I've been travelling, so
my weekly update links have piled up for three weeks. There is some
important reading here, and as usual the must reads are in the first
section.
This is a first notice that, as of December 31, this blog will be
moving to a Wordpress blog at http://howtosavetheworld.ca
since Radio Userland, which has hosted this blog since its inception
nearly seven years ago, is ceasing its collaborative operations with
Salon. If you change your bookmarks to the new link now, it will take
you back here until the official switchover. Thanks.
this
hilarious bit of 'systems thinking' is from holytaco.com; thanks to fer_ananda
(Fernanda Ibarra) and Amy Lenzo
for the link
PREPARING
FOR CIVILIZATION'S COLLAPSE: UNDERSTANDING WHO WE'VE BECOME
Walking
Away from Our Colonial Culture:
Derrick Jensen explains that the first step in understanding and
preparing ourselves to end the damage of civilization culture is to deprogram
ourselves from the colonial cultural indoctrination that makes us
afraid to bring it down, and
reconnecting with all-life-on-Earth, starting with just doing something
effective that we are particularly good at doing.
Copenhagen
is a trip to hell for those who truly and most sincerely grasp the
scope of the problem. In Hell, whether your kids and grandkids have
enough to eat, whether we have resource wars over the remaining water
are treated as distant tertiary (if that) issues, over how much money
we can get for not burning the last bits of rainforest. In Hell,
politicians who view this as a purely political issue - they will be
long out office before their constituents suffer much - puff themselves
and their nation, making small commitments they probably won't keep,
with no real grasp of what is needed, while the people who are already
paying the price get hosed again. And good people, who actually really
do give a shit and are watching their life's work be ignored in every
meaningful respect get to describe future suffering, and watch people
shrug and move on.
My
friend Pat Meadows, a very, very smart woman, has a wonderful idea she
calls “The Theory of Anyway.” What it entails is
this – she argues that 95% of what is needed to resolve the
coming crisis in energy depletion, or climate change, or whatever is
what we should do anyway, and when in doubt about how to change, we
should change our lives to reflect what we should be doing
“Anyway.” Living more simply, more frugally, using
less, leaving reserves for others, reconnecting with our food and our
community, these are things we should be doing because they are the
right thing to do on many levels. That they also have the potential to
save our lives is merely a side benefit.
Learning
to Live in Now Time: Many
biologists hypothesize that wild creatures, and perhaps some
prehistoric human cultures, live/lived "outside of time" as we know it,
the linear progression from past to future -- without the sense of time
as a constraining dimension at all. In times of stress these creatures
do suddenly snap into our linear "clock" time, but in times of leisure
they lose that sense of time, and their joyful moments are essentially
eternal. We apparently lost this capacity -- in part because our modern
civilization's stress is ever-present, and in part because our brains
form in response to what we are taught in infancy, and what we are
taught is that clock time is "real". We can no longer think otherwise.
This, I think, is what Presence is all about, and why it is so elusive
to us. Two recent articles touch on this:
If
I don’t like the answer the
Magic Eight Ball gives, I turn it over and try again. Eventually,
“It
is certain” shows up in the inky window, and I know
“Will I be able to
write something good?” or “Am I to find
love?” will have the outcome I
desire. Surely one can trust the Eight Ball to know these things. I can
sleep.
If I don’t like the way these cards tell my future,
I’ll do it two more times. Isn’t this a
best-of-three game?
I can reason my way around anything, even the opening
“Caution about
the present” card. Of course I am being cautious.
Aren’t I? Well, yes,
in my usual incautious manner of approaching anything. It is the last
card that tells the truth, however. I do not need to shuffle the deck
again, hurrah. “A good augury.” I will take it. I
can live on auguries
in the absence of proofs. It is all I need, along with all I already
have.
Personally,
I think it far more important for those who have surplus resources to
put those resources into obtaining as much control as possible over the
essentials of their own existence. There are many hard assets one could
buy now that may not be available later - assets that you could use to
feed yourself, keep yourself warm or provided clean water. This is a
much more important use for your wealth than owning something you
intend to bury in a hole in the ground and sit on.
