Thank You, Douglas Adams

The late Douglas Adams is probably best known for his radio plays and books entitled The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  In 2015, I took some time to study the late author's life, his influences, and of course his work.  Doing this was useful and enjoyable.

I learned that he and I were both influenced by the comedy of Monty Python.  As I learned more about Adams, I learned of his appreciation for P.G. Wodehouse and Robert Sheckley.  Having no familiarity with their work, I sought out several of their books and read them.  It was interesting to see their influence in Adams' work.  No, I'm not saying that he "stole" anything from them.  He didn't.  But it's easy to see echoes of their work in Adams' own.  This helped me better appreciate something I learned from Austin Kleon in his book Steal Like an Artist.  Namely, that every artist borrows ideas and techniques from those who came before, and builds on them.  Adams clearly learned from these two (and probably Python), but created something I think is better than they did.

Something else I learned about Adams was how much we had in common.  We both had technology in common, and (around the same time on the calendar) were fans of the Apple Macintosh.  (I later lost that fandom, but Adams retained it.)  We both enjoyed Monty Python.  Some of our musical taste was also very similar.  I suspect that if we had met in person before he died, we might have been friends.  Sadly, I'll never know.

Despite having never met or communicated with Adams, I am grateful to him for many things.  His Hitchhiker's works remain among my favorites today.  Each time I re-read them, I enjoy them all over again.  Now that I've begun taking my writing more seriously, I learn from them as well.  The last time I read through one of Adams' books, I began to see certain techniques he used to create unique and funny sentences.  For instance, Adams would embody inanimate objects with emotions or motivations, as in "The rain made itself heard against the glass."  (This implies that the rain wanted the character's attention and intentionally made noise against the window.)

I know that many times during Adams' career, he wondered if he could really do it, if he could ever really succeed as a writer.  He questioned himself and his abilities constantly, which I suspect almost every writer does.  I am grateful that he stuck with it and produced The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Last Chance to See, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and his other works.  These have taught me a lot about writing humorous stories.  I thankful that he didn't give in to the self-doubt and get a job as a banker, a stockbroker, or something else.

Thank you, Douglas, for hanging in there and cranking out the work you did.  I only wish you'd been with us longer and been able to bring us much more.  You deserved a longer life and a chance to enjoy all your success.

Read More

Writing in Public - Year 1, Month 5, Days 13-19

My adoption of Dean Wesley Smith's Writing in Public challenge continues.

I underwent surgery on Monday, April 13.  Recovery continued until Friday, April 17, when I returned to work.  Despite being in recovery, I hoped that I could maintain the pace set last week with a record of 20,589 words.  If so, I'd be on track to set a new record for this month.  How did this turn out?  Read on.

On Monday, April 13, I underwent sinus surgery to hopefully resolve some long-standing breathing and infection issues.  I wrote a very short journal entry (88 words) that morning and nothing the rest of the day, which was mostly spent sleeping or watching video on Netflix.  I re-watched the first episode of the amazing Neil deGrasse Tyson Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, the Futurama movie Beast with a Billion Backs, and Atari: Game Over about the recovery of Atari video game cartridges from the Alamagordo, New Mexico, landfill - as well as the demise of Atari itself.

Tuesday morning, I awoke feeling OK given having just been through surgery. I wrote a journal entry (287 words).  I also wrote a post about tablets for Windows Desktop Administration (2605 words).  I added more words to my Douglas Adams article series notes and draft (1,325 words added).  Also managed (2,007 words) some notes around the Mimas Object story.  Daily total was 6,227 new words.

Wednesday, I awoke not feeling as well as the previous day.  Wrote a post about a Suntory beer that claims to make the person drinking it better looking (71 words) for Columbus Beer Scene.  I watched a neat video of Kermit the Frog at TEDx Jackson on YouTube, from which some of this week's quotes below are taken. I read Robert Sheckley's Dimension of Miracles.  Not feeling well, I pretty much slept the rest of the day.  Managed a journal entry late in the day (371 words) along with some additional notes on the Mimas Object story (2012 words).  Daily total 2,454 words.  Not bad for a sick guy.

