Follow the Black Swan

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First of all let me apologize to the gentle reader who was misled by my title. This is not going to be an enlightening piece of literature, where the black swan is a metaphorical representation of some philosophical idea I am trying to convey to you. The black swan does have a symbolic meaning to me that I might divulge at a later time, but it has little to do with this post. This post is about one thing and one thing only: money!

Start any credible writing course or read any decent book about writing as a profession and you are more than likely to be reminded of the immortal words of Dr Samuel Johnson, author of the first English dictionary, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money". Most courses that are serious about getting you paid for your written work will encourage you to write letters for newspapers that pay, enter competitions for cash prizes - you will note that the vast majority of small writing competitions award cash prizes for a good reason - and indeed chase anything that means a monetary return. There is little place for pride in the early life of a writer trying to turn profeessional. In fact, the story of the struggling writer who prostitutes himself in anyway to make his talent pay is a virtual modern proverb these days. Check out the very funny Ed Reardon's Week for a great caricature of the overeducated writer desperate for work or, indeed, the Ricky Gervais's series, Extras for examples of an artist tortured by the continued loss of his credibility. And yet ask many non-writers their opinion on writing for a living and they will think it is a simple case of writing a book and sending it off the lucky publisher keen to get their hands on your gold. You then receive nice fat advance payments for every subsequent book, as you laze back in your expensive surroundings just waiting for the inspiration to grab you before writing your next bestseller. J.K. Rowling is cited as the supreme example of this and it is perhaps why many a struggling writer see daggers at this phenomenally successful writer. The truth for most, however, is a very different story.

When I was at school I remember a special room being set up where students, in their free time, could investigate career opportunities. You would enter your career of choice and then be given a list of the qualifications that best suited this job and the places in further and higher education that offered them. Then it would tell you what the general job prospects were. I remember going into the room with the same writing myth in my head I have previously described. The qualifications came up, English and History. I was overjoyed. My two favourite subjects! Then job prospects followed: very poor.

As the years have past I have got work in print. I even sold my first two not very good short stories quite easily, but this did far from open the floodgates of opportunity for me. I wrote for martial arts publications, using the vehicle of my twin passion to get some leverage up the professional ladder of opportunity. Unfortunately the ladder was sort of propped against the wrong wall, as the industry rarely pays hard cash for any work. It is a business based on the fact that a highly competitive world of clubs and retail businesses are falling over themselves to get publicized, meaning that some people virtually pay to get their work in print! I do know at least one person who got paid to write for a magazine, but from his account it was a severely unbalanced Faustian deal. Luckily I was published with Martial Arts Illustrated who although didn't pay me hard cash gave me free advertising space. So, I worked out a way to promote seminars off the back of articles I wrote on good martial artists.

Eventually I did succeed in getting a book into print and significantly it wasn't a martial arts book. However, no serious businessman would have been impressed with the niche market returns I received versus time and effort put into researching and writing this book. Mind you, this is the general nature of the writing business. The general path most professional writers take is qualify as a journalist and then to start writing their books in their spare time. This is not the route for all of us, much less those of us who weren't qualified to become journalists when we left school, however, the principle is a very sound one. Get paid for perfecting your craft in order to support the projects you love. Of course, journalism is an art unto itself and many journalists only write books as sideline and incidental projects. Their real love is their actual job. If you are a writer like me, however, you want to write books for a living. You want to write about your intererests and passions and receive a serious income for it. I am on my way and I have found some useful new tools at my and your disposal.

Writing has always been an accessible art to most people. That's why you get the J.K. taunts. Most people could write a book. Most people can also make money from it and some recognition. This blog is proof of the latter point. The internet has proven to be an incredible tool for today's generation of writers. It certainly has some big dangers varying from being dragged into listless or empty self indulgent writing, where your work is never going to generate any indirect let alone direct monetary returns, to the new problems with copyrighting http://web.me.com/penandspindle/heathervallance/The_Goblin_Market/Entries/2009/7 /31_Why_My_Copyright.html However, if you can steer your good ship, Discipline with strong awareness light on well across the internet then there is plenty that can be used to your advantage.

According to Don Tapscott's Grown Up Digital the era of the critic may be at an end. Few consumers trust the words of the distanced academic "expert" over someone they can relate to. The internet provides a collaborative community, a global one at that, which forms groups and trades information. Savvy internet companies realize this. They understand that Tapscott's Net Generation like to read reviews from people like themselves before they decide to buy a product. They also understand that this community will reward and recommend good reviews. Many sites, such as Amazon, have done this. I am actually a member of Amazon Vine, a special group that receives any early releases they list whenever I want free of charge in order to review them. This is hardly payment for my services, but it was quite nice to receive that recognition for a bunch of reviews I wrote years ago as an exercise to see how my work reviewing non-martial arts items might be received by the general public.

