GREAT ADAPTATIONS

Smarty-britches Search Engines

Ah, the refreshing insanity of search engines and their algorhythmic wheezing. A few months ago I read Darren Rowse’s hilarious account of the weird choices sometimes made by Google Adsense in terms of those ads that show up in the right column. I’m no stranger to this dynamic, having made the bizarre discovery of my book, “Little Shifts,” translated into Portuguese. Actually, I didn’t find it. A friend did. Imagine my surprise… “Congratulations about your book being printed in foreign languages.”

HUH?

Bizarre, because hello, you’d think my publisher might have mentioned it, and hysterical because the reverse translation has a – well, let’s just say a wisdom of its own. Besides announcing in their press release that I am the author “Suzanna American Beth Stinnett,” there were these loose-as-marbles interpretations. Check it out:

“To change some things of place, to move in the closet, to revirar the drawers and the garage, also are small significant changes. This because the context where everything before existed also dumb.”

Okay, I admit to writing a chapter about clearing clutter. But I never said to revirar. And what about this one, so uplifting, yet so final:

“The communication potential finishes to grow. It says: `You is very legal. It breathes! Everything is well’.”

And this last little set, well, I might have to use it in my next book. Somehow the valley reference just rings. So remember:

“Open the doors to the changes. Valley everything to remember its interior process; of its axle and balance.”

Yes, indeed. Valley everything! And don’t forget the guacamole!

Suzanna “It must be love” Stinnett

To check out the REAL book, see the Little Shifts page. You is very legal!

By the way, I hope you don’t let a little digital misfiring discourage you from all the other glories of online communication. If you are working on content for your blog, for Twitter, or any other vehicle of modern communication, you’re invited to come check out my audio for my Content Guide, “The Writer in the Blog.” The audio supports the writer’s process. See the first few short (3 minutes or so) installments here on my audio blog: Spoken for You.

And don’t forget: Valley everything!

Yours anagramatically,

Suzanna Stinnett

p.s. Be sure and get your copy of Cloud Alchemy by joining my web family here at Great Adaptations.

Here’s a big factor that no one can quantify. When it comes to a successful teaching website, who can make money at it? And how long does that take?

Herds of analysts have scaled these cliffs

There is no shortage of attempts to figure this out. Really. It’s an important piece of the puzzle. It’s hard to market a program when you can’t quantify the results. But the reason it is impossible to put numbers to this is the same reason it is so powerful, so juicy, and so exciting.

But we do know what, how, who, and why. Right?

It’s not that we don’t know what works. It’s not even that we don’t know why it works. We do. We know people have needs and we know some of them can be met through various online offerings. We know why people look for stuff and we know how they arrive. We know a heck of a lot about why they leave, too. So what is it that we don’t know?

Can you predict when a bud will open?

What we don’t know, we can’t know. And that is this: Our readers have no way of knowing exactly where they are in their own personal development.

When people start learning about online income, specifically these bright and shiny newer models of online teaching, they must engage both an internal and an external process.

How about a spreadsheet for a sail.

The basics of this kind of work are easy to understand. (Thank goodness, finally, there’s something we can actually talk about.) You have to figure out what you want to communicate, who you are communicating it to, and how to connect to them. That’s it.

I call it the Three Seas: Community, Conversation, Connectivity.

The simplicity ends there. But if you understand the Three Seas, at least you have crossed the threshold. You’re on the other side, starting to make all the necessary mental connections. You’re in the boat and you’ve got oars.

The water’s fine. Deep, but fine.

And now you’re in that vast area of potential, the ocean of human possibility, what online analysts would love to be able to get onto a spreadsheet. You’re going to ply that ocean in your little binary boat, asking your own fine self pointed questions like “What do I really want? What do I really love? What do I really know?” It’s a continuum, a life process.

Just connect the dots.

Where you are in that continuum is what dictates your timeline with online success.

How connected are you to your heart? How much do you know about your message? How deep is your love?

How bad do you want it?

With every cell in my body

I made it through those hoops because I never even considered taking no for an answer. I want to travel freely, to connect with people, to share what I learn, to enjoy economic freedom. I could see these gifts within the worlds of online teaching. Once I understood that, I never looked back.

