500 Words

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500 Words is an ongoing conversation with creative people. We've profiled composers, photographers, and labyrinth makers. As we prepare our next short run of fiction for the web, we're featuring short-form conversations between father and son. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe to 500 Words.

Got a podcast ready to launch but need support? Workshop it in the podcast Creative Working Group. It starts Feb 16 and meets every Wednesday. http://futurex.network/studio

In this episode of Now Here’s Something, Bodhi and I go deep for three minutes about the dilemma we all face now: screen or paper. 

If you’re just joining me on the 500 Words journey, I’m posting a podcast as I work up the next numbered series of very short short story posts written exclusively for this newsletter. If you want to receive the posts in the order they are created, consider subscribing. 

Bodhi is my youngest son. He is eight. 

There have already been two fiction series posted on this blog. The first, Wait, Wut, was about adapting to the impossible conditions imposed on us by the pandemic. The second, The Counter Narrative, was a series of posts written from some time in the future. Each post is 500 words long or pretty close to it. 

Got a podcast ready to launch but need support? Workshop it in the podcast Creative Working Group. It starts Feb 16 and meets every Wednesday. http://futurex.network/studio

Hello! During the last few months in this space, I’ve been posting a series of short-form stories from the future. I need to give the time machine a little rest (those things can overheat if used every day) and I need a little time to write up the ideas for the next short-form series.

So, during this period of incubation and fermentation, I’d like to present a podcast. Bodhi, my youngest son, and I have recorded some blips that I hope you will enjoy. The first one asks the important question, “Are cats worth it?”

The name “Now Here’s Something” comes from what Bodhi says when he wants to redirect the conversation from a topic that is blah to a topic that is interesting to him.

In the podcast he plays a 20-year-old. He is eight years old in real life.

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Got a podcast ready to launch but need support? Workshop it in the podcast Creative Working Group. It starts Feb 16 and meets every Wednesday. http://futurex.network/studio

Sure, I write short-form essays for the web right here on 500 Words. I’m working on one today to share with you. I’m also the co-founder of a futurist network called FutureX. This week, we’re hosting an event about the future of school and work online. Spending so much more time on screens might be going well for you — or not. We’ve assembled an all-star group to discuss what’s coming next in school and work and answer your questions. It’s free. Click here for more information and to register.

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Got a podcast ready to launch but need support? Workshop it in the podcast Creative Working Group. It starts Feb 16 and meets every Wednesday. http://futurex.network/studio

Editor’s note: This is a guest podcast by Bodhi Schneider. He is eight. He’s also my son. He wrote the script and composed the music.

How the climate crisis affects the food chain

Hello, I am Bodhi Schneider and I’m gonna teach you how the climate crisis affects the food chain.

First, do you know what climate change is? If you don’t hear is what it is: climate change can do a lot of damage. it is caused by greenhouse gases which include carbon dioxide and methane. These gases trap heat inside of the air and causes earth to warm up. Now, since carbon dioxide and methane trap heat inside of the earth it can melt ice caps …

-cracking noise

… and warm weather patterns permanently. That’s what climate change is.

And how that affects the food chain? Well, imagine three fish. fish1 fish2 and fish3. If fish1 dies out because of the hot weather.

-blazing sun noise

fish2 has nothing to eat therefore fish2 starves to death. And since fish3 can’t eat fish2 Fish3 also starves to death. That’s how the climate change crisis affects the food chain.

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Got a podcast ready to launch but need support? Workshop it in the podcast Creative Working Group. It starts Feb 16 and meets every Wednesday. http://futurex.network/studio

This week's call is with Vikram Chandra, novelist, software developer, and deep thinker about the creative process. I first discovered his work when I read his bestseller Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty, a book about the creative drives and lives shared by writers and coders. One of the book's most mind- blowing sections (I am re-reading it this week) is about the precision of Sanskrit as a language. In 500 BCE, a scholar named Panini wrote a grammar of Sanskrit that fit in just 40 dense pages. His work has influenced Western grammatical theory for centuries, and that theory "became the seedbed for high-level computer languages," as Vikram points out in his book. You can draw a line connecting Sanskrit with how computer programs are conceived and written.

That was my point of entry into his work, but I wanted to interview him because he wrote something that terrified me.

I learned from reading a blog he wrote that he doesn't outline his long, complex novels. He writes with purposeful ambiguity.