However, what prompted me to write what has become a rather lengthy ramble is a price comparison website called Dooyoo. This is where I appear as the BlackSwan featured in my title, writing reviews and actually getting paid to do it. How do I find the time? Those who know me will understand that time is not a plentiful commodity at hand. I try to restrict myself to writing stuff that is directly related to my own work - be it teaching martial arts/self defence or promoting my book. However, like most writers I am also constantly feeding off inspiration. This mainly comes in the form of books and entertainment. I love to discuss these things and there are plenty of people who enjoy reading my opinions and recommendations. Therefore, I thought why not use the time I would normally use to reply to an email to make some money?

Dooyoo was recommended to me through the famed "money saving expert" Martin Lewis. Here's the page I read: http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/protect/make-money-surveys#review I am not interested in wasting my time on paid surveys. That's not what I like doing. The point is I like writing about works that either inspired me and also ones that didn't. If you are a reading this you are more than likely to be a person who enjoys writing and enjoys sharing their views on different media. This a great exercise to get your views out there and to see if they people find them useful. Better that than to write a big explanation on Facebook, Myspace, a forum or the like whether or not you thought the latest episode of Big Brother was any good.

When I first registered with the site I was expecting - rather pompously - to see a huge slew of badly written reviews and plagerized work. Although there is a lot of dross on the site, which is only to be expected, I was astounded to see a large number of good writers, many like me who have their own professional website and blogs. The community was very much the embodiment of what Tapscott described in his book with members policing and rewarding one another. If you do decide to join up, here are a few pointers I have learnt early on:

1. Obviously don't plagerize. Any new review is immediately registered and the community are onto it like white on rice. You will get a rating - Very Useful, Useful, Somewhat Useful or Not Useful - pretty quickly. There are a lot of serious users on this site, and a good number probably relying on it for a decent secondary income. However, there is nothing wrong with recycling an old review you may have written on your blog or another website that encourages customer feedback. My advice would be to preface the review with a small disclaimer that the review has been previously posted elsewhere - if it is on your blog then that's more advertising!

2. Make sure your reviews are for products only listed by Dooyoo. Remember it serves as a price comparison website, so many of the products are from other retailers. There is a function that allows you to only see products in the Dooyoo catalogue. You won't get points for reviews written for any other products. It might add to your profile, but the money is way too small and time is far too precious to bother with that sort of thing. Also, if I know many of you like I know myself you will get snared into producing more and more work without any instant rewards.

3. There are two types of review, an express review and a premium review. The premium review is the one that pays the money 50p per review. These immediately get advertized once you have written them. You have to get £50 before you can request a cheque. Express reviews are any reviews under 150 words. They don't get advertized and I guess are a way for to save an incomplete reviwe online, a review you can later add to in order to make the 150 word count. You can edit any of your online reviews at any time. You get points for good ratings on your reviews by other members, points that help get you to your money mark, therefore you are given an incentive to produce both quality and quantity.

4. Join me. Let's get our Circle of Friends going. That way we can build up plenty of points and our work better recognized, which means more money! Also don't forget to give me ratings when on get on there. Follow the BlackSwan! http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/member/BlackSwan/



Don't forget to check out Jamie Clubb's main blog www.jamieclubb.blogspot.com

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Challenging Material

Timothy Leary (via last.fm)

Timothy Leary’s “Evolutionary Agents” is not a book one would immediately associate with Geoff Thompson’s Real Combat Method. I doubt even Leary - with his audaciously leftfield views - imagined that his lucid and controversial work would become set reading material for a class training to get certification in self-defence instruction. Yet there we all stood in a circle being questioned by Geoff Thompson, himself, about our thoughts on the work. In truth the course was far more than a simple “hard skills” course for training how to deal with a violent situation. Most of the students who went on the course already had instructor level certification in one respected realistic combative form or another. My take on Geoff’s decision that the reason why books such as Leary’s were made compulsory homework for all who attended the course was because they prompted the internal battle. This is what might be termed cerebral self-defence – as Geoff once put it “self-defence is defence against the self”.

