's worth communicating.

The lost generation

The Canadian sent me this, and now I give it to you, dear reader.

I wonder what will happen to a generation that grows up without Seinfeld. Without any knowledge of Seinfeld. You can extoll his hilarity to the skies, his timing, his characters, his whatever, but in my books, Jesus H Christ, it's about the language. That's not all—not by a long shot, but there are so many signature lines. Really.

• Get out!
• The sea was angry that day, my friends.
• No soup for you!
• I'm going out on a high!
• The Manziere
• man-hands
• Jerry! Newman!

I could go on.

Back in the day, the Copywriter and I used to talk-giggle Seinfeld all the time. "How fucking funny is he?" we'd ask each other, already agreed on the answer.

Retrograde

Do you ever find yourself pining for the places and people in a book you read?

I do this all the time. All the time. Right now I'm pining for the Moors and Jamaica Inn, for brave Mary and the uncanny Vicar.

I've only read that book once. The problem arises when you succumb to the pining, and re-read. This, in turn, cements the pining, causing the need to re-read again. It becomes an addiction. It's terrible.

Books whose characters, situations, and often actual sentences for which I now pine almost continuously include:

• The Secret History
• Other Voices Other Rooms
• The Little Friend
• The City of Your Final Destination
• The Quiet American (actually, for all Graham Greene, as a sort of amorphous longing)
• Less Than Zero
• All the Pretty Horses

Interspersed with these longings are less clear-cut desires, just as strong: for the writings of Yann Martel, Aravind Adiga, Jared Diamond, Margaret Leigh, Rumer Godden.

They are with me always now. I think about these books, these authors, every day. Not all of them, but all of them in what I imagine must be a subconscious sequence that takes each in its turn over a period of, say, 10 or 14 days.

Thank god they're all in the house. Imagine where I'd be otherwise.

What has social media become?

Call me crazy, but I miss the bad old days of social media when no one knew what the hell they were doing.

People were excited about just communicating, and they actually told you shit. Not just what they had for lunch, but occasionally interesting stories about things that were happening to them. They started tweets with all caps like complete n00bs, because they were complete n00bs—we all were.

These days? Public updates on Twitter and Facebook (by which I mean comments that aren't back-and-forth between friends) have "matured" (or maybe the users I follow have "matured") to the point where all I ever see is:

• self-promotion/ingratiation
• cause-promotion, and
• bitching.

Christ it's boring. Maybe I need to move to a new social media platform to watch the collective userbase collectively work out wtf they're supposed to be doing all over again.

In the meantime, if you're sick of it too, I encourage you to follow these independently entertaining tweeters:

• Scott
• Stephen
• Horse
• Ben
• Vijay
• Chippie

Also, you can join me in looking heartily forward to the next exciting wave of actually interesting content in the d/evolution of social media. I don't care what form it takes, as long as it moves beyond the three points elucidated above.

Hell and the Midwest: a tale of two cities

Right now, I'm reading Dante's Inferno and Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Both focus on the occult (sorry, Catholics). Both are lurid, joyous, lyrical, unnerving. One is poetry,  written in Italian in the 1300s, the other is prose, written by an American in the 21st Century. Both are worth your time.

If you're thinking, "But heavens, 200+ pages of 14th century poetry about hell? Will I die of boredom? Think I'll stick with cruisey YA fiction from the 60s," think again, my friend.

Of these two books, Hell is the cruise ship, ferrying you safely through mires and flaming fields, past sinners of all kinds and colours (not to mention many-headed hell hounds, gorgons, belligerent boatmen and more).

I resorted to Hell as an escape from the horrors of worry and wait, of late-night sleeplessness and erring thoughts, and boy, has it delivered in red-hot spades. Despite the title and the premise, Hell is a tale of salvation, beautifully—yet accessibly—rendered. If it were reviewed by the bookish press today, it would demand that old chestnut of an adjective, unfuckingputdownable.

Something Wicked, on the other hand, is probably the most uncomfortable book I've read in living memory, and given my recent turn through All the Pretty Horses, that really is saying something.

Just how Bradbury managed it, I really don't know, and that not knowing—wondering—is a gift and a pleasure. Having never got past this to any of his other works, I'm in the dark about how palpably discomforting he is generally, although The Sister agrees that this one's a bit of a read.

It was she who gave it to me, then scorned my horror over its treatment of adult relationships, its treatment of children's relationships, its treatment of, well, relationships. She did agree about the heart-aching loveliness of the setting, though—a midwest so gloriously innocent and uninhi(a)bited that young boys could smell cut hay from bedroom windows and run pounding-pulsed through summer nights most crazily derailed.

So if, dear friend, as the waning year progresses, you find yourself needing to spend your dark hours in orbit between two equally dark cities, those illuminated by Hell and Something Wicked would make excellent itinerary points.

The slowdown

I hate waiting. People always grumble about impatience, but we are all impatient. We all need to know or do or have what we want as soon as we can. Few of us love to wait.

So I know you're in the same boat. What I don't know is whether waiting takes you over as it does me. What I don't know is whether waiting swiftly becomes a torture—such a torture in fact that it's easier to simply write off whatever you're waiting for than to remain waiting.

The danger in this is one of throwing babies out with bathwater. But to the tortured one, it's a price worth paying. Well and truly. Writing off means you'll no longer be waiting. It means, go about your life as if this is all there is. Forget hope and wishes; just dim the headlights and pretend that all there is is what's on the road before you.

The alternative is to wait for what's not coming—and that's the worst of all, worse even than the torture of waiting itself. In my experience, this is why you don't ever want to wait too long. This is what justifies writing off in advance, rather than holding out hope.

Hope. This is what makes waiting a torture.

When I said waiting takes me over, I meant it. Right now I can't think of anything else, do anything else, write about anything else (unless there's a brief and a few hours' diversion into the pixelated, Legoland-style world of Official Business).

All I can do is wait. Or write off. Either way, it's torture.

Give it up

Q:

A: Don't have one!

Caveat: I'm a freelance writer/content developer so I'm all for hiring writers. But this ad hit me right on the funny bone.

The web is about content. And functionality, yes. But in lieu of groundbreaking, niche-storming functionality, content is the easiest tactic by which ordinary you-and-mes can get noticed online.

Tired of it? Then give it the hell up, chump.

Unintelligible

A writer really has only one job: to make sense of.

Make sense of what the expert has said, what the figures reveal, what the confused plot line allows to play out.

Make sense of it for the reader in a way that speaks to them as if they were the only one in the world who could understand the message.

