Tag: creativity

New Author Bio, And It’s a Weird One

Now that I’m prepping for my third book, I thought it time to update my bio. The old one was a little outdated anyway; it still had me living in California and talked about achievements prior to 2011. But I also wanted to shake it up. Write something a little…different…from your standard Amazon author page.

Here’s what I came up with:

One February day, when Hephaestus was hitting on The Muses, they began a playful argument: Is it possible for a mortal man to be *too* creative? What would happen to his primitive brain if it were to suddenly overflow with ideas? Zeus, never one to leave an argument to the fate of mere words, sent a lightning bolt to earth where it struck upon a hapless young man–your author, James Schannep.

Thus Click Your Poison books were created as a repository to store the overabundant brain fruit. Each of Schannep’s books split into three unique storylines and contain over 50 possible endings. But the fate of each book; nay, of mankind, rests with YOU, dear reader. For it is your choices that will shape the story in these books.

So dive in and find out:

Will You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse? (INFECTED)
Could You Solve a Murder? (MURDERED)
What if You Had Superpowers? (SUPERPOWERED – Coming soon!)”

How’d I do? Is it sufficiently odd enough to attract your attention without adding the fervent desire sit far away if we were on the subway together? Let me know in the comments below.

And as long as we’re talking about bios, there’s a rumor going around that Amazon’s promotion algorithms take into account how many “likes” an author page has. I’m sure some of you didn’t even know you could “like” an author on Amazon, but if you fee like hopping over to my author page and clicking LIKE, I’d be much obliged.

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The Productivity Experiment

I’ve had the relationship between creativity and exercise on my mind for a while now. From moving to one of the Top 10 fittest cities in the US, to an article that I just can’t get out of my head about famous creatives and how they spent their days. The blog Info We Trust designed some pretty fantastic visualization of that data, gleaned from Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey. Check out my favorites below.

 

 

KEY:

But rather than making my a personal pinwheel of productivity, mapping out my own eccentricities, I simply analyzed my “ideal work day” and explored how to go about being more productive while maintaining a certain level of activity. In addition to writing every day, I usually take morning walks and try to work out most days. During the occasional afternoon run or swim, I often come up with some of my best ideas. I once found myself sprinting home so I could write down the twist ending to MURDERED, afraid I’d forget the burst of inspiration. Yesterday, while mowing the lawn, I came up with the plot for a pretty fantastic Sci-Fi horror film (I’ll let you know if it ever makes it to the big screen…).

Okay, so the relationship between exercise and creativity is long documented. So what? Well, here’s the problem with that daily segmented wheel–it’s finite. There are only so many hours in the day. But what if I could combine the act of walking and writing?

Enter the treadmill desk.

The plan is to walk while writing, researching, editing, and marketing. I just purchased a walking treadmill and raised one of my desks to accommodate. I’ll start off slowly, with sitting breaks, but I’d like to get up to several miles of work by the end of it. What do you think? Am I onto something or just “spinning my wheels”? What’s your secret to productivity?

Check out a video on “The Desk of the Future!” below:

 

 

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