There is nothing quite like tackling what might be called “challenging material”. Such material might repel you or make you feel awkward at first, but ultimately provides you with a deeper perspective over what you might have written off as absolutes. Challenging material is best when it scares you and it has clearly scared others. It should scare you not only because it challenges your beliefs, but because in some way it reinforces them. Geoff presented us with various books that acted as cerebral weight training material. He did not expect us to agree with all the books in their entirety – it is impossible that anyone could given the diversity of their individual philosophies – but to draw positive inspiration from each and every one of them. We were all on easy footing with books like “The Gift of Fear” by Gavin De Becker – a book treated like a bible in my own self-defence class – and “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl; however, it was clear that Yogananda’s “The Autobiography of a Yogi” would herald in the more challenging information. Out of these texts, “Evolutionary Agents” was one I found the most personally challenging.

Let’s get one thing straight, “Evolutionary Agents” is not, technically speaking, heavy reading. In fact, the first thing that impressed me about the book was the way its author got things moving from the start. In fact, the simplicity of the prose is quite daring. It is written as if the author was feverishly scrawling down his thoughts as they rushed into his mind, not stopping to take a breath and then rushing the book’s finish line. This might not be too far from the truth given Leary’s proud stance on the controlled use of hallucinogenic drugs, LSD in particular, to improve man’s capacity for creativity. In fact, he was part of a movement of controversial authors who aggressively promoted this theory. The pace of Leary’s writing style is in line with his argument regarding pace and the back of his book states that it is “not the survival of the fittest, but the survival of the fastest”. He plays with the word race in human race to put forward his theory that everything is about mobility.

Leary goes to great pains to explain the direction all natural progression moves. His all encompassing philosophy sees everything as a race through time with all of us living in different time zones – the progressive thinkers are living in the future and the rest are living in the past. He then gets quite deep into metaphors – so deep in fact it gets a little difficult to decide where the metaphorical finishes and where the literal begins. Likewise his arguments vary from the genuinely original and creative to what suspiciously reads like “shock for the sake of shock” statements. I am not completely dismissive of the obvious shock tactic. Some times we need to go to extremes to re-set a balance. Leary is very much – and consciously so – in line with punk in this respect. However, it didn’t take long in my first reading of “Evolutionary Agents” to really feel the bite of his elitist argument. This is the first stage where you realize you are facing “challenging material”. The fact that the book was compulsory reading, I have to admit, was the first coax to continue my reading. At this stage I feared that what I was reading was typical 1960s undergraduate academia at its most masturbatory.

There is plenty to support this fear. Despite preaching the importance of mobility towards to the future, there is clear nostalgia for the values of “The Age of Aquarius”. He says that the greatest advancements in creativity occurred between 1960 and 1980, his era, and he sees California being a migratory Mecca for all Evolutionary Agents. Of course, California was the place to be in the 1960s as far as the psychedelic movement was concerned – the location has also proven to be fertile ground for some of the world’s strangest cults, pseudoscience and mystical charlatans. Does Leary fall into this category?

My answer is that I don’t know, but one thing I did find despite all this was that “Evolutionary Agents” is an inspirational read. It inspires because it provokes and motivates at the same time. Like Ayn Rand, another hugely influential writer who has also been accused of being a founder of a “cult of personality”, Leary’s main focus is on developing the individual and breaking away from the conventions of society. He has fascinating metaphors to describe the insect-like castes that humans create to keep people from progressing as individuals. Looking at human behaviour in animalistic terms is quite valid. The great anthropologist Desmond Morris wrote some very accurate findings on the way humans act in a group in his “Naked Ape” and “Manwatching” books. Leary may not follow an orthodox biological route on this one, but I completely agree that humans generally follow a herd mentality or – as Leary would say – our “hive” mentality. Those who break away from these castes are what Leary calls “outcastes” – another play on words – and are the pioneers of the future. History certainly backs Leary up on this one. Single individuals who have gone against the norm of the day and stood hard and fast to their principles are those who have affected some of the greatest changes. They have shifted the paradigms of their time and changed our perceptions.

Changing perceptions; now this is a common theme running through the discussions conducted on the Geoff Thompson course. Around the time when I was seriously considering giving up reading “Evolutionary Agents” or, at least, skimming it, I arrived at his “Correspondence Theory”. This actually reinforced a belief I have had for a long time – that everything is connected and that it is a crime to completely break with the past. There is so much we can learn through history and valid foundations for the future are laid there. This is a fairly sound principle.