Do it long enough and eventually you come to see everything through this lens—everything is a matter of making sense. Life itself, as lived by the writer, becomes a transposition of the long-form mess into neat chapters, clearly headed, climax and denouement, the epilogue, the afterword.

But this is a cruel deceit, because life is rarely sensible. It won't always fit the narrative, the chapter sequence, the page count. Sense won't always be made.

And at those times the writer is lost. The person singularly charged with saying things the right way cannot even begin to decipher events, let alone unravel meaning or decouple cause from effect. Nailing down the message is impossible; reformulating it in a digestible way seems like some remnant from a dream. The more the writer looks at things, the more incommunicable they become. Slowly, hope derails, the words begin to melt into concepts, and sense joins the realms of fantasy.

Still the writer keeps trying, keeps looking, keeps frowning at the page.

And still, whatever the meaning is, it remains unintelligible.

Introduction to idioms

"Can I see your ticket?"

He is four, and shyly sweet. I hand it to him.

He opens the cardboard cover, turns it over, folds the flimsy paper back to the staple that holds the whole together.

"Now don't you tear that," says his dad.

"No," I say, smiling at his bright gaze. "If I don't have a ticket, they'll throw me in the caboose!"

A flicker of confusion.

"The caboose?"

"Yep, the caboose. And I'll have to shovel coal to pay my way home."

He smiles, not understanding, but knowing I'm toying with him.

I wish I could tell him what a caboose was, and why I'd shovel coal anyway, and that shovelling coal in a caboose would be pointless, and how shovelling coal could ever get me home.* But he, oblivious to my angst, smooths the ticket back against the cardboard cover, still smiling.

*Talking to children is a lot like talking to non-native English speakers much of the time.

I'm not kidding about The Television

Let me make one thing plain from this here outset. I did not open a book for pleasure until I was, oh, about 15. All I did before that was watch TV. So I know the lovely luxury of switching off as you switch it on. I know the intoxicating escapism of the medium. Believe me.

But these days, Jesus. All I ever seem to want to watch are snippets from iView and ABC News24. Even when I have a television at my disposal—when I'm languishing on someone else's couch, say—I turn to freaking News24.

Why I can't sit down to watch The Block or Masterchef or The Voice or Grand fucking Designs like the rest of the world, I have no idea. I am re-watching Deadwood on DVD, but that's like one episode at a time, a couple of times a week, max.

So maybe I watch four hours of moving pictures a week at the outside. I do like movies; I just don't seem to get time to watch them.

I know what you're thinking: what the hell do I do with my evenings? By way of retort, let me say I would rather die than surf the channels nightly, looking for "something good on". I would rather die than get the paper for the sake of the Green Guide (I know people who still do this. People with the Web connected to their very homes. I'm not kidding). I would rather die, these days, than give up my nights at home, any of then really, to The Television.

What I do when I have an evening at home—and there are, say, four a week—is:

write; light the fire, then stare into it; wash dishes; play records; mail-order seeds, books, cheese cultures, music, or wine yeast; clean the chainsaw; make cocktails; mend things; cook; turn the incubating eggs; thin seedlings; write personal email to my closest charmers; Skype if the stars align; go to bed with a rum and read.

Far from the days of Gilligan and Solid Gold, I've become so abstracted from TV/series culture that I literally cannot understand how people go home and turn it on and sit down in front of it every night, let alone put it on in the mornings. You'd think that living alone I'd be glad to have it babbling—for the company, as people say—but I'd much rather listen to the wind and the frogs and the odd cow lowing in the valley.

I don't know what's happened to me. But I'm really, seriously, not kidding about The Television.

[inescapable]

[The sky tore across the bowl of the valley. There was a light rain, yet we could see stars. 

Nothing made sense. 

Not the still trees, whose leaves wept drizzle; not the dark turned dirty by an ill-conceived moon; not even the earth, which gave beneath our feet: every step a misstep, every step taken in blind faith, in hope and peril, and in most, the peril proved out.

Nothing was as we wanted it. 

The nearest we came was a delusional ignorance—if we took a thing and turned it in the light just so, we could convince ourselves it was real, and what we needed. But shift the light, move the thing, and back sprang reality, sure as darkness, inescapable]

Niche selection

Derek Bickerton's Adam's Tongue* hits a heart-stopping high point on its second-last page.

The book, subtitled, "How humans made language, how language made humans" argues that niche selection is the reason why we have language and no other species does.

It's a long story, and one I can't explain here. But here's the para that put the whole book—and the concept of niche selection's impact on human evolution—into perspective:

"Why is it, do you suppose, that when a hunter-gatherer group is sucked into the vortex of 'civilisation,' so many of its members seem to undergo a kind of spiritual death, quickly falling victim to drugs, alcohol, irrational violence, or suicidal despair? ... for ten thousand years, ever since cities and government began, we have been selecting against the most independent, individualistic members of our species. Rebels, revolutionaries, heretics, criminals, martyrs—all those opposed to the current norms of society—have been systematically imprisoned, exiled, murdered or executed ... But the passive the compliant, the loyal, the obedient ... prospered like the green bay tree. Has this really had no effect on human nature?"

While this seems to imply a degree of idealism in what is hardly a perfect or idyllic lifestyle, Bickerton's point—that we've spent less time being civilised than we have evolving from uncivilised origins, and that we're still continuously adjusting to that world as a species, potentially with dire future consequences—is pretty arresting.

Especially for anyone who's ever felt they don't belong here. Which is all of us, right?

*Woo! Buy it for $12.95!

Unfreakingbelievable

Isn't it a bit late to start telling me what the thing is after I've signed up?

(The only reason I signed up to Medium was for work—for this, you might say—and because it used my Twitter login to make that happen.)

But wait. There's more. Here's what happens when you click the "Read this" link:

That's the start of 841 words of ... something. (One of the headings is "Why Medium? Why Now?" I'm not kidding.)

Let me paraphrase from the intense, eye-hurting speed-scanning I attempted: you publish something on Medium and it's collected into a larger collection of stuff, like funny life stories. Maybe. Think Storify crossed maybe with Tumblr and WordPress.com, then multiply by the number of the first house you lived in...

Why didn't they just say so on their homepage? Who knows. Maybe because their "preview" in itself doesn't look that exciting. Maybe because they feel your precious personal details are in fact due payment for the exciting if vague news of their thrilling, if currently-still-in-development-and-not-really-available-for-human-consumption-or-indeed-even-beta-testing service. But do you?

Startups, no shit: get a copywriter and maybe someone to help you with brand communication. Even the early adopting first wave deserves that much.

Diggin' du Maurier

There's no shortage of books that have been turned into movies. And some of them are good movies—think Capote, American Psycho (only digestible in cinematographic form), Murder on the Orient Express (ha!).

