BenCrowder.net

Reading on the iPhone

Ben — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 03:36:27 +0000

I read a lot. I also love my iPhone. So, naturally, I spend a lot of time reading on my iPhone. (In fact, as I look back over the 90+ apps I’ve downloaded, my favorites are the reading/writing ones.)

I’ve tried most of the iPhone ebook readers (Eucalyptus, Stanza, Classics, BookZ, eReader, Kindle, Bookshelf, and Shortcovers, with Instapaper covering a slightly different niche). The ones I come back to? Eucalyptus and Instapaper. We’ll throw Stanza in for good measure, since it’s my fallback ePub reader and was my favorite until Eucalyptus showed up.

Eucalyptus

I love love love Eucalyptus. At first I didn’t think I would — I’d convinced myself that Stanza’s page-turning mechanism was best (tap on the right side to page forward, tap on the left side to page back). But it only took thirty seconds before I fell in love with Eucalyptus and pretty much everything about it. Sure, you can only read Project Gutenberg texts that are in English, but that covers most of what I wanted to read anyway — and it’s not like 20,000 books isn’t enough. ;)

Did I mention that Eucalyptus is beautiful?

And here we are turning a page (and this is now my favorite way to turn pages on the iPhone). A still shot doesn’t do it justice, so make sure you go over to the website and watch the video (under “Reads like a book”):

And I love the blue progress pie charts — brilliant:

I can’t think of any real complaints I have about Eucalyptus. It’s awesome. If you have an iPhone and you love books, go buy this app now. It’s worth every cent of the $10.

And what am I reading? Trollope’s autobiography, Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, James E. Talmage’s Jesus the Christ, and I’m rereading both Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre (both of which I adore).

Stanza

For a long time, Stanza was my shining star for iPhone reading. Now that Eucalyptus has come along and dethroned it, however, I find myself hardly ever opening it. I still keep it around to read any non-Project Gutenberg ePubs I come across, though. (Which hasn’t happened yet.)

I have to say, after using Eucalyptus for several weeks, Stanza feels almost sterile. I seriously love Eucalyptus.

Instapaper

Instapaper doesn’t really compete with Eucalyptus or Stanza because it’s not a fiction reader: it’s a way to read long-form blog posts and other web pages on your phone. (Or on the web.) You set up an account on Instapaper.com and then use a bookmarklet to save pages to your Instapaper account. The iPhone app automatically syncs with your account. It’s perfect at what it does as far as I’m concerned.

And it’s got the über-awesome auto-scroll feature — using the iPhone’s accelerometer, Instapaper can sense when you’re tipping the phone forward or backward and then scroll accordingly. It works really well.

Summary

Reading on the iPhone is great and so convenient it gives me goosebumps. I can read anywhere now, since I always have my phone with me. I’ve read the first third of Trollope’s autobiography on my walk home from work each day, for example. Dead time is dead no longer. (I also use WriteRoom to work on my novel — got a nice page or so written this morning on my way up to work.)

Will something else come along and unseat Eucalyptus? Maybe. It’s hard to imagine something better, but I’m quite open to that possibility. Competition is a very good thing here. :)

Me, the writer

Ben — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:57:14 +0000

I went to the BYU Writing & Illustrating for Young Readers Workshop last week — five full days of writing awesomeness. Each morning we gathered in writing groups (I had around thirteen great people in mine, with Lael Littke as our fearless leader), then had a plenary session for everyone together (with editors and agents as the speakers). The rest of the afternoon split us up into breakout sessions on topics like dialogue and making time for writing. Almost every single class I went to was über-useful. Basically writers’ heaven for a week. I’m definitely returning next year…and the next…and the next. It’s totally worth it.

The best part, though, is what happened afterward.

I woke up.

You see, I have lots of hobbies. Lots of projects. That was how I defined myself, really: by being a many-project person. A Renaissance man.

But my real dream is to be a writer. Being one of those people like Jefferson who absolutely cannot live without books, I knew when I was younger that I wanted to be a writer. Then real life stepped in and I surrendered and made plans to do something practical with my life. Sayonara to the writing dream…or so I thought.

