Can you predict the future?

Here's the best video I could find showing the surf at the Huntington Beach Pier.  I moved to H.B. in January 1987, and lived there most of the time until late 2008.  So when I imagine sitting on a beach, looking at the waves, this is the one I imagine.  The vast majority of days the waves are 2-4 feet high, with 5 foot sets.  The surf shown in this clip is all from big days, and barrels happen sometimes, but are really rare in H.B..  

It's a simple question:  Can you predict the future?  

Most people would instinctively say, "No," then hesitate.  You probably think it's a trick question, since I'm starting this blog post with it.  Or maybe you want more information, you want details, "How far into the future?"  

For an example, will the closest traffic light to your house turn green, at some point, about an hour from now?  You most likely said, "Yes."  If not, you might want to move to a better location, with less backed up traffic.  You just predicted the future.  How did you do that?  Traffic lights are a machine, one that works on a timed pattern.  Green, yellow, red.  So unless it's broken, that light will turn green, just about an hour from now.  You can make this judgement, predict the future of that light, based on its reliability, and on a pattern.  There's a really small possibility that the light won't keep working.  A storm or other power outage could happen, and that light could lose power, and then your prediction would be wrong.  But the odds are well in your favor, due to the light's reliability, and its steady pattern of changing, that it will turn green just about an hour from now, within a couple minutes or so.  

Now, let's step this idea far into the future.  Think about your favorite ocean beach.  It could be one you visit often, if you live on a coast.  It could be one you've been to on vacation.  It could be a beach you've seen in movies or on video.  Picture the waves on that beach.  Now, how big will the waves be, at exactly this time, 50 years from today?  Can you make a good prediction?  

Back in the late 1990's, I lived on 15th Street, in downtown Huntington Beach, for nearly 3 years.  If I wasn't working in the morning, I'd often ride my bike down to the 6th Street donut shop, right on Pacific Coast Highway, and get a donut or two, and a Diet Coke.  Then I'd cross the street, sit on the edge of the upper parking lot level, and watch the surfers, while I ate my donuts.  I never did learn to surf while living in H.B., but I went Boogie boarding a bit, and was surrounded by surfers, and surf talk.  On most days there, on the north side of the H.B. Pier, the waves would be 2-3 feet high, with 5 foot sets.  That's about average.  "Sets" are the groups of large waves that come every few minutes, usually caused by a storm hundreds or thousands of miles away.  

So if I said, "Fifty years from today, at this time, the waves on the north side of the Huntington Beach Pier will be 2-3 feet high, with 5 foot sets," there's a good chance I will be right, or pretty close.  About 60% of the time, maybe more, that's about right.  Now there could be a storm across the Pacific at that time, and the waves would be overhead, say 6-7 foot high, like some in the video above.  So my 50 year prediction would be wrong.  Or if I hedged it a little bit, and said, "In 50 years, those waves will be 2-4 feet high, with 5-6 foot sets," I'd raise my chances of being right, by expanding my target range slightly. 

So I just made a 50 year prediction that probably has a 40% to 65% chance of being right.  How?  From experience of watching the waves daily in H.B., over several years, I know the average height.  It would take some outside element, a big storm at the right time, in the right part of the ocean, to prove me wrong.  Also, waves are a regular natural cycle, they are something that keeps happening, and go up in down in size, influenced by a whole range of oceanic and atmospheric influences.  So I'm betting that the same basic cycle will exist in 50 years, because I've seen it in Huntington Beach over the 34 years since I first watched those waves.  They are pretty much the same now as they were in 1987.

So when you can find some repeating pattern or cycle, and it works over many years, you can make reasonably good predictions, well into the future.  Not perfect by any means, but reasonably good.  A forecast would be a better name.  You can forecast what the waves will be like, with a reasonable degree of certainty, barring major outside events.  

If a huge breakwater is built offshore, blocking the wave action a half mile out, then there won't be hardly any waves.  Also, climate change could alter the weather patterns, and the wave patterns, which could make the average waves larger or smaller.  But you can make a prediction, even fifty years into the future, if you have some kind of long term waves or cycles involved.  

There are waves and cycles in all kinds of things.  The weather, the seasons, ocean waves, planets revolving around the sun, stars appearing at certain times from our viewpoint, meteor showers and comets appearing at certain times, all these things go in cycles of some sort.  You get the idea.  