The journey itself? So worth it. So totally worth it. It gets bigger and wilder every day, like some wacky fractal safari, oh, yeah.

The ghost within

Ready to connect to your own ghost? Try this. Get out your journal or whatever you use to communicate with yourself, and write for fifteen minutes about something you really want to do. Something outrageous or deep or almost unreachable. Tonight, when you get into bed, read what you wrote. Close your eyes and drift, and feel what it will feel like to actually be doing that very thing. No details about how you’re going to get there, just the feeling of it happening, and even a little further than that. Here’s the meat: See yourself after you’ve reached that pinnacle. What comes next?

Suzanna

Click here for a look at The Writer in the Blog.

Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm Announcing her Candidacy for President in 1972

Global Female Brain

The ‘net, web, or mesh encompassing this planet (sponsored by constant technological innovation) has been viewed as a “global brain” for twenty-five years – at least. And this is a productive way to look at our intelligence, flowing fractally forward.

Since the right half of the human brain is said to host the creative engine, and the female brain, we’re told, has super-strengths due to high-complexity mondo right-left brain connections that foster the use of creativity (and other human relation tasks), does it follow that women are destined — er — designed to carry our innovation forward into fantastic femme formations?

I’m not seeing a preponderance of women innovating in technology. The women I do find who are deeply involved are definitely bringing a uniquely feminine blend of intuition, creative thought, and humanity into the mix. I’m just not seeing enough of the “she.”

This is a call to you women innovators – and the curious but not-yet-active innovators of the female persuasion. As a way to further the balance, I’m asking you to participate in the first Great Adaptations Adapt-athon.

We are all adapting in endless creative ways, adapting to changing conditions, working our lives around the stresses and rewards of this millennium. This site supports and highlights the great adaptations and innovations of our ongoing cultural transformation.

I invite women and men to tell me: How are you adapting? I want to know something about how you have adapted your life, your significant relationships, your thinking, your dreams, and your workspace. Tell me one story that speaks to your adaptation as you make your way through modern life. For good, for bad, for otherwise, describe the challenge and the solution you have put in place. Qualify? If you’re reading this, you definitely qualify. Rather than exclude men (exclusivity bugs me), what I’m going to do is choose winners from the submissions from my readers, female and male, 50-50. Two women and two men will win the prizes. Humor my Libra-ness, this is about balance. Men appear to participate in greater numbers than women in all kinds of web-based systems. I want to encourage women to bring it on. ‘Cuz I know you’ve got the juice.

As a loose format, just write out the challenge that you faced, and then explain how you created an adaptation to solve the challenge. It might have to do with your routine, or your relationship, your kitchen-corner-office, something that helps the environment, or — you name it! How did you adapt in order to make things work for you? Put a different way, what did you adapt so it would work better?

Get the idea? This Adapt-athon kicks off on May 1st, and runs until May 31st. There will be prizes! The top four Greatest Adaptations will receive special kudos, recognition, links to their sites, and even a little cash. The winners will show creative thinking and courage and brain power.TO PARTICIPATE: It’s easy. Bloggers can post their adaptation on their own blog, and send me a link so I can go find it. Include your title and the challenge your adaptation meets. If you don’t have a blog, go ahead and post your adaptation in the comments area below. You are welcome to use video or audio, just post it as a link so I can go view it. In order to receive the updates about the Adapt-athon prizes, and see more examples of how people are submitting, be sure to subscribe to my e-mail list up at the top right column here. When you submit your adaptation, don’t forget to include your contact information or a link to your website!

Okay, she-people, and he-people too, I know you’ve got it. Let’s see it in action.

Suzanna

To receive all the Adapt-athon Updates, subscribe at the top right of this page.

“You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no halfway measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That’s what I always do. Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion held by people who have no imaginations. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one – well, at least one and a half.” – Winston Churchill

Naps are still taking a long slow turn out of the realm of perceived laziness. What Churchill had discovered, however, is that napping gives a person far more high-energy alertness than the time the nap takes out of the day. And it can do much more than that.

