My Life of Travel - a letter to a long time creativity colleague and friend
My Life of Travel - a letter to a long time
creativity colleague and friend
Dawn
Good to hear that you are back to sleeping through the night.
That has not been my routine for years.
Perhaps because of my varied international travel
or my varied health conditions or age.
By the way my opening line in my "middle of the night" email
was supposed to be
"BLINDLY FLASH OF THE OBVIOUS"
not
"BLAND FLASH..."
damn AUTOCORRECT SPELLING systems.
in response to your message about websites.
I have gotten people to my website for years
getting them there to really read pages in depth has been
the problem.
first professionally created website...
one of the very first private domain names
When I created it originally, designed by Charles Cave (Sydney, AUS) and Lou Boncek (western NY State),two creativity colleagues I met through Marc Tassoul's Chat Group in 1991 or 92 it was meant to become a
VIRTUAL LIBRARY OF CREATIVITY
with links to books, movies, filmstrips, articles
about creativity around the world.
Great idea but unrealistic to create I discovered soon.
I still like the page design but it is very old school technology
and I never could do any management of it or addition work.
My 2nd generation Website I created using CONTRIBUTE 3 software that eventually Apple's constant upgrade, upgrade, upgrade made it incompatible with the latest or newest Apple OS System in 2004 or 5.
Here is the opening page of that website as I designed it.
I spent hundreds of hours playing and creating that website with hundreds of links to other pages and to my open pages, especially Smugmug and Homepage photo albums (500 of them) that thanks to STEVE JOBS
Homepage was scraped making my page useless.
have 4 interesting enter pages for
Leadership
Communication
Teamwork
Cre8ng and Creative Thinking
all that are still on the www but very old school technology also
Along came Wikipedia with the idea of having hundreds of independent
people submitting material (much of incorrect or simply wrong too often)
but I did not have the resources to make that happen.
My current website uses a custom designed WordPress template
designed by a local IT guy. We worked off and on with it for about 4 months before it officially was active on Blue Host, the host website for it.
There are almost 400 separate pages on my current website
that I created since 2011 using the custom designed Word Press
template that was created for me by an IT guy I knew through my
Toastmasters Club over 3 or 4 months.
He is long gone.
All 3 of these evolutions of my website from 1990 onward work find on laptops and desktops but not well on APPS driven devices like smart phones or tablets.
The design layouts of websites is totally different now.
I simply do not have the current knowledge to work with the newest WordPress templates that adapt to all types of devices easily.
I have bought a new domain
I have bought a new template
Word Press has continued to upgrade, upgrade, upgrade
and I can no longer manage it like I learned to when it was first loaded up to Blue Host in September of 2011.
Even have tried to learn how to deal with the latest version of Word Press
with a little help from Francois Coetzie and from Mohammad Huesein, a prisoner I got to know as a good friend from the day we were both processed into Al Wathba Prison on October 26th, my middle brother's birthday (75th)....[that is the first time I noticed the date connection].
Mohammad is a full-time professional website designer who is from Egypt. After he was released a few months after me he returned to Alexandria, Egypt to live.
I get lost easily trying to following today's tutorials due to my shallow knowledge of TECH-EASE language.
I won't give up.
If you are interested in following the process and progress on books I am currently writing you can go to their respective blogs I created.
MELT THEM DOWN (a new book about creative thinking that I have been playing with off and on for a few years that I got excited about working on beginning over the weekend through a challenge from a 20+ year writer friend's encouragement to write a new creativity book to help me get back into the SPEAKING CIRCUIT)
I have blocked out the outline and written initial drafts for
Preface
Introduction
so far
living alone has its benefits
http://www.livingthelifeofacreativewaltermitty.com/2017/05/melt-them-down-preface_15.html
initial book cover design includes a melted crayon painting one of my friends in South Africa gave me as a gift 5 or 6 years ago
the other book I have been writing on for now almost two weeks is about my second trip completely around the globe in 2003.
ENDLESS SPRING
http://myendlessspring.livingthelifeofacreativewaltermitty.com/2017/05/my-endless-spring-intro.html
I have blocked out 3 such books about long international trips
1977 - Motorcycling Around Europe on a Euro-Rail Pass
been working on it since the Spring of 78. Have written
several published articles based upon parts of that trip.
I told you about it a couple weeks ago
2001 - Life is a Creative Journey, Not a Guided Tour
I worked on that from the Fall of 2001 through to the Summer
of 2002. During the Spring I started seriously working on it
after attending a Writing Weekend Course led by Chris Clarke-Epstein
who did the course for the GSA - Georgia Speakers Association
I walked away with 1500 crisp words and a polished outline.
I wrote nearly every day on that one 2 to 8 hrs a day until
I took my 150,000 unedited words to the NSA Headquarters when
I signed up for C. Leslie Charles weekend workshop
HOW TO GET PUBLISHED. Within two weeks of returning home
I completed a BOOK PROPOSAL and scraped the book because
what I created I then hated.
The Endless Spring, 2003 Trip around the Northern Hemisphere,
I have been steadily writing for daily for about two weeks now,
a chapter rough each day.
blah blah blah....
thats my life now
writing, napping, writing, napping, writing, napping
watching lots of dvds, some walks, some storytelling
and writer group activities along with attending
various artist gatherings: Athens Plein Air, art shows, art openings.
No exotic traveling, which I have been doing for 20 years
since Merry became ill.
travel travel travel
Speak speak speak whether paid or not.
you have the patience of someone who is not a Baby Boomer or Millennium if you have read all the way to here.
Thanks
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