There are patterns, and sometimes pretty regular cycles, in the doings of animals and humans as well.  Will ducks fly south this fall?  Yep.  By and large, most of them will.  How about 20 years form now?  Yep, it's a safe bet most of them will fly south then, too.  

So you CAN make relatively good predictions, even years into the future, if you have some kind of long term cycle to work with.  Not perfect predictions, but reasonably good predictions.  You can predict a wide variety of things days, months, or years into the future, if they go in some kind of cycle or wave.  Astronomer's can tell you when Hailey's comet will come into view 2,000 years from now, to the day. Yes, there are things that could change that.  The comet, or Earth, could be hit by huge asteroids, or a black hole could sweep through and suck the Earth into oblivion.  But those are tiny, very remote possibilities.  Chances are, the astronomer's prediction will be right, 2,000 years from now, on when you can see Hailey's comet.  

But can you make 99% accurate predictions years into the future?  That seems impossible.  Think about your favorite beach again.  Look at the waves, watch them crash, and look at how big they are.  Now, 50 years from today, will there still be waves hitting that beach?  

Heh, heh, heh.

-Steve Emig

That time I asked a bestselling novelist for writing advice

For a 5 minute interview, this is actually a good look into the mind and creativity of Sharleen Cooper Cohen.  She's written several novels, like The Ladies of Beverly Hills, and many other projects for stage and screen.  This 2011 interview is from the promotion for her stage adaptation of An Officer and a Gentleman, a hit movie from 1982.  

In 1995, when American Gladiators ended, so did my work as stage crew guy.  I burned out on TV production work as a crew guy, and wound up a furniture mover back down in Orange County.  I'd been working as an office mover since 1992 for much of the year, and working on TV show crews in the summers.  One of the moving companies I worked for was Beverly Hills Moving and Storage, although we were based out of Carson, right next to Compton, 25 miles south. But with that name, we got a lot of calls to move homes in Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and that area.  

I was doing a ton of reading in those years, and trying to find my voice as a writer.  I wrote a fair amount of stuff that no one ever saw, trying out different ideas for short stories, novels, or movie screenplays.  Mostly I made a zine every now and then for my BMX friends, or a zine of poetry.  I wasn't sure where I wanted to go next, and just kept reading tons of books, and listening to a lot of audio books, as well.

One moving job took two of us to a very expensive house in the West part of the San Fernando Valley.  Although I didn't mind working hard, we were happy to hear that we were only moving the clothes and office supplies of the couple, and a few favorite pieces of furniture, to their beach house.  I remember the house being loaded with a lot of contemporary art, of all types.  That included at statue of a woman who looked so lifelike, I actually touched her to see if she was real, since she didn't move as I walked by carrying things. 

The couple was friendly, and in the course of the move, I learned the woman was a novelist, with several popular novels out in print, a couple of which were bestsellers.  The woman was Sharleen Cooper Cohen, and she had written seven novels, published between 1979 and 1994.  When I asked her what she'd written, The Ladies of Beverly Hills was a novel I had heard of in the press.  So as a furniture mover who was a wannabe writer, I got up the courage and asked what her best advice was to be a writer.  We were in her writing room, when I asked.  

Her answer was simple, "Just glue your butt to the chair and write."  

Honestly, it wasn't the advice I wanted to hear.  But it stuck in my mind, and here I am, 20-25 years later, knowing she was right, and sharing it with all of you reading this post. 

As young people interested, maybe even obsessed with, writing "something great" some day, young writers, like me back then, always want to hear some trick, or some magic formula.  We want to hear how to find the right subject matter, or how to know it's going to be a hit book before we start.  We want to hear some little known method to writing a bestseller, or hit screenplay.  

But there is no secret.  It's a process, at some point a spark of inspiration, a cool idea, comes for a piece.  Then comes the real trick to writing.  Sitting down for as long as it takes, and actually writing the thing.  Then usually re-writing it.  Then either self-publishing it, or looking for someone else to publish it.  There's a lot to being a creative person, particularly a working creative person, like an author.  But when it comes right down to it, sitting down and writing, day after day, for a long project like a book or screenplay, is what it all comes down to.  You can't publish or sell what you haven't written.  Thank you to Sharleen Cooper Cohen for the simple, straightforward advice to a young writer moving your clothes and furniture 25 years ago.

