Let's Eat Nothing But Coffee For A Week

and see what happens.

I don't diet, I travel. As a Creative, though, sometimes I like to see how diet and activity affects my creativity. I like to take advantage of otherwise-annoying circumstances to see what happens in the context of writing, reading, and doing the miscellaneous support activities for those two things.

Today, for reasons unrelated to writing, I'm half-way through eating nothing but coffee (or tea) for a week. I'm feeling the Creative juices flow, as they often do. I'm not a proponent of the Starving Artist image because it sends the wrong message to aspiring artists, but there's a certain dignity to this view of life.

On the one hand, you get the purely artificial (and possibly placebo) effect of caffeine coursing through your system at a heavy rate, sending your heart pounding and your mind racing. On the other hand, you've got the angry gnawing of an empty stomach and the dull roar of burning fat to focus the mind. I've taken it up to eleven by sitting in a busy restaurant sipping coffee when I write.

The first day or so a slight haze forms in your mind, but then you break through into that joyous zone of 100 Caffeines. That's when you really get started. Just write down everything stream-of-conscious style. No idea is bad in this condition, it just rolls out. Paragraphs of dialog, setting details, random inventions, drawings of a spaceship. Even a statistical formula made an appearance, but I don't think I'll put it into the story. On second thought, thinks I, it would be interesting to learn how to type-set it in as text without using an annoying image. TeX? No, that wouldn't work for .mobi...

See? This is great. Try it! Two more days to go.  

Link

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At some point during this ill-advised adventure I ran across this picture on some random website and tracked it down to Aly Fell. I was amazed by the quality of just about everything I saw from this artist, and by how much it synced with my own sensibilities. The link under the picture leads to a gallery at the artist's website, and I've put a link to the artist's blog in my linklist and blogroll.

Check it out!

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250 words? Yes
Book "Lived Too Long To Die"
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Reading - ?

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