A couple years ago, however, I realized I really liked this blogging thing. A lot. I started writing plays, too, and before long I remembered (how could I have forgotten?) that writing was what I loved most. That feeling has grown stronger and stronger until now where I know it’s my life’s work and it’s what I want to spend the rest of my life doing. Even if it’s so dang hard sometimes. :)

But even then I was still only spending a sliver of my free time writing. Sure, I wrote twenty short plays and a 50,000-word NaNoWriMo novel, but time after time I’d get distracted by zillions of other little side projects. I thought I didn’t have time to write. And I didn’t, since I was filling up my time with lots and lots of other stuff.

After this last week of full-on writing focus — within five minutes of getting home after the conference, actually — I woke from my reverie and saw that all of those little side projects were pulling my energy away from what I want most and shunting it off in too many other directions.

Not any more.

Starting now, I’m axing all of my side projects, with the sole exception of the magazine. No more new projects (I’m finally learning how to say no), no more freelance work (which means Quillfire Studios is going to be hibernating), no more anything that isn’t reading, writing, or the magazine.

This feels right, more right than almost anything else I’ve done in a while. It feels so, so good. Like I’m coming home after a really long time away. This is what I was made for.

I can’t wait to see what happens when I take all of that energy and time I was pouring into my design work and fuel it into my writing instead. Watch for the explosions, folks. ;) It’s going to be hard — design was easy, but writing was and still is hard — but man oh man is it going to be worth it.

It’s only been five days and I’m already seeing the fruits of this new shift in focus. (Monday night I finished the first draft of my first full-length play, for example. And my Tanglewood novel is humming right along.) I still have some loose ends to tie up, but it’s like my mind is clearing up, like I’ve been lugging around a full hard drive in my head for the past five years and I’ve finally cleaned it all out.

I do have to say that it’s kind of scary, shutting down major parts of my life (especially since those were a huge part of who I thought I was), but it’s going to be okay. In fact, it’s going to be awesome.

And you know what? Within five years I’m going to be a full-time author. Maybe even within four. ;)

Disclaimer, because I’m a disclaimery kind of person: I’m not bashing on design. I’m still a designer and will always be a designer. I love design. It’s just that for me, right now, writing is more important. I expect that down the road I’ll start picking up design projects again; I just have to take a break right now and focus on what matters most. That’s all.

On the writing habit

Ben — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 02:59:34 +0000

I write sporadically, in occasional bursts and drips. And I hope that that sentence will quickly become false. :)

See, to really be a writer, you have to write regularly. You have to. That’s how you get good, by putting in the hours and making writing as much a part of your life as brushing your teeth. (Assuming you do, in fact, brush your teeth.) (No, I don’t want to know.) Gladwell gives the 10,000-hour number in Outliers, and I’m pretty sure he’s right. There’s magic in habits. (Must. Resist. Nun. Joke.)

Setting a goal merely to write every single day is great and noble and all that, but the organizational freak inside me wants to set a more specific goal, either in words or in hours. And so I have. Ever since that NaNoWriMo day when I blistered out 10,000 words in a single day (yes, you read that right), and 5,000 the next, I’ve had this uncanny belief in my ability to pump verbiage out onto the page at an alarming rate.

But wait, what about that thing called real life? Those 10k/5k days were empty holidays and Saturdays, but ordinarily I don’t have eight hours a day to write. At first, a thousand words a day seemed like a good goal, so I tried doing that. I lasted all of, oh, three days. After that came a long line of starving zero days with nary a word to my name. (Blogging and twittering don’t count towards the goal, by the way.) (And yes, on those days when I didn’t reach my goal, I realize I should’ve just doodled a picture and called it even. :P)

Brief tangent that’s not really a tangent: People like Trollope are the reason I keep thinking I need to be sizzling out thousands and thousands of words a day, because of course I need to have 80+ novels published by the time I die…right? Bzzt. It’s not about the numbers. And while prolific can be good, and writing that much does give you plenty of practice to get you to your literary Carnegie Hall, it’s silly to worry about goals like that when you’re still trying to finish your second novel. And by “you” I mean “me.”

So, my new goal is 500 words a day. It’s smallish (two pages) and almost reddens my cheeks with underachievement, but I’m coming to terms with the cold reality that writing is not yet high enough of a priority in my life that I can do more than 500 words a day consistently. (And I’d rather write a few words every day than a lot every once in a while.) It shames me to say that. I mean it: I’m cringing over here. I am a writer, so why do I keep letting myself get distracted with all these other projects? Tsk, tsk, Ben. Anyway, that will change someday (hopefully soon), but in the meantime, here’s to 500 words a day and all the books that will come out of it.

I still feel like a pansy. But at least I’ll be a producing pansy!