Sleep experts propose that napping should have the status of daily exercise. Studies show that most people are chronically sleep-deprived. These sleepy workers make more mistakes, cause more accidents, and are more susceptible to heart attacks and digestive troubles. NASA’s studies show that 24-minute naps significantly improve the alertness and performance of their pilots.

A reviving-type nap should last no more than 30 minutes. After that amount of time, the body will lapse into a deeper sleep which is difficult to wake from, and may change the body’s clock. A 20 minute nap taken about eight hours after waking from the night’s sleep is shown to be far more helpful than adding that 20 minutes to the long sleep.

The ideal time for a nap is after lunch – if lunch occurs midday. Naps taken later in the afternoon will tend to disturb the sleep cycle. If you are going through a particularly stressful time, recovering from illness or injury, or are under treatment for cancer, naps can be highly beneficial even when you get adequate sleep at night.

Brain Booster: A short afternoon nap, with a cup of black or green tea to ease into wakefulness. Enjoy a productive, fulfilling evening with your brain cells firing, smooth and ready.

I’m curious about people who have an alternative lifestyle, particularly bloggers and online communicators who can work any time of the night or day. If you’re one of these, let me know how you’ve altered your sleep patterns – if at all. Have you found you work best in the middle of the night? Do you nap? Do you forego sleep? Do you blog in your sleep?

Just curious,

Suzanna

Scientists have only begun to discover the health benefits of green tea. A recent study at the University of Purdue concluded that a compound in green tea inhibits the growth of cancer cells. And the Chinese have used green tea as medicine for over 4,000 years, treating everything from headaches to depression. There is also evidence that drinking green tea reduces total cholesterol and improves the balance of good-bad cholesterol in the bloodstream.

Studies vary in the recommended amounts of green tea, but to receive real benefit for the immune system, protection from cancer, relief of rheumatoid arthritis, and lowering of cholesterol, you would need to drink four to five cups per day.

Black tea has on average about 80% more antioxidant capacity than green tea. In one test by Italian researchers, drinking a single cup of strong black or green tea revved antioxidant activity in the blood by 41 to 48%.

You can benefit from just a couple of teaspoons of milk in your tea, as it releases the antioxidants. Any more than that will neutralize the value. Some sources claim that any milk neutralizes the antioxidants.

Studies indicate that eating antioxidants even late in life can help reverse mental decline that has already occurred. That’s really good news. So don’t hesitate to discover and begin your best brain routine.

Suzanna

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These habits are the premium ways to keep your brain from growing – and guarantee that you’ll start forgetting everything you want to remember by the time you’re 40. The antidotes, of course, reverse the whole process – so don’t read them unless you really want the euphoric experience of constant brain growth for the rest of your life! CAUTION: Reading this article WILL trigger some new neural connections. Sorry about that. It’s just how it works.

Number Five: SKIP BREAKFAST.

The brain operates on glucose. It can only store about 10 minutes’ worth of usable sugar, so by morning it is seriously deprived. If you skip breakfast, you can keep it in that state all day! Skipping breakfast lends itself to several brain maladies, most notably depression and anxiety.

ANTIDOTE: Eat something. Almost anything. That raspberry croissant with your coffee will give you a huge boost of sugar, and screw up your insulin response at the same time, but it’s still way better than nothing. Most people do well with a little bit of protein first and some carbs after that. P.S.: Chocolate is, as you may have heard, a powerful antioxidant and brain booster. However, look for the purest form of chocolate available, as it loses most of its magical powers when heated. The best I know of is coming from Sunfood: Organic cacao nibs. (Crumble the bitter nuggets onto something slightly sweet and it’s fantastic.)

Number Four: DEHYDRATE YOURSELF.

Avoid water. Drink only the things that further dehydrate you, like triple frappucinos, Mickey Big-Mouths and Hornitos. Side benefits of dehydration include headaches and irritability. Cool!

ANTIDOTE: Drink a glass of water when you get up and more between meals. It works better if you also get some electrolytes in there, which you can do by adding a few grains of unprocessed salt (most sea salts have the essential minerals intact). The milk of green coconuts has great electrolytes too. You can even count that green tea (if it’s brewed, not commercially processed), and get major antioxidants at the same time. This is big league stuff, only for those interested in innovation and power over their own lives.

