Category — Writing

I can’t say enough great things about Ignite Lansing 3.0. It was a spectacular event that blew away my highest expectations. The crew was amazing. The venue was amazing. Everything was, at the risk of being repetitive, amazing.

I arrived on scene at 6:00 PM as the speakers were told to do, the interior of the Knapp’s Building was a buzzing hive of activity. Lights. Lasers (yes, laser). Cameras. They were all alive.

I had my pre-show briefing with show runners (Nick, Ben), the MC and the stage manager, Melissa. I was happy to see I could use a hand held mic, as I wanted to be mobile during my speech.

Around 7:00, the floodgates opened and attendees started arriving. It was energetic chaos (I mean that in a good way). Dozens filled the line for the Cravings Popcorn bar (my LansingNext co-host Julielyn helped as a volunteer).

The evening was pretty much a blur for me until I had my cue to head for the stage around 9:00 PM. I was in Group C, the last of the three groups of presenters. The crowd had thinned a bit by this point, but it was still very much a packed house.

I was pumped, primed and ready.

I took the stage and killed. My choice to go for the silly, crazy presentation worked. Had a lot of great crowd reactions (although my spork joke at the open didn’t seem to go over that well). I’m glad I decided to wear an eye-patch and to do a “character voice,” the crowd ate it up.

Five minutes later, it was all over. I received scores of compliments afterward, both in person and online.

Better still, I took First Place for my group. Bam.

I think I had third place overall. I don’t know when the video will be on YouTube, but I will post that asap once it becomes available.

Thanks to everyone at Ignite Lansing for putting on a great event!

This scene from ERNEST SAVES CHRISTMAS inspired my presentation a bit.

I am one of the presenters at tonight’s Ignite Lansing 3.0 at the Knapp’s Building in downtown Lansing.

For those unfamiliar, the Ignite events are held around the world and the idea is you get people together and share ideas in five minutes.

That’s right, five minutes.

Five minutes, 22 slides, 15 seconds a slide. That’s a lot of information to cram into such a brief amount of time.

And of course, being the crazy person I am, I signed up to be a presenter. Visitors to the Ignite Lansing website voted on which presentations they wanted to see. I was fortunate enough to be chosen.

I am equal parts nervous and excited about this opportunity. I’ll be speaking in front of a group of hundreds in the building, as well as being streamed online. Afterward, the presentation will be archived for all to see on YouTube. The presentations can be watched at video.ignitelansing.com (I go on at 9:15 PM EST).

So yes, I’ll be speaking in front of a crowd nearing 600, not to mention many more watching online. This is quite a bit of pressure, but I’m up to it.

My presentation is called How to Survive Writing a Novel.

Now, I do not plan for this to be a five minute promotion of the Magic of Eyri, I am not that shameless of a self-promoter. I do list myself as the author of it on my title slide, but I felt it was necessary to show the audience that I actually wrote a novel.

I am taking a very funny, zany approach to this and I don’t want to give too much away ahead of time. Although I have been dropping hints here and there, especially on this week’s episode of LansingNext.

My goal is not to be boring. I am treating this as more of a performance piece than a presentation, if that makes sense. I’ll be digging into my improv comedy toolbox a bit, and just having fun.

If I can share information and entertain at the same time, awesome.

I shall post a link to the YouTube video once it is online. Wish me luck!

Here is a round up of my body of work added to the Internet canon last week. Huzzah.

Building a Healthier Lansing – a feature article for Capital Gains about the Power of We and AmeriCorp doing it what they can to make Lansing a healthier city.

Last week’s development stories for Capital Gains (I write four a week):

• Entrepreneur Institute Moves to 1,000 Sq Ft Space in Downtown Lansing
• Replay Entertainment Exchange Thriving, Expands Space
• The Tin Can Opens in Downtown Lansing
• Cravings Popcorn Moves to Old Town

Here is a nice bio that Capital Gains wrote about me to announce my taking on the development writer role.

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Now, onto the aural realm:

Last week’s episode of The Magic of Eyri Podcast.

Last week’s episode of LansingNext (featuring  Julielyn Gibbons and myself)

Facebook fan pages are all the rage these days–seems like every day I have a bunch of ’suggested’ fan pages in my Facebook inbox.

