• Kryptonite - Rare, radioactive ore from Superman‘s home planet of Krypton. It comes in many colours, but the most common is glowy and green. Created by DC Comics.
• Adamantium - Man-made, nearly indestructible metal alloy most famous for being fused with the Wolverine‘s bones. It is nearly colourless and shiny. Created by Marvel Comics.
• Liquid Metal- Nanomorphic mimetic poly-alloy used by Skynet to build the T-1000 robots from the Terminator series. Created by James Cameron.
• Unobtanium – Rare mineral mined on Pandora, a planet near Alpha Centauri. Created by James Cameron for his movie Avatar.
• Amphilicite – A mineral that is mostly inert, but becomes a potentially universe-destroying energy source after processing. Created for J.J. Abrams’ show Fringe.

Now imagine a Liquid Metal robot with an Adamantium exoskeleton powered by Amphilicite, with a Kryptonite core encased by Unobtanium. It could be a DC/Marvel cross-over, directed by James Cameron and produced by Bad Robot, Abram’s production company where this… well… bad robot from an alternate future fights Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Green Lantern, the X-Men, and the Avengers. Joss, if you’re reading this, call me.

1. Write. Every day. 

If you want to be a writer, you have to write. When you were learning to talk, you would babble on and practice making sounds until they eventually formed words. The same goes for writing. Write streams of unintelligible gibberish, write whatever comes into your head when you are staring at a blank page. Just write. Don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense. Don’t worry if it is babble. It will help you practice.

2. Listen to yourself talk. 

Write like that. If you can talk, you can write. It might not be perfect, but it will sound natural.

3. Read. A lot.

There is no truer way to understand how to express yourself than to read. The exposure to different styles is invaluable. And it will broaden your vocabulary.

4. Test Your Tenses

Write in the past tense (I loved that old typewriter). Write in the present tense (I love that old typewriter). Write in future tense (I will love that old typewriter). Write in first person. Write in third person (Jason Theodor loves that old typewriter). Don’t write in second person unless you really know what you are doing, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Watson. What feels the most natural to you? I find that writing in the present tense, pretending that something is happening right now, is an interesting way to make memories come alive. But I had to try it first to know.

5. Strike a Tone

Are you funny or serious? Are you authoritative, or investigative? Is it light, or dark, sad or excited? Political? Religious? What is your personality? Is it opinionated, or scholarly (or both)? Is it casual, or formal? Practice a few styles and see what feels the most natural. Know your intended audience, but write for yourself.

6. Be Introspective

Think about how you think about thinking. Get inside your own head, and observe what goes on there. Try to capture that. How do you view the world? What do you think about? What do you really see? How do you feel about it? These questions can help you find things to write about, and a perspective to write from. What do you think about at night before bed? What do you think about when you commute to work? What do you think about when you shower, or when you drink a tall glass of water? Think about these things.

7. Be prepared

Always carry a notebook and a pencil. Even if you have a phone handy, a notebook will never run out of batteries, and a pencil will never run out of ink. Write thoughts and ideas as they come to you, or you will often forget them in moments. The more you write down, the more ideas will come.

jted's Top 3 Goals

Creative people often have many, many things on the go. I used to say, “If you want to get something done, ask a busy person,” and in many ways this still holds true. Busy people have energy and momentum. But there’s another side to it. Having too many ideas, starting too many projects, can lead to ‘action dilution’, where you are spread so thin that you are effectively immobilized.

Once or twice a year, it helps to examine your personal, creative priorities. Make a list of the Top Ten things you would like to achieve over the next six months. Prioritize them, with the most important goals at the top. Now ask yourself, “What Would Jobs Do?”

Steve Jobs, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography, did a lot of strange things including: cry in meetings, park his Mercedes the handicapped spot, eat only fruit for months on end…but I’m not talking about those things. Steve knew how to focus. He did this by being ruthless with lists. Every year he would invite his Top 100 employees from Apple (the first ruthless list) on a retreat. They would talk and brainstorm, and at the end of the retreat they would pitch company priorities to Steve Jobs as he stood in front of a white board. After intense debate and impulsive editing, there would be a list of the Top Ten most important company priorities for the year. Then Steve would examine the list, strike out the bottom seven items, and state, “We can only do three.”

Try that with your own list of personal priorities. Look at what you want to accomplish and winnow it down to the top three. Focus on only those three core goals for the next six months; you can assess and re-prioritize in half a year. This should allow you to get past the ‘action dilution’ problem, and get a few really important things done. If this process can turn a tech underdog into a tech titan (Apple is now the most valuable technology company in the world), think about what a little focus might do for you.

Movies and TV Shows: iTunes ($3.99-6.99/rental) & Netflix ($8/month)
Most high definition blu-ray discs cost thirty dollars and take up shelf space. As much as I love the extra features, I need to anticipate watching a movie more than five times to make it worth the purchase. Otherwise: hope it comes to Netflix, or rent it on iTunes. I don’t have cable TV.

Music: iTunes ($9.99/album) and Music Match (27.99/year)
I buy most of my legit music through iTunes. I haven’t tried Music Match yet, but will likely test it soon so that all my music is portable and backed up.