Number Three: BE STILL.

Move as little as possible. Sit on your couch with your laptop and move only the index finger and middle finger of your right hand for hours at a time. This will reduce circulation to the point where no brain growth whatsoever is possible. Zilch. Also, it will make your neck freeze up, which helps restrict blood flow to the brain.

ANTIDOTE: Stand up and stretch your arms over your head, then reach down to the floor. Now that you’ve got a head rush, step out around the coffee table and walk across the room to the front door. Don’t tell anyone you’re leaving. Walk outside and down the street, swinging your arms. Go all the way to the stop sign before you turn around. When you go back in the house, find the yoga schedule in the stack of papers on your kitchen table. Attend the very next possible class. Other options include bike rides, tree climbing, and special marathons involving mangoes and a partner.

Number Two: DEEPEN YOUR DEBT.

Stress yourself out by consistently living outside your means. Buy something every day or so that you don’t need and didn’t know about before the infomercial. Use credit, and pay only the minimum on your cards. As your debt load eclipses your income, the resulting stress will produce a constant stream of the stress hormone cortisol, effectively eliminating your ability to use short term memory, which will spiral into more stress as you ponder the life of a relative who has Alzheimer’s disease.

ANTIDOTE: Start collecting stuff you already have and placing it into a pile to be sold. Really look at the things you have and see if you love them enough to pay their rent (storage!). That’s what I thought. Pretend you are getting ready for an extended period of travel, which could result in actually doing that. Give away anything you can’t easily sell. Realize that anything you will ever need will be readily available, since practically everyone has a glut of stuff in their garage and is now auctioning it online for pennies. Learn the difference between distress and eustress. Learn stress relief techniques.

Number One: BE REPETITIVE.

Do the same thing over and over and over. Caution! Your brain will totally wake up and grow if you change something automatic, like how you brush your teeth. Just noticing how you do something will create new neural growth, so I may be doing you a disservice by telling you this. The older the habit, the more brain growth you’ll get by changing it. The tiniest shift will result in unseen benefits down the line. Let me repeat. Change nothing or risk brain growth. Oh, and NEVER evaluate your own thinking, because if you do that, they will instantly change! Be adamant that your thought patterns have nothing to do with your life experience. Like a parolee returning to the cell, same thoughts equals same actions equals same outcomes.

ANTIDOTE: Upon awakening, throw pillows straight at the ceiling. Get out of bed on your palms. Doesn’t the world already look different? Face away from the mirror while combing your hair. Break routines in little ways. The brain gets very interested when you do this. New chemical cascades result. Moods improve. Coping skills expand. Giggling may occur. Find ways to remind yourself throughout the day to make little changes. The nervous system will send signals to the brain that things have changed, and it will grow in response. Especially effective: Interact with people in new ways. Give just a little bit more love. Discover and go outside your dominant mode. Imagine that you are vastly more creative than you’ve ever believed. Notice the color red today, yellow tomorrow. Look at the edges where things come together. Observe how you go across thresholds. And breathe.

Yours,

Suzanna

Dr. Frank Lawlis has done a great job of describing the steps to enhance creativity in his book, “The IQ Answer.” Other authors have described similar steps. Let’s go over these basic concepts which can be creatively applied to your blog writing with great results.

Immerse Yourself in Your Topic

The first step is immersion. This is when you start gathering information about the creative challenge you have in front of you. If you are blogging as a way to make a living, you are paying close attention to your readership. Few things are as productive for your long-term goals as learning everything you can about your readers. Who are they? Where do they live? What do they do for recreation? While you immerse yourself in the material, keep asking yourself questions. Ask yourself what you know about the topic, what you want to know. Make a list of what you don’t know. This is an exercise which involves many brain areas.

Incubation

Next, you will start to incubate. You have to go away from the information onslaught and let your own thoughts and ideas percolate up. Now the creative process is gearing up. If you can do this without being frightened, you are ahead of most people. For a lot of ambitious types, it is very hard to move away from the work at hand. The sensation of gearing up your brain is like traveling to a new planet. Your habitual brain normally fears this change and will let you know with anxiety and strange little fear-stories. You can keep your brain in a more creative mode by using music, movement, retreating from noise, turning off the TV and the radio, and doing breathing exercises.

