Creative

I’ve evolved quite a bit since starting this site.

When I first conceived GroovyMojo, I was recovering from divorce, recovering from the dot.com crash, and working at a fall-back job doing computer support.  I was rather lost at the time, and decided I needed to rediscover my path in life.

As I did some introspection of my own passions and interests, and searched for new things to help me on my way, this web site came about.  When I first put it together it was an experiment, just to see what I could do.  And I put the context ads on it to see if it would support itself.  When people asked me, "What’s it about?" I didn’t know how to answer.  "Everything, I guess," is what I’d finally say.

"Groovy" means good, and "mojo" means magic.  I wanted some good magic in my life.  I write science fiction and fantasy, so I actually think about magic quite a bit.  I think I’ve come to understand it, the way it really works, and it’s not actually supernatural.

Magic — real magic, not trickery — comes from thought, intention, and deed, all together.  The magic part comes from the synergy of the three.  Synergy, an over-used buzz word, is the term for the total being greater than the sum of the parts.  It a real phenomenon.  And that is how I define magic in our mundane world.

You mix a positive attitude, a lot of thought, solid realistic goals, passion, and action, and you get groovy mojo.

Good magic.

Good things start happening because you draw the good things to yourself.  Your success builds upon itself, and gets stronger.  You achieve goals and set new ones.

I worked myself into better jobs.  I achieved my goal of becoming a full time professional writer.  Then, as I realized — in a professional sense — what I really enjoyed is creating and maintaining websites, I worked myself into a position where I do that for a huge multinational corporation.

Even better, I’ve found someone who I love without measure, a person that I seemed to be designed for at a molecular level, and she for me as we11.  I can’t imagine someone more perfect.

Groovy mojo works.  It worked for me.  If it can work for me, it can work for anyone.  The requirements are that you have to believe, and you have to want it, and you have to be determined to study the ways that you sabotage yourself and develop ways to keep it from happening.

It’s an ongoing process.  You don’t set it up, get it going, and step back from it.  You have to live it.

That’s why, when I stumbled upon the quote, "Life isn’t about finding yourself, it’s about creating yourself," I instantly knew that had to be my mantra, and so I made it the theme of this website.

So now if someone asks me what this website is about, I know what to tell them.

It’s about creating yourself.

Last year a lovely and talented writer named Jennifer turned me on to Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.

Thank you Jennifer.

Thank you.

I’ve had this book for months and I haven’t even finished it. I can only read about two pages before I suddenly have to put the book down, rush over to my desk, and write something.

This book is so unique you can judge it by weight. It’s light, yet it holds more inspiration per ounce than anything I have ever hefted before in my life. It’s like condensed inspiration, slowly and lovingly rendered down to almost pure form.

I know I’ve touted this book before, maybe here, definitely elsewhere, but even if I’m repeating myself it deserves to be repeated. I sometimes wish I’d discovered this twenty years ago, but no. Things happen for a reason. The universe has a timing all its own. Something brought Jennifer and I together one morning at a Starbucks, and I think her gift to me was to tell me about this book. So the book came into my life at a time where I can really appreciate it, and savor it, and let it inspire me one page at a time.

I cannot recommend it highly enough to anyone who writes. Not just novels, but poetry, business reports, sales receipts, shopping lists … even if you don’t write at all. It teaches you in a very Zen way to appreciate life as it happens.

It’s a writer’s job to notice things. Moments. Instances. If you notice them, you appreciate them. Then you can write about them.

But the real gift here is that you learn to notice them.

Thank you again, Jennifer.

And thank you Natalie Goldberg.

A writer’s trick for keeping words flowing is to do timed writing practice every single day. Doesn’t matter what you write, and doesn’t matter how many words. Just pick a time and start writing. Say, 15 minutes, and set a timer, and write constantly for those 15 minutes.

This is an established practice that’s been around since the 60′s. But here’s a new twist on it.

Go to FutureMe.org and set up an account. It’s free.

This is a place where you write letters to yourself to be delivered to you in the future (up to 50 years in the future).

Every day go there and do a timed writing exercise and set it to be emailed to you one year in the future. Or longer. Or shorter. Whatever you want.

But it would be so cool to read all the random stuff that was in your mind a year ago today. Who knows what will turn up? What it will inspire? What forgotten thing it will remind you of?

Make sure you click their Google Ads everyday so that they can afford to send you the email a year from now!

…from MojoWriter.com

I’ve been a fan of Microsoft Word ever since Word for Windows 2.0, the version that won me away from WordPerfect 5.1. However, in their struggle to improve it over the years, they’ve bloated it with a plethora of features only a few specialists could appreciate. Each successive upgrade always had some small thing here or there that made me think, “Okay, that’s cool.” But it’s become so much more than a word processor … you could use it to do almost anything.

All I want it for, is to write.

This upgrade, however, has got to be the smartest in years. Instead of throwing in another truckload of extraneous features, they concentrated on making the experience of using the software much better. The more I use it, the more I appreciate what they’ve done. And that helps me to concentrate on what I want to do.

The features they did choose to add, though, are also smart. Big case in point … I’m writing this review in Word 2007, and it speaks directly to my Content Management System (in this case, Drupal). I post directly to its API from the word processor.

That rocks.

This is not to say that I wasn’t lost for the first few days. Everything has been rearranged, and that was — at first — aggravating. Some things that I couldn’t find were hidden from me in plain sight. I looked all over the place for the word count feature only to discover it’s right in front of me, on the bottom left-hand corner. Some other controls, like the AutoCorrect options, are buried deep in a very non-intuitive place … but you only have to find it once.

The most common controls are right at your fingertips. Literally. Across the top in their new “ribbon” interface, and also … and this is the real winner … almost everything you could possibly need when creating text is available in a pop up right-click menu, including the most common formatting controls. For those of you who like to keep your fingers on the keyboard and not use a mouse, you’re in for a treat. Hit the alt key and watch what happens.

All I can say is that it’s intelligent, a pleasure to use, and the working space is 100% oriented toward helping you concentrate on what you’re doing.

Very well done, Microsoft. Indeed. Kudos to you!

WordWeb is a great little dictionary program I’ve been using for years, and it’s completely free. You can be typing away in anything on the screen — email, word processor, database, web form — and suddenly suspect you’ve misspelled a word. Simply click on the word and then press Control-Alt-W. Up pops WordWeb with a list of words so you can find the right spelling. Or, if you did spell the word correctly, up pops a definition and list of synonyms.

I just now used it on the word “synonym.” Cool, I did spell it right.

This is an indispensable tool for anyone who does a lot of writing outside a full-featured word processor. It’s free, it works offline (you don’t have to be connected to the Internet to use it), and you can download it right now from: http://wordweb.info/free/