I Am Moving...

Bill Dowis has moved to his new home at www.billdowis.com

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My Mind Works Like YouTube

Have you ever clicked a link to a YouTube video and after watching the video clicked on one of the recommended videos? After watching that video you click on another recommended video. Before long you will be watching a video that is nowhere near the same as the first video you watched.


That is how my thought process works. My mind is like YouTube.


Yesterday I was out for a run and I started thinking about the Disney Marathon which I will be running in January. That thought led to making a shirt to tell people I am running 26.2 miles in Disney World. I am vain like that. That thought led to the idea of selling T-shirts to help pay for my flight down there, which led to the thought of donating a majority of the money raised to a favorite charity. I am vain, not selfish. Those thoughts led to the idea of making running inspired T-shirts. Not an original idea, but a popular one. That thought quickly grew into an idea for a T-shirt empire.


A thought process like that could go on forever.


I think that many people have a similar thought process. Especially when it comes to the creative process. One idea starts as a seed and before you know it you have a forest that needs to be trimmed back and groomed to get a nice looking property to live on. Or sell.


Speaking of running… Check out the run report for the Run For Your Lives Zombie 5K I did this weekend.

Is Hack Really Such A Bad Thing?

Hack is usually used as a derogatory adjective. To be a hack writer means that you grind out thousands upon thousands of words without thinking about the art of writing. You are viewed as nothing more than a word factory. Is that such a bad thing?

Think about the dime store pulp novels of the fifties. There was something for every taste including romance, mystery, and western. These novels carried a low price tag and new ones were available at least every month. They were not going to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature, but they were stories that people enjoyed reading. They entertained the hard working Americans.

Let’s look outside the realm of the written word. Almost everyone I know enjoys a hard hitting action movie. Remember the eighties when Stallone, Seagal, Schwarzenegger and Van Damme would produce movie after movie of nothing but action, cursing and killing? Those movies weren’t winning Academy Awards, but just like the pulp novels they were entertaining and people enjoyed watching them.

The same thing occurs on television. You cannot surf through a dozen channels before hitting so called “reality television.” There is hack content if I have ever seen it, but look at what it has in common with everything I just talked about. It is produced with quantity being more important than quality. It is not winning any awards. It entertains people. And it is in some sort of demand or else it wouldn’t be worth producing.

So what is wrong with being a hack, especially in this digital age when it is easier than ever to produce and distribute your work? Speaking of the digital age, the majority of the websites you see is full of hack content. No matter what subject is covered the words need to be written and site owners pay writers to produce high volumes of content to fill those pages. 

Now I would be insane or stupid or both to suggest that quality does not suffer when focusing on quantity, but to say that there is no quality at all would also be insane or stupid or both. The audience that enjoys this type of entertainment is not stupid. They like to be entertained as a form of stress relief. This is the entertainment that does it for them. 

So there is nothing wrong with being a hack. In fact, hacks get paid. If you want to make money at what you love then you need to be a hack. If you are happy at your day job, then I guess you can produce that artsy stuff.

Better yet you can do both because, as Ben Affleck said in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, “You have to do the safe picture then you can do the art picture.”