Posts from — January 2008

Steven Pressfield

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DO YOU:

1. dream about writing the Great American Novel?
2. regret not finishing your paintings, poems, or screenplays?
3. want to start a business or charity?
4. wish you could start dieting or exercising today?
5. hope to run a marathon someday?

If “yes,” then you need THE WAR OF ART. Now, in this powerful, straight-from-the-hip examination of the internal obstacles to success, bestselling author Steven Pressfield shows readers how to identify, defeat, and unlock the inner barriers to creativity. THE WAR OF ART is an inspirational, funny, well-aimed kick in the pants guaranteed to galvanize every would-be artist, visionary, or entrepreneur.Steven Pressfield enjoys great international success as a bestselling novelist.But in order to reach the top he had to do a lot of work to fight the inner demons that told him he couldn’t make it.THE WAR OF ART is his challenge to creative block, and his succinct, straight-from-the-hip style will help every reader unleash their personal ambitions, be they literary, artistic, or business-minded. According to Pressfield, the internal obstacle to success is Resistance.Resistance is the difference between the life you lead and the life you want to lead, and can take many forms.Pressfield shows readers how to identify and defeat Resistance at every turn and challenges them to change their amateurish, unsuccessful habits into a professional attitude that can get the job done. Finally, Sun Tzu for the soul!Inspirational, funny, and a great kick in the pants, THE WAR OF ART is the perfect book for anybody who had a goal circumvented by life and circumstance:which is to say, you and everybody you’ve ever met.

View More about The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles

Stephen Inwood

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A thoroughly readable and enjoyable book about the intellectual colleague and contemporary of Christopher Wren and Isaac Newton in 17th century London. The writing is witty and engaging and provides a vivid look at the social, scientific and physical structure of London after the Great Fire. I especially enjoyed the author’s humorous descriptions of the machinations behind the scenes of the Royal Society and the often dangerous and bizarre experiments that Hooke and others would perform for the Society. A great peep into the development of many engineering, physics, astronomical chemistry and architectural discoveries.

View More about The Forgotten Genius: Biography of Robert Hooke 1635-1703

Caroll Michels

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The classic handbook for launching and sustaining a career that “explodes the romantic notion of the starving artist”, with new and expanded resources for succeeding in the burgeoning Internet art market (The New York Times)Now in its fifth edition, with over 85,000 copies of previous editions sold, How to Survive and Prosper as an Artist is the preeminent guide to taking control of your career and making a good living in the art world. Drawing on over two decades of experience, Caroll Michels walks artists through the complicated process of balancing grants, gallery representation, private dealer sales, and a personal studio to ensure a public profile and a steady income. Included is a wealth of insider’s information on getting into a gallery, being your own PR agent, and negotiating prices, as well as innovative marketing, exhibition, and sales opportunities for various art disciplines. The new edition is fully updated with strategies for using the Web-everything from generating income through freelance work, to creating an entrepreneurial web site for promoting work to agents and clients, to assessing online galleries. An expanded and updated appendix adds more than 200 new resources such as Web designers, insurance and legal services for artists, internships, art colonies, and corporate and public art programs.

View More about How to Survive and Prosper as an Artist, 5th ed.: Selling Yourself Without Selling Your Soul

Duane Packer

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AcidFreeInk says: Despite the cheesy cover and the sometimes foofy spirituality, this is a great practical and inspirational guide to creating abundance while on your creative journey.

Amazon says:
This book is a course in manifesting and creating abundance in your life, Section I, Creating Money, is a step-by-step guide to the art of manifesting. You will learn how to discover what you want, drawing things to you that will fulfill and satisfy you, that are even better than what you ask for. You will learn advanced techniques of manifesting and how to work with your own energy and the power of magnetism to draw things into your life in the fastest, easiest way possible.