Encouraging Your Brain’s Pathways

The next stage is when you use symbols to encourage communication pathways in your brain. As Dr. Lawlis states, “Every brain is hardwired with preset images, visual representations of spirals, lattices, webs and geometric figures.” If you like to doodle, this is a good time to make use of that habit. Allow your hardwiring to present itself on the page. When you do this, you are allowing your body to send you signals. Your mind responds to this emerging information and your creativity is deepening as you allow yourself to express these primitive mental pathways. Another amazing step in this stage is to create a mind map, drawing out circles and connecting lines that mirror how your brain is organizing information. Look at the photo of a mind map I’ve included with this post. Don’t imitate it, draw from your own brain’s patterns. Be loose.

Evaluate and Filter Out

Now comes the evaluation part. Look back on what you have done and filter out everything that seems mundane or just doesn’t interest you. Find some part of your recent creative journey and focus on it, elaborating and enhancing that pathway. Through this exercise, you may find a whole new avenue you have never considered. You may very well discover that you are quite good at something creative which you have never consciously known! For your blogging topics, you may see a vein of gold you haven’t noticed before.

What areas of your blog writing seem to need a shot of creative juice?

Suzanna

When Love Comes Back

Happiness is a physiological process which may enhance creativity. The happiness that comes from having your love returned is like a chemical elixir, pumping endorphins and other hormones through the brain, keeping neurons firing at top capacity. Neurons work with information, and the memories that are forming during the course of a good relationship are very strong creative enhancers.

Depth Works Both Ways

Ever wondered why it takes so long to get “over” a long-term relationship? That’s the depth of the neurological involvement showing its less-than-lovely side. As long as the relationship continues, however, that neurological development goes on at many different levels.

Empathy is an Excellent Challenge

We know that newborn babies who are unloved or separated from family because of illness or other misfortune suffer a low rate of neurological growth. Some mental processes, such as empathy, do not ever reach full development in the absence of maternal love in the first six months of life. Empathy, for example, is a prime ingredient in the writing of a great novel or short story. A fiction author cannot create compelling stories without being able to step into the shoes, minds and heart of their characters. This ability is called empathy. The bloggers who seeks big-time success must develop his sensitivity to his readership almost to the level of telepathy!

Images and Sound Enhance the Brain State (but you knew that!)

There is even a way to develop a mental state that is exhilarating in the way falling in love stimulates the brain. Realizing that you have this choice can lead to some fascinating experiments. You can experience what is called the “loving” brain through viewing a photograph of a beloved, through the use of music and dancing, through a commitment to selfless acts, and through simply contemplating this choice. Becoming more aware of love and positive experiences will also enhance the brain’s creative capacity. And inspiration, wherever you may find it, is a premium agent for development of the brain.

Blogging Makes Brains Grow

These physiological responses to information make it easy to understand why blogging is such a phenomenon. Available to just about anyone, the ease of communicating is fostering a torrent of imagery, storytelling, sharing, and general reaching out to the world. This mimics the brain’s activity when we work to understand something new. The neurons literally reach, stretching to the goal.

Fall in Love

Get inspired, fall in love, and share it. Tell me what is inspiring you right now. What is keeping you reaching for your goals? Is it love? Money? A desire for freedom or travel?

Suzanna

New blogger? Congratulations. And uh-oh.

Watch out for the New Blogger’s morass.

Right there! By your left foot! Careful or you’ll slip right in, and then how we will ever find you?

I’m excited about the opportunities popping up for people who want to communicate through blogs. Teaching, tutoring, “knowledge transfer,” building communities – these are just a few of the creative options for working and playing online. And the main way people seem to be getting into this business nowadays is through blogs. Even big businesses are starting to understand the value of a well-appointed blog. Blogs are the portal, and the blogosphere is the big brawny planet of creative adaptation. And by the way, “blog” is really just another name for a website. What I’m referring to is a website that uses devices made for blogging as its way of communicating with the world. That world of devices, and a whole philosophy that is emerging through it, is the blogosphere. It’s a big place.

