I've been thinking about branding and how it applies to the creative worker. For example, suppose you have a website that becomes famous; is that website now a 'brand' for you? Or for the website itself? And which is better?

Think about the authors and artists you know that have websites. For example, John Scalzi has a well-known blog called Whatever. However the blog is at whatever.scalzi.com, not whatever.com because whatever.com is owned by one of those carrion-eater domain name fences. He also has a movie commentary column on amctv.com. The brand here is John himself, not 'Whatever' or the AMC TV column 'Notes from the Monolith'. Yet the separate activities could be seen as separate things by people who don't already know about John because they appear in different places. And they certainly are separate 'brands' even if they work to bolster John's personal brand.

Let's now move on to a hypothetical: Someone who does a lot of different things wants to have a web presence for each of them. Should she mix them all together in a single site, despite the fact her audience might consist of people interested in one of the things and not the others? Or should she have completely separate sites with their own 'branding' for each thing and then cross-link a lot?

Take the poll. Comment. Let me know what you think!

Poll #1344859 Branding and the creative worker
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: Friends

Is personal branding is important for the creative worker?

Someone does a lot of different things. Should they have one 'brand' for themselves or separate brands for each thing?

Do you feel that you (check all that apply):

One year ago today I lost Anita. I have been dreading this anniversary for weeks.

At work I made some good progress on my current project in the morning and then I was given an interesting puzzle which kept me unmindful of the day until after lunch.

After that it got hard. I finally gave up and went home early, to sit and get my act together. A year ago at 4:40 PM I held Anita's hand as she stopped breathing and went into fibrillation, feeling her pulse flutter against my fingertips and then stop. Today I spent that same minute sitting by myself in my living room, as alone as anyone can ever be.

Thirty minutes later I picked up my grandson from after-school care and we did chores together around the house. After a late dinner we watched the J.P. Patches 50th anniversary special on PBS before I put him to bed. It was kind of fun sharing that bit of my childhood with him.

Funny thing, but I didn't cry today at all, until now as I write these words. Yes, this dread day has gone by and a year of living without Anita is behind me. But it doesn't change the important things a bit. She is still gone. I'm still here. This day will come again and again, hopefully for me it will come for a great many years.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how good I was to her. And, honestly, I don't think it was good enough. Anita gave far more to our relationship than I. Yes, the same was probably true of every relationship Anita had with another human being; it was her way. Still, I owed her more than she got and I will regret to my dying day every little moment of discourtesy, every time I didn't respond to 'I love you' in kind, every hurt feeling I ever caused her. Certainly these things were not common, nor large. But they happened and, in the human way we all have of remembering anything self-judgmental, they loom enormous in my mind.

But my year of rain has passed. Yes, the clouds are still there. It will rain yet again, without doubt. Still, I live in hope of sun. I haven't broken through my grief and depression in the way I described wanting to do nearly a month ago, but I didn't expect the process to be fast or easy then. So I'm not disappointed in myself, in that way. Although I haven't been writing fiction much, I have been playing guitar again and have even started composing a couple of new songs.

Most likely I will process my emotions through my music until I can understand them; it is what I have always done. What I need to do new, in this, is to record the songs and write down the lyrics. Always before I have composed what I called 'ephemeral music'; songs I would write, sing for a week or a month, and then forget. It drove Anita bonkers when I did that; she would ask me to play some song I had written not long before, which she had liked, and I would just shrug my shoulders helplessly. It bothered her that I would forget them and it bothered her even more that it didn't bother me that I would forget them.

I usually write songs for myself, you see. And not sharing them with others (unless they happened to be there when the songs are with me) is yet another small selfishness of mine.

So, for Anita, I must fix into a matrix of remembrance those songs I will write over the next few months. The funny thing is, I still don't feel a great need to do this. It isn't like I am creating great music that will touch a million souls. It isn't like I expect to gain a thing from doing it. But it was an oft-repeated wish of hers and one I want to honor.

Quite literally, it is the least I owe her...

It isn't that I expect happiness. I don't consider a state of happiness my god-given right as a human being and an American. I don't think happiness is a normal base state and consider any deviation from it a disfunction. Hell, I can remember few intervals longer than a day out my life that I would describe as 'happy'.

So, why complain about it now? Because I am actively unhappy. Not just depressed; normal depression includes in its baggage a dreadful ennui which precludes any deliberate action. No I went past that state a while back and have moved into a death-spiral form, possibly unique to me, where I am fully aware of what is happening to me and have begun to lean into the curve instead of coasting my way down (normal depression) or trying to fight my way out (my normal way of dealing with normal depression).

Quick note to all of you out there: Please do not read into the foregoing any clues that I am about to do something drastic to myself. I am deliberately using purple prose and loaded language to convey my feelings. In actual fact I am far too ornery a bastard to do myself in.

