Over the weekend I really enjoyed watching @sizemore and some chums making a sci-fi short in 48 hours for the Sci Fi London Film Festival 48 hours competition.  I was even more impressed when I saw what they came up with.

Mike opened up to questions on his blog and I asked about where the name of the girl, Merica Adams came from.  I’m always fascinated by how writers choose character names.

Says Mike:

“Good question. To quote the first episode of Joss Whedon’s ANGEL, “It started with a girl.”

Years and years ago I met a girl in a bar who was called Merica. I was enthralled by the name and the fact that she had a tattoo in an interesting place. Never came across the name since and I’ve been looking for a character to christen Merica from then until now.

Adams was just a good strong name like Flash GORDON or Buck ROGERS, but also a nod to Adam Strange. Perfect combination I think. Her name is never said aloud in the short, but we did have some tank crew voices talking to her in Hungarian that never made the final cut.

Maybe we’ll do a director’s cut and get them back in…”

 

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

One of my most consistent creative blocks is thinking about how what I’m making is going to be received.  I can go round and round in circles in my head for ages worrying about this or that. (Btw it’s one of the reasons I try to write longhand and then type-up rather than type straight in to a machine that’s designed for editing rather than composition.)

This morning I was writing and the thought came “What’s the worst that can happen?” and after I had a couple of little fantasies about my favourite critics’ put-down lines, I wrote “nothing”.  Exactly.  *That’s* the worst that can happen: I hit publish/send/tweet/upload and I get *nothing* back.   I’m much more bothered by silence in the face of publication than having my errors pointed out or by someone’s silly misinterpretation or misunderstanding of what I’m trying to say.

Why? Because I interpret that silence as indifference or hostility.  Hostility so strong that there’s just nothing to say or the fear that I’ve written something so meh that people can’t even be bothered to work out how to type “tut”.  The silence of eyes rolling.

How about a more supportive interpretation?  What am I doing when I’m being quiet (not just online, but all the time)? Often, I’m just being, breathing quietly and being aware of my breath.  Listening, processing but not necessarily reacting immediately.  What if the network were like that?  What if silence could mean acceptance, appreciation, assimilation of ideas?

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

Michael Dila picks up Tara’s “Unclear Path” and riffs on it, adding in a couple of important points about this journey/traveler metaphor:

“What kind of people would rather take the hard way than the easy way? People who are looking for something, but don’t know what it is. There is a lesson in the historical/mythical place that the Spanish conquistadors called El Dorado: a lost city of the Mayans made of gold and containing untold riches. No one ever found El Dorado and the truth is it can never be found, not because it is a myth, but because those who seek it are more interested in the search.”

So again and again, especially when making decisions about where to go next, the people around me came up with the most direct possible route from where I was today to New York.  It was almost as if we automatically optimise for efficiency.  

And I had to patiently and kindly remind them that if the point of this was simply to get to NYC from San Francisco then I probably would not have ended up in their company having this conversation.  If I could have (and mostly I think that means, if I had been driving a car and I was less of a scaredy-cat) then I’d have made it even more convoluted, I’d have doubled back on myself, I’d have stayed in a different place every single night, I might have ended up leaving the USA altogether and actually heading south for El Dorado.  

Even as it was, options other than the direct appear insane – why would you go from SF to Austin via Seattle and Milwaukee? I could not possibly know the answer to that when I was sitting in Half Moon Bay. But I’m awfully glad that that’s what I did!

Let’s say it once again.  The point of this trip was *not* to see whether you can get from San Francisco to New York (of course you can, in many boring ways) it was to see what happens when you set a goal and then allow for the journey to unfold over the period of a month, letting other people in on the decision making. Which leads me to Michael again: 

“There’s something important that … is often missing from many mythological accounts of those who explore and experiment on the frontier: we do not do it alone.”

Please. Read The Whole Thing.

I may go round in circles for a bit with this, pulling out ideas, referencing them back to the trip and then trying to put them in a broader context.  That’s how I’m learning. Hope you are too.

Originally posted on Please Look After This Englishman

Sorry, this was supposed to be a “bonus link” for that last post but I got carried away with my own rhetoric.  Here, have some of Tara’s rhetoric instead.

However, I was heartened to learn recently that this is a keystone of being an entrepreneur. A study on a swath of successful entrepreneurs in INC Magazine found that, though we have lofty goals, like luggage, these goals may “shift during flight.” it stands to reason that unpredictable outcomes are bound to happen as one pioneers uncharted waters. Instead of nailing down a clear goal and barreling towards it, entrepreneurs ask questions that lead them towards answers.”

Originally posted on Please Look After This Englishman

Why is the idea of a journey important right now?  How can we use the ideas about a journey to help us understand things that are changing or confusing or just too complicated in our everyday lives?  

That’s what I’m trying to do here.  Although I enjoy travelling and telling stories about what happened, just because what happened was fun, unexpected or interesting, I’m much more interested in drawing out what they mean and what the whole thing means about how we live life.

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to say that, I got too tangled up in just letting people know I was still here, still going, still OK.

Back to the question.  Why is it important?  

Because deep down we know that the current form of organising society and our economy is no longer working, has not been working for some time, is highly unlikely to go back to working the way it used to.  

We can feel the ache to bud and blossom in some new way.  We just don’t know what that new way will be.  It is entrepreneurs and artists who will create it.  The people who play with new ideas and try them out.  They are on a journey, on the uncharted path to the future, they try things, they put things out there that are half-baked, that they don’t really understand themselves yet, because that’s the only way to understand them.  

