Start the week #10

Writing prompts, premium news, interesting links

Greetings!

Street sculpture in New Bond Street, London. Photo by Terry Freedman

Snoremaster Awards

I’ve decided to resurrect my Snoremaster Awards:

This is something I invented a few years ago as a quick way of indicating to my readers (in the field of education) whether a government pronouncement was worth the effort of listening to it or reading it. Most of the time government edicts are unreadable, because they’re full of corporate claptrap about driving forward agendas and delivering goals.

Anyway, last Thursday I skipped the Substack Office Hours in order to attend a local council meeting, a kind of “Meet the people and hear your concerns” event. I really wish I’d have filmed it because it would have made a marvellous training video on the subject of how not to run a meeting. Everything that could have avoidably gone wrong did go wrong, plus one thing that may have just been unfortunate, but for which there was still no excuse (organisers ought to make contingency plans). Perhaps I’ll write about that soon. Well, I’ve awarded the meeting three snoremaster ‘stars’ (out of five), because ‘only’ 90% of the meeting was completely boring and unengaging as a result of the debacle. It would have been five, but the discussion we had on our particular table was potentially useful.

A big surprise

Speaking of education, I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that my article on three experiments (four actually, but who’s counting?) had more views than any other article. I thought maybe three people would read it, but I couldn’t have been more mistaken. Unless, of course, only one person read it several hundred times. That’s the trouble with these kinds of metrics: it’s never unequivocally clear what they actually mean. Stop press: my review of the hieroglyphs exhibition has had even more views. Amazing.

Paid subs

There are a few people who have taken out paid subscriptions to Eclecticism, presumably because they’d like to show their support in some way. Naming them, or even hinting at their names, is out of the question, but it is very humbling. And by the way, that is not intended as a humble brag. I do think it’s really nice of them. Well, I just thought I’d mention, because I don’t think it’s blindingly obvious, that a year’s premium subscription to this esteemed publication is $45 rather than $50. I’m working on providing extras for premium subscribers. For example, there’s a more fully-featured version of the article planner I mentioned.

If I were able to write kick-ass ads I would, but I can’t, which is why I asked ChatGPT to do so a few weeks ago. This is part of what it came up with:

[Eclecticism is] for the sharp dresser, the big shot, the guy who knows which fork to use. It's for the fella who ain't satisfied with the same old, same old. You're lookin' for class, style, and a little bit of edge, ain'tcha? Well, this is it.

For the full monty see:

An advertisement for my newsletter in the style of a 1930s wise guy gangster

Writing prompts

I spent a bit of time creating a spreadsheet that generates random prompt/genre suggestions. I got the idea from J.M. Elliott, who publishes The Problematic Pen. She thought my article planner spreadsheet was useful for generating ideas, which is something I hadn’t even thought of.

The new spreadsheet consists of three columns: ideas and genres, and the prompt. This last is the amalgamation of the first two. Thus, looking at it now, one of the suggestions is to write a flash fiction story using the starting point “It was a day like any other”.

In the Google Sheets version the suggestions are changed every minute, or you can simply refresh the browser. To change them in the Excel version, you have to press the function key F9 (but see below).

You can change the ideas and the genres as you wish. But save a copy of the spreadsheet, because you won’t be able to edit mine. Let me know how you get on.

Unfortunately, the Excel one isn’t working, even though it was working yesterday. There are different versions of Excel according to what device and operating system you use. It’s driving me mad. And to think that colleagues used to call me the Excel Maestro.

I was going to get to work on sorting out the Excel version, but then I discovered that Richard Byrne has an easier solution. Watch his video below. He talks about generating nouns and verbs etc randomly, but you could just as easily generate the kind of writing prompts I’ve been talking about. You can even save your file by logging into Google. You can view mine here if you like: Terry’s Writing Prompts. I’ve just spun my wheels, so to speak, and the writing prompt is to write about the last play I watched as a piece of humor.

Here’s Richard’s video:

Articles written

I’m feeling quite cock-a-hoop. Last week I read and reviewed three books for an education magazine (I’ll publish the reviews here in due course), four articles on other websites, and seven here (eight if you count a correction). I’m pleased because I’m now starting to get back to the level of productivity I used to have.

I’ve already alluded to most of the articles, but in case you missed it I also wrote one that I didn’t send out:

Controlling which emails you receive

Other people’s articles

An article I came across on Mary Tabor’s newsletter:

Why Make Art?

It’s really interesting, but I’d rather not comment before I’ve read it again (and again). It’s pretty deep and wide-ranging, and I need to make sure I understand it enough to say anything.

It was the opening sentence that hit me though: why make art … when faced with the dilemmas of existence? I find myself wrestling with this question on particular days, such as the anniversary of 9/11 or Holocaust Memorial Day. Part of me thinks that anything I publish on such an occasion is going to be completely trite when set against the enormity of the event. But another part of me thinks that writing about something relatively ordinary is a form of triumph, as the following story illustrates.

I came across a piece of writing by Rabbi Daniel Smith. He wrote that one day when he returned home to London at the end of term at Liverpool University, he arrived just in time for his parents about to go to a party. They invited him to join them, which he did. He said the people at the party were in their 40s, and discussing boring topics like mortgages, plumbing and schools. Nobody was talking about the need to overthrow the system. Needless to say, Daniel was bored out of his skull.

Rabbi Hugo Gryn, who was also at the party, asked him if he knew who these people were. When he said he didn’t R.Gryn told him to ask his parents.

He found out that after the second world war his parents had looked after children who had come from the concentration camps. His mother told him about them:

Twenty years ago that woman was a child who could never be left alone because she was suicidal, while that man over there had to sleep alone because he screamed so much during the night he kept everyone else awake.

The fact that not only were they here, but able to talk about schools and plumbing was extraordinary. And a form of triumph.

Further reading

Reading, by Terry Freedman

Here are a few referral links to newsletter directories. If you click through and sign up to these services, you’ll be sent links to other newsletters you might be interested in. And the people who run these services will promote this one too. So it’s a potential win-win-win situation.

Refind

I find this one especially useful for discovering newsletters and articles concerning leadership matters, which I’m quite interested in.

The Sample

I very much like the variety served up. I receive one suggestion a day, and have subscribed to a few of them.

Yakreads

This has links to long reads. I haven’t really explored it yet, but it seems quite interesting. If you sign up using that link apparently I’ll get $4 credit towards an advertisement. I’ve no idea how much an advert costs though.

Finally…

Your call to action is to subscribe to this newsletter if you don’t already, and to share it if you do. If you value my work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate it.