I was reading Neil Gaiman's blog today and came across this interesting link. Someone had taken some of his prose (the infamous "I Believe" passage from American Gods) and rendered it in Wordle.

It's a word-art site where you feed it passages of text and it spits it out in a mind map sort of visual-word poetry/art. You can create your own account, upload all sorts of interesting passages, see how the site creates renders of what you add and share it with others.

I'm making all sorts of word art with it to use as covers for my journals, greeting card covers and just fun background image art.

Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones, used to write and rewrite poems in college so she could memorize them. She writes,

In college I was in love with literature. I mean wild about it. I typed poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins over and over again so I could memorize them. I read John Milton, Shelley, Keats aloud and swooned on my narrow bed in the dormitory.

I copy bits and pieces of my favorite writers prose down in my journals, tucked between entries of daily life and my own imagination. I keep various quotes and story snippets from writers I admire among my index cards. While I write them down, as the pen makes scratching marks across my pages, I look at the language: how it runs off my pen (or mind's tongue), how long the sentences are, and what words were used. I like to think that it helps me dissect language down into uncovering what makes them work and "so great."

Have you ever attempted to imitate your favorite writer's prose? How well did that go? Feel free to share your experiences in the comments below.

Last year I wrote a post detailing ways to use collage as a tool for motivation.

Today, while perusing the RSS feeds, I stumbled upon this site, Polyvore. Apparently, this site allows you to collect images from all over the site and mix and match them into your own collages. You can then share these collages with anyone. Rolling over and clicking on any of the images in the collage, takes you back to the original site where you can buy it.

I have yet to try this app (wanted to share this with you all first); but in my quick perusal of the site I did see that they teach you how to use their editor. The potential to use this tool as a powerful and visual way to create motivation collages that can then be shared with others is amazing. I can see many kids also using this as a way to create wish-lists for holidays or any occasion.

People keep journals for many reasons: to keep a history of their lives; to record stories and poems; and to get the chatter inside their head out of their mind and on paper. And sometimes, research. Research and notebooks go hand and hand, it seems. At least it does for me. I have many three-ring binders filled with various magazine clippings, web page and graphical printouts; and articles about the many topics I'm interested in. Sometimes, however, people keep journals of their own work history.

One of the biggest notebooks that I keep is the one I keep for my career as a technical writer. I store all sorts of things in this binder: from notes about my jobs to articles taken from various trade publications like the Society of Technical Communication. I also have sections for productivity tips and techniques and links to useful grammar and writing websites. Basically, I stuff anything I feel I can use in my career over a long term goes into this binder.

The ultimate dream for any artist and crafter is to be able to open up a shop where they can sell their creations and make a living from their passion. Thanks to sites like Ebay and Etsy, crafters can do just this. For those of you who think you might want to eventually swap out your 9-5 job to pursue a business based off your creative designs, then Craft, Inc.: Turn your creative hobby into a business, by Meg Mateo Ilasco, is your guide into getting your business started

Mateo Ilasco uses Craft, Inc. to hit all the major points of starting your own crafty company. Her writing is crisp and tailored perfectly to today's crafting audience. The chapters are loosely organized around topics such as: starting a new business; overview of business topics; making your product identity; marketing (with heavy emphasis on internet and trade show techniques); production and pricing; and how to live beyond the dream. She teaches you how to make business and marketing plans and how to act when you're invited to trade shows. The book also contains many internet resources to help you along the way to turning your crafting hobby into a profitable business.

Craft, Inc.: Turn Your Creative Hobby into a Business author: Meg Mateo Ilasco asin: 0811858367

CardNets are templates that are designed to facilitate a more free-form or non-sequential style of linking ideas and activities. CardNets use little navigational icons to establish relationships among different cards. This approach can be useful when you're performing complex tasks with many individual sub-tasks that require different styles of note taking yet are related to one other.

Right now, the Core Set is available (adapting the most used templates from my hPDA templates). The next sets will cover project/process planning and novel plotting. Please suggest ideas for other complex processes that you'd like to see rendered using the CardNet approach.

Instructions on how to use CardNets are available on my website.

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The first time Doug posted an article on fountain pens, I felt a familiar urge creep up my back. It entered my "office supply junkie" nerve and made me drool. Fountain pens are the ultimate in writing shiny. A delicate balance of elegance and environmental reuse. I recall dabbling with cartridge-style calligraphy pens back in high school and how fun it was to write with them. Thanks to Doug's article, I knew that I wanted to give them a second chance. So a few months ago, I decided to hop onto the enabler bandwagon. I started researching fountain pens and what types would work for me. At this point, you're probably wondering why I said research. You'd think I'd have just gone and ordered the best looking pen right away. However, I'm a left-hander, a southpaw, and not all fountain pens work for us. Therefore, I've written this for those left handers out there who want to give fountain pens a shot. This article sums up what I know and have experimented with.

Fountain pens are not created equally for both right and left-handers. Fountain pens work different than modern pens; they are made to drip ink across a piece of paper when a hand pulls the nib across the page. Whereas a right-hander pulls a pen across the page, lefties drag the pen as our hand moves rapidly across and occasionally into the paper (depending on how hard one presses the pen on the paper). Dragging a pen makes the ink skip out so not all the letters get formed correctly. It can also gunk up the tip of the nib with tiny paper fibers because we have scratched the pen's nib deep into the paper itself. So, not only must the pen we use be a bit more rugged but it also needs to be designed to allow the ink to flow smoothly when the nib drags across the paper. Many manufacturers make special left-handed nibs, often referred to as oblique nibs, that are like a right-hander's pen but offset so that we can write with them. However, the most popular solution I've seen is to get a pen that contains a small rounded ball on the end of the nib. This ball allows the pen to flow when writing at any angle and solves the issue of malformed characters when writing with a standard fountain pen.

Take to the skies with this colorful, flying agenda template. Whether traveling or staying home, this template is sure to make you think of beautiful trips you've taken in the past or are about to take in the future.

Once complete, you will find the entire set here:

http://wordswithin.info/blog?page_id=880

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The second one in this series, Swirly Q is in shades of muted greens and lavendars, complimentary of spring and the glorious summer to come.

To view the entire series, once it's complete, please visit:

http://freshfocus.info/blog?page_id=1072

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