Thursday I wrote a post for Columbus Beer Scene (103 words).  I spent most of the rest of the day in bed.

Friday I wrote a post for How To Write Fiction (1303 words).

Saturday and Sunday I discovered the incredible time sink that is GTA V.  I've spent far too many hours since then playing through that one.  No words were written.


Here are my notes from this week:

• Meaningful Quotes: 
• "Have no fear of perfection. You will never reach it." - Salvador Dali
• "Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will." - Charles Boudelaire
• "In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few." - Shunryu Suzuki
• "Our creative economy grows if all of us share what we know and seek out the wisdom of others" - Kermit the Frog, TEDx Jackson
• "Creativity prospers best under particular conditions, especially where there is a flow of ideas between people who have different sorts of expertise." - Sir Ken Robinson
• What Didn't Happen and What I Can Improve for Next Week:
• None of the outcomes below happened.  I underestimated my ability to recover from the surgery and didn't have as much writing time as expected.  I did, however, allow the game to take up too much time on Saturday and Sunday - when I did feel better and could have been writing.
• Biggest Outcomes I Wanted for This 5-day Period:
• Finish the Douglas Adams post series
• Finish The Mimas Object story on ASL Series Blog
• 10 Opening Lines, 1 paragraph, 1 page
• Worldbuilding in the Immortality universe
• Brainstorming in the Technology story
• Biggest Outcomes I Want for the Next 7 Days:
• Same as above.

---

THIS WEEK'S WORD COUNTS

• ASL Mimas Object Story:  4,019 words
• Columbus Beer Scene: 174 words
• How To Write Fiction: 1,303 words
• Windows Desktop Administration Blog: 2,605 words
• Journal: 746 words
• This Blog: 1,325 words
• Opening Lines: 0 words

TOTAL WORDS FOR THIS WEEK: 10,172 words (avg. 1,453.1 per day)

---

APRIL 2015 WORD COUNTS

Novels:

• Fully Invested: 0 words (notes and backstory)
• The Alliance (series): 0 words
• ASL - The Ark: 0 words
• Alien Love Story: 0 words
• Driven To Kill: 0 words
• Local Gods: 0 words
• The Black Eagles: 0 words
• The Old Hotel: 0 words
• Thief of Police: 0 words
• Immortality Story: 0 words
• Technology Story: 106 words

Short Stories:

• The Mimas Object (a story in the Alliance universe): 4,019 words

Non-Fiction:

• Introduction to Application Repackaging: 0 words
• Troubleshooting Windows Applications: 0 words
• Amazon Product Reviews:  0 words

Blogging and Journaling:

• Alliance for Sentient Lifeforms (ASL): 4,083 words
• Begin Brewing: 0 words
• Columbus Beer Scene:  1,999 words
• How to Write Fiction: 2,547 words
• Introduction to Application Repackaging: 0 words
• Windows Desktop Administration: 7,858 words
• This Blog: 6,713 words
• Guest Posts for Other Blogs: 0 words
• Comments on Other Blogs: 1,038 words
• Journaling:  7,159 words

Opening Lines, Paragraphs, Pages:

• Opening Lines Written: 24 lines (792 words)
• Opening Paragraphs Written: 10
• Opening Pages Written: 1

APRIL 2015 - TOTAL WORDS: 36,314 (avg. 1,911.3 per day)

---

CHALLENGE - YEAR TO DATE RESULTS:

Record Word Counts:

• Day:  8,693 (March 29, 2015)
• Week:  20,589 (April 6-13, 2015)
• Month: 56,486 (March 2015)

Month of Challenge	Words Written	Days	Words/Day
December 2014	20,754	31	669.5
January 2015	16,018	31	516.7
February 2015	47,660	28	1702.1
March 2015	56,486	31	1822.1
April 2015	36,314	19	1,911.3
TOTAL WORDS	177,232	140
Avg. Words per Day	1,265.9

Read More

Writing in Public - Year 1, Month 5, Days 6-12

My adoption of Dean Wesley Smith's Writing in Public challenge continues.