They are handy when it comes to promotion and stay connected–I have one for the Magic of Eyri Podcast.

I bit the bullet and made one for myself over the weekend.

Why? Shameless self-promotion.

Well, OK. That was only a little bit of it–the two main reasons are:

A) I wanted to lay claim to the name on Facebook.

B) I’m getting more and more folks I don’t know asking to be ‘friends’ on the site, so I’m hoping this is a way to stay in contact with people, but keep my main Facebook account for people I actually know.

And it is (yet another) place to post links to things I’m doing.

Honestly though, reason A was the biggest reason.

My name is very common, and I look at this as branding and trying to make sure that searches for me actually lead to me and not the many other Daniel Hogans out there.

I will confess that I felt a bit odd creating a fan page for myself.

I’ve been writing my development stories for Capital Gains in TextEdit on my iBook as of late. I’m sick of using MS Word, and copying from Word into the Capital Gains uploading/editing/publishing site ain’t a good thing.

MS Word adds some kind of crazy coding that shows up when it is pasted into blogging software–I have the same issue here with WordPress and on the software the Examiner.com uses.

So, the other day I had a some text selected and did the ol’ Right Click and noticed the ‘Speech’ option, followed by the ‘Start Speaking’ command.  I had been aware of Mac’s text to speech in the past, but never used it. I figured, why not?

I greatly enjoyed listening to my iBook read off my short article to me–but then I realized this could serve a helpful purpose: proofreading.

I am a fast reader. Very fast. And because of this, I tend to mentally “skip” words when I don’t read aloud (this is pretty common actually).  I’m good about reading stuff aloud when proofreading, but even then I go too fast at times.

Because the Text to Speech voice reads at much, much slower pace it helps me stay on track. Plus, there is the addition of the computer just reading aloud, which helps if I missed a word while writing (I also type very fast) or mistype a word.

I also noticed that it helped with some of my word flow a bit. I would listen to a section and think “I don’t like how that sounds” and rewrite it.

If you are a Mac user, play around with the Text to Speech option in TextEdit, it is an easy way to aid your proofreading.

I’m toying with using it to record a character voice for the Magic of Eyri Podcast. We’ll see! It isn’t a perfect system, as the Text to Speech has problems with words such as “live” (as in “to live”) and “live” (as in “live at the Fillmore”).

Back on January 20th (was it that long ago? Wow) I had a feature article run over at Lansing Capital Gains about being single in Lansing (Single in the City).

The funny thing here is that when I turned the story in, perhaps early Fall, I was single–but, by the time it ran, I had a new girlfriend. I kind of had a gut feeling that would happen, which was why I agreed to write the story (and make fun of myself quite a bit).

I enjoyed writing this story a lot because I was allowed to go first person and showcase some of my humor a bit more–although my editor did cut my favorite joke, which was about me wearing my Chewie Is My Co-Pilot t-shirt while trying to pick up geeky girls.

Or something.

The shirt was designed by R Stevens, creator of one of my favorite webcomics, Diesel Sweeties.

I did manage to wear my Threadless, A Simple Plan shirt for the photo shoot however.

I kind of regret not wearing my Chewie shirt, but since the photos were being taken at Pinball Pete’s Arcade in East Lansing, the Space Invader referencing shirt won out (another option I considered was my Yooper Steez shirt, designed by all-around-awesome Lansing dude, Justin “Bugsy” Sailor).

I caught some (friendly) flack from those who knew I had a new girlfriend, yet was writing about being single.  The girlfriend in question was fine with it, as I told her about the story way before it ran.

But the story isn’t so much about my being single, but more how I went about meeting people, expanding my circle of friends and places to go on dates around Lansing.

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Speaking of Lansing Capital Gains, I was brought on to be a weekly contributor recently.  Starting on February 17th, I’ll be writing four development stories a week.  These are very, very short–only 200 words at the most–so it equals out to less than a feature article (1,000 words) a week.

There will be a bit of a learning curve for me, as I have to find leads and such, but I’m getting a lot of help from my editor and fellow contributors.

I consider myself the furthest thing from a journalist, but I am very happy to have this opportunity to see if I can handle the rigors of a regular writing gig. So far, so good.

And if you live in Lansing and have any leads for me, drop me a line.