As you begin, you know very little about what the book is. But the thoughts and visions persist, which means that this character and her world have some kind of special energy for you, and you want to know more about this character, what her situation is. - Vikram Chandra

This means that he may spend years writing his way into a story, leaving big plot holes, learning about the characters as he goes, until the novel comes into focus.

This seems like a scary way to write, but it has successful practitioners. His first novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, won the 1996 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book.

Sacred Games is a literary novel that is also a crime novel, a detective story, and a thriller. It has a hundred characters. It became the first original television series from India on Netflix.

So feeling along in the dark might be a good way to write a book. Novelist E. L. Doctorow described his writing process like this: “You know the headlights are on in the fog and you can see just so far, but you realize you can drive the whole way like that.”

Joan Didion wrote something like, I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see, and what I think it means.

I can keep throwing quotes at you all day. They will do nothing to push back my terror of wading into a long book without an outline. On the call, Vikram and I talk about his discovery process and my planning process.

Since he is the rare person who values purposeful ambiguity and also has an engineer's mind, he is working on a kind of super-software for writers that keeps track of who, what, where, and when.

You can use kind of hacky solutions like the old-time honored index cards on the wall, your hand drawn or a software based timelines. But the problem is again that none of this knowledge is attached to the text. And so that's what I obsessed about for nearly a decade and discovered that it's actually a pretty hard problem, attaching facts to text, which has a very honorable and long effort.  - Vikram Chandra

His answer is called Granthika, which is in beta now with an official launch coming in October. You can try it out. Here’s the link: https://granthika.co

Easily as mind expanding as Sanskrit grammar forming the conceptual basis of computer programming languages, Granthika is an AI word processor that tracks and corrects continuity errors in your timeline, characters, and events. It's an editor by your side who constantly tests your story's factual correctness. As Vikram suggested in our call, "if you move the inquest up before the murder, it tells you" and you can fix it.

Learn more about Granthika.

Read the blog that got me terrified about feeling you way through writing: Finding a Book: The Writer’s Journey

Check out Vikram Chandra's books on his website.

Thanks for listening,

Lee

A technical note

A reminder, On a Call With … is just a phone call. Actually, a Zoom call. But it’s not a fancy podcast with all the fancy studio equipment. It’s meant to be informal and easy to do. If you want to hear some fancy studio stuff with engineers, multiple cities synced up, location recording, custom music, and all of that, have a listen at this link.

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Got a podcast ready to launch but need support? Workshop it in the podcast Creative Working Group. It starts Feb 16 and meets every Wednesday. http://futurex.network/studio

In this special on-location edition of the podcast, Ady Floyd, a senior research manager at Trendhunter, shares her ideas and tips about creating a keynote speech.

With 20,000,000 monthly views, TrendHunter.com is the world's largest, most popular trend community. The Toronto-based group leverages big data, human researchers, and AI to identify consumer insights and deep-dive opportunities for the world's most innovative companies.

In exchange for recording this podcast and writing about them, the Trendhunter folks allowed me to experience their Los Angeles Future Festival in person.

I interviewed Ady just after she delivered her keynote on future trends in retail. She shares her tips about how to develop a keynote, how to polish your ideas, and her best piece of advice for anyone considering giving a keynote.

For my audio geek friends reading and listening, this is a location recording, so there’s a little background noise at the start.

Thanks for listening,

Lee

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Got a podcast ready to launch but need support? Workshop it in the podcast Creative Working Group. It starts Feb 16 and meets every Wednesday. http://futurex.network/studio

This week's' conversation is with Adrian Fisher. 

This is a man who believes in the power of the rough pencil sketch. He believes in having control, but not. 

My art form is parallel rows of things. -- Adrian Fisher

He is a maze designer. I can't seem to get enough of interviews with people who design and construct mazes, so you'll indulge me? Thanks. I think there is a parallel between creating mazes and writing stories and almost got Adrian to go along with the idea, but not quite. He was helpful, though, when I told him about the time I had an anxiety attack while in a corn maze, offering the wise explanation that I am a modern person who expects everything to work like a computer. This is true. 

It's like playing chess with me except that I have to play all my moves in advance as the chess player, as the designer, and then I must lose. I must lose just before you've had enough. Because I'm here to entertain you. 

One thing to remember as you listen: This is a Skype, not a phone call. So it has the usual Skype blips and dropouts, which is why I don’t usually use Skype for podcasts. Adrian joined me on the call from his studio in Dorset, England, so Skype was the best way to go.

Since 1979, Adrian and his company have designed and created more than 700 full-size mazes in the grounds of palaces, castles, stately homes, zoos, wildlife parks, amusement parks, children’s museums, science centers, malls, universities, schools, city centers, and farms. He has written six books about mazes.