I'm continuing to study Douglas Adams, both the man himself, his writing, and his thoughts on how he wrote what he did.  It's been enlightening, and I've been able to grasp and appreciate him and his work on an entirely different level.  It's also helped me from the "creative family tree" point of view to realize that he and I had many things in common, despite being born many years apart and leading lives on different continents.

On Monday, I wrote a journal entry.  I also did some work on the Immortality story (resulting in an unidentifiable word count because it was adding items to a list and modifying some of them, so there was a change in word count but not an easily measured one).  I wrote three posts of Columbus Beer Scene (1492 total words).  That gave me 1,987 words for the day.

On Tuesday, I wrote some more of The Mimas Object story for the ASL Series (1621 words), a post on six-word stories for this blog (152 words), and a journal entry (753 words) which included some ideas for spicing up The Mimas Object story, which is still a little dull to me.  I've also continued to read about Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  That made the day's total 3,557 words.

Wednesday evening, I wrote a journal entry (531 words), a beer review for Columbus Beer Scene (333 words), and several product reviews for Amazon.com (1038 words).  I also wrote 16 opening lines and a few opening paragraphs (451 words).  That was a daily total of 2,353 words.

Thursday on my lunch hour, I wrote two posts for the Windows Desktop Administration blog (3749 words total), a journal entry (209 words), and several opening lines (341 words).  I also wrote an installment of the ASL Mimas Object story (755 words).  That gave me a total for the day of 5,054 words.  Since Monday, I've written an average of 3,238 words per day!  I also continued reading the Douglas Adams biography.

Friday, also on my lunch hour, I wrote two security related posts for the Windows Desktop Administration blog (1504 words) and a journal entry (1016 words) for a total of 2,520 for the day.

Saturday I was busy most of the day.  It was after 11pm before I had the time to sit down and do some actual writing.  All I wound up managing was a journal entry (348 words). Lowest per-day total of the week.

Sunday was largely a day of chores and errands, but I did begin gathering notes and writing part of a series of posts which will eventually appear here on this blog, about Douglas Adams and how he worked.  Those notes total 4,302 words and are all I managed today apart from this post (468 words).

Of all the weeks I have detailed records for, this is the week with the highest word count!  A record!

Here are my notes from this week:

• Meaningful Quotes: 
• "[As a comedy writer] You're trying to see things, by shifting some perspective, shifting some variable somewhere, that suddenly makes two things that were apparently completely unalike suddenly appear to be alike... and appear to be alike because in some fundamental way, they are.  It's always those moments of sudden, rather startled, recognition that give you particularly good moments in comedy." -- Douglas Adams
• "Writer's Disease:  About ninety per cent of your time is wasted on totally pointless and distracting activity, and only about ten per cent is actually spent dreaming up and composing and shaping and honing all those wonderful, exciting, soul-stirring excuses for not having got anything written." -- Douglas Adams
• "You map out a plot, and you write the first scene, and inevitably the first scene isn't funny and you have to do something else, and you finally get the scene to be funny but it's no longer about what it was meant to be about, so you have to jack in the plot you had in mind and do a new one." -- Douglas Adams
• "Nobody could say anything bad about my writing that I haven't already thought ten times worse." -- Douglas Adams
• [Speaking about being practically locked in a room to write against a deadline] "...the strange thing is, under those circumstances you actually come up with all the best stuff. Stuff you couldn't have written any other way." -- Douglas Adams
• "He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom." -- P.G. Wodehouse
• "It was one of those parties where you cough twice before you speak and then decide not to say it after all." -- P.G. Wodehouse
• "If you want to succeed, find leaders who are doing amazing things in the world, and push them up. Find powerful people and help them reach their goals. If you’re of service to them, they will be of service back." - Unknown
• What Didn't Happen and What I Can Improve for Next Week:
• Plot outline for The Ark - Not Done
• Continue worldbuilding in the Immortality universe - Not Done
• Finish the Mimas Object story - Partially Done
• Flesh out the "straight" part of the "Technology" story - Not Done
• From all the above, I see that I probably need to force myself to sit down and work on these projects in order to keep momentum going.  Otherwise they stall out for weeks at a time and never get finished.
• Biggest Outcomes I Wanted for This 5-day Period:
• Plot outline for The Ark - Not Done
• Continue worldbuilding in the Immortality universe - Not Done
• 20 opening lines, 2 paragraphs, 1 page - Done
• Finish the Mimas Object story - Partially Done
• Flesh out the "straight" part of the "Technology" story - Not Done
• At least one post on this blog - Done
• Biggest Outcomes I Want for the Next 7 Days:
• Finish the Douglas Adams post series
• Finish The Mimas Object story on ASL Series Blog
• 10 Opening Lines, 1 paragraph, 1 page
• Worldbuilding in the Immortality universe
• Brainstorming in the Technology story

