The Sorcery of Shipping
If you can't ship in two days, you're toast.
~ Shippo.com Advertisement
Online commerce requires a bit of magic. To get the purchased thing from a screen to the consumer is tricky. Finding faster ways to ship is akin to sorcery; I don't understand either but believe both are real.
Shippo.com figures out how to quickly get a product from the screen to front porches. They seem to be doing well. Taking a lesson returns me to the writing table. An idea is like an online purchase because ideas are unique to an individual. A purchase has one recipient's name in "to the attention of:" and a writing concept lives in one person's mind.
If I'm given a concept to write, and do not develop the idea, it's because I don't understand the magic. Making money on the internet seems like magic unless the process is understood. Then it's not magic but it can be a money machine. Before hearing the Shippo.com commercial, publishing seemed like magic.
Seeing the parallel between publishing and online commerce, writing is less akin to sorcery. It would seem like witchcraft to sit quietly, believing content to be received by the Invisible, and place my fingers on audible pieces of plastic. To stare into a flat piece of illuminated plastic, and trust that letters will pour from my imagination in patterns other people will understand, seems weird. From time to time I stop rubbing the little buttons and mumble to myself a bit.
Sometimes I laugh at the patterns of letters and sometimes they make me cry. A voodoo priest would be able to make other people laugh or cry when, at a distance, they look into illuminated windows to somehow see what I've done. I am not a warlock, voodoo priest or magician.
I am a writer.
If I can't ship in two days, I'm toast.
I need to continue taking the content God gives me and pivot in obedient keystrokes. Mark Batterson says that writing is an act of obedience for him; that the sound of his life being surrendered to the Lord is the clickety clack. I see more of what he's saying.
Content is, for reasons God only knows, entrusted to me. Some of I hear and see frightens me. I am learning to get the content out of my mind and into the atmosphere; learning how to ship. Andy Rooney wrote Out Of My Mind and reading his writing is giving me courage. At the bottom of what produced his book is a discipline of shipping content.
Fright of quality and personal baggage halts shipping. It's better to get a beta version out than it is to sit on the draft indefinitely. I"m sitting on drafts but am learning to ship. Obedience demands no less. Why should God continue entrusting content to someone who doesn't pivot and ship?
I want to be a steward, want to be used of the Lord; to be trusted with content. There's nothing magical about obeying the Lord. Miracles seem like sorcery until their processes are more fully understood. I don't understand miracles and don't understand sorcery but I do understand how to write.
"If God has given you something to do, and the ability, why on earth wouldn't you do it?"
~ Stephen King
~ Shippo.com Advertisement
Online commerce requires a bit of magic. To get the purchased thing from a screen to the consumer is tricky. Finding faster ways to ship is akin to sorcery; I don't understand either but believe both are real.
Shippo.com figures out how to quickly get a product from the screen to front porches. They seem to be doing well. Taking a lesson returns me to the writing table. An idea is like an online purchase because ideas are unique to an individual. A purchase has one recipient's name in "to the attention of:" and a writing concept lives in one person's mind.
If I'm given a concept to write, and do not develop the idea, it's because I don't understand the magic. Making money on the internet seems like magic unless the process is understood. Then it's not magic but it can be a money machine. Before hearing the Shippo.com commercial, publishing seemed like magic.
Seeing the parallel between publishing and online commerce, writing is less akin to sorcery. It would seem like witchcraft to sit quietly, believing content to be received by the Invisible, and place my fingers on audible pieces of plastic. To stare into a flat piece of illuminated plastic, and trust that letters will pour from my imagination in patterns other people will understand, seems weird. From time to time I stop rubbing the little buttons and mumble to myself a bit.Sometimes I laugh at the patterns of letters and sometimes they make me cry. A voodoo priest would be able to make other people laugh or cry when, at a distance, they look into illuminated windows to somehow see what I've done. I am not a warlock, voodoo priest or magician.
I am a writer.
If I can't ship in two days, I'm toast.
I need to continue taking the content God gives me and pivot in obedient keystrokes. Mark Batterson says that writing is an act of obedience for him; that the sound of his life being surrendered to the Lord is the clickety clack. I see more of what he's saying.Content is, for reasons God only knows, entrusted to me. Some of I hear and see frightens me. I am learning to get the content out of my mind and into the atmosphere; learning how to ship. Andy Rooney wrote Out Of My Mind and reading his writing is giving me courage. At the bottom of what produced his book is a discipline of shipping content.
Fright of quality and personal baggage halts shipping. It's better to get a beta version out than it is to sit on the draft indefinitely. I"m sitting on drafts but am learning to ship. Obedience demands no less. Why should God continue entrusting content to someone who doesn't pivot and ship?
I want to be a steward, want to be used of the Lord; to be trusted with content. There's nothing magical about obeying the Lord. Miracles seem like sorcery until their processes are more fully understood. I don't understand miracles and don't understand sorcery but I do understand how to write.
"If God has given you something to do, and the ability, why on earth wouldn't you do it?"
~ Stephen King
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