Mormon Digitization Project

Ben — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 17:44:05 +0000

Not too long ago I downloaded Eucalyptus, a slick new ebook reader for the iPhone. I love it. I didn’t think anything could knock Stanza down from being king of the hill in my ebook-reading world, but Eucalyptus did it and with style.

Caveat: Eucalyptus can only read books from Project Gutenberg. But that’s not really a problem for me, since most of what I wanted to read was on there anyway. (Well, most of what I wanted to read that already happened to be free.)

Fast forward to this morning. I’m Mormon, and I want to read more Mormon-related texts. I searched around on Project Gutenberg but only found six or seven books — the Book of Mormon (of course), James E. Talmage’s Jesus the Christ and The Story of Mormonism, and then some outsider and/or anti works. Hardly anything.

I want to change that.

There are lots of public domain (pre-1923) texts related to the Church which would be valuable to make available for free, so my new goal is to start digitizing them and putting them into Project Gutenberg. (So I can read them in Eucalyptus. ;))

Yes, yes, I’m aware that there are already places like GospeLink with plenty of these texts. That’s great, but I want Mormon books in Project Gutenberg, and so far that hasn’t really happened. It’s been seven years since I submitted The Story of Mormonism to Project Gutenberg, and the number of Mormon-related texts added since then (if any) is paltry at best.

I’m going to start building a list of the books I think should be added, and if you have any additions, let me know. (The only real stipulation is that there has to be at least one edition of the book published before 1923, to ensure that it’s out of copyright.) First on my list is John A. Widtsoe’s Joseph Smith As Scientist. I also plan to add the D&C, Pearl of Great Price, and eventually the Journal of Discourses.

I’ll also be developing my Unbindery web app as part of this, and I’ll need volunteers to help with proofreading. When that part is ready, I’ll let you know, but if any of you do want to help out, shoot me an email and I’ll add you to the list.

Last but not least: I like naming things, mainly so I have a way to talk about them. To that end, then, I’m going to call this the Mormon Digitization Project. Here we go. :)

Tutorial: Depth of field in Blender

Ben — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:25:39 +0000

Here’s how to do depth of field in Blender. What’s depth of field, you ask? Go read the Wikipedia article for the details, but the layman’s summary is that it’s how you blur the out-of-focus parts of an image. (The blur is called bokeh, by the way.) The shallower the depth of field (or the lower the f-stop), the blurrier the out-of-focus parts get. I like it because it looks better and feels more professional, and it also focuses the viewer’s attention right where you want it. (But it’s not something you should use in every shot by default. Don’t leave artistic judgment behind. :))

The good news is that Blender can do depth of field. The bad news is that it’s only possible via postprocessing (using compositing nodes), which isn’t perfect. But it mostly works.

I’m visual—show me what it looks like

Here’s the sample scene before adding depth of field:

And here it is afterward:

As you can see, both the foreground and the background are now blurry, leaving only the center thingie in focus.

Overview (Microwave Edition)

All you have to do is give the camera a focus point (Dof Dist or Dof Ob), add a Defocus node, and render with Do Composite.

The Gritty Details, Please (With Pictures!)

1. Set up the scene. Here we’ve got a pretty basic setup with cubes (using some array modifiers and a path to spiral them out), lights, a thingie in the middle (made by extruding a cube), and a camera.

2. Select the camera and go to the edit buttons. Click on the Limits button (under “Show:” in the upper right). You’ll now see a line pointing out from the camera, with a yellow line through the camera itself to show you where the camera’s focus will be.

3. Now to set the focus. You can either give the camera a set distance (Dof Dist) or an object to focus on (Dof Ob, which we set here to MainCube, but you could just as easily use an empty to have finer control over where the camera focuses).

4. Open up the node editor, click on the face (the middle of those three buttons), then click on Use Nodes.

5. Add a Defocus node (Add->Filter->Defocus). And ignore the fact that there’s nothing in the RenderLayer on the left — I’m pretty sure it’s a bug in Blender 2.49.

6. Drag the RenderLayer node’s Z output to the Defocus node’s Z input, the RenderLayer node’s image output to the Defocus node’s image input, and the Defocus node’s image output to the Composite node’s input. (Just follow the diagram. :))

7. Uncheck No zbuffer. This way it’ll look at the depth data from the scene, which is exactly what we want. Also set the fStop down to something low (lower is blurrier) — try 8 or 12 for starters. Note: when you do the final render, deselect the Preview button here.