Yes
Men and Accomplices
Make Canadian Government Look Like Idiots:
That's not hard, since our right-wing minority PM is a climate change
denier, but the
Yes Men outdid themselves with a triple-barrelled spoof of Canada's
absurd climate change inaction:
They faked a "change of heart" Canadian Government press announcement,
then they faked the Canadian Government's response to their own fake
announcement, and then they faked a third-world country's heartbroken
response to learning the initial announcement was a fake. Absolutely
brilliant.
The
Amazing Intelligence of Crows:
Like humans, crows and other corvids developed larger brains (and hence
tools) because, if they hadn't they would not have survived. Look
at some of the things they do.
Thanks to CreatvEmergence
(Michelle James) for the link.
Light
unmitigated by leaves can change in an instant.
This is what makes deserts both so alluring and so unforgiving
— that lack of moderation. Sharp contrasts appeal to the eye
as well as to the moral imagination
The condition of the snow can change by the hour: what held you up at
dawn might crumble under your boots at ten. The only constant is the
need to walk and walk and walk, for warmth more than exercise and for
revelation more than warmth.
In a radically simplified landscape there are fewer places to hide, and
things that had been hidden are selectively revealed, in strong light
and with maximum contrast: that’s what I mean by revelation.
Nothing mystical about it. And the extreme conditions should serve to
remind us that revelations are not necessarily pleasant; a preference
for pleasant news and comforting beliefs can be a real obstacle to an
accurate perception of reality.
The desertedness of deserts is of course another big part of their
appeal. You can be alone with your demons. The wintertime desert is
barren, devoid of fertility — but as anyone who has chosen to
remain child-free will tell you, this can be a gift, too. All sorts of
things need open space to flourish. Biologically speaking, the extreme
environments known as barrens in the eastern U.S., like the western
deserts, often accommodate species found nowhere else.
So what seems barren to most might be for some the most fruitful
country imaginable, the moment-by-moment mutability as welcome as the
phases of an unpredictable moon.
We revisit other memories. Then the male nurse comes in with two
hypodermics. This is something he remembers how to do; like riding, it
is in his muscle memory, not the shriveled synapses of some tiny
portion of his brain that has taken away everything he is--his past.
So, while he's in the bathroom, I ask, with my eyes, cocking my head to
one side, and the nurse knows what I want to know. "Oh, it's always
this way. He'll get it back, don't worry."
So that he has something to do--he is a person whose worst fear is not
moving, not having somewhere to go--I ask him to walk me to the
elevators. Slowly, in his sock feet. The door opens; a quick hug, and I
back in. The door closes.
On the dark highway I move forward into space. Random songs on the
radio speak only to me, as they have been doing for a couple of years
now. I wonder how it is they can be so specific, then I realize: they
are only ever about two things, love, and loss. Both of which are
behind me, down the hospital corridor, and ahead of me, in a place
called home.
Probably,
Then: From Christian Anton
Gerard, in Orion:
If
I lived in a forest and you lived somewhere else, maybe in the forest,
maybe not, no difference, just somewhere else, with a different
language, and you found me in my forest and we had to talk, had to find
out if the other was dangerous, I would point at a waterfall and say,
maybe, waterfall and you would say, la fin du monde. We’d
stand there looking at each other as if we were talking about the thing
or maybe what we wanted from the other. We’d probably point
to a few more things. It would feel important. Like the end of the
world or maybe like the world itself. Probably, then, we’d
realize the world is big. Much bigger than either of us had
anticipated, and one of us, without doubt, would walk away.
I
think you have to feel secure before you can feel anything else.
When I was a child, before I knew that people could be dishonest,
hurtful, sociopathic, I remember feeling everything. I was completely
open. And then, at age 7, when I learned the terrible knowledge of our
civilized society, and had my heart broken, I stopped feeling so much.
It hurt too bad. It wasn't a conscious decision, just something my body
did, to protect me. I just shut down, hid away in an imaginary world
where people were themselves, authentic, undamaged. I ceased to belong
to the 'real' world, became disconnected from it, ceased to be able to
function in it.
Then, when I was 17, I fell utterly in love, and I became invulnerable,
and let myself really feel again. I wrote
about what I felt and it was,
although incompetent, wonderful writing. My self expressed itself. I
wrote poetry on the walls of tunnels with the pseudonym "SAM",
and young women were so moved by it that they wrote me love letters
under the poems.