---

THIS WEEK'S WORD COUNTS

• ASL Series Blog:  3,407 words
• Columbus Beer Scene: 1,825 words
• Windows Desktop Administration Blog: 5,253 words
• Journal: 3,352 words
• Amazon Reviews: 1,038 words
• This Blog: 4,922 words
• Opening Lines: 792 words

TOTAL WORDS FOR THIS WEEK: 20,589 words (avg. 2941.3 per day)

---

APRIL 2015 WORD COUNTS

Novels:

• Fully Invested: 0 words (notes and backstory)
• The Alliance (series): 0 words
• ASL - The Ark: 0 words
• Alien Love Story: 0 words
• Driven To Kill: 0 words
• Local Gods: 0 words
• The Black Eagles: 0 words
• The Old Hotel: 0 words
• Thief of Police: 0 words
• Immortality Story: 0 words
• Technology Story: 106 words

Short Stories:

• The Mimas Object (a story in the Alliance universe): 0 words

Non-Fiction:

• Introduction to Application Repackaging: 0 words
• Troubleshooting Windows Applications: 0 words
• Amazon Product Reviews:  0 words

Blogging and Journaling:

• Alliance for Sentient Lifeforms (ASL): 4,083 words
• Begin Brewing: 0 words
• Columbus Beer Scene:  1,825 words
• How to Write Fiction: 1,244 words
• Introduction to Application Repackaging: 0 words
• Windows Desktop Administration: 5,253 words
• This Blog: 5,388 words
• Guest Posts for Other Blogs: 0 words
• Comments on Other Blogs: 1,038 words
• Journaling:  6,413 words

Opening Lines, Paragraphs, Pages:

• Opening Lines Written: 24 lines (792 words)
• Opening Paragraphs Written: 10
• Opening Pages Written: 1

APRIL 2015 - TOTAL WORDS: 26,142 (avg. 2,010.9 per day)

---

CHALLENGE - YEAR TO DATE RESULTS:

Record Word Counts:

• Day:  8,693 (March 29, 2015)
• Week:  20,589 (April 6-13, 2015)
• Month: 56,486 (March 2015)

Month of Challenge	Words Written	Days	Words/Day
December 2014	20,754	31	669.5
January 2015	16,018	31	516.7
February 2015	47,660	28	1702.1
March 2015	56,486	31	1822.1
April 2015	26,142	13	2010.9
TOTAL WORDS	167,060	134
Avg. Words per Day	1,246.7

Read More

Writing in Public - Year 1, Month 5, Days 1-5

My adoption of Dean Wesley Smith's Writing in Public challenge continues.

As we discussed on Tuesday night, March was another new record word count for me.  I managed to write a total of 56,486 words during the month, an average of 1,822 per day.  This is still a long way off from a prolific professional author like Dean Wesley Smith, but it's the most I've written outside a NaNoWriMo month.  It beats my previous record set in February.