8. Select the Do Composite button. (If you don’t, it won’t use the nodes we just set up and you’ll get an ordinary render.)

9. Render. You’ll notice the sharp artifacts on the far left and center bottom. To be honest, I don’t know how to get rid of these. My guess is that they appear because Blender’s depth-of-field isn’t actual DOF but is just a postprocessing illusion. If any of you know how to fix this, let me know.

Notes

This tutorial was made using Blender 2.49.

Mormon Artist Issue 5

Ben — Sat, 30 May 2009 22:44:01 +0000

Guess who forgot to blog about releasing Issue 4 of his magazine back in March? Yeah, I just realized that. Whoops. :) Anyway, Issue 5 of my magazine Mormon Artist is now available for your reading pleasure. Just hie on over to http://mormonartist.net and either read it online or download the PDF for a more sumptuous experience. :)

We’ll have our special contest issue coming out in the next month or so, too. (And hopefully another contest shortly after that.)

You know, it kind of blows my mind that the magazine is still around. It’ll be a year next month since I got the idea for Mormon Artist, and here we are five issues later, with eighty-five volunteers helping out. Hard to believe. :)

Review: City of Bones

Ben — Wed, 27 May 2009 18:13:12 +0000

A review of Cassandra Clare’s novel City of Bones.

Amazon • LibraryThing

City of Bones is another of those books that gets rave reviews and actually deserves them. Within the first few pages I was completely sucked into the world of the story and rearranging my schedule to be able to finish the book. It was worth it, too.

The novel is a can’t-put-it-down urban fantasy set in New York, where demons (bad) and werewolves and vampires and the rest (not necessarily bad) are real, and people called Shadowhunters fight the demons. I have to admit that the premise had me thinking this book wasn’t for me (I guess I’ve developed an aversion to vampire tales), but it didn’t take long before I was won over. Everything just clicks in this milieu, from the magic system to the various societies and cultures. Nothing felt tacky or cliché or, for lack of a better word, stupid.

Have I mentioned the characters? Holy smokes, these people are awesome. Clary, Simon, and Jace are the three major characters, and they’re all drawn in ways that make them real and funny (Simon is hilarious!) and immensely endearing. These are characters you’ll want to spend lots of time with. (Which is why I’m glad there are two more books in the series. :))

Disclaimer: City of Bones is definitely for older teens. There’s a bit of language and some light innuendo. Nothing too hard, but more than your typical YA novel.

CONduit 2009

Ben — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:33:20 +0000

This past Friday/Saturday I went to CONduit, a science fiction and fantasy convention up in Salt Lake at the Radisson Hotel. Now that I’ve established my geekiness (not that it was ever in question ;)), here’s a recap.

Friday

My first impression, as soon as I walked into the registration area and saw all the people in costumes, was that I was glaringly overdressed in my dress shirt and pants (which is what I wear all the time, apparently because I wish I lived in the 1800s or something). It ended up working out okay, though.

The day was a whirl of panels on topics ranging from Dollhouse (Joss Whedon’s TV show) to writing evil overlords (making them believable, that is) to YA publishing.

I haven’t watched many episodes of Dollhouse, but the following Joss Whedon has collected is fascinating and I figured I could learn from him. And I did learn some valuable things from that panel — mostly ways to deepen my own writing, seeing what makes fans go gaga.

Ditto with the evil overlords panel; we talked about things like making your overlords sympathetic (they have to think they’re the hero of their own story, for example, because hardly anyone is evil just for the sake of being evil) and researching real-life villains like Hitler and Stalin.

For me, the YA panels on both Friday and Saturday primarily burrowed their way into my brain as a rabid urge to WRITE. In all-caps. :) That basically describes the whole conference, actually: in almost every panel I went to, the discussions got my writing soul itching to write. I almost had to force myself to stick around each time — I was sorely tempted to book it and find a quiet corner of the hotel where I could pull out my laptop and write for hours.

After a great panel by Howard and Sandra Tayler on structuring their creative life (they do Schlock Mercenary full-time), my friends Josh (who told me about CONduit in the first place) and Daniel and I headed up to the boardroom so they could check out Paul Genesse’s book release party for The Dragon Hunters (which I’d never heard of). The party was over, but we ended up hanging out with Paul and some of his friends for an hour or so, mostly geeking out over Lord of the Rings.

