Quantum Storytelling

By way of Seth Godin, marketing rockstar extraordinaire, comes this link on How to be a Successful Evil Overlord.

If some of these foibles weren’t true, the author of the page couldn’t provide such ‘advice.’ Are any of your villains guilty in making such obvious mistakes?

I’m normally not much for these little viral blog exercises. Too often they seem like an excuse to avoid posting real content, but this one seemed fun and more in spirit with the noveling. Rob over at Writing Tips From the Trenches came up with this one;

“Go to Wikipedia. Type in your birth date (but not year). List three events that happened on your birthday. List two important birthdays and one interesting death. Post this in your journal.”

July 2nd Events:

• 1679 - Europeans first visit my home state of Minnesota and see headwaters of Mississippi - led by Daniel Greysolon de Du Luth.
• 1776 - The Continental Congress adopts a resolution severing ties with Great Britain, though a formal Declaration of Independence is not adopted until July 4.

July 2nd Births:

• 1877 - Hermann Hesse, German-born writer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1962)
• 1903 - King Olav V of Norway (d. 1991) - I’m part Norwegian.

July 2nd deaths:

• 1961 - Ernest Hemingway, American writer, Nobel Prize laureate (suicide) (b. 1899)
• 1977 - Vladimir Nabokov, Russian-born writer (b. 1899)
• 1999 - Mario Puzo, American author (b. 1920)

It seems like my birthday is a good day for writers to die. Nabokov was right on the money, dying both the day and year I was born. I never knew that.

Over the last year I’ve had to curb my book-buying addiction. You know the one I’m talking about. You see a book that piques your interest so you buy it. What’s wrong with that? It becomes an issue when you’ve got a two-year queue of material and you still haven’t stopped buying.

Because you know… I have to buy all the books in the world RIGHT NOW otherwise I might not be able to read them later, when every single one of them goes out of print, or Amazon explodes, and libraries everywhere shut down. I must prepare for the literary apocalypse, upon which my collection of unread books will become priceless!

It will be like Mad Max. Collectors and librarians will start showing up at my house with mohawks, leather outfits, chains and sawed off shotguns, threatening me to turn over my pristine copy of Philip K. Dick’s ‘Dr. Futurity.’

No, no. We must calm ourselves and realize that this is never going to happen. If you’ve got five thousand books to read, another one isn’t really going to satisfy the hoarding compulsion!