I saw myself then as a synergy, a complicity of my physical/sensuous
(S), emotional (A, for analogic/resonant) and intellectual (M, for
Kubrick's monolith) selves. When I was in my most relaxed state I was
also at my most aware. I was reconnected, open, raw. I was at once
astonished and terrified. I was completely present.
And then, mostly through my own foolishness and idealism, I lost that
love, and with it I lost everything. I lost myself. I went through a
roller coaster decade during which I alternatively felt unbearable
grief, brief joyful relief, and nothing at all. Finally, I froze over.
I created a persona that could function in the terrible world, and for
almost thirty years that comfortable persona took my place. Still, this
persona, as successful as it was, sensed that there was something
wrong, that it wasn't me, that it was a fraud. It became anxious and
easily angry.
drawing
by hugh mcleod at gaping void
I was empty. A shell.
And then, slowly, over the last few years, I cracked open and something
I'm not quite sure of emerged. It was a kind of child, reawakened,
unfrozen, but still a bit numb. I was blocked by my stories, my myths,
and the emotions of fear and anger those stories evoked. But I was
determined to become real again, to reconnect, to be open and raw and
let my heart be broken, to show my broken heart to the world.
I was and am drawn now to places that allow me at once to be broken and
to heal, to get rid of all the gunk that has accumulated around me for
decades, stuff that is not me at all. Those places I'm free to be
broken and healed are wilderlands -- forests and beaches where life
existed, as it has for millions of years, without people, without being
crowded and stressed and made anxious by the invasive species homo rapiens.
I am not at home in such places. I am not self-sufficient or
knowledgeable of how to live in the forest or by the ocean, without the
trappings of modern civilization. Yet I am drawn to these places, if a
little fearfully, by something larger than myself, by this yearning to
reconnect with all-life-on-Earth, what John Gray calls biophilia.
And when I start to open myself to these places the real me begins to
emerge again, this complex, damaged creature so full of grief, love,
and loneliness. Lost for so many years, so long dead to the world.
And in these moments SAM awakens again, and I begin to begin to find
again that stillness, that Zero Time, of infinite relaxation and
awareness, when I become sensitive again to what is going on within,
and what is going on without, and they become one current. And the fear
and anxiety and anger subside and my senses become alert to these
amazing things happening all around me and inside me that I had
forgotten how to notice -- the catch in a young woman's voice, the
astonishing colours of dusk, and the breath of lamplight and new-fallen
snow, the scent of berries and of rain, the look within the look of
faces of people that somehow I had forgotten how to see.
The humming resonance between me and some other creature, a resonance
that makes us one, singing together, completely "I am you and
you are me and we are altogether" connected.
The songs of birds, plaintive or joyful or, like me, now, responsive, a
harmony, alive, breathing, there, here, this moment, this magical
place. Shouting, tweeting, moaning, I love you.
This is what's really important, this feeling, this connection. This knowing
what is and what to do and who to be. This fullness and emptiness and
being just a part. Present.
Raw. Nobody-but-myself. No body. Every body. Our self. One.
A
recent e-mail message from Sheri Herndon
prompted me to think about Step 8 of my What
You Can Do (to make the world a
better place) process -- "Create New Structures
and Models".
My initial thoughts on this were to focus attention on helping with the
creation of new model communities that:
are intentional (i.e.
members have a shared purpose, vision and set of values),
embody the principles
of permaculture, unschooling and the transition movement, and
incorporate Natural
Enterprises (sustainable, responsible, joyful co-operative businesses
where people do the work they're meant to do).
