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The Guru of Failure

Since my tweet about the Zen of Failure is showing some real legs on Twitter, and my blog posts about failure keep getting visitors, I’m growing concerned. Do I really want to gain a rep as the Guru of Failure?

“Oh yeah, Dale Sproule, that failure guy.”
Nice.
I need to remember that in the end, it’s about finding success through failure. My failures are a big part of the credentials I bring to the table. How could I speak authoritatively about failure if I hadn’t frequently come away from endeavors battered and pummeled, bloodied and demoralized, crushed and spindled and broke.” Nobody is interested in my List of Woes – nor should they be. Because the useful and interesting part of this whole exercise is the climbing-back-up part. The part where you take what you learned from the failure and use it to beat your oppressors about the head and shoulders until they cry out, “Okay, fine. You may sit at our table.” And they put you at the far end, on one of the kids chairs, with a cushion. Bu…
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The Process of Writing

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Writing is Easy
Unless you’ve studied engineering, you probably couldn’t build a ten story building, and no one would give you the resources to let you try. Unless you’re an experienced coder who knows something about user interfaces, you’re unlikely to unilaterally create a new computer app that anyone would want to (or could) use. You might come up with a great idea, but by the time you gain the skills necessary to turn it into something useful and readily available, someone else will have done it first, and probably better. Hard skills – from driving big trucks to brain surgery – are not easy to fake. So when you’re unemployed or unhappy in your job and you’re looking for some sort of outlet for your energies, you may start tallying up your skills and think, “Oh this skill isn’t current” or “I haven’t done that since college.” But writing? Now there’s something we can all do! Hundreds of thousands of us write on a daily basis, we are all taught how to write in grade school. And most o…
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That So-called Literary Legacy and Three Bucks Will Buy You a Coffee

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Transversions and Everything After
In the mid-1990s, Sally McBride and I dreamed up, published and edited a well-known and respected small press magazine called TransVersions: Literature of the Fantastic. Over the course of six years, we were fortunate to publish stories by new authors and established pros. Being one of the highest profile genre magazines publishing poetry, we received a wonderful offer from Governor-General Award winning poet and Canadian SF icon, Phyllis Gotlieb to become our poetry editor.
Over the course of 11 issues, we published stories by a pretty impressive list of authors, including Gemma Files - author of Experimental Film; David Nickle – author of Eutopia and Volk; Jeff Vandermeer – author of Annihilation and the Southern Reach trilogy; James Sallis – author of Drive; Robert J. Sawyer – author of Flash Forward; and over 100 others. Many of our contributors went on to great success (Sallis and Sawyer were already well known), with books and stories being adapt…
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The Trouble with Modern Media

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180 years ago, a British fellow named Charles Dickens wrote some books. Over the decades and centuries, those books have been studied by millions of students around the world, they have been in libraries and been translated into many languages. If you found the original manuscript to any of those books, aside from being able to sell them for a fortune, you would still be able to read them. Sure the ink has probably faded in some places, the paper is fragile, and the cursive script they were written in is finally starting to become obsolete – but they would still be accessible to the majority of English speaking readers. About two years ago, while putting together a collection of my short stories, I attempted to find the first draft of a story I wrote in the 1990s – a mere 20 years ago. I had saved the first draft on a 5 inch floppy disc – the most popular transportable medium of the time. As that format quickly became obsolete, I copied my story archive onto 3 ½ inch floppy discs – a …
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Avenging Glory Website in the Works

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I've added a page to this blog to let everyone know that an Avenging Glory Website is on its way. And hopefully to give you an idea of what to expect from it.

I hope to have fun with it in a way that hasn't been possible on most of my other websites. I intend for it to be more interactive, and have a few ideas about getting people to participate.


My Razorwings website in the 1990s featured an attempt at turning my story into a graphic novel.

The biggest problem was that it took about 10 minutes to load the entire website and two minutes more to open each individual page after that. I can take the optimist's view and say I was way ahead of my time - or I can own up and admit, I was in way over my head.


It was a nice idea that had huge problems. Not the least of which was being a mediocre artist working in a new medium (primarily photography and Photoshop and trying to use that medium to tell a bigger story than it was capable of telling at the time. I tried to tell the stor…
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Licence to Fail

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Having already posted my Zen of Failure, I’ve realized I can now use it to excuse all sorts of unsuccessful experiments on this blog.
My last blog post came right out and asked for comments. How many comments did it get me?
Zero. As a consequence, I now know something that seemed promising, that absolutely does not work – at least within the scale currently possible on my blog.

The experiment was based on some advice I had read that suggested: a)Asking questions b)Appealing to your readership Both of these methods can successfully generate comments and elicit response.
So why didn’t it work for me? It probably has something to do with
Response Ratios
I selected some random YouTube videos as examples of normal response ratios: ·An album with 14,151 views has 510 likes and has generated 58 comments. Ratio of comments to views is .4 per cent. Just over 3 per cent of the viewers took the time to say they liked it. ·A popular Ted Talk with almost 15 million views received just over 25 thousand com…
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Please Share Your Wisdom - All You Obi-Wans of the Keyboard

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So, here's the thing - despite my nearly 50K page views, I have a decided lack of followers, so I figured, "Why not put that out there and ask people for help and advice. How do I convert viewers to followers?

And how do I get comments? Do I need more pictures? Please feel free to share your tips or thumb or nose at me in print. It's all part of the eternal quest for answers.

a) Do I give away books?

b) Give away friends books?

c) Give away rare books?

d) Publish excerpts from work in progress?

e) Avoid publishing excepts from work in progress?

f) Give away popcorn?

g) Get my friends to post salacious photos?

h) Just write something interesting, for crying out loud!




Reading is Sexy Photo from Do-Ming Lum at Tiger Mountain  Creative Services. Model: Ash
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