Wednesday I didn't feel well and spent much of it sleeping or reading.  The reading was P.G. Wodehouse's Psmith in the City which seems to be more of a single story than My Man Jeeves and follows two bank employees in England.  I've grown to appreciate what Douglas Adams saw in Wodehouse's work, and have read several lines that remind me of something Adams would write.  I consider this research for my own writing, as I'd love to be able to deliver humorous lines the way Adams and Wodehouse did.  All I managed was a journal entry (478 words).

Thursday I added to my Ark story on the ASL Series site (676 words), wrote a post about Douglas Adams and Wodehouse's humor style on How to Write Fiction (1244), and did a journal entry (623 words).

Friday I wrote a journal entry that included an exploratory draft of a possible short story or novel around technology problems a person experiences (1165 words).

Saturday I wrote only a short journal entry (254 words).  I'd slept in, the day was a busy one around the house, and we went out with friends in the evening.  That left me with little writing energy.

Sunday I also slept in, then had breakfast with my wife.  After that, there were things to do to get ready for the family to come over for Easter dinner.  Since Thursday, I've continued to read a biography of Douglas Adams, so the time not spent writing hasn't been wasted.  I've learned a number of useful things from the book and I think I'm beginning to understand how Adams was able to write such funny material.  I also see that he and I have had much in common. I've also seen a number of interesting coincidences.  For instance, in the radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it's said that Ford Prefect "picked up his crucial towel at Marks & Spencer (the Salisbury branch, according to the series)" (This quote is from The Frood: The Authorised and Very Official History of Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.)  Out of all the Marks & Spencer branches that could have been chosen for that line, it happened to be the one with (a more-common spelling of) my last name...

I did some brainstorming for a story (106 words) and a journal entry (541 words).  That's it.


Here are my notes from this week:

• Meaningful Quotes: 
• "There is nothing better than a few constraints you can comfortably kick against." - Douglas Adams
• "All of my life I've been attracted by the idea of being a writer, but like all writers I don't so much like writing as having written." - Douglas Adams
• "You may not set out to make a point, but points probably come across because they tend to be the things that preoccupy you, and therefore find a way into your writing."  - Douglas Adams
• What Didn't Happen and What I Can Improve for Next Week:
• Pretty much all my wanted outcomes.  I need to set aside writing time and not allow other activities to intrude on it.
• Biggest Outcomes I Wanted for This 5-day Period:
• Plot outline for The Ark - NOT DONE
• Continue worldbuilding in the Immortality universe - NOT DONE
• 20 opening lines, 2 paragraphs, 1 page - NOT DONE
• Finish the Mimas Object story - WORKED ON, NOT FINISHED
• Biggest Outcomes I Want for the Next 7 Days:
• Flesh out the "straight" part of the "Technology" story
• Finish wordbuilding the "Immortality" universe
• Finish The Mimas Object story on the ASL Series Blog
• 20 opening lines, 2 paragraphs, 1 page

---

THIS PERIOD'S WORD COUNTS

• ASL Series Blog:  676 words
• How To Write Fiction Blog:  1,244 words
• Technology Story:  106 words
• Journal: 3,061 words
• This Blog: 466 words

TOTAL WORDS FOR THIS PERIOD: 5,553 words (avg. 1,110.6 per day)

---

APRIL 2015 WORD COUNTS

Novels:

• Fully Invested: 0 words (notes and backstory)
• The Alliance (series): 0 words
• ASL - The Ark: 0 words
• Alien Love Story: 0 words
• Driven To Kill: 0 words
• Local Gods: 0 words
• The Black Eagles: 0 words
• The Old Hotel: 0 words
• Thief of Police: 0 words
• Immortality Story: 0 words
• Technology Story: 106 words

Short Stories:

• The Mimas Object (a story in the Alliance universe): 0 words

Non-Fiction:

• Introduction to Application Repackaging: 0 words
• Troubleshooting Windows Applications: 0 words
• Amazon Product Reviews:  0 words

Blogging and Journaling:

• Alliance for Sentient Lifeforms (ASL): 676 words
• Begin Brewing: 0 words
• Columbus Beer Scene:  0 words
• How to Write Fiction: 1,244 words
• Introduction to Application Repackaging: 0 words
• Windows Desktop Administration: 0 words
• This Blog: 466 words
• Guest Posts for Other Blogs: 0 words
• Comments on Other Blogs: 0 words
• Journaling:  3,061 words

Opening Lines, Paragraphs, Pages:

• Opening Lines Written: 0 lines (0 words)
• Opening Paragraphs Written: 0
• Opening Pages Written: 0

APRIL 2015 - TOTAL WORDS: 5,553 (avg. 1,110.6 per day)

---

CHALLENGE - YEAR TO DATE RESULTS:

Record Word Counts:

• Day:  8693 (March 29, 2015)
• Week:  12,650 (March 23-29, 2015)
• Month: 56,486 (March 2015)

Month of Challenge	Words Written	Days	Words/Day
December 2014	20,754	31	669.5
January 2015	16,018	31	516.7
February 2015	47,660	28	1702.1
March 2015	56,486	31	1822.1
April 2015	5,553	5	1,110.6
TOTAL WORDS	146,471	126
Avg. Words per Day	1162.5

Read More

My "Family Tree" - The Douglas Adams Branch - Part 2 - Wodehouse

While reading about Douglas Adams, I learned that one of his favorite authors was P.G. Wodehouse. This places Wodehouse in my author "family tree" also.  I read about Wodehouse earlier this evening and learned some interesting parallels between the two of us:

• Wodehouse and Adams both wrote items for their school newpapers, as did I.
• Wodehouse wrote short stories that were later collected to become his novels.  Last year, I began using some of my blogs in much the same way... to write short passages that would become topic or chapters of a finished book.
• Wodehouse wrote song lyrics, which I dabbled at in high school.
• Wodehouse had "little interest in politics and world affairs" which is true of me as well.
• Wodehouse had trouble with plotting in his early works, but later became known for his skill at constructing and developing plots.  I still have trouble with plotting.  It would be good to know what helped Wodehouse develop that skill, apart from simply writing more stories.
• Wodehouse never had any biological children, but did have a stepdaughter.  I have no biological children but two stepchildren.

Those are the only similarities I found between the two of us.

One thing I found interesting about Wodehouse was how he seemed to poke fun at his critics throughout his career.  An author who criticized him was parodied in one of his works.  A critic who called him a "performing flea" found his words the title of a Wodehouse book.

After reading about the man, I took a look on Amazon and found that I could read his book "My Man Jeeves" for free. I did.  It was interesting.  It's basically a collection of brief tales about people who all claim not to be intelligent, and get into a variety of unfortunate situations.  In many cases, the butler Jeeves (being the only one described as intelligent) often provides a solution that saves the day.

For a modern reader, the 1919-era language can be difficult to sort out at times.  You'll find phrases like "I'm a peaceful sort of cove" (man), "I have never touched you" (borrowed money from you), and "unless I made the thing a bit more plausible, the scheme might turn out a frost" (unless I made it seem more believable, it wasn't going to work).  If you stick with it, though, there are some very interesting turns of phrase, like:

• "England is a jolly sight too small for anyone to live in with Aunt Agatha, if she's really on the warpath."
• "...an hour before he had seen his aunt off to whatever hamlet it was that she was the curse of."

These phrases could easily be confused with something from Douglas Adams, so it's clear he was influenced by Wodehouse's work.

You can often tell when one of Wodehouse's characters is in trouble.  This is usually when an aunt or an uncle arrives.

I expect to read more of his work, both because I can see what Adams enjoyed about it and because I do enjoy puzzling out some of the unfamiliar language.  One of the nice things about Wodehouse's work is that much of it is available free of charge on Amazon.com.  Reading it on the Kindle, it's easy to tap an unfamiliar word or phrase and find out what it might mean.