Sheri prompted me to dig deeper and be more specific about what
institutions such communities would contain. Joanna Macy's book Coming Back to Life
has the following list (the last six items are my own additions):
teach-ins and peer
study groups
think tanks and Gaian
learning institutions (where you would learn improvisation,
story-telling, and some of the other critical life skills in the
graphic above)
groups that would
maintain measures of genuine well-being to replace GDP, stock markets,
phony inflation & unemployment numbers as the gauges of our
society's health
consensus and conflict
resolution services, to replace lawyers
non-violence 'genuine
defense' institutions, to replace the military
renewable energy
'transition' co-ops
land trusts and
conservancies, replacing land ownership with community stewardship
community-based co-ops
for gardening/permaculture, CSA, tool-sharing, skills banks
community-based
repair, recycling, composting and re-use programs
holistic health
institutions based on self-management and prevention
local currencies and
gift economy programs
unschooling
(natural/self-directed learning)
collective,
independent, non-commercial information sharing and communications media
clothing co-ops (like
Mondragon's)
community theatre
community-based
scientific research, idea and innovation centres
facilitation
'collaboratories' (where skilled facilitators would help you resolve
challenges both local and global)
well-being centres for
personal growth, relationship management and self-learning
artist and crafts
co-ops
I think it would be interesting to visualize how such communities,
working from a kind of 'blueprint' that would be adapted to suit local
needs and preferences, could be entirely self-organized. This would
require a lot of learning (and relearning) how to do things for
ourselves that we have come to rely on governments, professionals,
corporations, 'experts' and foreign workers to do for us. We are, most
of us, so used to having things designed and organized for us that we
have lost the essential skills to do this for ourselves.
That's why I think we need good working models, that show others how
and why each of these institutions works. Equally important, they would
demonstrate the co-operative form of collective work self-organization,
as contrasted with the modern hierarchical command-and-control form of
top-down work organization. It takes practice to learn to make
decisions with
others, instead of (as we have been trained to do) making decisions for
others or acting on decisions others have made for us.
Likewise, most of us expect jobs to be designed and created by others,
that we can then try to fit ourselves to, rather than creating our own
-- self-employment is considered too difficult, too stressful, and too
much of a commitment for most. We need to learn (that was one objective
of my book Finding
the Sweet Spot) that
sustainable entrepreneurship is not difficult or stressful, provided we
don't try to do it all alone.
One purpose of my novel/film will be to create a vision of how such
communities could be formed, and operate, and how much better they
would be, by every measure, than the wasteful and toxic industrial
systems we rely on today. If you read the list of 19 community
elements above, you probably think creating a community with
these elements is hopelessly idealistic. My objective is to work with
others to create models that will show such communities are entirely
possible.
What do you think? Can you imagine a community with these 19 elements,
working effectively, sustainably, responsibly, joyfully? How big could
it get before it started to come apart, get disconnected? Can you
envision the world after the collapse of civilization, with a human
population only 10% of the size of today's, starting over and building
a community-based society that looks like this? Or do you think it's in
our nature to create hierarchy, hoard power and wealth, wage war, and
grow until we're stopped by some outside force?
In
my thinking about activism, I keep reassuring myself that people will
listen when they're ready, and that by working with those who are ready
to initiate change, we are more likely to make a difference
collaboratively than in isolation. What I want to understand better,
though, is what motivates others to do what they do, and believe what
they believe. If I understand this, I hope, I'll be able to find and
recognize others who are
ready to work with me to do the radical work that must be done to make
the world a better place.
Much has been written about what humans need, physically, emotionally,
intellectually, spiritually. I'm more interested in the moment in what
people want,
and specifically, what we want from others (rather than from ourselves
and our environment). We are, after all, inherently social creatures,
and that quality has proven to be a tremendous evolutionary success. In
my recent article
on empathy, I identified forty
emotional needs, of which these 26 were "needs from others":
accepted
acknowledged
forgiven
included
trusted
worthy
admired
appreciated
approved of
believed in
heard
listened to
loved
needed
noticed
recognized
respected
valued
What we want
from others, I think, is what we believe, if we get them, will fulfill
the above needs.
In my observation, most of us particularly want six things from others,
which map very well to the three lists above:
In order to meet our
security needs, we want authority,
control,
and knowledge
In order to meet our
belonging needs, we want purpose
(what Dave Smith calls "to be of use")
In order to meet our
self-esteem needs, we want attention
and appreciation
These are the six means to the 26 ends of fulfilling our needs from
others. By giving these things to others, authentically, we are most
likely get people to learn, understand and appreciate what we want them
to, in order for them to become part of the solution rather than part
of the problem. Let's look a bit at the motivations for these six wants.
We desire attention and appreciation because we cannot know ourselves
well without the context of seeing ourselves as others see us. Their
perspective, and our conversations, are essential to understanding who
we are and what we believe, and, more importantly, why we are here. In
my experience (and this is a somewhat dangerous and changing
generalization) most men seem to crave attention more than
appreciation, while most women seem to want appreciation more than
'mere' attention. I think this probably has more to do with cultural
conditioning than biology. It's a cliche that 'women give sex
(attentive) to get love (appreciative), and men give love to get sex'.