And all around them people are saying “No! Don’t do that!  Keep doing the old thing, stay at home, in the old place. You have to know what you’re going to do before you set out so make a very detailed and accurate plan. If you really must go out there, only follow the paths that others have trodden before you”

But they’re wrong, the important thing is to set out, to get on the road.  And everyone who does that is in a little way making it easier for others to do so too and ultimately making it possible for us all to survive.  And so those people need encouragement.  They need to be affirmed and told that they are doing the right thing.  And that is why they deserve to have art made about them and what they do, to help them and the people around them to understand what they are doing and how they are living.  

And that’s what this is all about.

Originally posted on Please Look After This Englishman

Why do people buy stories?  Why do people pay story-tellers to tell them the stories that they’ve gathered out in the world?  

I’m not talking about the bulk of book & movie purchases, which seems to be fiction: made-up, complicated and modernised versions of ancient themes.  They’re generally reassurances that all is well – even when they’re about serial-killers and child-torturers we feel better because we know that it isn’t happening in our little corner of the world.

When it comes to someone going out and experiencing the world and then coming back and interpreting what they’ve seen for people back at home, (ie the stuff I’m trying to do here) I’ve experienced four attitudes:

1. You go and look, and tell me what’s going on, I’ve got plenty of stuff here to keep me busy, but I am interested in what’s out there and what you think.

2. I’m afraid that I may be wrong about how the world works, please show me evidence that I’m right after all.

3. Even though I hate to admit that I’m wrong, I know that I grow most by hearing different points of view.  Give me something to fight against and maybe learn.

4. I don’t really get what you’re doing and I don’t have time to work it out for myself.

5. La-la-la! I’m not listening! Go away, you’re wrong, your methods are wrong, I hate you, etc.

So far, I think, I’ve only really engaged with Types 1, 5 and to a certain extent 4 where I’ve tried to turn them into a Type 1 – because within Type 1 there are those who will pay up front to make sure this kind of thing happens and there are those who won’t.  

Types 2, 3, 4 and some Type 5s (yikes!) are the next stage of engagement. I haven’t had to deal with this yet because I haven’t really done any interpretation, I’ve simply reported on what happened, sometimes what I thought about it, but not really in any depth.

But this is where the real value is, this is where the benefits emerge for readers: “evidence that I’m right”, “growth… something to fight against and maybe learn”, having something presented simply that “I don’t have time to work out for myself”  

Things that they might be willing to pay for in one form or another.

Originally posted on Please Look After This Englishman

Here’s me in my Learning Pool t-shirt while I was in New Orleans.  Ray Nichols kindly took me along to an event called “Be The Change: A Celebration of New Orleans Social Entrepreneurs”.  It was great – a few hundred energetic people, all full of big ideas about how to change their bit of the world.  We talked and talked and talked.  

As full disclosure, Learning Pool gave me the t-shirt and $200 towards the trip.  In return I said I’d wear the shirt and let people know (including through this blog post) what i thought about their new product mylearningpool.  Oh, and I had some promotional postcards to give to people who might be interested in the product at SXSW and other places I went.

I’ve known Dave Briggs, their Community Evangelist for as long as I’ve known anyone on the social web and I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know the founders, Mary and Paul better since I met Mary at the UK GovCamp in 2010. What impresses me about every “Poolie” I meet is their passion for understanding how to create value for their customers, coupled with their commitment to improve public services.

They have a wide range of Learning and Development products for public sector organisations but their new baby is mylearningpool, a collection of (currently) 20 or so online courses for all sorts of people in social enterprises or the voluntary sector.  They cover basic skills for individuals such as:

Originally posted on Please Look After This Englishman

The one thing I want to learn from The American Trip is that asking for help in this way really works.  Also that sticking with the process, no matter what, is what makes for the most amazing experiences.

So here are the elements of today’s conundrum.  

On the debit side:

• I have no paid work at the moment, nor any lined up.
• I am behind with my rent and some other bills for last month as I didn’t raise enough to cover my overhead back here while I was travelling.
• Though I’ve paid the slew of 1st of the month bills, I’m now running short of cash for day-to-day expenses.

On the credit side:

• I have just had an amazing adventure, the type of journey that most people never get to make in their lives.
• I have learned from and been inspired by countless other artists, entrepreneurs and creative people during the last month.
• I have a great number of stories, ideas, photographs, bits of audio and video from the trip that I’d like to make something meaningful from.  There is at least some analysis of the value and flows of social capital and a broader narrative about the style of travelling as a metaphor for the future of work and organisations.  There are doubtless other products in there that I haven’t started to draw out yet.
• I’ve continually expanded my network among people I’ve met on the road  

I can imagine immediate flow coming from the following directions:

• Paid gigs (part- or full-time) doing what I do or something else you’ve seen me do.
• Micropatronage or sales of music.
• One-off Donations, perhaps from people who enjoyed watching #plate11 as the live bit unfolded and would like to see more but didn’t get round to contributing earlier.

And then there are sales of what I can produce from the trip as well as looking at grant funding in the longer term.

A big lesson of the last month is not to let my imagination limit what can actually happen.

I have no more doubt that the answers will come, one way or another, than I had that you could help me get from San Francisco to New York City via all sorts of adventures just over a month ago.

And so I thank you, once again.

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

http://boos.audioboo.fm/swf/fullsize_player.swfOriginally posted on Lloyd’s posterous