Emerging Writer: The Shoestring Collective

Heard about this last night at The International songwriter/poetry night and will look into it soon Emerging Writer: The Shoestring Collective

it's good to have a dog...

...a dog gets you out and going to places you might pass by every day and miss out on. Thanks Clara.

Ps. Seth Godin says 'don't blog about your dog if you want traffic' - no traffic jams here then

Good Idea?...

...Condolences to any Michael Jackson fans who believe he’s dead.  Personally, I suspect he’s probably hanging out with Elvis and hoping to get a job at the chip-shop.

 

Good idea?  Filled up at a petrol (gas) station this morning – yes it’s payday – and noticed a bargain offer.  Bargain offers seem like a good idea at the time but usually spend their lives gathering dust in the drawer you’re always meaning to clean out.

 

This offer? It was a wind up flashlight that also was an emergency  phone charger , complete with adapters for just about every type of phone and all this for 10.99.  I don’t know where I found  the strength of will to resist but I did.

 

Some years ago when Trevor Bayliss invented the wind up radio, it was a real breakthrough.  No batteries required.  People in remote villages in Africa could now be in touch with local and world news – not to mention being able to discover Michael Jackson and lots more.  It wasn’t cheap but relief organizations would get sponsorship and get enough of them out there to fill a gap.

 

Coming back to the wind-up flashlight/emergency  charger;  as a flashlight you’d need a fairly large pocket to accommodate it and so as likely as not, it’d spend most of it’s time at home.

 

One day perhaps you’ll find yourself in a situation where  you need to urgently need to make a phone call, and shoot, you’ve got a flat battery.  You forgot to charge it.  You also forgot to take your car charger out of the other car.  No problem.  Take out your wind-up emergency charger, the correct adapter and 10 minutes winding – ignoring the searing pain in the broken arm (the emergency in this case) and, if you have reception, help will soon be on the way.

 

Then the awful reality hits you – you’ve left the emergency charger  in the drawer you’d been promising yourself you’d tidy out.

 

Tip!!!  Scientists have discovered that singing ‘Happy to Be’ for between 2 and 5 minutes will charge your phone enough to make that call.

 

‘Hello, this is an SOS.  Can you root around in that drawer and find the emergency charger and bring it to……’

 

Now what can I do with 10.99?  Suggestions please

Happy to Be

 

 

Prosody...

...

when Clara met Beyonce...

...she hardly batted an eyelid.

Clara - a.k.a Stoned Dog features in too many of my videos. Here's one;

my channel is;

http://www.youtube.com/user/seanoneillsongs

songwriting...

...last Saturday I took part in a mutual 'listen and discuss' session with about fourteen other songwriters.  It was and interesting exercise in which a song was played either live or from a recording and critiqued in a formulated way - 'what I really liked about this song is....', followed by, 'If it were my song, I might have another look at....'

I played one live song and one from a CD.  The live one, 'The Sum of the Parts', was brand new and one I'm totally fired up on, having spent a couple of months refining it.  The recorded song, 'I Can't Hear You', is about 10 years old and just about wrote itself over a cup of coffee.  Everybody had suggestions as to what I might do with the new song to make it a better song - in their view and just about everybody told me to leave the older song as it was.  

I also listened to about 25 or so songs and loved a lot of what I heard and, hopefully learned something from suggestions on where they might be improved.

What I didn't learn though was how to change my mind when I feel that something is just right.  Maybe that's why I still need a day job.

Here's some sound advice from Arlo Guthrie;

Poppy...

 ...beside the shore at Tsilivi, and enough camomile to make tea for a small country