TAKEPLACE: WRITING IS A STRANGE AND DANGEROUS CALLING

Thursday, February 24, 2011

WRITING IS A STRANGE AND DANGEROUS CALLING

My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus.
~ William S. Burroughs

Writing is a strange and dangerous calling.

I do mean calling. Like Burrough’s word virus, the craft of writing compels us to it in a way that is beyond our ability to resist.

A writer writes.

A writer who does not write inevitably descends into a booze, coffee, sex, nicotine and/or guilt-driven world of pain. Steven Pressfield has covered this ground well.

If you’ve got the touch, the way with words, I’m betting you understand what I’m saying. I’m also betting you’re nowhere near having it “together” as a writer. COPYBLOGGER

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TakePlace was made with you in mind It's about ideas and innovation, creative perspectives, and solutions. We're advocates for change, because change needs friends. We explore complex systems, adaptive agents, modeling, simulation, artificial life, and complex (information, biological, and social) networks. We especially focus on the Web as a complex information network in which we leave abundant traces of our social and semantic activities: what we do, what we are interested in, whom we talk to, what knowledge we acquire and contribute. Our research spans from modeling the dynamic processes that occur on the Web (how information networks grow and evolve, how individual and collective traffic patterns emerge, how attention bursts are generated and shaped by social and search tools) to designing tools that mine the Web to build better search, navigation, management, and recommendation tools (where ‘better’ means more intelligent, autonomous, robust, personalized, contextual, scalable, adaptive, and so on).