Author: Squared By Woods Books Publishing

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Living in the Shadow of Creativity

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Creativity has long been the buzzword of choice for entrepreneurs, inventors, and visionary types looking to market themselves. It has become nearly synonymous with genius. There appears to be no shortage of creativity anywhere; a steady stream of articles on improving one’s creativity can be found in just about every nook, corner, and cranny imaginable. For instance, a Google search on improving + creativity will churn up some 85,000,000 results.

Yet, a search of creativity’s lesser-known twin sibling, improving + destructivity, will only yield about thirty-five thousand results.

I’m not talking about the garden variety nihilist here, but the selective kind of destructivity that permits someone to cut through the endless swath of backward metaphors, hyperboles, oxymorons, and figures of speech in our world to find out what truly matters, what doesn’t, and where the path of least resistance lies.

The sculptor does not look at a block of marble then start decorating it with ribbons and paint.

The whittler does not look at a block of wood and start gluing more stuff on it.

The destructive genius wields Ockham’s Razor as if it were… Ockham’s Razor.

Consider the following two sentences:

1) “Jimmy grew from 5′ 11” to 6′ 6” in three years.”

2) “Jimmy’s a skyscraper of a man who shot up like a rocket in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

One may have been written by a destructive genius while the other by a creative one.

One has substance and the other has flair.

One is all icing and the other is all cake.

One genius is living in the other’s shadow.

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To Catch a Literary Agent

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With this last round of major editing coming to a conclusion, I now feel fully equipped to play the waiting game (a.k.a. hunting for a literary agent). Agent… it’s one of the few words that just seems to inspire an aura of confidence. Agents carry about them an ineffable mystique; they can instill fear among world leaders or assert their power as catalysts for destruction. Here are some examples:

Literary Agent
Secret Agent
Double Agent
Agent Orange

They are men, women, and things of action! Catching one of these elusive creatures, the literary agent, will necessarily require a tremendous amount of effort, craft, and stealth (i.e. my posting may go on hiatus until I wrestle one into signing a contract, figuratively speaking).

Also, have you ever noticed how any word instantly becomes hip, cool, and fierce sounding if it precedes or comes after the word agent? For instance:

Agent 50%

What exactly is being implied here? Would this agent only do half the job that you paid to have done in full? Maybe, but I’d be willing to bet that half of the job would be top notch with a moniker like that. Other examples include:

Butterfly Agent
Agent Cupcake

I rest my case.

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The Bridge Is Still the Barrier

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Some words convey ideas of such magnitude that one can never forget the circumstances under which they were learned. For me, that word is ineffable.

I first came across it while reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby in high school; it was paired with an equally interesting word in the context of ineffable gaudiness. The latter I was already familiar with, i.e. something ostentatious, showy, or tastelessly ornamental and extravagant. But ineffable, that one was new, intriguing, and sent me sprinting for the dictionary.

The main entry for ineffable, an adjective, implies that something is incapable of being expressed in words, for instance, on account of being too great or extreme.

A word to describe the indescribable? My first reaction was horror… no self-respecting writer, poet, artist, etc. should even have that word in his or her vocabulary, let alone use it in a work of fiction meant for publication. We can explain everything!

However, recently I’ve asked myself, “What is language?” Not just English or Latin, but math too. Are they just a collection of symbols used to re-present physical objects in the world, like an emotion? Are they mere substitutes? “Yes,” the answer would appear. Language is but a tool at our disposal to help us organize the world. Though, if this is forgotten, then I would reason that one can easily become dominated by it just like any other tool that one is not masterful at using.

Two can never be one,
One can never be two.
The floodgates may open,
But if the dam holds true,
Then the bridge is still the barrier.

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On Editors and Other Respected Professions

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After wrapping up another round of editing and unwrapping some awesome presents, I can only wonder how editors [ the ones that actually get paid ] keep their wits about them. Editing myself has felt like running a marathon while holding a flashlight in the dark, rerunning the route to make sure no short-cuts were taken so it could be retraced, and then finally going back again to pick up any trash that may have been left on the course.

It’s funny, thinking back to earlier times, when I just knew I wrote platinum… where everything that came off my pen tip was sacrosanct and impervious to review. Not editing then was more of a refusal to acknowledge my shortcomings than any real lack of effort. While I sometimes feel a twinge of nostalgia for the reckless passion it imparted into my writing, these days I don’t even write my own name without spell checking it twice.

Maybe editing someone else’s work is always easier because a call for help can be made if one gets lost. But the trailblazers, to whom do they turn? They’ve been lost since the beginning. Being found, to them, is merely to visit the same place again.

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The Misnomer of the Technological Singularity

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Recently, I have come across the term technological singularity in my journey through cyberspace (i.e. The Artificial General Intelligence Society; the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence; and Humanity +). Essentially, the technological singularity is a theoretical point in the future where the rate of technological progress and artificial intelligence develops to such a tremendous level that it dwarfs all other intelligent life, transforming the world beyond anything humans can predict or fathom. A more comprehensive description of the technological singularity, along with who coined it and who popularized it is available here:

Technological Singularity

This scenario doesn’t sound that scary, right? Yet, something very ominous and forbidding is implied when one compares something to a gravitational singularity. In astrophysics, a singularity is a point theorized to have infinite density and zero volume, such as at the center of a black hole.

If one considers the technological singularity from the more sensationalistic doomsday scenario, then it might be a point in the future when all intelligent life is swallowed up by artificial intelligence and reduced to fiery smithereens in an apocalyptic accretion disc of death and destruction. Going by this interpretation, one might be lead down the road into believing that humans are incapable of foreseeing the consequences of their own actions. It would be the equivalent of telling a child, “Yes, you can go build yourself a robot, but you may not play with it because it might hurt you.” Inherent in this is a deeply-seated notion that people should be afraid of what they are capable of creating, and hesitant to master the tools at their disposal.

On a side note, after spending the better part of a week busting out a book proposal, revising a query letter, editing half a book, and finding the first literary agency I want to submit to yesterday, I discovered that they are on vacation from December 23rd until January 6th [ *Grumble Grumble* ]. It’s fair enough though, everybody needs a holiday. It’s taken me eight years to finally get around to making this book happen, so another two weeks won’t hurt it.  Though, I wonder where all of those artificial literary agents are hiding at and if they charge an arm and a soul…hmm.