Taking this family tree idea back further, Wodehouse was reportedly inspired by a number of others, including:

• Frank Sullivan - Known for his character "Mr. Arbuthnot the Cliche Expert"
• Sir A.P. Herbert - An English humorist, novelist, and playwright
• Sir W.S. Gilbert - An English dramatist, librettist, poet, and illustrator know for the Savoy operas
• Alex Atkinson - An English journalist, novelist, and playwright
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson - A popular British poet
• Shakespeare
• Rudyard Kipling - An English short story writer, poet, and novelist, known for The Jungle Book, Gunga Din, and The Man Who Would Be King
• Omar Kayyam - A Persian mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and poet
• Edgar Wallace - An English writer, incredibly prolific
• Agatha Christie - They exchanged autographs and letters
• Donald Jack - An English and Canadian novelist and playwright
• Gavin Lyall - An English author of espionage thrillers
• George MacDonald Fraser - A Scottish author who wrote historical novels, non-fiction books, and several screenplays
• Dame Ngaio Marsh - A New Zealand crime writer and theatre director
• Rex Stout - An American author of detective fiction featuring his character Nero Wolfe

It will be interesting to figure out which of these were his primary influences, because this is a lot to wade through.

Read More

My "Family Tree" - The Douglas Adams Branch

As I've probably mentioned before, I've become a big fan of Austin Kleon's book Steal Like an Artist. The book describes itself as the author's advice he'd go back in time and give himself at age 19.  I've read and re-read the book several times.  In terms of words and pages, it's a light read.  The ideas and concepts it covers, however, are anything but light.

In the section entitled, "Climb Your Own Family Tree" the author tells you to:

...chew on one thinker - writer, artist, activist, role model - you really love.  Study everything there is to know about that thinker.  Then find three people that thinker loved, and find out everything about them.  Repeat this as many times as you can.

Kleon suggests that seeing yourself as "part of a creative lineage" will help you feel less alone as you work.  Hanging their pictures in your work space is like having "friendly ghosts" helping you along.

That advice in hand, I realized that one writer whose work I really loved is the late Douglas Adams.  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and Last Chance to See are all very excellent works.  They're imaginative, loaded with humor, and a joy to read.

Here are some things I learned about Adams that I found interesting:

• He wanted to be a performer, like the Monty Python group.  In fact, he went to Cambridge and tried to get into Footlights because that's what most of the Pythons had done.
• He actually worked with Graham Chapman, John Cleese, and Terry Jones during his career, so he achieved that dream before he died.  He even has a writing credit in a Python episode and appears in a couple of their sketches.
• Adams loved science and technology, and was often "tech support" for his friends.
• To get into a peer group in school, he was forced to write a poem about a candle.  His was actually quite amusing and well written for a boy of 17.
• He wrote spoof articles for his school newspaper.  (I did that sometimes, too, though one of mine wound up with me in the principal's office because it offended a literature teacher.)
• Adams spent a period as a hospital porter, barn builder, chicken shed cleaner, and bodyguard to a Qatari family.
• Adams was known for missing writing deadlines, once quipping that he loved the "wooshing sound they make" as the fly past.
• He wrote three serials for Doctor Who (The Pirate Planet, City of Death, and Shada) during the Tom Baker era.
• Adams played the guitar, which is something I've long wanted to be able to do (and Adams played it left-handed).
• Adams had musical taste that included Pink Floyd, Procol Harum, and Bach.
• In 2013, on what would have been Adams' 61st birthday, Google celebrated with a doodle showing the Hitchhiker's Guide, and other elements of the Hitchhiker's universe.

This gives me the next level of the family tree to investigate:

• Monty Python
• The Doctor Who episodes he helped write
• Pink Floyd's music
• Procol Harum's music
• Bach's music
• William Blake - a poet, painter, and printmaker that Adams got recognition for writing about
• The Burkiss Way - a BBC Radio 4 sketch comedy show he wrote for
• John Lloyd - a television producer and writer who roomed with Adams, and wrote with him
• PG Wodehouse - described as one of Adams' "heroes"

I am familiar with Monty Python, but should look at them more from a writing standpoint than from their actual comedy work.

More on this investigation as it continues.

Read More