So, transporting into the online world through a blog is good way to do it, right?

Maybe. Probably. But only if …

Yeah, you’re ahead of me. Only if you have some idea of what you’re doing. If you are thinking that this might be a way to make a living, and have fun at the same time, well, you’re right.

Maybe. You’re right if you know how to figure it out. Where to look, who to read, what to buy into, how the heck the whole machine works.

I’m going to make it a little bit easier on you.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a sales pitch. You can learn for a long time without getting out your credit card. What I can do is lift the veil for a moment, take your hand, and give you three keys to the kingdom. These keys are people. All the keys are people. People who have been around a while, innovating, articulating, brainstorming, putting the pieces together. I want you to know about them because they are some of my best resources.

Allow me to introduce:

Yaro Starak, whose site is www.entrepreneurs-journey.com,

Darren Rowse, whose site is www.problogger.com, and

Brian Clark, whose site is www.copyblogger.com.

You can learn pretty much everything you need to know from these three guys.

But now there’s another problem.

The problem is information overload. And even narrowing it down to three people I totally trust and highly recommend, well, you’ve still got a problem. Any idea how much information is on those three sites alone? Well, the posting rhythm varies, but it’s typical to see at least two or three articles a week from these guys, sometimes more, and these are not two-minute reads. Everything they produce is relevant to growing a successful blog. Everything. So do the math. How long will it take you to get a feel for what they are telling you? They’ve been at it for a few years, and the last two years in particular are full of innovations and revelations. Got time to read oh, say, about a thousand content-rich posts? No? Uh-oh, morass again.

So I’m going to help you with this one too. You cannot afford to miss what these guys have to say, but you can focus in on what is relevant to a total beginner. They’ve made it relatively easy to do that, and I’ll just hand you the links here so you can relax, point, and click.

Start here. Read these three blogs, and you’ll have the door open to your own portal to the blogosphere.

Darren Rowse has created a whole system for introducing people to blogging. Here is a great place to get familiar with his style:

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/02/14/is-a-blog-right-for-you/

Yaro Starak has a fantastic free resource that is very revealing about taking the leap to a monetized blog. Go on his website at the link below, and get a copy of his “Blog Profits Blueprint.” You’ll find it in a box in the right column on his home page.

http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/

Brian Clark also has a free resource for you to look at. His program, “Teaching Sells,” describes a system for building a learning community. I think we are going to see this blossom into an entire culture. You can get this one on his home page:

http://www.copyblogger.com

If you’d like to continue learning about bloggers and their brains, I’d love to have you in my writing community. Subscribe to my list, (by typing in your email in the right column there where it says “We’d love to have you”) and I’ll respond with some special stuff of my own.

So there you go, be fearless, and don’t forget to take your brain breaks. Come back and let me know what you think about these three resources. And here’s my question for you: What would you like to tell the world as an online communicator?

Best regards,

Suzanna

When I responded to Darren Rowse’s call for videos on his Problogger site, my experience in making videos amounted to a three-second pan of thread spools in my sister’s sewing room in Duluth, Minnesota, shot on my cellphone. I had never even held a camcorder. At least not while it was running. So Darren asked his readers to do a video on “Why I Blog,” and post it online for him. Well, I could not miss out on the opportunity to be part of this project. So what if I had less than a week to do it? How long could it possibly take? Yeah, some of you are chuckling already. Well, buck up. I did it. It wasn’t easy, but I did it. So here is my mini-manual for all you newbies out there who have no idea where to begin. Ready?

