Food I assume. But that’s risky. Any gift you give a polar bear is risky.

Blogging is gifting and it’s also sacrifice. But what does the blog world need? What kind of a gift? Global warming is affecting the blog world, everyone is innovating, and everyone is telling us how to innovate, how to create and write and socialize. Our land is shrinking, everything is getting smaller while people, real people, seem to be moving farther away.

It’s easy to follow along with the trends. It’s harder to go another direction.

We have to go in another direction.

Wherever that is, it brings us together. Sharing gifts and food and stories and laughs.

We need new forms.

So my question to you: How do we make it better?

Share your thoughts or write a post and send me the link here in the comments or at rossgale4 at gmail dot com.

After two days of heavy traffic on my site while reading Michael Hyatt’s new book Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World I went ahead and wrote the sequel.

My book is called: Anti-Platform: How to Hide When Everybody’s Looking. It’s a step by step guide for anyone who, like myself, is too famous.

Michael Hyatt’s book Platform is super helpful for bloggers, musicians, writers, unemployed 20-somethings, and stay-at-home moms looking for a practical guide on how to build a platform where you earn the attention of a following. And it’s selling out like crazy.

Seriously, it’s selling out so fast even digital books are out of stock. It’s in the top five of Amazon’s best sellers and it would be #1 if moms weren’t reading those sexy Gray books with the hot-compelling characters and voluptuous language. Platform passed Jimmy Fallon’s book and Fallon was in Band of Brothers for a couple scenes. Band of Brothers for God’s sake.

My prediction, because of what I’m seeing in my own life after reading Michael’s book, is that a lot of people will be super famous in the next few days as a result of also reading Michael’s book.

My book, Anti-Platform, is for those super famous people. Anti-Platform gives practical guidance and contains 5 Chapters:

1. How to juggle your fame while driving your new Hummer-Hybrid.
2. What would you rather have, another 1 million dollars or your new big-head full of nickels?
3. How to focus your attention when your focus is worth billions.
4. How to find some peace and quiet among the crowd screaming your name.
5. How to create elegant disguises that even fool the CIA so you can get FroYo without signing autographs and getting Instagrammed.

Mr. Hyatt told a joke. He laughed. He had vanilla FroYo. There are two similar looking mountains behind us.

Stay tuned for how you can get your grimy hands on a copy of my sequel. And in the meantime go read Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World.

But wait. Once people read my book they’ll need another guide on living with SUPER-SUPER-FAME. The world needs the writer willing to sacrifice for the greater good. If you’re willing to write the sequel to the best selling sequel to the best selling guide on how to build a platform, let me know in the comments and I will send you the cover image for your future book with YOUR NAME ON IT:

Go buy Platform.

1. Don’t think after breaking your record for blog visits in one day because your mom kept refreshing the page that you know anything about blogging.

2. Be real, but sometimes be fake.

3. Kill readers with killer writing and delete all rambling. This one time I wrote a post about someone, a friend, who got crabs, and I compared that to the writing life and it was really funny and people thought it was really funny and sometimes I think back on that day and smile. The day I posted that blog, not the day my friend got crabs. Wait, I didn’t have a friend who got crabs. I remember now, I was just referencing a movie (Super Troopers) where there was a punch line about crabs. That’s it.

4. Never take yourself too seriously.

5. Take very seriously the things you’re passionate about. The world will never care enough about your passions.

8 1/2. Pretend you know what you’re talking about until you actually do. Fake it until you make it. Am I faking or making?

9. If you must listen to music while you write then buy an anti-skip Compact Disc player. Anything without internet or games or apps or email or Words With Friends (I’m rcg4, btw)

10. Never take advice from lists. Stories are better.

11. Read the classics.

12. Read books about which books are the classics.

13. Never take writing advice from people who say they’re a writer, but have published what, like one poem?

Anything I forgot?

I daydream about doing television or magazine interviews where I talk about my upcoming book. And instead of being forthcoming I’m vague and mysterious and the interviewer is frustrated and I’m smiling at my genius on the inside.

This would be the imaginary life of my career as an author. In this life I turn down the chance to be on Oprah and instead invite her out to Oregon to play a game of wiffle ball, or walk through the woods, where her or her conduit will really get to know me, the vague mysterious me.