The Queen visited a maze he made to commemorate the Beatles.

Adrian has also created rides and puzzles for iconic visitor attractions across the globe including Legoland, Tussauds and the London Dungeon. He has made the tallest maze in the world, up the side of a building, and some of the largest corn mazes.

I want to make you the hero of your own story.

Thanks for listening, 

Lee 

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I'm preparing something new for this email, for subscribers only. I'm calling it cycles and it will come out on Wednesdays. I'm thinking of it as a workout for your creative self, helping you do better, deeper stuff. You’ll be able to be part of conversations with other subscribers. Still incubating, but it should arrive in your inboxes in a couple of months and cycle through the year. 

See you next week.

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Got a podcast ready to launch but need support? Workshop it in the podcast Creative Working Group. It starts Feb 16 and meets every Wednesday. http://futurex.network/studio

This week's phone call is with David Tolzmann. 

David is the founder of The Labyrinth Company, which designs and builds walkable labyrinths in all media. He’s designed and crafted labyrinths in churches, medical centers, hospices, friaries, retreat centers, and schools, and for spiritual counselors, businesses, and individual homeowners all over the world.

He made his first labyrinth nearly 25 years ago because a church group asked him to recreate a version of the world’s best-known labyrinth. “They thought I was an engineer and they were trying to recreate the labyrinth from Chartres Cathedral which is very complex. But it happened that I knew the labyrinth and I was able to help them because I am mathematically inclined. I'm not an engineer, but I must have given that impression.” he said.

I have a friend who calls a labyrinth a left-brain jamming device. Your left brain gets involved in solving a puzzle that doesn’t exist. — David Tolzmann

A labyrinth is a single path to the center of a pattern. There is no puzzle. But when you walk the path, the logical side of your brain gets busy, leaving the other side of your brain to explore spirituality, creativity, and nonlinear thinking. That’s the “pop psychology” version of what’s going on, as David puts it, but it captures the process well enough. He believes walking a labyrinth is a superior form of meditation for Westerners.

The first labyrinth design, the Seed Design, was discovered in Pylos, Greece. It dates to around 1200 BCE. “There was a transaction about goats, and on the back of the tablet is a labyrinth doodle.” This simple starting pattern has been transmitted to our time.

It's in every culture. It's in the American Southwest. It's in China. It's in India. It's in South Africa. The same design all over the place.

Thanks for listening,

Lee

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Got a podcast ready to launch but need support? Workshop it in the podcast Creative Working Group. It starts Feb 16 and meets every Wednesday. http://futurex.network/studio

This week’s interview is with Christina Dunbar, who has said, “Our culture is starving for story, for vulnerability, for truth telling, for personal story. Story creates meaning and we have a lack of meaning right now in the world.”

Christina Dunbar is a storyteller, director, and producer of women’s stories for stage and film. She is star of the one-woman show, Dirty Me Divine. Christina is the founder of RED, a circle for performing artists, and creator of She Takes The Stage, a one-of-a- kind program that guides women to hone their message through their personal story and share it at a live theater show. Christina has taken artists, authors, lawyers, and coaches through her story workshops, public speaking trainings, and creative retreats, and is passionate about supporting women with a message to take the stage.

When you share your story you begin to own the story, it doesn't own you.

-- Christina Dunbar

Her one-person show has eleven characters in it, so of course we talk about her creative process, the work-outside-the-work that an artist has to do, like being in nature, doing yoga, recharging, and what sort of magic happens when she makes a safe space for women in her workshops.

If I come off that stage and I've been sweating, I've been crying, I've been laughing, I've been feeling, and I just really feel used up by life in that performance, that to me is very, very satisfying.

Thanks for listening,

Lee Schneider

“On a Call With …” is now available on Apple Podcasts. If that’s where you listen and share your podcasts check it out here.

You can work with me.

I produce great podcasts. I record in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or New York, and can work on site or remotely. Got an idea for a show? Let’s build it from the idea up. Got a show ready to launch? Let’s talk about production. Soon I will start teaching my media course for USC and my calendar will fill up fast, so now’s the time to sign up with me and get some ideas flowing. When I consult, the first 25-minute session is free.

One more thing.

The Haven Chronicles is an amazing science fiction podcast that has hooked me. The writer-producer-director joined my podcast network FutureX. I wanted to know about his creative process, so I interviewed him for Cult/Tech on Medium. Give it a read.

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