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1. As soon as you see the project announced, recognize that there are only six days left before the deadline, and know that it’s not enough time. Conclude that you are doing it no matter what.
2. Continue with whatever you normally do for two days. Let your idea gestate. Make some notes about the story you want to tell. Take all the time you want to let your imagination run. Look at a few random videos on Youtube.
3. Decide your video has to be a tour-de-force. Note that some have already posted their short, neat videos, filmed in their office or living room, just relaxing and answering Darren’s question. Decide this is nowhere near good enough for you.
4. Spend a couple of hours watching funny dog videos.
5. Now that you’re totally inspired, start looking at old National Geographics for the elements of your visuals. Tear out a few dozen great pages and stack them on the kitchen table.
6. Go to the thrift store and find a book on animation. Clay animation. Read the entire book.
7. Start creating your visual background before you’ve finished your script. What the heck. It’ll look good anyway.
8. Cut a bunch of images from old maps. Spread little paper corners and wedges all over the house.
9. When your partner comments, “That looks interesting,” frown and nod without speaking, giving off the impression of confidence and intense focus. No one will bother you after that.
10. Take one whole day to cut out and assemble your set. Make stick puppets using wire and wooden shish-ka-bob skewers to create handles for them. They won’t be quite long enough, but that will add to the excitement when you film.
11. Over the weekend, when you have a whole day you could be completing the video, go flying instead. While you’re at a distant airport, leave your only good pair of glasses in the ladies’ room.
12. Be sure and borrow a camera from someone else. It’s best if they also do not know how it works. (The creative process loathes certainty.) You’ll need the manual. Read it before bed so you can wake up knowing what to do next.
13. Don’t bother to find out if you have the cables and plugs to load the video from the camera to your computer. You can deal with that later.
14. Scribble out another outline of your script. Try to match it to the collage pieces you’ve arbitrarily created. The decision making process is streamlined by your blurry vision.
15. Set up your filming area in the stairwell. Put the camera on the tripod above the top stair, so people coming upstairs get the message. You can balance a hot light on the upper railing. If you live in earthquake country, like I do, this just adds to the joie de vivre of the whole thing.
16. Filming! Do a couple of run-throughs so you can see where your arms and head will show while you’re moving the puppetry. Promptly forget this information. Have your partner stand on the stair below and try to reach across the artwork without getting in the picture. Be sure you have to reach from the floor and twist awkwardly to do any zooming or help with the puppetry. This creates a lot of extra muscle strain which helps justify any drinking you might want to do at this point.
17. Realize that editing will take way too long, so you’ll have to go for one perfect take, sound and all.
18. Continue doing takes until at least 2 a.m. The really good stuff happens in the madrugada.
19. Re-confirm that it’s a good idea to film in one take. Knowing how to edit just takes away from the spontaneity of the final product.
20. Now that you have one usable take, get some sleep. It will look even better in the morning.
21. It’s time to start getting your great video off the camcorder and into your computer so you can show it to the world. Realize that the manual is for a different model. Figure out how to do it anyway, and then realize that the computer needs a completely different connection. Firewire or something.
22. It’s never too late to switch to the other camcorder. Get your partner to quit what he’s doing and help you reshoot in the middle of the day. Decide that the mid day glare is actually a good thing.
23. Take two shots and realize that you have less than an hour to get it loaded before the deadline. Call your film making friend and beg for instructions.
24. Load your video onto YouTube. Ignore the various warnings about compression and all that stuff.
25. Watch the loading bar like a hawk. After half an hour, when nothing has happened, panic. Stop the loading and start scrambling to figure out how to compress the video.
26. Go online and find all the free video compression programs available. Load four of them onto your system.
27. While they’re loading, it’s time for a snack. Get really tense with your partner in the kitchen, and drop the cutting board on your toe. This will clarify everything you’re doing. Now you are ready to upload to YouTube.
28. Talk to your film maker friend who decides you can probably just upload the video. Maybe YouTube is doing maintenance or is busy right now, she says. Decide this makes sense, and upload to YouTube without changing anything on your video.
29. Be amazed when it uploads easily and appears on your YouTube account.
30. Breathlessly following the instructions, go to the website that is running the project and add your video to the comments list.
31. Discover that the project is already closed.
32. Double check your timezone calculations. Realize that Australia is actually 17 hours ahead, not eight. Notice that you knew this, but ignored it somehow when you were starting this project.
33. Attach your video to a different blog post, and beg to have it included in the group project.
34. By some miracle, your video is accepted. You’re a success.

Break out the champagne!! No one will want to talk to you now, so you can have the whole bottle to yourself.What are you waiting for? Get your video done! And share your story: Tell me about your worst video-filming experience. But first, go see the result of my efforts here: Because They Blog. Suzanna