While I Was Away (part 1)

I once heard you can’t write if you’re happy.

I’ve been quite happy lately. That being said, I’ve also been rather busy.

I also mistakenly deleted the registry of the blog’s pictures by taking them away from google+ (google linked them together without me asking for it). Once I found out google owns blogger and stores everything in a single place, and it’s so easy to ruin settings or misplace information… I was quite angry with their service. Bottom line, it’s been a while since I last decided to write something for this place. But all it needed was a bit of work to make the page look nice, and fixing the pictures to make me want to write some more again. So here I am, typing, hoping it comes out cool. Maybe I’ll change blog service provider in the future. For now I’ll make do.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about a few creativity related subjects:

• Intellectual property as the purest form of capitalism: It’s quite a surreal feeling, the one I get when thinking about how our society allows us to own ideas, and more importantly, to make profit from owning them. Walt Disney, as a company pays lots of money to a group of lobbyists to get congressmen to extend the time of copyright ownership after the creator has dead, thus preventing us all from drawing naked mickey mice and selling those drawings.
• Tablets and cloud storage: There’s no excuse nowadays not to read. They give us access to an infinite resource of material. All classics are free; we don’t even need to store them on a drive locally as they can exist in our Amazon accounts. Technology has pushed forward our society, and just made access to information a commonplace reality.
• One can only write about what one knows: Quite a lot of the books I like are somewhat autobiographical. The hero of the story tends to share the writer’s personality traits, other characters tend to be based on real people at least loosely. When we make up the entire thing it always ends up looking plain, a bit forced… at least in my case (I’m not a good liar).
• There are only 7 basic story plots: That’s about right. In the past century a couple more have been added but that’s only cause way too many authors were sick of the basic 7 and made a huge effort to freshen up storytelling. It would be real cool if I get to see a few more new ones during my lifetime.
• There is no money in poetry, and there is no poetry in money: Poetry doesn’t sell, very few people like it. It’s hard, it’s personal, it asks for the reader to break a thicker wall before making a connection with the writer. Last year’s Nobel Prize winner (the Swedish poet) was widely unknown, and even now after the award we don’t see his works around.

It seems a bit unfair to dedicate just a couple of lines to each of the subjects… but I don’t really have a huge argument to present on any of them. Or do I? In any case, I would like to end this entry with a cool phrase:

There are two golden rules to success: 1) never reveal everything you know.