I wish I was joking about this.

There is a difference between the Writer and the Career/Professional Writer (like the one I imagine).

The literary agent Michael Bourret once said,

It’s a balancing act, but being an author and having a career as an author are two different things.

The Writer is someone who writes because they must. The Career/Professional Writer is at first a Writer, but then becomes a person who does not write because they’re busy selling their book. According to the novelist Helen DeWitt, Jonathan Franzen hasn’t written in over two years, because he’s busy pushing his product.

She’s a bit cynical and frustrated and I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and forgive her for the rant, but I also like that she doesn’t romanticize the subject,

The writer who is literally an addict, the writer who can’t help himself, the writer who HAS to write, can never be anything but an amateur, because the industry requires the professional to put writing on hold not just for a day or two, or a week, but for years.

(This is a comment in response to this Paris Review post.)

But I do think there are writers who make the effort to write everyday and still be professionals. My mentor Bret Lott comes to mind and his novel Jewel was picked for the Oprah book club.

There is still a difference. Most of us are just writers, writing because we must and dreaming about making it a career. Understand that a career often means selling and not writing. Marketing and spending your own money to get the word out, to find readers, to sell yourself.

Tim Kreider laments his long lost days of simply being a Writer,

But now that that long-anticipated day is almost here, after all that work and longing and postponed reward, I find myself unexpectedly missing the hard part, the boring part, the long slog to get here. Sitting at my laptop listening to music on headphones and watching steam from a vent unfurling outside the window in the darkening winter afternoons, forcing myself to write for just 40 more minutes, may have been as good as it’s ever going to get

I guess be careful what you wish for. Or maybe start preparing now.

The truth writers wrestle with isn’t an attempt to fix the broken as much as it’s an attempt to understand our suffering. Tony Woodlief explores this further from the Good Letters Blog:

We writers must cast out lines, thin strings with paper cups at their ends, along which we whisper our secrets in hopes someone will listen. We whisper our secrets in search of some unburdening, of beauty birthed from ashes…

What if the reason there are television screens in every godforsaken corner of the U.S., and rampant alcoholism in Russia, and endless electronic distraction in Japan, is because the average man and woman need something, anything, to tamp the intensity of bearing a soul in this soul-crushing age?

What if we writers are able to tell stories of hurt and joy only because something in us is dulled enough to look them full in the face?

What a mission we might have then, to introduce the truth of brokenness and redemption to our brothers and sisters terrified to hear it. We’d have to whisper our little truths of moans and water pools in hopes that our stories would turn others back to their own hidden stories, thereby sparking that blessed epiphany we readers have experienced and which keeps us coming back to the writers we love, the epiphany that can be summed up in this way:

Yes, I have felt this too, and I see you have felt it, and so I am not alone.

I just want to say thank you to everyone who shared with me their posts over the weekend. They were all very moving and heartfelt. I want to do something a bit more than just putting up the links in a post, but that will have to wait when I can connect them all together in theme and pulse. I’ve been reading them multiple times and want to do them justice.

I just can’t say thank you enough for your gift of attention. I hope you realize the time you spend reading and participating is very valuable and I don’t want to waste it.

If you’d like to get in on my Postcard Blogging I’ll be doing over the summer while the “Bereshit Bara” Creativity Blog Series rocks out, then email me your mailing address at rossgale4 at gmail dot com. The “Bereshit Bara” series will knock your socks off. I’m blown away by the talent of these 13 Creatives and am so lucky they all agreed to participate and share with us their wisdom and creativity. I know we’ll all be inspired by them.

And again thank you.

In case you missed it, here’s The 13 Creatives:

Tyler Braun, manofdepravity.com
David Clark, davidclarkart.com
Dyana Herron, dyanaherron.com
Diana Huey, hermit?
Chris Hunter, recluse?
Elizabeth Myhr, elizabethmyhr.wordpress.com
David Jacobsen, jacobsenwriting.com
Adele Konyndyk, adelekonyndyk.wordpress.com
Shannon Huffman Polson, aborderlife.com
Britt Tinsdale Staton, alivestudios.net
Chad Thomas Johnston, chadthomasjohnston.com
Derek Smith, magicalteaching.com
Alissa Wilkinson, alissawilkinson.com

My wife pointed out to me, after viewing me having a conversation with a friend in a coffee shop, how my body position—facing away from my friend, leg on knee, lack of eye contact—displayed a lack of engagement and interest. And she compared this to a satisfying conversation she’d had with a friend where they leaned toward each other across the table, made active eye contact, and jumped from subject to subject like two quick cats chasing a mouse carrying a wheel of cheese.