Second quick note: Those who have been reading me for a while are probably surprised to the extent of which I am baring my soul here. Sure, I have done a little of that kind of thing in the past, but normally I avoid talking about what I 'feel' in this journal and instead focus on what I 'think'. This may be changing; read on...

So I am in a nasty state where I am angry and hurt and unhappy. Not a lack of happiness, but a surfeit of its polar opposite. I haven't been making much progress on my various creative projects because I am not creative when I am depressed. I haven't been writing here much because I don't have a lot to say other than the kind of thing I am saying now. I haven't talked about it much, even with my closest friends, because I don't have much to share besides bile. And I am self-aware enough that I have chosen instead to either pretend differently around others or just avoid social situations entirely.

I haven't stopped living my life, but I have stopped enjoying it. This has to end!

Now I certainly have plenty of excuse for melancholy. Enough for anyone. I don't need to go into details; those who know me can stand witness and those who don't can believe or not. But that doesn't mean I have to wallow in it. Nor does it mean that, as I approach December 10th, I have to descend to some nadir of the soul. To surrender entirely to the velvet embrace of dark dejection.

I fear that I will struggle with depression every year about this time for the rest of my life. But, in truth, my current state isn't just about losing Anita. It is also about aging. About my fears for my children and my grandchildren. About work. About the fact I haven't done so many of the things I wanted to do and the fact I may go to my death-bed without even a Wikipedia stub-entry.

Yes, the last one is stupid. It is also very real. Please forgive my egoism at wanting to have something to be humble about. (And yes, I would make a great show at not displaying pride were I even a little bit famous.) But you don't get to my point in life without wanting to skim away the dross and focus on what is truly important to your being. And part of my anger right now is at myself: for being angry that I haven't achieved a minimal level of greatness. Crazy huh?

Well, depression isn't about rationality. Being the kind of person that I am, the unreasonable unreasoning of depression is one of the things feeding into the downward spiral: I want rationality. I want control dammit! I do not like it when a feedback loop in my brain starts running my life. Whether or not I have free will, I want to choose. And I choose not to be unhappy any more.

That doesn't mean I will be happy. It does mean I can move in that direction instead of further away. Over the next few months I will actively work to break the spiral. I will not feed the demon. If I must, I will seek help; professional and convivial. Most importantly, I will get back on the creative horse!

What that means here is that I probably will be writing a bit more. However I think this little corner of the Web is about to segue into the kind of thing a 'Journal' is supposed to be; more personal, more personable. I think I may try to open up a little more in this space. (Believe me, there is a robot in the back of my brain right now, waving its dryer-hose arms and shouting 'Danger Will Robinson' to a Star Trek 'Red Alert' accompaniment: I fear sharing. It's a guy thing, maybe. Certainly a John Wayne thing.)

As to writing about what I 'think', that will be moving elsewhere. After all, one doesn't achieve Wikipedia stub-level fame without having a prestigious address and, although LiveJournal isn't the MySpace slums, it isn't exactly downtown either.

Don't expect this transformation to happen very quickly. I am all about rationality and, let's face it, it's going to take me a while to break away from my pain and focus on my future. Expecting anything else is just plain stupid. There will be reverses and life will get in the way. There will be times when I feel like giving up.

But I'm not gonna. I'm not.

I'm not!

In an attempt to show how capable the open source Blender 3D animation application is, the Blender community has created a short subject and distributed it with a Creative Commons license.



Complete video here.

I'd say this is pretty convincing proof that Blender is up to the task of creating animations as good as any from the commercial competition. To me this raises another question: By lowering the cost of entry, will this mean we get more animated works from outside the established production houses?

Mind you the real cost of an animated video isn't the 3D modeling tools or even the render farms. The single biggest expense is the time of the many creative individuals you need to drive those tools. That factor doesn't change. But it does mean that these creatives now have access to a free alternative toolset and therefore we may have more artists and animators learning how to use them.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Of course someone could really change the game by coming up with an animation tool simple enough to use that it lowers the total hours required for a minute of animation by a full order of magnitude. If that happens, all bets are off.

Jim McGee has an interesting article on how design and creativity are the important skills for the knowledge economy. I think of this as a huge 'Duh' moment, but maybe it isn't so obvious to everyone.

Earlier I described creative people in a way that made one commenter say it sounded like being "a perpetually angsty teenager."

Well, now there is some research showing a direct relationship between being a bit odd and being creative:

New research on individuals with schizotypal personalities – people characterized by odd behavior and language but who are not psychotic or schizophrenic – offers the first neurological evidence that they are more creative than either normal or fully schizophrenic individuals, and rely more heavily on the right sides of their brains than the general population to access their creativity.

The work by Vanderbilt psychologists Brad Folley and Sohee Park was published online last week by the journal Schizophrenia Research.