Saturday

The YA panels on Saturday included one on the Harry Potter phenomenon and another on the Twilight phenomenon. (Ironically, most of the people on the Twilight panel hadn’t read the books.) (I tried reading the first book recently, but watching the movie apparently drained me of any need to read it. I tried. And failed. And tried again. And failed again.)

Another disclaimer: I don’t take very good notes. Most of the time I don’t take any notes at all; I used to, but then I never went back and read them, so I’ve mostly stopped. Which is why these summaries are more general than specific. :)

Anyway, one of the panels I went to was actually a recording of two episodes of the Writing Excuses podcast (by Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler). I’d never listened to the podcast before, but I ended up liking it a lot. The first episode (season 3, episode 2) featured Aprilynne Pike (#1 on the NYT bestseller list right now for her book Wings) and was mostly about how to make your fantasy or science fiction novel feel real. The second episode was a general Q&A with the audience. I can’t remember much of it, but that’s okay because I don’t have to — it’ll be online soon. :)

After the conference, Josh and Daniel and I went to dinner at the Gateway food court with a bunch of people, including Aprilynne, James Dashner (whose Maze Runner book is being published by Random House), Rebecca Shelley, and Paul Genesse. My overwhelming desire to not look like a fanboy ended up quieting me for most of the rest of the evening (silly me), but even so, it was a lot of fun. Authors are real people.

We returned to the hotel and ended up hanging out till 11 p.m. with Howard and Sandra Tayler, L.E. Modesitt, Julie Wright, Eric James Stone, and others (including a brief stop-in by Dave Wolverton/Farland).

Hmm, it probably looks like I’m name-dropping. (That’s because I am. :P)

Anyway, the conference was a blast — definitely worth the $45. Writing conferences and workshops rock.

Tanglewood: a teaser

Ben — Tue, 26 May 2009 12:07:40 +0000

It’s been a little too long since I posted any of my fiction here, I think. Here’s the first scene from my YA fantasy novel-in-progress. (I’m going to the BYU Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers Workshop in a couple weeks and had to submit this to my writing group.) Anyways, keep in mind that this is still just a draft and is very subject to change. :)

Chapter One

Charlotte made another notch in the doorframe: Will Tupper was the seventh child gone missing. Seven in one month. Charlotte swallowed and stepped out the door, almost losing her balance on the wooden step. Good thing she didn’t, because Mrs. Tupper sat curled up in a ball at the foot of the step, swaying back and forth, tracing circles in the dirt with her index finger as her gasps and sniffles muffled the air.

“Ma’am?” Of all the places for Mrs. Tupper to come, why here? Charlotte wouldn’t have expected her house to even make the list.

“Last night, girl, I watched him. Fixed my eyes on him all night long, every last minute. Didn’t even blink.” Mrs. Tupper wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I tucked him in tight. Come morning, I pull back the covers to wake him up. Stones! That’s what was left of my boy.”

In all of Charlotte’s fifteen years, she’d never heard of boys turning into stones, especially not when their mama was watching them sleep. Some boys spread stories that they’d given their parents the slip, leaving bundles of straw under the covers so they could steal out to climb down the cliffs in the moonlight, but stones? Too heavy. And yet Will was gone, vanished plain out of sight. Charlotte wanted to ask if Mrs. Tupper had looked under the bed, but when she saw the blue-black wrinkly circles under the old woman’s eyes, she figured silence might be better.

“Magic,” Mrs. Tupper said. “In the air. I smell it.”

All Charlotte could catch was a faint sooty smell from the ashes Mrs. Tupper had trailed in under her boots. She must’ve walked straight through the firepits on her way here.

“I…I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“I hear him whisper, Charlotte girl. Whispers. He’s out there, his soul’s on the wind even though his body’s a pile of stones. He’s alive.”

Charlotte opened her mouth to say that she didn’t think the pile of stones actually was Will, but she thought twice and decided to keep her lips shut. Better for Mrs. Tupper to think she had her son safe inside the house, even if he was only a bunch of rocks. The other six families had it harder, not knowing where their children were — dead or worse. At least rocks were something you could see and hold. Charlotte pulled her hair back into a ponytail with a loose ribbon she found in her pocket.

Mrs. Tupper must’ve seen the twitch in her fingers, because she said, “You don’t believe me. I see it in your eyes. You think I’m a crazy old woman, don’t you. Well, you know what, Charlotte girl? You tell your mama and papa that I’m going to bring back my boy if it’s the last thing I do.” Mrs. Tupper stood up and squeezed Charlotte’s hand. “Just watch.”