I'm currently at the pointy end of Jamaica Inn, a beyond-excellent novel by Daphne du Maurier of The Birds fame (another great story-turned-film). I saw the movie, also by Hitchcock, who, needless to say, directed The Birds—honestly, what's happened to this sentence?—before I read the book, and loved it. And I assumed, like most films made from books, that it basically told the story of du Maurier's novel.

Not so, oh similarly innocent friend. Not so at all.

According to the Big W, the author herself "was not enamoured" of the movie, and while I love the book, and dug the movie, I can see why. Hitch switched whole, entire characters who play major roles in a plot that, while largely accurate, ends differently than the novel (from what I remember).

These are some pretty major changes. If some director took your story, and switched the responsibilities of characters who ended the thing differently than you'd intended, you'd be a bit miffed too. Like, I imagine, du Maurier, I do wonder why  Hitchcock couldn't have stuck more closely to the novel. Although, speaking to the Canadian recently, I pointed out that the talkies were young when Hitch hit the screen, and Jamaica Inn, the movie, was made in 1939. Hitchcock was an experimenter—who knew what he was thinking?

In any case, both book and film are good. I recommend them to you heartily, as good fodder for stormy nights in any season but summer.

[fury]

[The fury
of the raging trees
as plain as me,
enraged for me
we are of the same place—
we, together,
know the darkness better.

The screaming
of the flailing grass—
through which I passed
when I went, at last—
gapes, aghast, to cold stars
cast forever
as lonely tears unfettered.

The icy
cut-cold, bitter pond
lost before long
to summer's song
stares, unrippled, back at me,
who's lost
and beyond scared forever.]

Let's not talk about it

I've been having a lot of trouble stopping talking about All the Pretty Horses, which I read not so long ago.

As Aces points out, Cormac McCarthy has a knack for making you laugh and cry for mummy on the same page. It's amazing. I want to read the whole trilogy, although I don't know if I can bear to start from the beginning again. It's such torture—a beautiful torture, true, but torture nonetheless.

So, the book was good, and I am enraptured. But now that my own life seems to be taking on an alarmingly All the Pretty Horses-ish vibe of its own, I find I've stopped talking about it.

I've stopped talking about it altogether.

Still, it's best to be optimistic, right? As long as I stay out of Mexican prisons, things should turn out okay.

The last thing

So, Monday. So, watching the low ebb of what you think of as your life slip away, molecule by molecule, in a slow and necessarily tedious drain. So, absent friends you would literally kill actual humans to be with right now. So, there never being enough time to do the things we yearn to, to say the things we long to, to be properly in touch.

So fuck you, Monday.

The answer to all these problems, momentarily speaking of course, is to get your blue self to The Paperback and pick up The Ragged Edge of the World.

To buy it new, because you never buy anything new.

To buy it from an independent bookshop, because you like the bookshop and you like the lady behind the counter.

To buy it regardless, because for Christ's sakes people, the world as we know it is crumbling to nothingness around our very ears, and if all I have left in life is the ability to spend $20 on a new book by someone who put some thought into writing it, and to buy it from someone who likes talking about books without the merest hint of pretension and who held Other Voices Other Rooms for me when I was still a long way away but really really needed a copy, then by God, I shall.

If it's the last thing I do. If it's the only thing I can actually do.

Ways of thinking

"...set out with the avowed object of guiding [people] ... into more constructive ways of thinking about the topic."

This quote is taken from Adam's Tongue, a book on the evolution of language by Derek Bickerton. He's talking about a paper published in a scientific journal, but when I read this this morning, the blue sky blueblueblue above my bed, the sunlight playing in the forest, it struck me that this is what the best writing does, and the best films and the best art:

They show us more constructive ways of thinking.

Perhaps it's by example—think In Cold Blood or prettymuch anything by Clive James. Or perhaps it's by evidence, sometimes self-contradictory evidence, like Catcher in the Rye or The Bell Jar or, since you're probably thinking, Jesus, can you pick anything else from the year 11 English reading list?, A Burnt Out Case or The Weekend.

Good writing shows us what we can't see in ourselves, and the world. It brings pieces of life to light, into focus, and then makes sense of them for us.

More constructive ways of thinking are to be pursued. This is not to suggest that there are Officially Constructive and Officially Unhelpful ways of thinking, but that if you're stuck on something, and you can't move forward with it, there is bound to be a more constructive way of thinking about it, if only you take the time to look elsewhere, and to look with an open mind.

Adam's Tongue also has a lot to say about thought and language, about online thinking (concentrating on a task at hand) and offline thinking (daydreaming or thinking about something that isn't in the here and now).

This discussion made me see differently the pop-culture notion of "mindfulness", and wonder if perhaps the reason I feel so at ease, so much freedom, when doing something physical that requires concentration in the here and now is because this is where we began—this is the most basic, and oldest way we think.

Maybe imagining and abstraction are hard—taxing, engrossing, entrapping, painful—because these kinds of thoughts were acquired later, when language came about, and we need to expend more energy on them to make them happen. Maybe we're not as adept—or comfortable, or skilled—with offline thinking as we like to tell ourselves, and as our creative capabilities would have us believe.

Maybe. Who knows? In any case, it's an interesting way of thinking about imagination and abstract thought. And one gleaned through reading good writing.

The ugly side of being a writer

Invoicing. That's the ugly side.

Or, more specifically, telling a client with annual revenues of, oh, $8 billion that you can't continue to work on their projects until the payment for that 7-day invoice you gave them a month ago lands in your account.

That yes, they will be missing the precious Tuesday deadline they had in their mind but hadn't communicated to you until now, since, ahem, they owe you more than a few lazy gs and have done for weeks despite your repeated requests for immediate payment.

That yes, this most certainly is a change of tack from your previously lap-doggish eagerness to please, and your unrelenting commitment to meeting their tight deadlines with outstanding copy time and time and time again.

This is the ugly side of freelancing: being a hard arse. It doesn't come naturally to almost anyone as far as I can tell. It is much easier to just happily continue on, writing pretty things and talking sweetly to stakeholders you want to impress with your professionalism and understanding. Believe me, it really is.

If only that were the way to get paid. If I were feeling philosophical about it, I'd say that sometimes we must be who we are not in order to do justice to ourselves. But I'm not feeling philosophical—just disgruntled—so instead I'll make a cocktail* and write something devastating for a client who does pay.

*Yeah so it's only 3pm. But it is Friday. 

Concisination

I could spend precious verbiage telling you what I've been doing of late, of the wrangling, the mental gymnastics, the creative push-and-shove, the battles to the death.