The second section of this book, Developing Mastery, will help you learn to work with and move through any blocks you may have about allowing abundance into your life. The third section, Creating Your Lifes Work, will help you learn to make money and create abundance through doing the things you love. You will learn many simple energy techniques to draw your ideal job to you, discover your life’s work, and do what you love for a living. The fourth section, Having Money, is about having and increasing money and abundance in your life. You will learn how to create joy, peace, harmony, clarity, and self-love with your money, letting it flow and increase.

View More about Creating Money: Keys to Abundance (Roman, Sanaya)

Bryan Peterson

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acidfreeink.com comment:This is THE book on exposure for serious photographers.

For serious amateur photographers who already shoot perfectly focused, accurately exposed images but want to be more creative with a camera, here’s the book to consult. More than seventy techniques, both popular and less-familiar approaches, are covered in detail, including advanced exposure, bounced flash and candlelight, infrared, multiple images, soft-focus effects, unusual vantage points, zooming, and other carefully chosen ways to enhance photographs. The A-Z format make sit easy for readers to find a specific technique, and each one is explained in jargon-free language. Top Tips for each technique help readers achieve superb results, even on the first attempt.

View More about Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera (Updated Edition)

Paulo Coelho

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An inspirational tale about following your dreams.

My Heart Is Afraid that it will have to suffer,” the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.”Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams.”

Every few decades a book is published that changes the lives of its readers forever. The Alchemist is such a book. With over a million and a half copies sold around the world, The Alchemist has already established itself as a modern classic, universally admired. Paulo Coelho’s charming fable, now available in English for the first time, will enchant and inspire an even wider audience of readers for generations to come.

The Alchemist is the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure as extravagant as any ever found. From his home in Spain he journeys to the markets of Tangiers and across the Egyptian desert to a fateful encounter with the alchemist.

The story of the treasures Santiago finds along the way teaches us, as only a few stories have done, about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, learning to read the omens strewn along life’s path, and, above all, following our dreams.

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Ted Orland

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“This is a book about making art. Ordinary art. Ordinary art means something like: all art not made by Mozart. After all, art is rarely made by Mozart-like people; essentially-statistically speaking-there aren’t any people like that. Geniuses get made once-a-century or so, yet good art gets made all the time, so to equate the making of art with the workings of genius removes this intimately human activity to a strangely unreachable and unknowable place. For all practical purposes making art can be examined in great detail without ever getting entangled in the very remote problems of genius.”
–from the Introduction

Art & Fear explores the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn’t get made, and the nature of the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way. The book’s co-authors, David Bayles and Ted Orland, are themselves both working artists, grappling daily with the problems of making art in the real world. Their insights and observations, drawn from personal experience, provide an incisive view into the world of art as it is expeienced by artmakers themselves.

This is not your typical self-help book. This is a book written by artists, for artists — it’s about what it feels like when artists sit down at their easel or keyboard, in their studio or performance space, trying to do the work they need to do. First published in 1994, Art & Fear quickly became an underground classic. Word-of-mouth response alone-now enhanced by internet posting-has placed it among the best-selling books on artmaking and creativity nationally.

Art & Fear has attracted a remarkably diverse audience, ranging from beginning to accomplished artists in every medium, and including an exceptional concentration among students and teachers. The original Capra Press edition of Art & Fear sold 80,000 copies.

An excerpt:

Today, more than it was however many years ago, art is hard because you have to keep after it so consistently. On so many different fronts. For so little external reward. Artists become veteran artists only by making peace not just with themselves, but with a huge range of issues. You have to find your work…

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Julia Cameron

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The Artist’s Way is the seminal book on the subject of creativity. An international bestseller, millions of readers have found it to be an invaluable guide to living the artist’s life. Still as vital today-or perhaps even more so-than it was when it was first published one decade ago, it is a powerfully provocative and inspiring work. In a new introduction to the book, Julia Cameron reflects upon the impact of The Artist’s Way and describes the work she has done during the last decade and the new insights into the creative process that she has gained. Updated and expanded, this anniversary edition reframes The Artist’s Way for a new century.

View More about The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity [10th Anniversary Edition]