Authorscope – Know Where You Stand

Posted on 15 February 2010 by Erik Hare | 8 Comments

You’ve finished your novel manuscript. It’s been months of work, sometimes in bursts of energy and sometimes a desperate obligation to the characters and the story to slog it through. Now what?

Most manuscripts are never actually read, which is a terrible shame. There are literally thousands of good novels which sit on computers and shelves as stories barely told despite the tremendous effort. Thousands more could be great with just a little bit of coaching and support. But once you’ve finished writing, your work has barely begun because the next thing you need to do is find a way to have it noticed among the incredible noise of the publishing world. That’s why we created Authorscope.

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Storytelling

Posted on 12 February 2010 by Erik Hare | 12 Comments

A fellow poster on a chat service had a very important problem that he was asking for help solving. His son, an adult, is developmentally disabled and the programs that the family has come to rely on to create for him something like a normal life were being slashed. When this poster tried to explain the situation to officials and others who might help, their eyes glazed over and they lost interest. What can he do?

The answer was a simple one: he had to learn how to tell a story. He had to make the people listening want to care and get involved.

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Smallness

Posted on 10 February 2010 by Erik Hare | 14 Comments

The hidden and the manifest give birth to each other.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short exhibit each other.
High and low measure each other.
– Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 2 (John C.H. Wu translation)

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Jet Stream

Posted on 8 February 2010 by Erik Hare | 9 Comments

When in doubt, you can always talk about the weather in polite Minnesota conversation. Days like today, when we are expected to have a foot of snow and Olympic Ice Dancing on the roads, it’s a topic you can count on. It’s not controversial but it provides a nearly endless supply of entertainment much like driving a flaming bus through a wall of televisions, at least in the sense that it’s likely to be lethal.

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Great Recession? Great Denial

Posted on 5 February 2010 by Erik Hare | 28 Comments

What is the best way to describe our economic situation? If you look at the popular press, the term that is gaining truck lately is “Great Recession”, a term that refers to the worst recession since the Great Depression of 1929-1937. But isn’t a really bad Recession just one way of defining a “Depression”? Well, maybe, but that would involve using that dreaded “D word”. That kind of cowardice, the inability to call the situation what it is, lies at the heart of why we aren’t capable of dealing with it properly – which is why it continues to get worse.

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