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Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life
On NaNoWriMo, Personal Writing Style
By Natalie Goldberg—What's your personal writing style? Delve into the meaning of your own writing style. BTW, NaNoWriMo stands for "National Novel Writing Month".

A Guided Imagery On Nourishing The Artist Within
Have someone read this guided imagery exercise to you as you relax in your chair, couch, etc., and imagine yourself in the setting described. The words should be read calmly by the reader. Give it a try—you'll like it!

Ashfaq Ishaq, International Child Art Foundation Founder
Ashfaq graciously allowed me to interview him, so I ask what impact he feels ICAF has made since its founding in 1997, 13 years ago. Teach children compassion and allow them to fully express their creativity. It goes a long way to reaping benefits.

'Dr. Hope' And His Act Of Kindness
Get to know the "doctor" and his charitable contributions to society. See how he works with teachers so that they can get the needed supplies, books and other things for their students.

Tim Anders (Doctor Hope) has certainly had an interesting childhood. His mother was an actress and his father was a Catholic priest which indeed created problems with family life.

Bending Space and Time : Five Time Bandits

Five Time Bandits

By Tom Evans

Time Spiraling The normal human mind can only have one thought at a time.

Just think about what you are thinking about and the thing you are thinking about gets replaced with the thought you are having about that thought.

Just read the above sentence again, pause from reading this article and just check the validity of this notion.

So armed with this new knowledge about the way we think, this gives us the most amazing insight when it comes to our time management.

If we are focused on anything else other than the task in hand, time will slip away from us.

When you ponder this statement, Five Time Bandits emerge …

Switching away from the current task
Being diverted away from the current task
Fretting over the past
Worrying about the future
Thinking about something else

If you read conventional time management books, they will be awash with tips and techniques that will help you with the first two Time Bandits. They help you to priortise better and how to stop interruptions.

There is nothing much out there that deals with the last three Time Bandits though.

Bearing in mind you can only have that one thought at a time, if you are working on a task and your through stream gets interrupted by the past or future, you immediately drop to less than 50% efficiency.

More insidiously, merely running any internal dialogue, or inner commentary, is enough for you to stop your flow. Try this simple exercise out.

Think about a short sentence you can write say of 10 or so words. Form the sentence in your mind and say it internally. Now write it down and try and think of what you are doing tomorrow at the same time.

You can’t right? By the way, if you can do this, please get in touch!!

We can either think about something or do something. Multi-tasking in a single instant is beyond the current state of human consciousness.

To banish those Time Bandits, we have to develop discipline to stop external interruptions but also to reduce our inner interruptions too. In the same way nobody can breathe for you only one person can write your masterpiece. If you inner dialogue is active, your creative muse cannot get a look in. •

Renaissance Man and Imagineer Tom Evans is the author of four books and counting about creativity. More »

8/1/12

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