Instead, let me admit that "concisination" is not a word. "Concision," however, is. When I told a new team member at a client site that I was in the business of "concisinating" the other day, he said, "She's our copywriter and she's making up words! What have we done?!"

That was before I spelled "neck" with a k. At the start. (It came right after "knuckles" so I couldn't help myself.)

Fortunately the designer likes to write "words" by putting down the first couple of letters, but then trailing off the rest in a vague, you-know-what-I-mean-ish squiggle. I think I'm in good company here.

[a foreign place]

[There's something about meeting a hare
on a cool morning,
or in the dim twilight.
That black eye glows,
and you are caught:

time
stands
still.

That's how you know you've seen one
—how you know it's not a rabbit:

for a single, perfect moment
you fell into that timeless eye
(the slender ears
narrow face
ticked fur
as intangible
as to have been imagined).

In a heartbeat, it's over.

The cool morning continues
or the twilight fails further
—ordinary,
as if the world
is as it always has been
and not now a foreign place
you must fight to make your own again.]

[infinitesimal]

[to see what growing up in such unpredictable circumstances does to you," she says. "Surrounded by physical peril. Death is everywhere." 

She shakes her head again, like she's trying to clear her thoughts. 

"This is hard to understand," she tells me, looking at me directly. "It's hard to say. You're always waiting for the death blow, you know? And that can come at any time, no matter how rosy things seem."

I stifle a frown. She goes on.

"There are times when I sense trouble, and that's when I see the peril clearly: death on the road, on a flight of steps, by plain and simple accident, or maybe ... I don't know. Some violence inflicted by a stranger...

"Other times, it's not so obvious, but it's always there—in the surprise you feel at good luck, at tenderness, at the kindness of a stranger ... good fortune at not hitting black ice on the drive home."

She pauses. Outside a car sighs past on the road. A blackbird calls in the late afternoon.

"Life is a numbers game, mostly," she says after a long while. "Odds. Chance. But there are times," she adds

—and here her eyes stare into the space between herself and me with clarity, as if she's actually looking at something real and specific and concrete in that void—

"when the chances of surviving seem infinitesimal. When it all seems]

What the fuck I'm doing now I'm done

Last time, I left you on a cliffhanger.

In case you've forgotten, I was waxing lyrical about a book and wondering with what I'd fill the empty void left by its imminent completion.

The answer is: this. I'm reading a wildly compelling, equally soul- and synapse-nourishing number about the evolution of language.

No shit, kids: the evolution of language.

I'm barely a few chapters in, but already I hold lofty hopes for the realities from which this book will pull multiple masks. Heavens to Betsy, but it is good.

Note to self: find more Derek.

Pertinent questions on evolution ... and, er, other stuff

Events like this put me off Richard Dawkins because, to put it bluntly, he can be so fucking condescending. Being an arsehole is a surefire way to discourage people from, well, liking you (let alone coming around to your way of thinking), and Dawkins's relentless, supercilious intellectual aggression makes me want to set his hair on fire.

However, for, oh, months now, I've been reading The Greatest Show on Earth, and slowly, slowly over the course of the book I've come to love Dawky's writing, and perhaps his brain, if not the man himself.

What on Earth is happening to me?

Really, I pretty much loathe him in person. But The Greatest Show is a joy to read. A joy. Whatever my personal objections to the man's MO, his writing is easy, charming, human, amusing and clear. It gives the impression that Dick Dawkins (as I like to think of him) would be a great person to sit down and have a chat to, even though when I see him in action I want to throw the viewing device of the moment through the nearest window.

How is this possible? How can someone's natural writing style be so different from their actual persona?

For the better part of this year I've used The Greatest Show to entertain myself on planes, stave off torrid wee-hour emotional debacles, and indulge my still sleep-addled brain on many a weekend morning. No matter how crap you're feeling—how sad, how sleepy, how distracted, how disgruntled—DD somehow manages to whisk you away to a beautiful, intriguing, and captivating world of beautiful, intriguing and captivating sense. And it is our world, our sense. And he tells it so well.

I'm up to the last chapter. Which raises a new question:

What the fuck will I do when I'm done?

[never with]

[every single day. He was never without them, yet never with them. They were always there, the three of them, those three lost loves.

To think of any one of them would make him smile—the fun they'd had, the shared moments of bliss, of fear, of boredom—but now they were lost, and there was always that sadness. He missed each one terribly, even now, and he didn't know why that was. He couldn't understand. All the same, it was there, every day, the deep pain of each loss.

They said that in life there would be pain as well as happiness. But now the thought of adding a new person to the list was torture, a terrible]

Make good; be happy

Originally I titled this post "do good, be happy", but the point here is not just doing, but making. Creating something that you, personally, believe is good makes you happy.

This is not opinion; this is a fact.

In recent weeks I've been writing a large body of work with no style guide and little tonal direction. I wrote outlines that said I'd edit existing content, but then when I came to do that, I found that that content said nothing, so more often than not, I deleted it.

So I've been doing a lot of making—so far, around 9000 words in draft, plus whatever I used in the outlines for the drafts.

And right now, I'm not sure if it's what the client wants, because I've had very little stakeholder feedback indeed. My project sponsor's back from break on Monday, and will, I'm sure, give me sound direction then. But will it be "scrap this and bring back our lovely, fluffy corporate motherhood statements"? I sincerely, sincerely hope not.

Not just because I like my writing to actually say something, but because I'm happy with what I've made here. There is something immensely, deeply satisfying about communicating through something you've made, and I think what I'm making here is good.

Will the client be satisfied? I don't know. Am I? Hell yes. If I could write more about their business—write more that makes their superficially boring, dry story arresting and compelling (or at least, in the especially dull parts, readable), I would. Gladly. This is satisfying work.

If I had children, this is what I'd tell them: make good, be happy.

What do you do?

You'd be surprised how often people ask me this question and don't get my answer. Perhaps it's because I say it, rather than writing it, and it doesn't come out the right way.

But today I found an excellent example of something I do, and I thought I'd share it with you.

Look at this:

This phrase was an error message I got on the Optus website:

Let's just be clear: this message reads "Please type the password same as above." It is supplemented by the word "Mediocre".

Among the things I do is make sure that language like this never makes it onto your site. My job is to make sure that every word that appears in association with your brand is a word you'd want associated with your brand.

(If you're wondering what's wrong with "mediocre", the answer involves targeting a mass market [and associated reading levels], brand values, and brand language. Are your eyes glazing over yet? I thought so.)

Terrifying

 

I'm not sure what I thought I was going to write about this sentiment, but I'm pretty sure I thought it applied almost exclusively to novelists and those pouring their soul (rather than straight technique) into their writing.

