There are a growing number of stories out there about people who have written books, published them electronically and done well. There are also stories out there of authors using social media to promote their work.

Andy Holloman has done both. His book is getting great reviews on Twitter.

Why not take a look at how someone is doing it.

If you’re looking for some innovative and interesting viewing this coming weekend why not take a look at the Independent video channel on Vimeo? This channel showcases over 500 videos by independent artists. If you want to see something cool, new and of very quality this is the place to go.

The 2nd in a series of articles talking about the evolution and redevelopment of the Findingviews digital arts website.

I’ve decided to make the shop the home page of this site. I want to make fuller use of this shop and hiding it in the menu won’t help there. I also want to talk more about photographs and pictures I work on so putting the gallery front and centre makes a lot of sense to me. It’s not just about seeking sales. It’s also about arranging this web site in a manner that better reflects it’s job.

I’m sticking with keeping the shop powered by  Redbubble. The reasons for this are very simple. Redbubble do a great job of printing and posting my work. I thought about keeping stock and selling it directly. It turned out that conflicted with my belief that we should only use what we need. Creating stock and hording it is not as environmentally as printing images and T-Shirts individually for each and every customer.

The blog itself continues to expand and is improved by the new look. Its made up of two components, thoughts about my work and comments that should be published here on Findingviews and a stream of discoveries and thoughts from Sharedcreation. Sharedcreation seeks out to discover and publicise things that people are creating and publishing. Its a look at the expansion in creativity that has been perpetuated by the Internets ability to enable low cost distribution. I believe that this is changing bout how our culture operates and also how we get our entertainment. I feel sure that this can only get more interesting.

The actual black on white design itself is meant to enable reading. I hope it achieves that.

There are other updates and changes to come. I’ll update this blog as these happen.

I’ve learned that a number of places are still open for the 10th anniversary Twilight Realms LARP event. If you never tried LARP or tried Twilight Realms out then this could be a good opportunity to see collective story telling in action. The Anniversary game promises a great story line and a plethora of fantastic characters to interact with.

On top of that the game will take place in an actual castle

I was reading this article from New Scientist that describes Titan and started coming up with ideas for potential stories.

Then it hit me - reading an article about a place and thinking up fiction for the environment. Its an essential practice for SF authors but valuable to any writer -as we cannot always visit every place that a story demands we talk about.

Yet in order to keep the reader interested we have to make the reader feel that they know the place. So if you want to write great descriptions about any place, practice on some extreme examples from magazines or journals, before putting pen to paper on that new killer description in your latest work.

Giving inanimate objects personality can lead to some interesting ideas and circumstances in fiction. So how would a happy or angry bullet react when being shot from a gun

Although Shared Creation focuses extensively on Internet based creativity there is a certain rightness in looking at the real world too. LARP seems to bridge the both the digital and the real.

LARP is consenual group story telling - everyone agrees to a framework of behaviour and uses it to take part in the telling of a story. Its part a very modern idea, part a very ancient idea. The bridge between digital and realworld comes in the way that concepts, stories and characters are often developed online and then played out live.

Twilight Realms is a group that does this. The world is build largely online, and then enacted at events.

Very creative, very modern, and very retro.

Stealing creative software may bring you more problems than solutions, worse still it may not help you be more creative