Photographs: Flickr ($24.95/year) and Picassa (free)
I don’t used these services nearly as much as I should, considering that I take hundreds of thousands of pictures a year.

Email: Gmail (free, ad supported)
I’ve been using Gmail since it came out, and never looked back (and never ran out of space). It’s got great search built in, and I always make sure my receipts are sent here.

Editable Documents: Google Docs (free)
Google Docs keeps getting better and more collaborative, and I can finally edit docs on my iPhone and iPad.

Synchronized Documents: Dropbox (50Gb@$99.00/year) & iCloud (5Gb free)
Dropbox is amazing and worth every penny. All my working documents live here, and simultaneously exist on all my machines. It is a truly freeing way to work, when you don’t need to cart computers around, but can just use them as access points. Dropbox is the definition of cloud-based data, and has integrated their service into so many applications that it is far more useful than iCloud. Box.net is working very hard to innovate for enterprise and comes a close second.

Passwords: 1Password ($49.99)
This was the single best investment I have made in an application. It keeps all my passwords encrypted and synchronized. It also integrates with my browsers to remember new logins, and give me access to old ones I have long forgotten. At the time of this writing, I have 463 logins, 4 accounts, and 8 serial numbers all tucked away in it’s virtual vault.

To Do Lists: OmniFocus with OmniSync ($79.99 for Mac, $39.99 for iPad, $19.99 for iPhone)
The best (and most expensive) to-do apps on the market, based on the system of Getting Things Done guru, David Allen. These apps keep you organized and on top of things across all devices at all times.

Ideas & Notes: Evernote (free) and Backpack ($7/month)
Evernote is another app that, like Dropbox, offers a rich cross over between computer and mobile device. It has replaced the Moleskine as my go-to app for keeping records, notes, and organizing thoughts and ideas.

Screencaps: Skitch (free) and Aviary (free)
Skitch was recently purchased by Evernote, but it allows you to take a screen capture, annotate it, and upload it to a linkable web location. Aviary is a web service and browser plugin that lets you take full-page screenshots (even reaching below the fold), edit them, and store them.

Browser Windows, History, & Extensions: Google Chrome (free) with FreshStart extension
Since I’m always in a browser (usually Chrome) doing research, checking mail, following tangents, exploring new services, checking out recent work, I always have scores of tabs open at the same time. The FreshStart Cross Browser Session Manager allows me to pick up where I left off on any machine using a Chrome browser and the FreshStart extension. Chrome itself has built in syncing of my extensions, history, passwords, and many other options.

What cloud-based services do you use? What can’t you live without? Please comment below.

There are trillions of pieces of web content out there, and ninety-nine percent of it is irrelevant to your interests. But that remaining one percent (of trillions) is still a lot of stuff. Which is why there is a plethora of niche web services to help you organize and catalogue the things you find along the information super highway. After enjoying Pinterest.com for a few months now, I remembered some of the other web services I have used that are supposed to help me ‘collect’ things, and keep them in nice little buckets. But I am signed up to so many services now, that I need buckets for my buckets… How do I organize and catalogue my copious number of organized catalogues? Here is a short list of services that I still use:

jted’s Top 10 Web Content Collection Tools

In no preferred order:

1. LinkedIn - for my collection of Business Persons
2. Tumblr - where I collect cool, creative stuff I stumble across
3. Amazon Wishlist - where I aggregate the things I want, not just on Amazon but anywhere on the web
4. Pinterest - which is great for organizing images and videos around themes (like Perfect iPad Accessories)
5. Delicious Stacks - which re-launched fairly recently and now allows you to group your bookmarks in stacks (like my list of Image Discovery Services)
6. Instapaper - where I collect more long-form research that I can feed via RSS to my blog (mostly articles on creativity)
7. YouTube - which allows me to collect funny or ad-related videos (dubiously, there are now huge gaps in my older collections, as if the videos were eaten by moths while I was away)
8. Feedly via Google Reader - where I collect and organize (and read) the RSS feeds I’ve collected over the years into categories like Infographix, Trendspotting, Architecture, and Friendz
9. Facebook – for keeping track of everything I like.
10. Evernote – the web app and service where I collect all of my thoughts

What have you integrated into your daily routines, to capture, catalogue, and review the vast amount of information you come across every day? Feel free to comment below.

1) Talking Animals
2) Mystery to Solve/Secret
3) Dead/Clueless Parents
4) Diary Format Used
5) Graphic Novel Hybridization/Pictures & Speech Balloons Used Intermittently
6) Magic (see Talking Animals)
7) Hero/Anti-Hero as Outsider (see Dead/Clueless Parents)
8) Recurring Villan/Bully
9) Buddy/BFF
10) Mytho-Theological Tie-in (see Magic, Talking Animals, etc)
11) A Quest Fraught With Adventure (see Mystery to Solve/Secret)
12) Long Catchy Title With Repeating Elements

I challenge you (in the comments, if you’d be so kind) to name one popular literary series for children that doesn’t contain at least 6 of these crucial ingredients.