But in the last day or, oh, week or so, I've found myself terrified by the blank page. Moreover, I've found myself doubting my abilities to fill said page adequately by the (non-)feedback of what you might call stakeholders. 

But, this: I was in a meeting on Wednesday with what you might call a high-powered executive who gave me a small but meaningful piece of advice. She asked me how I got into writing, then told me that she thought it was a gift.

A gift.

"If you can write, you are very fortunate," she said. "It's a gift and you should use it well."

People talk about gifts all the time—he had a gift for running, or piano, or physics. And they say it ad nauseam about writing, so I've always ignored it.

But there in the empty boardroom, as the sun sank low over the skyscrapers and the evening chill crept out early from beneath the leaves of the trees in the park across the street, it struck me: a gift.

A gift.

What if I had a gift? Imagine.

If this was a gift, then writing would not be the mere putting together of words, puzzle-like, to convey some sense. If this was a gift, then I would have something unique, precious, unable to be replicated.

Imagine.

Somewhere around there, for the first time, I began to conceive of the merest spark of an idea that maybe this was something more than a commodity. Maybe I wasn't just a mouthpiece for this woman's corporation, and others like it.

Maybe I had something to offer of myself.

Thought for the day

Very often, I'll read a piece of text and have an automatic response that seems counter to what the writer intended. Case in point:

Automatic response: Looking at punching yourself in the face?

[what they weren't]

[door, wall—these were the things that were real. These were lasting, tangible realities devoid of the kind of interference that could somehow make them something else, that could, through conversation and connivance, mould them into what they weren't.

Things had become clear at last, and simple. There was no need to deliberate, or even to question. Finally it was as plain as the snow that kept falling, flake after freezing flake beyond the glass, as inevitable as death, as tangible as grief.

This just was.]

A strange confluence

Take You & Me, add All the Pretty Horses, mix with the late-night singalongs I've been party to recently, and temper with upcoming visits to a few country folk I know, and you have one hell of a strange confluence of events.

Maybe I really should plan that trip to Mexico after all. Or get a horse.

Studiofy: Q&A

So, you have a nightmare of a project and literally insufficient hours in the day to pull it off by the month-distant deadline?

You need to knuckle down, and crank it up, for a whole month?

Still your palpitations, sweet prince. The answer is clear: studiofy it.

Q. What is "studiofy"?
To studiofy is to turn your life, your living space, and your head, into a working studio. There is nothing else. Your kitchen is in your studio. Your weekend is your studio. That annoying, non-project-related email is breaching the sanctity of your studio; just delete it and turn back to work.

Q. But ... that sounds a lot like a kind of prison.
Listen. Do you want to meet this deadline—and meet it well, not just on time, but by turning out the best conceivable work you've ever freaking-well done—or don't you?

Q. Well, I—
I don't really have time for your objections. I'm in my studio. Do you have a thesaurus? No? Then you're no good to me.

Q. Okay. Can I call you then?
Not really. I mean, unless you're either calling with critical information for the project, or you want to suffer a painful phone-death inflicted by my interrupted rage.

Q. Really? Jesus Chri—
Yes really. Look, is this going anywhere? Can we do it in July? I have shit to do, dude.

The visual dilemma

Have you seen those  infographics for job ads yet? I'm living under a rock, so maybe this is old news. But for me, this alarming new trend brings my ongoing misgivings about the anything-goes world of infographics into the starkest possible relief.

I understand the point of infographics to be to tell a data-based story more clearly (or to tell stories more clearly using data) and in a more digestible way than is possible using words alone.

So why do the vast majority of infographics contain so much text?

Designers, of all people, should realise that the visual elements they add to an infographic add at least one layer of communication.

If a picture tells a thousand words, you don't just want fewer words in your infographic, you want fewer visuals, each with a clear, powerful message.

The current state of infographics champions form over function: designers dazzled by the prestige and viral potential of what, let's face it, is currently little more than a gimmick format choose the format before they consider the data, story, or message.

That's why we get infographics that try to express concepts like these:

Well, how do you list the disciplines required of a role in an infographic? I'd argue that you don't. It's not data, and it just adds words to what should be a visual message. (As for secret powers, that's anybody's guess.)

This information would be better written as bullets in a list. Why? Because as we look at that layout, our brains have to navigate an unfamiliar landscape (which—yes—captures attention!), and we start to wonder about aspects of that landscape. We're paying attention to the imagery and how it's positioned within the interface, and wondering what that implies about the text information.

If the answer's "nothing", as it so often seems to be with today's infograhics, then you're wasting users' time and mental energy.

I think text in infographics should be as reviled as fine print on financial documents.

Infographic text should succeed at a glance, the way a good site IA does.

If your graphics don't carry so much of the message that you can't say everything else you need to say about a given point in maybe three words or less, all your trendy infographic is doing is adding complexity to a message that could probably be more clearly expressed using just words.

And that's a sad, sad thing for a designer to spend time doing.

Sell what you love

Sell what you love!* Where? Why, on the internet, of course.

The things that make the web so great—its reach, egalitarianism, opportunities to connect, and handy, easy, DIY ethos—are also the things that make it such a great marketplace.

Here, you can take your precious passion and turn it into a money-making concern. Sell your cute crafts on Etsy, and the junk from an old, dead hobby on eBay. Grow today's Tumblr blog into an overnight sensation and start merchandising tomorrow. Solicit funds from strangers for that great business idea you had but don't want to sacrifice your lifestyle to build.

Make no mistake—this is serious business. And it's cool.

Take your innermost dreams, your hopes, your personal perspective, and of course your physical possessions, and monetize them. Put them to work for you. Why not? It's easy—just promote a friend's post/event/product, and they'll do the same for you. Thank your sponsors publicly, and they'll remember you when it matters. Before you know it, your shit will go viral. The sky's the limit!

You can also buy more things—dreams, hopes, perspective and possessions—for less. Whatever it is, you can always get it cheaper on the internet. You're not screwing someone over for it—they want to sell for less! That's their USP! Something's better than nothing, right?

Everyone's selling what they love, and boy are they happy. Thank God technology released us from the bonds of the dollar-dependent lifestyle our parents had. Now we're so free. Free to sell anything, everything—and love doing it. Everyone's an entrepreneur!

Get on board: isn't it time you turned your passions into profit?

*For the purposes of this post, "sell what you love" may also be read as "prostitute your passion". Up to you.