However, I did not intend this article to be a review of “Evolutionary Agents”, but rather a reflection on what happens when we expose ourselves to “Challenging Material”. This particular book was the first in a long while that exposed my personal prejudices. I don’t like to pigeonhole myself as anything, but I guess I am, roughly speaking, agnostic and sceptical in my life philosophy. I guess this has come about from often wanting to be objective, open-minded and having more than the average person’s experience with charlatans. Therefore books like Leary’s and another book on our list, Joe Vitale’s “Zero Limits” are immediate foils for me to exercise my principles and progress my thinking. The experience is never comfortable, but once you find a connection somewhere in the work – an “energy” as some might say – it becomes quite compelling.

Around the time I completed the Geoff Thompson instructor course I read a short book entitled “The Sadeian Woman” by the feminist author, Angela Carter. The book is perhaps one of the bravest I read in a long time. Carter effectively takes on Sade’s philosophy and not only draws positive ideas amid the scenes of extreme pornography that include torture, rape and a nihilistic approach to life, but actually finds the great libertine’s limit. This is no easy task. Sade is very hard reading and I don’t mean that in a “War and Peace” or “Paradise Lost” deeply profound way. If Timothy Leary’s books are written in a fast-paced style that easily pulls you along, Sade’s are long winded affairs that just seems to catalogue as many perversions and contentious ideas as possible. Having said this, his Libertine characters do have many parallels with Timothy Leary’s Outcastes or Ayn Rand’s Objectivists. After all he is presenting a philosophy that champions hedonism, like Leary, and selfishness, like Rand. Incidentally Rand has one character describe the hero of “The Fountainhead” as “The Marquis De Sade of architecture” for his audacity.

Angela Carter does not react with a counter-argument or the condemnation that many other feminist authors have done when they discuss Sade. Instead she discusses how his heroines, Justine and Juliette, are prototypes for the twentieth century image of women. Sade’s heroine Justine, of the book of the same name, who is punished throughout her whole meaningless life for trying to be virtuous, is seen as the forerunner for the inoffensive and vulnerable blondes of the media like Marilyn Monroe. Likewise Justine’s sister, Juliette, the eponymous heroine of the Justine’s sequel, who is rewarded for her crimes of survival and indulgence, is described as the archetype for the “career women” of the 1980s.

However, it is in his play “Philosophy in the Bedroom” that Carter actually finds that De Sade will only go so far. She demonstrates that far from having the sensuality usually associated with erotic fiction it is all rather mechanical and the orgy that is mainly described by the players comes across as a sort of aristocratic parlour game – regimented and anything but free. The play culminates in a scene clearly designed to derive the most shock possible – the rape and torture of a mother by her daughter. However, it is during this act that Carter sees that Sade will only go so far – that he actually does fear real chaos – and he pulls back. It is this one crucial moment that many a shocked or reactionary critic would have missed in their rising disgust for the horrendous acts being committed that Carter really goes that stage further as a literary feminist. She effectively challenges Sade, a man whose work was far more explicit than anything the controversial DH Lawrence would write and far more aggressively anti-religious than the expelled atheist poet Percy Shelley would publish, on his own terms and ends her succinct criticism with a type of “is that all you’ve got?”

During our course Geoff spoke of a short film he recently completed and was soon to be distributed called “Romans 20:12”. The film apparently deals with that most loathed and feared of crimes in our society, child abuse, and using the titular verse from the New Testament it offers forgiveness as the only real way the abused can successfully claim revenge. Geoff predicts it will be met with opposition and that it is a controversial idea, but he believes in its worth. Keen readers of Geoff’s work will see that it is another connection with his autobiography “Watch My Back”, where he described the abuse he suffered as a child and his adult confrontation with his abuser. I feel it will challenge those who do have religious views and perhaps spark debate on the nature of forgiveness – is it another hidden example of true selfishness and even a type of revenge?

We need material that challenges us if we are to progress. As the celebrated martial arts and self-defence instructor Mo Teague regularly says, “We need traction to move forward”. The challenge can come in many different ways, but I think it is important that it addresses an area we feel fundamentally weak about. I think this is not a million miles away from the Stephen R. Covey principle regarding empathetic listening. If we do not listen, read or face something that makes us feel uncomfortable we allow that thing to become an insurmountable obstacle. Also we allow unnecessary prejudices to feed our ignorance and handicap us from understanding more about our fears. My personal take on what stops certain people from looking into things that scare them is that they worry it will change them. This is every reason to take on the fear. How do you know that your principles are strong if you have never truly tested them?














Don't forget to check out Jamie Clubb's main blog www.jamieclubb.blogspot.com

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