What Charlotte said — “Yes, ma’am” — wasn’t at all what she wanted to say. What are you thinking? Crazy is right, if you’re going to march into Tanglewood like it’s your own kitchen. Sit yourself back at home, ma’am, and let the parson do what he does best. And what was that? Finding lost children? Nobody’d had any training on that, not least her papa. All he was good at was finding and saving lost souls. Can’t do much good for the soul if you can’t find the body, though. And so far there weren’t any bodies.

“Thanks.” With that, Mrs. Tupper turned around and stomped back down the path to the village, flexing her fingers as she went. Charlotte didn’t particularly like the woman, but still she hoped it wouldn’t be the last time she saw her. They didn’t need anyone else going missing. Especially not any of the adults.

Shaking her head, Charlotte got up and went back into the house. “Stuart! Get yourself in here, boy.”

She heard the tap-tap of his crutch on the wood floor before she saw him round the corner, stuffing something into those pockets of his. Something round and shiny.

“Stuart, what’ve you got in your pockets? Out. Let me see it.”

“I don’t think so,” Stuart said, scowling. “Just because you’re older doesn’t mean you’re the boss.”

Charlotte folded her arms. “Whatever. Will’s mama was just here. He went missing last night.”

“Serves him right.”

“Don’t talk like that, you’ll be next.”

“Will is worse than a beetle.”

“Stuart, you let Papa hear you talking like that and you’re going to be a beetle yourself.” She rubbed her temples. Why was talking with this child like beating her head against a stone wall? He was only nine. Nine was too young to be goat-stubborn, wasn’t it? “You know anything about it?”

“About beetles? Nope.”

“Very funny, boy. About Will. His mama found a pile of stones in his bed when the sun came up. You boys playing at something?”

Stuart fingered whatever it was in his pockets, then shook his head. “I don’t even like him.”

“I know,” Charlotte said. “That’s the problem.”

“I didn’t do anything. Leave me alone.”

“You don’t know anything about it? Like where he went?”

“How should I know?” He turned around and hobbled back towards the kitchen. “But if I did, you’d be the last person I’d tell.”

Review: The War of Art

Ben — Mon, 25 May 2009 21:57:12 +0000

A review of Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art.

Amazon • LibraryThing

Like most books I read, I’d heard of this one a few times before I got around to reading it. Clever title, I thought. Turns out that it’s a completely apt title and an even more awesome book. (Caveat: there’s a lot of strong language in this book, so if that sort of thing bothers you, you probably shouldn’t read it. Read Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit instead.) (Read Twyla’s book either way, actually. It’s just as good.)

So, Pressfield’s contention is that any kind of activity that creates order out of chaos — moving from a lower state of order to a higher state of order — will find opposition. He calls it Resistance, and it’s always there, every time you try to do almost anything creative.

Resistance obstructs movement only from a lower sphere to a higher. It kicks in when we seek to pursue a calling in the arts, launch an innovative enterprise, or evolve to a higher station morally, ethically, or spiritually.

So if you’re in Calcutta working with the Mother Teresa Foundation and you’re thinking of bolting to launch a career in telemarketing…relax. Resistance will give you a free pass. (p. 17)

He’s right, you know. I deal with Resistance every single day, whether when trying to write (this is where I face it the most) or work on my magazine or do illustrations or even work on my family history. Giving it a name and being aware of it is a huge step towards being able to overcome it, as I’ve been finding in the week or so since I finished the book.

I should also mention that the book is surprisingly spiritual and more often than not coincided with my own beliefs. I like that. (Of course. :))

Anyway, it’s only a couple hundred pages and the chapters are very short (I breezed through half the book in a single sitting and only stopped because I was going to be late for a meeting), so if you do anything creative and find yourself getting stuck (and if you don’t mind some salty language), read this book.

BenCrowder.net

Reading on the iPhone

Eucalyptus

Stanza

Instapaper

Summary

Me, the writer

On the writing habit

Mormon Digitization Project

Tutorial: Depth of field in Blender

I’m visual—show me what it looks like

Overview (Microwave Edition)

The Gritty Details, Please (With Pictures!)

Further Reading

Notes

Mormon Artist Issue 5

Review: City of Bones

CONduit 2009

Tanglewood: a teaser

Review: The War of Art