[bright lights and danger]

[...and back and forth for hours, but in the end I know that it really doesn't matter what I do. In any case I need the money for tomorrow, so if I don't make it to the party, I'll still need to drive out in the dark, get onto the freeway and get to the Caltex where there's an ATM. Bright lights and danger, I think. I could die so easily out there. But I know that it really doesn't matter what I do, if I do]

Storify this

Ever since I came across Storify I've been trying to think of something it could be good for.

Storify lets users curate social media updates on a given topic into a story. This one, on editors, was pretty blergh but even this one on Syria has that same air of "and then he said and so I said but she reckons" to it.

Still, in my unquenchable thirst to mashuperate the content as much as possible, I've thought long and hard about how this could be good. As far as I can tell, there are two options:

1. Stupid and hilarious riots of conversations about something serious: like the conversation I had with my friend the other night, ostensibly about the Leveson inquiry, but really about cute lawyers at the Leveson inquiry. I'm, clearly, not kidding. All you need to do is look at spoof Twitter accounts like that of Jesus Christ, or serious humour publications like The Onion to see this would work. Hilarity (along, I suppose, with porn) is the lifeblood of new media.
2. Actual conversations, augmented with other media, that precipitate a tangible result: for example, you and I hatch a plan, via a Twitter exchange, to paint Gina Rinehart's house with a photovoltaic coating under an ironic cover of darkness. The curated, temporally arranged replication of the exchange is supplemented with maps showing our GPS locations throughout the exchange, soundbytes from the salesman who sold us the paint along with his headshot, footage we took on-site at painting time with infra-red camera, news reports on the incident following our apprehension by police and subsequent arraingnment, simultaneous rallying of friends and supporters via social media and telephone, shots from their protest outside the court, etc. Think of the possibilities for reportage of things like the Arab Spring protests, Brisbane council evicting the Aboriginal tent embassy, and so on! Compare those possibilities with the Syria story I mentioned, and you'll see there's a big opportunity there to make shit, well, interesting and informative.

That, as far as I can see, is how social media storytelling, like Storify, could be good. Incidentally, I made a multi-character story on Twitter in February last year—this might be the other decent way to use a system like Storify: for fiction entertainment.

In any case, the multiple media factor is the clincher. Curated social media conversations alone won't really cut much mustard if you ask me.

Ending the charm offensive

Today I realised just how much effort I put into writing charming professional emails.

I start always with a sweet salutation, then elucidate some carefully expressed sentiment framed just the right way so as not to offend or leave room for confusion, and finish by telling the correspondent how much I'm looking forward to hearing from them.

For fifteen years I've been composing—really, composing is the most accurate verb here—these missives to people who:

• reply with "Thanx"
• don't bother to respond at all
• are incapable of using salutations of any type
• ignore my email then write to me a week later to ask what's going on
• read the email, ignore what I've communicated, and reply with three short sentences that tell me what they're going to do regardless, apparently, of the input of myself as their colleague
• reply with questions relating exclusively to something else entirely.

So why bother?

This is the question of the day. The only answer I can come up with is, "because I'm an idiot." Well, idiocy no more. From this day forth, I will give precisely on a par with what I get.

And so ends the charm offensive.

Evolve

Today's cuteness courtesy of FastCompany:

...grow a tail with a hook in it! Simple!!

Seriously, though, that nifty fellow looks to be doing better than we are, no?

Hobbled by cliches

Today I was speaking with my favourite human about doing physical stuff, country stuff: cutting wood, digging trenches, wrangling goats.

He said, "Yeah, you're doing this kind of work all the time, and it's still work, it's still physical labour, but it's just what you do."

And I said, "Well, yeah, it's like … physical work. But it just becomes … you know, that's life."

That's life.

I did not mean "that's life" in the sense that the cliche would communicate. I wasn't saying, "yeah but man, you just gotta suck that shit up." Or, "you have to take the bad with the good." Or even, "yes, but don't you see, this is all part of the rich tapestry of life." (Of course I didn't mean that—what am I? Some kind of Zen master of block splitting?)

What I meant was, that is life. That is where the life is: in morning air so cold it burns your nostrils. In rasping-throat breaths as you stack wood. In seeing next year's buds at pruning and knowing that Spring is hurtling toward you even now, with the first frost. In the crystalline nights, with the terrible stars screaming dead light into the precarious, overwhelming dark, each one barely a pinprick, but so much bigger than you.

That is life.

Fuck you, cliches.

Why wireframe your copy?

When we think of wireframing, we tend to think of reducing everything down to its most basic, functional parts.

But this article points out an important aspect of wireframing to do with copy: when you wireframe, you need to include real copy, not dummy text.

This is particularly important if the thing (site, app) you're building promotes a new-concept product or service. In those cases, user testing of wireframes can actually help you to identify conceptual language that does and doesn't work to communicate what you need it to.

That, in turn, can help to define the brand language itself.

Last year I saw this first-hand. The designer, a charming and intelligent individual, took the wireframes and added in my copy, which included references to the new-concept product that the site was selling.

The testing showed that some aspects of the language (like some aspects of the layout) were confusing in context, and needed refinement. It also showed us how far visuals would go to communicate the new concept, and where we needed the refined copy to step in.

To find this out at wireframe testing stage was a massive advantage. The refined copy (and I'm talking 4-word phrases here) proved far more successful at communicating the brand's fundamental purpose at the second round of wireframe testing.

Copy does so much to communicate the purpose and function of a site (or brand) at first glance.

I know a picture tells a thousand words, but often, visuals end up being pretty busy. On the other hand, single- or double-word prompts, or even short-phrase prompts, can be absorbed in an instant. Taken together, the dominant copy on your page contributes massively to that initial communication in the new user's "WTF is this?" moment.

The new-brand-defining moment, if you will.

Example? Example. Not an image on the page. Can you tell what this brand does better than any other? In an instant.

Bad example? This. The visual is busy (and boring), and there's zero actual information in view. The first big word I see is "Analytics", which only reminds me of this brand's largest competitor.

Why should I click on anything on this page? No reason is given in this first view. To put that another way, nothing unique is communicated in the user's first glance at the screen. This is just another analytics brand. Any clicking or scrolling I do will be an attempt to try to find a reason to stick around.

I don't know the facts, but I doubt this homepage's wireframe was tested with real copy. In case you're as slow as I am, the USP is real-time data. Real-time data! The benefit? Respond to this minute's site visitors, right now. That's some selling proposition. Don't use the past to try to predict the future: seize the moment, statisticians and site owners!

Is the immediate communication of a brand's unique function "usability"? Yes. Without a function, the brand has no use to the user. Without a unique function, the brand provides no motivation for its own use.