And both genders want lots of both attention and appreciation.
When we get attention it tells us "what I think and feel matters" and
"what I say and believe is important". When we get appreciation it
tells us "what I do has value" and "what I say and believe makes
sense". We get these assurances through others -- no amount of solitary
rationalization is sufficient to do this (which is perhaps why some
unappreciated artists suffer so much).
We desire authority and control because we believe that it will give us
comfort, freedom and security. Authority can be bought (with money
and/or influence) or it can be earned. Unfortunately, earned authority
usually comes with a catch -- responsibility. If you're rich and
powerful you can wield authority irresponsibly, but the rest of us have
to accept responsibility before we are given commensurate authority --
and often we get caught, stuck with the responsibility but not the
authority.
Authority can give us some control, but less than we might think.
People are remarkably adept at ignoring decisions and instructions from
authorities when they don't think they're optimal. Bullies and
sociopaths are expert at controlling other people, but it's usually
coercive, manipulative, and resented, and rarely sustainable. With
authority can come wealth (and vice versa), which can buy a measure of
freedom and security. But for the most part, the only thing we can
really control is ourselves (and there are some arguments, well
hashed-out in these pages, that our bodies control our minds, not the
other way around).
We desire knowledge for the same reasons -- comfort, freedom and
security. Unfortunately, most of what we are offered today is not
knowledge, because it is unactionable and useless -- it does not enable
us to increase either our capacities or our competencies. The only
means to achieve these is practice, and our modern frenetic society
provides us with neither the time nor the process to practice
effectively. Instead, we are forced to buy into a civilization that is
fragile, overextended and dependent on others we don't know.
Paradoxically, our knowledge of this lack of self-sufficiency, capacity
and competency actually reduces
our sense of security.
We desire a sense of purpose because it gives our life meaning and
direction and enables us, through a shared meaning and values, to
belong to our communities. We instinctively give to and share with
others, because it's a bonding activity.
When I think of all the relationships in my life, I recognize the
extent to which my interactions with others are mutually motivated by
these six wants, and the 26 needs that underlie them. I can see how
salespeople, seducers and sociopaths learn to cater expertly to these
wants (by both satisying them, and instilling fear that we don't have
enough of them) in order to get what they want and need from us in
return. And I see how gullible most of us are to these ruses, in our
almost indiscriminate hunger for these six things.
What we have created as a result is a dreadful scarcity of these six
things. We live in an attention-deficit society, and we are bombarded
with propaganda telling us that if we don't buy X or do Y we won't be
beautiful enough, strong enough, smart enough, interesting enough or
anything else enough to be appreciated.
We have pyramidal hierarchies where authority and wealth are hoarded at
the top and meted out stingily to others. We are bombarded with
terrible news and cynical lies that persuade us that everything is out
of control, to the point we need to arm ourselves with guns and duct
tape to protect ourselves. And we have to cede control over everything
-- what we eat, where and how our clothes are made, where and how we
live -- just to keep a job, to keep what Derrick Jensen calls "the fear
of never having enough" at bay.
We have a firehose of information, but we don't have any of the
essential knowledge that allowed humans in previous generations and
other cultures to life a healthy and decent life -- how to grow our own
good food, how to fix things, how to prevent illness and accident and
self-diagnose and (for most illnesses) self-heal when we are sick.
We have no sense of our purpose because we are too busy doing what we
must to think about why we are here at all, or about what the world
really needs (in place of whatever junk commodity or overhyped service
our employer has us offering sixty hours a week to customers as dumbed
and numbed as we are), or even about what we love doing or are uniquely
good at doing that would, if it were known and applied, allow us to be
of use effectively, and learn what we're meant to do and hence why
we're here.
I have always been blessed with exquisitely good fortune, and I now
have a surfeit of all six things (or, in the case of the
security-driven wants, their most useful surrogates -- financial
independence, self-control and self-knowledge). But I recognize that
these are not things I can give to others to enable them to join me in
my activist pursuits. And now, what I most want from others that I do
not have is the companionship of those who have, by fortune or hard
work, reached the same place that I have, and who are able and willing
to dedicate themselves, with that terrible knowledge, to doing what we
must do to make the world a better place.