"The idea that schizotypes have enhanced creativity has been out there for a long time but no one has investigated the behavioral manifestations and their neural correlates experimentally," Folley says. "Our paper is unique because we investigated the creative process experimentally and we also looked at the blood flow in the brain while research subjects were undergoing creative tasks."

. . .

Brugger hypothesized that schizotypes should make novel associations faster because they are better at accessing both hemispheres – a prediction that was verified in a subsequent study. His theory can also explain research which shows that a disproportional number of schizotypes and schizophrenics are neither right nor left hand dominant, but instead use both hands for a variety of tasks, suggesting that they recruit both sides of their brains for a variety of tasks more so than the average person.

"The lack of specialization for certain tasks in brain hemispheres could be seen as a liability, but the increased communication between the hemispheres actually could provide added creativity," Folley says.

Weird. Have I mentioned that I am ambidextrous?

(Hat-tip FuturePundit.)

holyoutlaw was musing about how creative ideas can seem grand when they first occur to you, but deflate a bit when you try to explicate them. Oh, how true!

Creativity is a damn funny concept. You can define the word all you like, but I just don't think you are going to plumb the depths of the thing. Basically it is "Having the power to create."

But it is so much more. With extra baggage...

And what baggage! All the creative people I know share certain attributes that cause problems in their lives, and most of them seem to have other issues as well. For example, creative people tend to:

• Live their lives differently because they tolerate a greater degree of chaos in their lives than most
• Feel bad about the chaos anyway
• Are depressed more than most
• Feel bad about being depressed
• Have great ideas that come to them in flashes
• Feel bad because it is so hard to turn a raw idea into something more concrete
• Get depressed about the difficulty they are having
• Feel bad about being depressed
• See the chaos in their lives increase because they are depressed
• Find the chaos in their lives has created new problems for them
• Wonder if they should just give up and be like everyone else
• Feel bad about not being able to be like everyone else
• Have a new great idea, maybe even one that helps to fill out the earlier great idea
• Feel bad because it is so hard to turn a raw idea into something more concrete

And so on...

Another thing creative people do more than others is to take 'brain breaks'. To stop and spend some time doing something at right angles to the thing they actually are working on. To the non-creative this looks like goofing off, and quite often it is. But it seems to be a key ingredient of the creative process. Unfortunately it is also something that causes the creative problems unless they have a boss who understands this, or are luckily enough to have no boss. Most often this tendency to dreaminess and lack of focus is the source of more chaos, more problems.

The interface between the creative process and the real world is not a comfortable place to be. And those who do not live there often do not comprehend this. They wonder why the creative can't just pull their lives together.

Is it any wonder that creative people tend to have problems with substance abuse and depression? And yet, were you to find a way to make creative people live their lives like everyone else, the way even they would sometimes like to, you would probably have to kill the thing that makes them creative. In my opinion, the best thing everyone else could do for creative people is to decrease the chaos a little bit. Pick up the organizational slack a little. Not enough to stifle, only enough to keep it from multiplying out of control the way chaos so often does.

But, to carry on the thought some more, if creativity is tied to the things that makes the creative suck at organizing their lives -- is creativity a child of the chaos, or is it a sibling? Does the one create the other, or do both stem from the same source? Personally I have no clue. But I do know that creativity isn't just the ideas; it is the ability to stick with the idea long enough to turn it into something real. So, if chaos is the source, then creativity is more than just the ability to tap into the chaos. It is also the ability to drag that thing, kicking and screaming, out of the chaos and turn it into something organized. Whether that thing be a mathematical expression, a novel, a song, an invention, or a Jackson Pollack painting.

All this ties into my other existential obsession: trying to define art. Not all the results of creativity are artistic, yet all art is creative (including 'commercial' art like advertising, 'cheap' art like action novels, religious architecture, and even a child's scribble). So it seems as if creativity is also linked in a parent-child relationship to art, just as it is to engineering, physics, rhetoric, philosophy, economics, craft and everything else we humans do that is worth a damn.

(Which is why we need the creative. And why we should nurture them more, even if no-one understands exactly what it is that makes them that way, or how it works. But that is another essay for another time.)

(And another parenthetical point: if you believe in a god who created the universe, who made us in his image, then the creative are his children more than the rest of you. Children of the chaos. Which explains a lot about how arbitrary and downright mean gods often seem to be; they are probably depressed much of the time.)

Now here I am, at the end of the essay, and I haven't managed to define creativity one jot. Instead I've only managed to give you a picture of a creative person that might apply just as readily to a simply lazy or debauched one. But I'm certain you will know them by their works.

For it is the work, the end result, that truly defines creativity for us! It has been said that "Dying is easy, but comedy is hard." The same is true for creativity, "Ideas are easy, but being creative is hard."

Damn hard. Take it from the horse's mouth...

If so, check out Language is a Virus. There you will find a ton of tools and essays to help you push your creativity and use language in strange ways. They even have a long running 'Exquisite Corpse'!