I know, a post? Mid-month? It’s definitely a blue moon, because this blog… is normally not very regularly updated. But, I’ve been leaving long statuses on Wattpad (I’m trying to get into Wattpad, again. Hopefully I won’t fail, again), and I realised I wanted to save them somewhere more permanent. Like this blog.

So anyway, I listen to a bunch of podcasts, and there were a few that really inspired me recently. The two latest episodes of The Creative Penn were really good. I loved the one about writing with emotion, especially this quote:

“So after the big universal world building, the next level down, and you can break this down into several steps, the first one for me is finding a universal theme, which is a primal emotion and I’m going to center everything around.”

And from the latest episode on creativity, art and business, I really loved this quote:

I used to think that eventually as a creative person or as an artist I would “arrive,” and I put that in quotes. And what I mean by arrive is that someday I would get to a place where criticism didn’t bother me, where I felt very confident, where everything I put into the world felt easy, and where my life had a certain, my creative process at least, and my putting my work into the world had a certain flow. I realize know because I’ve been doing it for so long now that that’s never going to happen, like it doesn’t really change, and that that’s not actually a bad thing.

This episode also talks about the imposter syndrome, which is something that I definitely feel whenever I publish something, whether it be for sale, or just to a writing site.

And speaking of writing, there is this really interesting Artificial Intelligence software that analyses your story to see how well it fits the market and stuff. I have studied about AI, but I’m more of the IoT/Industrie 4.0/Industrial Internet side of things, so this is super new to me. I’d love to give it a go, but sadly, it’s a bit too expensive. Details about it on the 20booksto50k forum, and the Rocking Self Publishing Podcast has some info too.

And on a completely unrelated note, I really liked the recent (two weeks ago) Freakonomics podcast on Grit. As someone who tends to have a wide variety of interests, this line by Angela Lee Duckworth struck me:

“[O]ne thing that I found about paragons of grit, you know, real outliers in passion and perseverance, is that they have extremely well-developed interests. They cultivate something which grabs their attention initially, but that they become familiar with enough, knowledgeable enough that they wake up the next day and the next day and the next year, and they’re still interested in this thing. And I think that is something that we can actually intentionally decide: “I want to be the kind of person who stays interested in something.”

 I definitely want to stick with my many interests and not keep giving them up for something new. So far, I’m doing ok with sticking to writing, but well… it’s a good reminder.

And this is what I’ve found inspiring lately. I actually quite like sharing these, so I guess I may make it a weekly thing 😀