Yeah, I can work out how to sign up to the free trial and log in. I can scratch my way to hovering over that big arrow, clicking, and watching the video. But Jesus, in that first instant, I got nothin'.

Your video, your pretty pictures, and your logical, navigable, clickable interface don't mean beans—unless, together with your copy, the page says something unique in that first moment.

The random project

Every so often one of those projects comes along.

The random project.

"What the hell is this?" you beg the cosmos, staring bewilderedly at your email. "Did they say [insert ridiculous random project here]? Wait—" Your eyes rake back across the pixels to the Sender field. "—who sent me this?"

For [ridiculous random project], you (or, more properly, I) might insert:

• wacky music festival program/me
• fantastical creative-writing direct email
• greeting card messages
• outrageous-interview-then-carve-the-quotes-up-until-unrecognizable copy job
• comparatively-normal-interview-then-meld-all-talking-into-annual-report job
• my-management-team-just-changed-the-business-model-I-need-you-to-rewrite-all-the-content job
• write-an-entire-book-as-someone-else job
• boardgames.

Yeah, that's right, I said boardgames. And you thought I was just mucking around.

Show us yer briefs

Alarmingly few on the client side of the "information economy" know how to give a creative brief.

I know: yet another unfashionable opinion. There are, of course, some glowing exceptions within my own personal client list. However, I have found that few of my contemporaries in marketing roles within organisations know how to give a creative brief.

That's one end of the spectrum; the other is people who aren't my clients but run online businesses and approach me for work. Broadly speaking, they have less idea of giving a brief than they do about creating rocket-propelled grenades in a domestic kitchen.

I studied marketing, but I didn't learn to give a brief until I got a job and saw how others did it. I can't believe that in the last, oh, 15 years or so, no one has thought to teach undergraduates how to give—let alone take or interpret—a creative brief.

What's more concerning is that these greenhorns won't have anyone to learn from, since there are, apparently, few marketing departments where anyone more senior still knows how to give a brief.

The creative needs to know how to take a brief—sure. But it can be difficult (sometimes impossible) to communicate to a client who's never given one, and has grown up in the churn-and-burn, high-conversion, fuck-usability-fuck-users world of much online marketing, that a brief is even a thing, let alone a necessary thing.

I now find it easiest to just say no to such clients, and to revel—to crack champagne, make toasts, don gladrags—in the delights of those who do.

Because a brief helps the creative do a better job for the client. A brief makes it easier for us to make the client look good, which makes us look good, which means more work, and so the glorious cycle begins again...

Come what may

Sometimes, you can't write. Other times, you just can't read.

Usually it's best to accept this fact, put the books down, and go outside to stare at the trees, or turn the lights off and gaze vacantly at the moon.

The cycle adheres to a known trajectory, which usually ends in a long tail of disenchantment that takes some breaching.

Currently I'm trying to crack up that long tail with Monstress, which I bought at City Lights and which brought me to tears only last evening.

Give up, you say? Try something else? No, no. To abort is impossible. This is the only way. Come what may, we must press on.

Books on country

While I was a the Hill of Content bookshop (which I call the Hill of Content, for obvious reasons, rather than the Hill of Content; the former interpretation is also appropriate because I always leave in a state of inexpressible discontent) today, I saw a current, as in newly released, book described as a modern, British Walden, about a dude who lived on a remote farm in Wales for a bit. It had great reviews but as books are so wildly overpriced in Oz, and owing to my HoC discontent, I failed to purchase it.

However, it made me recall some of the great books on country I've read. In putting together these links I found out, happily, that the more obscure of them aren't just garbage, as my overly lettered family would have me believe, and a sad epithet to the death of taste and refinement in my reading habits, but are in fact internationally lauded tomes.

In any case, I wanted to give you a little reading list, if you're that way inclined:

• The Fat of the Land, Self-Sufficiency, and I'm a Stranger Here Myself, by John Seymour: great books, practical and homely. It was these that taught me to kill and clean a hen and a rabbit.
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver, the highlight of this list if you have any errings toward modern sensibilities and like a dash of food industry scandal with your country tales.
• I Bought a Mountain, by Thomas Firbank, which Wikipedia recommends as an "international bestseller" in its time and my sister derided with a grimace the words "Alida, that sounds terrible." In it, a strapping young lad of 21 buys a 2400 acre farm comprising part of Welsh Snowdonia and runs sheep with his elfin bride Esme, to whom he proposes after spotting her in the high street of the local village, in the 1940s.
• Harvest of the Moor, and Spade Among the Rushes, by Margaret Leigh, who wowed the crowds in the 1940s by being a solo woman farmer and crofter. Again, these books are described as "popular classics" but my sister disdained them with naught but a withering look upon an attempted read, circa 2009.

Twitter vs. Facebook

If you put Twitter and Facebook in a ring and had them fight it out, Twitter would win.

On what basis? Why, the basis that Twitter is far, far more realistic than Facebook. It's sardonic, jaded, wry, scathing, vitriolic, and mordant In short, it's far more honest than Facebook.

This week I made a status update on Facebook that read:

Rage. Just sayin'.

For me, rage = humour. Clearly you already know this. And on Twitter, this status would have gone unremarked.

But on Facebook, smushed in as I expect it was between cute-yet-seemingly-endless pictures of people's children, lurid holiday snaps, shared recipes for sandwiches shaped like elephants, lolcats, animated gifs, Kony videos, and notifications that people have changed their profile photo augmented by 30+ comments from friends on how gorgeous, how simply stunning, they are, this status update apparently stood out.

People responded not just to the update but in my private messages, on my timeline, via email.

Heavens! the collective Facebookian userbase seemed to say. Here's someone who hasn't just experienced the best day of their existence and illustrated it in intimate, multicoloured, multimedia detail for all of Facebook to see! What in hell is going on?!

Nothing, that's what. My life is not crammed with Brady Bunch-esque jollity. Everything I do is not golden and glorious. My children, lolcats, videos, profile photos, and sandwiches* aren't mind-numbingly cheerful. They're boringly real, and dull and uninteresting for the most part.

And this is pretty much how I like things to be. Reality has its perks. And truths, after all, make friends.

*Euphemisms, people! I have none of these things! ...except a profile photo of course.

In love with a dead man

Yeah, so I happen to be falling in love with Capote. What of it?

Okay, it has zero to do with his looks, gleaned only from the black and white back covers of original Penguins. And the man was gay so even if we had coincided chronologically and geographically and socially ... well, as you can see, it's too ridiculous to even contemplate.

But my God, his mind. His sensibilities and sensitivities. His view, his outlook, his expression. He could turn phrase, but it's not just that. He saw what mattered, and he knew it mattered. From his writing, Capote seems like the kind of guy you could sit down with and talk to—really talk to, human to human. And he'd get it.