Our journey is the nine-step one above that I have been showing on this
blog for months now -- the reconnection, action, and reflection steps
that will tell us where we have come from, where we are, and what we
must do now.
Joanna Macy would have us believe this is a journey that anyone can
take, if they have courage. But I'm not sure. If your life is
preoccupied with the needs of the moment, and driven by a terrible lack
of time/attention, appreciation, authority/independence, self-control,
self-knowledge, and understanding of your true purpose, how can you
possibly have the presence of mind to pursue, or even see the value and
urgency of, this journey?
I guess this is my way of saying that, perhaps arrogantly, I'm still
feeling very much too
far ahead. I'm impatient to find
those who are with me, ready -- not to follow me but to journey with
me, as peers, as collaborators, as radicals determined to take back the
Earth from those who have stolen and desolated it, and return it to the
collective stewardship of all-life-on-Earth.
Not that I'm looking for attention or appreciation, you understand.
The
Transition Movement's Founder at TED:"What
is most distressing when I speak with climate scientists is the
increasingly terrified look I see in their eyes as each new study that
is published." Rob Hopkins
explains the astonishing energy
efficiency of oil, and how our lives have come to be utterly dependent
on it. "The [absurd] idea that prevails at events like these TED Talks
is that technology can somehow solve everything, and get us through
this completely, that we can invent our way out of a profound economic
and energy crisis." A good summary of the Transition Response as a
movement that shares its successes and learns from its mistakes, and
adapts to the unique situation of each community. Thanks to Sheri Herndon
for the
link.
Medicated
America: Melissa Holbrook
Pierson: "In the line we
desultorily watch four white-coated employees beyond the counter
scurrying to fill the prescriptions, click-clicking little tablets by
the hundreds into bottles and then white paper sacks. In a mirror image
beyond them, another white-coated employee tends to the cars that have
pulled up outside in the dark to a window with a microphone in it. The
only money changing hands this night is doing so over drugs."
A
Plea to Become Vegan: As a
result of
the ADA study I reported on recently (that vegan diets can be perfectly
healthy diets), and some other persuasive articles readers have sent
me, I'm now taking the step to become vegan. This is a challenge: A
recent shopping trip to buy two weeks' worth of food took me over an
hour, most of it spent reading labels. It also means sometimes
foregoing local and organic foods to get enough variety in your diet.
Gary Steiner's recent piece in the NYT has encouraged me -- it's a
straight-forward, unemotional explanation of why, if you care about
animal cruelty and suffering, vegan is the only way to go.
From
Christopher Isherwood back
in 1966 (thanks to Dave
Smith for the link):
To
live sanely in Los
Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to
cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly
but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the
billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are
forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should
fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should
think and do and be. They have planned a life for you — from
the
cradle to the grave and beyond — which it would be easy,
fatally
easy!, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least
relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop,
the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the
hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up — before you
sign
that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really
want,
marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the
whiskey, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think,
to
discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must
do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if
you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and
tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme
and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.
From
my friend Sara in Second
Life: "I have to hide me at work."
MY GRAVITATIONAL COMMUNITY People
who have inspired or informed me frequently over the past few months.
For my full blogroll/online reference library, see
here. [* indicates
people I've met f2f]
- original research,surveys etc.
- original,well-crafted fiction
- great finds: resources,blogs,essays, artistic works
- news not found anywhere else
- category killers: aggregators that capture the best of many blogs/feeds, so they need not be read individually
- clever, concise political opinion consistent with their own views
- benchmarks,quantitative analysis
- personal stories,experiences,lessons learned
- first-hand accounts
- live reports from events
- insight:leading-edge thinking & novel perspectives
- short educational pieces
- relevant "aha" graphics
- great photos
- useful tools and checklists
- précis, summaries, reviews and other time-savers
- fun stuff: quizzes, self-evaluations, other interactive content
Blog writers
want to see more:
- constructive criticism, reaction, feedback
- 'thank you' comments, and why readers liked their post
- requests for future posts on specific subjects
- foundation articles: posts that writers can build on, on their own blogs
- reading lists/aggregations of material on specific, leading-edge subjects that writers can use as resource material
- wonderful examples of writing of a particular genre, that they can learn from
- comments that engender lively discussion
- guidance on how to write in the strange world of weblogs
My book is available to US buyers
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