Freewriting

Freewriting is cool. It's really helping me to access/organise my thoughts - something I have long needed. I got an intro to it via the audiobook of Accidental Genius by Mark Levy, who seems to have gotten a lot of his inspiration from Peter Elbow's Writing With Power. Might read that soon. In the mean time though, Levy's book has given me more than enough to experiment with.

Letting people interact with your product

On seeing a particular car drive by us the other day, Mike mentioned how he really liked it because he used to drive it in a car racing game. And yet, car manufacturers were (at least at one point) against having their branded cars in such games because apparently they thought it would be bad for them if people could smash their cars up in games. Turns out maybe not - at least with Mike. This made me think about how we tend to remember a lot from our adolescence, like the music we listen to, the friendships we had, and clearly for some, the cars we drive in computer games. If people will attach positive emotional memories to things in adolescence, it makes sense that they're more likely to have some positive attachment to them in adulthood. Perhaps Mike would consider buying such a car at some point. Message for me: adolescents are a powerful bunch to target for future product appeal. At the moment I just have my songs, and I'm really just writing them to discover my own artistic voice at the moment, but who knows, maybe in the future I'll have a more general product that I'd like people to get on board with for the long haul - maybe then I'd look at how to get adolescents to interact with it, get familiar with it, and feel some sense of ownership of, even before they've bought it.

Starting blogging. Again.

I tried to start blogging a few years ago. Basically nothing happened. I didn't know what to write about, didn't know what people would want to read, and set a high standard for myself in terms of writing quality and thoroughness. 

Now I'm taking a different tack. I'm just going to write whatever takes my fancy, no matter how short, no matter whether people are interested or not. That way, I can hopefully get into some sort of rhythm of blogging without too much expectation of myself (the expectation of perfection being quite likely the root of my procrastination). It might even be one sentence! Whatever the case - I want to blog and I think this might be one of the only ways to get myself started.

The posts will get very little editing and may not even make sense to anyone other than me. The ideas could be vague, easily misinterpreted and possible even misleading due to lack of thoroughness and clarity. I guess the point is that at the moment, this blog is for me to vomit my semi-digested (mmm!) thoughts, and get into some sort of habit. Maybe then I'll start to make it more accessible. So, if you're reading these posts, know that you are looking into my barely filtered brain. The posts are not designed to be correct or scientific, as much I would like to be able to make them in the future.