Sunday, April 15, 2012

What's In A Title?


Refusing The Needle: A Diabetic’s Natural Journey To Kick-Ass Health by Russell Stamets ebook available for all devices at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/145608 and for kindle at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007P6L5C4 tags: type 1, type 2, autoimmune, diabetes, lada, natural, alternative, diet, supplements, acupuncture, meditation, lifestyle, HAWMC
The question posed by today’s prompt is easy enough. I‘ve never pondered it much, but my writing style and habits follow reasonably set patterns. I’ll detail them in due course. But the real challenge with this one is how to find any kind of hook or relevance for my audience. Why in the world would a follower of the russell.stamets blog care about how this LADA warrior and lifestyle remodeler creates his content? To date, this blog’s sharp focus on one man’s different solution has been nearly inviolate. Even the lighter bits of verse I occasionally offer relate to some physical or mental aspect of my experiment. It’s true that a few of my friends probably wish I’d write about something else now and then. And I probably should keep a personal blog with the sci fi, philosophy, poetry, and other effluent for anyone that might care. But this blog is squarely in the Diabetes Zone. To date I’ve adhered to the school of thought that blogger’s shouldn’t stray from their message. After all, we’ve got Facebook for all the rest, right?

OK. Enough attempt at connective tissue. Here’s how I write. I still use pen on paper when laptop or android are inconvenient to use. I like the feel of my beautiful wooden ball point pen I got from the Planetree conference in Williamsburg in 2007. I have to fight my tendency to chew it. I like uniquely bound journals. Currently, I use a full letter size leather bound beauty that has protective tissue sheets between the pages, and a small Tibetan backpack size book with fascinating rough pressed fibrous pages. I write in these while swinging in the Skychair on the deck, or in the bright sunshine on the boat, or when travelling unwired. Partly because my left-handed scrawl demands re-interpretation due to its indecipherability, most handwritten musings evolve more than the typewritten.

My creative hours run from about 8a-2p. For a typical blog post, it’s an hour or two of conceptualizing after the prompt or idea before fingertips hit the keys. The first couple of paragraphs are roughly outlined in my head. The rest usually writes itself, and occasionally supplants the original thought. Contrary to most advice, I tend to edit as I go. The short form of the blog post suits me. Longer non-fiction involves a different, iterative, layered process. My latest, about my LADA project, surprised me with how different the final approach was. I had envisioned stitching together the extensive set of complete but separate thoughts from this blog. But the story declined to be told that way. It needed to be built as a fresh narrative, not composed of, but simply informed by the tens of thousands of words already written.

Oh yeah, how about titles? They’re sweated over for a book, but a last afterthought for something like this.

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Refusing The Needle: A Diabetic’s Natural Journey To Kick-Ass Health by Russell Stamets
ebook available for all devices at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/145608
tags: type 1, type 2, autoimmune, diabetes, lada, natural, alternative, diet, supplements, acupuncture, meditation, lifestyle, HAWMC

4 comments:

  1. Thank you for sharing your writing style.

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  2. Good stuff! I like your writing style very much.

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  3. Thanks so much. It's nice to know it's not always whispering into the wind.

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  4. That is exactly how I write. An hour or two thinking; the first couple of paragraphs written and edited in my head; the rest follows how it will.

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