Warning: The post below assumes you want to get better at blogging. If you’re blogging just for fun (hell, I am), this rant is not for you. It also contains snarky arrogance, so don’t read it if you’re not prepared to admit how wrong you are and how right I am about everything. Namaste.
Forget about sure-fire tips to wild blogging success, there are really only two secrets to be a successful blogger and I’ve found them:
1. Write well.
2. Or be a cute and nubile girl who blogs lots of photos of herself.
To everyone else who says you don’t need to write well to be a good blogger: that’s bloody stupid (cute and nubile girl photo-bloggers excluded). Blogging is a written medium and it is read. To say you don’t need to write well to create good reading is like saying you don’t have to cook well to make a good meal. To be good at your art invariably demands that you be good at your craft.
And this is art. Not Art with a capital ‘A’ that involves a lot of what-the-fuck moments, feigned understanding and pompous exclusion. But art because when it’s done well, it involves creativity, thought, and hopefully adds to the world of the person who’s reading it. Not unconsidered word vomit.
Web 2.0 Doesn’t Kill Good Writing
But Alvin, this is blogging! It’s not stodgy old literature or dusty cobwebbed print journalism. It’s Web 2.0 now, gramps, so suck it up and deal. Read More →
Neil Strauss has been preparing himself for emergencies for the last three years, but not for ordinary emergencies like blackouts or losing a job. It’s The End of the World As We Know It stuff that Strauss is concerned about – known by the acronym TEOTWAWKI in the book – the collapse of the system and civilization as we know it.
If you find his name familiar, here’s why: Neil Strauss is the author of the best-selling book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. In The Game, he reveals how he turned from a lonely and clueless music critic into one of the most famous pick-up artists in the world.
In Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life, Strauss writes about how he slowly loses his faith in the system, and determines to learn how to survive outside of it. He transforms from an everyday city-boy into a wilderness survivor who shoots, tracks, hunts, lives in the wild with nothing but a knife and the clothes on his back, picks locks, hot-wires cars, evades bounty hunters and escapes across the border.
Emergency’s 5 Acts
The book is divided into five parts; Orientation, Five Steps, Escape, Survive, Rescue. Orientation is a short introduction. Five Steps tells the story of how Strauss saw through the cracks of modern civilization, and why he decides to learn how to survive on his own in case The Shit Hits the Fan (TSHTF for short). Read More →