Yeah, temperamental recluse, whatever. Who cares? Love is blind, after all. I'd get him a rye on ice any time.

[home]

[Black hills rising
in this dark place
although we can't see them
they're out there,
they'll wait.

Don't let me go,
or forget how it feels
to be here at home
held tight in this place.

This lonely home of mixed and fickle fates.

All of the hopes
the mistakes we're making
the rivers we've crossed
and the losses we're taking
—none of it matters,
not to this place.

It's here that timeless longing waits.]

That's not what I do

Recently I've been approached by a few sources for what I consider churn-and-burn copywriting work.

Churn-and-burn work is any request that belies the enquirer's lack of concern for their brand's engagement with their chosen audience. These are people who don't actually care what they say to the market, as long as they get their conversions.

Asking a content developer you've never met to provide a quote on the basis of a two-line brief, or telling them you're not sure of your product's unique selling proposition but can they write the content anyway, screams, "I don't give a fuck."

If you don't give a fuck, I don't want to work with you.

Without wanting to sound like a complete wanker, Jesus H Christ people, actually communicating with your audience is what you're paying me for, so, presumably, you'd like me to take that seriously. I can only take that seriously if you do.

A decent brief, a willingness to meet, some shred of respect for your own brand—all these are evidence of your taking things seriously. You may be in it for the money; I am not. And I don't want to be the one trying to build up your brand amidst a hopeless corporate atmosphere of I-don't-give-a-fuck.

If that's your game, may I refer you to any of the countless freelancing exchanges online. They can help you, but that's not what I do.

The ghost writer

Sometimes, the ghost writer doesn't have the energy to pretend any more. Sometimes, she can't find the mask and pantaloons required to be you, can't make the vocal chords replicate your voice or the pen your hand.

On those days, she just has to give up and be herself. It's all she can manage, the simple putting together of sentences in her own voicee. Saying things in her own way, not trying to pass them off as yours.

Of course your readers will believe literally anything. Anything. But she knows the days it's just not in her. They're rare, but when they come there's something soothing and restorative in being able to be herself, if only for a few paragraphs.

On trauma

Night, by Elie Wiesel, was one of the most horrendous texts I read for school. The education board must have wanted to sort the wheat from the chaff that year, because as well as Night they subjected us to All Quiet on the Western Front. If you hadn't wanted to burn something down after the first book, you did by the close of the second.

The thing that struck me about these stories was how anyone could get past the experience of war, of a massive, surreal, ongoing trauma like that, and continue to build themselves a life afterward.

The problem with trauma is that it expands your understanding of what's possible in the world in horrible directions. It makes the unconscionable real. And this makes it difficult to reconcile the experience with whatever comes after—however calm or pretty or peaceful it may be.

There is a myth that children are more resilient about such things, but it really comes down to the individual. I like to think it would be easier to overcome trauma as an adult, but I know this isn't true. Similarly, if the first years of a life are spent in trauma, the "normal" world forever after can seem alien, like a movie set or a painting into which one has somehow strayed. It seems so real, yet it jars so strongly with the first truths we knew about ourselves and the world—truths that are as ingrained as how we hold a fork or recite the alphabet.

How can one make sense of worlds, realities, at complete odds? How can both be true? Inevitably we apply coping mechanisms from one world to the other, with disastrous results. Inevitably.

Perhaps this is why so many victims of trauma fail to achieve a post-traumatic world that is calm or peaceful or pretty. For some, it must be easier to reconcile trauma with a post-traumatic reality by perpetuating it. This mightn't be a conscious choice, but one that naturally precipitates from the expectations set by the trauma and the fact that, until someone tells or shows you otherwise, it's pretty much all you know.

Your expectations draw you down those same dark paths, to the hard ground you know better than any other. Perhaps that's where you feel the greatest sense of belonging. Perhaps that's where things make the most sense, where you make the most sense.

This is what trauma does to people.

[no amount of longing]

[past became a dream, and the future a fantasy. There was nothing left: no feeling, no sound, no movement. Balance, yes, but the balance was nil.

Nothing made sense. And nothing mattered.

It was about dealing—about moving through each day like there was some kind of direction, as if  there were purpose. But there was none, nothing. Everything stopped in a few months' time. Everything ended: the plank, the proverbial cliff, the rope. That was the moment the escape hatch opened for good, and the kind, well-meaning humans were jettisoned into the void.

Until then? The motions had to be gone through, the dramas played out as if they mattered. When all that mattered was what had been lost long ago—that which no amount of longing could bring back]

Why "feminism" makes me uneasy

I know it's unpopular to find feminism a bit weird, but I can't help it.

Feminism fights gender inequality on the basis of gender. To me this seems as counterproductive as gender-based discrimination. Saying women deserve equality because they're women is logically akin to saying men deserve something because they're men. It keeps questions of human rights shackled to gender, rather than setting them apart.

On this basis, feminism isn't about equal opportunity or gender equality; it's about women's advancement because they're women.

Perhaps I just don't get it. Here, in my defence, are three current examples of "support" for and "supporters" of "gender equality" that make me uneasy.

1. Greer makes public comment on PM's suits

Why Germaine Greer, feminism's (shall we say?) pin-up girl, would engage in a discussion of our female Prime Minister's suits and how big her arse is, is utterly beyond me.  Isn't she keen to avoid gender stereotypes?

Okay, maybe she loves the celebritisation of politics as much as everyone else seems to, but as an employee removed from the head office of a large organisation because I declined to wear sheer stockings, I submit that what's important in the workplace is work performance. I'd have thought Greer would agree, and engage in discourse accordingly. I'd also have hoped she'd have more interesting things to say.

2. Obama says women get more done

Oh, Obama. Perhaps Congress would get more done if there were more women in Congress, but surely that would depend on the individual women themselves, not simply arise as a happy benefit of their genders? As is the case with men, I believe.

3. The Age reveals that sex sells, and uses the fact to sell advertising

Okay, this may just be gratuitous snarking. A revelation from today's Age: sex sells. In fact, the piece focuses on the sexualisation of children—apparently female children, if this image is anything to go by.

"What's the big deal, sister?" you're thinking. "The sexualisation of tiny tots is totes wrong!" Sure. But here's the context for that story, in the carousel on The Age homepage:

Female children are sexualised by the media because women are sexualised by the media. Media like The Age. Will you take some hypocrisy with your morning news?

Campaigning for equality on the basis of gender reduces questions of capability to exactly that: gender. Surely that's something true advocates of equal opportunity want to avoid.