It made me wonder if this projection of aloofness is more apparent than I realize, not just in my conversations with friends, but of all my engagements and with people I’ve yet to connect with.

This is an attempt to uncross my legs, lean forward, growing quick as a mongoose defeating a cobra.

I’m dissatisfied with the overall conversation among blogs. I think we have a higher calling as blogger and writers and creatives and community engagers. I think we’re underachieving as a group and it’s time to shift the dynamics of the conversation so we’re less consumers and more creators, less sharers and more engagers, less anonymous and more accountable.

I’m a part of this as much (if not more for pointing it out, hold your calls for Hypocrite!) as you and it’s bothered me for some time now. For I’m disappointed in my own blogging attempts these past few weeks because I seem to care more how many people come visit rather than creating powerful stories and forming relationships.

Blogging is gifting and over time becomes sacrifice. There are millions of blogs, but it’s few compared to people in the world and few who do it well. Blogging as an art is rare, but possible. I guess this is what I want to inspire to. That a blog, a rich engaging blog can redeem, and “add to the stock of available reality.”

Thanks for everyone who shared their blog or their thoughts with me yesterday. It was moving seeing the raw and open hearts.

Now I want to read your most favorite blog you’ve ever written. I want to read it. It doesn’t have to be your best blog or your most popular, but your favorite.

You can post it here or email me the link at rossgale4 at gmail dot com.

Thanks and I can’t wait.

If you’re a blogger I want you do do me a favor over the weekend. Write a piece that gets to the heart of something. Don’t dance or impress, just speak plainly and honestly and get right to its core.

Whatever you care about or is on your heart. I just want “it” in all its “itness” like the buffalo above in all its power.

And then send me the link either in this comment thread or my inbox (rossgale4 at gmail dot com).

Thanks.

I live in downtown Portland with my wife.

I brought her a jacket while she ran an event booth outside. Two redheads with long hair sat in the grass. They both wore green plaid dresses. One was a dude. The dude in the green plaid dress also held up an umbrella to shade his pale skin from the sun. It was 7pm. His hair was a mullet.

Then a guy stepped out of his van blaring music. He started dancing to his music. The van was designed with aliens and ghoulish figures on all sides. The guy wore blue jeans, sandals, and a monkey mask. I thought maybe his wife or girlfriend was sitting in the passengers seat—she looked white faced and embarrassed—but it was just an Elvis mannequin. The sticker on the side window said: God knows this van is on the road.

Maybe I should have taken pictures—I should have taken pictures—but I don’t think the pictures could have fully explained what I’d witnessed.

Calvino said that the proper use of language enables us to approach things seen or unseen with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things seen and unseen communicate without words.

I think the gingers communicated a lot and not just in their plaid skirts and hair-do’s. And the monkey dancer communicated a lot in his unencumbered dancing and artistic flare.

But even if I say the dancing monkey was Extremo the Clown and the redhead in a dress was just some university student named Larry but goes by Laura, there’s still more being said without words.

In my own study of creativity, I continue to come back to memories, especially memories of childhood. Those memories contain a power I hadn’t realized. I will continue to go back to them. For in them is something of a clue or a key. Of which Georges Bernanos touches on through his character Curé de Torcy, a priest:

Poor blokes! They’ve worn everything threadbare–even sin. You can’t have a “good time” just because you want to. The shabbiest tuppeny doll will rejoice a baby’s heart for half the year, but your mature gentleman’ll go yawning his head off at a five-hundred franc gadget. And why? Because he has lost the soul of childhood. Well, God has entrusted the Church to keep that soul alive, to safeguard our candor and freshness.

–from Georges Bernanos’ novel The Diary of a Country Priest