MaxThink Wins the First Round

How moving my desk helped boost my creativity and changed the way I write.
The empty nest has given me the use of a couple of rooms. My “office” is in the back of the house. I keep my main computer with my window on the world via my Internet  connection in this space. I have [...]

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Monday Musings: Perception Organizes Our World

How we see and what we choose to see are only the beginning. “With perception we do not see the world as it is but as we perceive it.” [Serious Creativity -- Edward de Bono]

I took this photo a long time ago. I won’t call it a vase because it is more (and less at [...]

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Getting from YES to PO to NO

A finished article is linear (unless you’re James Joyce writing “Ulysses”). In the beginning, when you write your first draft, non-linear thinking is best.
The first stage of writing is YES, a mind dump, a free flow of thoughts, nothing held back. Don’t worry about where the thought(s) come from — suspend judgment and see [...]

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Virtual Desktops & Real Distractions

I’ve been looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I like to use a powerful text editor for my writing instead of a bloated word processor. I have a good one that does everything I need (almost). I wanted an editor that takes up the entire screen but keeps the text in the middle [...]

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Book Review: Taming the Terrible Twos

My good friend Ann Marie Dwyer published her new book, “Taming the Terrible Twos: a Parents Survival Guide” today. I’m probably just a bit biased because Ann Marie graciously invited me to contribute two articles and to be her editor. I’m proud to call Ann Marie friend and to be a small part of this [...]

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Writing: Call Forth the Fire of the Dragon

I’ve been writing all my life. It’s only in the past few years that I’ve begun recording my thoughts on real or virtual paper.
“We all cluster mentally throughout our lives without knowing it; we have simply never made these clusterings visible on paper.”
[Gabriele Rico in Writing the Natural Way]
Mental clustering can happen anywhere at any [...]

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Take a Walk to Beat Writer’s Block

Walking for inspiration is like dancing slowly with yourself, gliding effortlessly from thought to thought as you move to the rhythm of your footsteps. American author Gretel Ehrlich once said that “Walking is also an ambulation of mind.”
Ambulation is simply walking about. Amble, saunter or stroll — something magical happens when you go out [...]

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