Simple and free SEO for your blog, website, online work

Promoting your own creative work, isn't selling out, it's just sharing.  If you want people to see, read, watch, or experience it, then you have to let them know.  This is a sarcastic Sharpie doodle I did a while back.  

If you do any kind of work online, like blog, write articles, upload music, a You Tube channel, an Etsy or eBay store, asmall business website, whatever, then you know those three frustrating letters. SEO.  Yep, Search Engine Optimization.  It sounds scary, even daunting.  People think the evil algorithms are out to push their online work to the edge of the cyber world and crush their dreams. 

In the last couple years, there's been a huge upswing in free speech suppression, censoring, and there are some truly evil intended algorithms in places, it seems.  But generally speaking, it's still not really hard to get your web page, whatever kind of site it is, to rise up in Google and Bing rankings.  In the last 13 years, I've started over 25 blogs, written over 2,400 blog posts, on personal blogs, and pulled in over 439,000 page views.  This blog post details that.  So while I haven't made money directly from my blogs, I have got the SEO part pretty well down.  So here's my #1 idea:

Put 20 links from a blog or other website of yours to your new blog.  

Seriously, that's it.  I started learning about SEO in 2009, and this has been my Go To starting SEO technique since then.  Most of my blogs are LOCKED in the #1 spot on the first page of Google results.  Same with Bing, though I never use Bing.  Check for yourself:  Steve Emig: The White Bear, Crazy California 43, #sharpiescribblestyle (my sharpie art hashtag,which I OWN, use "images"in the search), Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now, Book 1, Block Bikes Blog, Freestyle BMX Tales.  Those are all my work.  Locked in the #1 spot.  

If you have a blog already (and you should have a personal blog for this reason alone, if no other), then just go into your blog posts.  Either go into your most popular posts, or the last 20 on your blog.  Somewhere in the blog post, simply add something like:  "Hey, I have a new blog called _____________, check it out."  Link that whole line to your new blog, website, online store, whatever.  Do that 5 or 10 times, each day, until you've got 20 links from your blog to your new site.  

Then just let it set, and keep working on the new site.  As the "spiders," or whatever they are, crawl through the internet's data, they'll see those links, and your new site will rise slowly up the ranks.  You can usually be on the first page of Google results in 1-2 weeks.  It usually takes 1-3 months to hit the #1 spot, depending how entrenched the current #1 is.  You may bounce around the top 3 or 4 spots for a while.  But if you keep blogging, or updating your website, you'll eventually LOCK into the #1 spot. 

If you don't have a website or blog to link FROM, to your new site.  Go to Blogger, and start a personal blog.  It takes about 3 minutes to start a blog.  It takes a little time to pick a theme, and do the basic design.  If you have something you want to blog about, then do that theme for your blog.  If you're just starting a blog to use for backlinks, then do 20 posts of something.  "My 20 biggest fishing catches."  "My 20 favorite vacation photos."  "The 20 best photos of my cat" (kid, aardvark, llama, '57 Chevy, dogsled, whatever).  Take the time to create a Blogger blog with 20 posts, and put a photos and 1 or 2 sentences about the photo, on each post.  That's all you need.  If you don't know how to do any part of that, go to YouTube, and look up a How-to video.  That's how I learned this shit, and I was a digitally retarded, and a Luddite back in 2008, when I got started. 

Once you do this, you have a blog with 20 posts sitting out there on the interwebs.  Anytime you need to promote a new site, put one link from each post on that blog to your new site, over 2-4 days.  Then wait.  That's it.  The algorithms go to work... for you.  Seriously, that's the biggest part of SEO... for anything.  

As you do more blog posts or update your new website, link to it from your various social media pages, and wherever else.  More links help, as time goes on.  But 20 good backlinks, from your own site, is all you need to start getting a site moving up the ranks.  Now get to it.  You're welcome. 

Elizabeth Gilbert's "genius" TED Talk

Worried about how to follow the freakish success of her bestselling book, Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert put together a now legendary Ted Talk.  I just listened to this again.  I think everyone doing creative work should watch this talk every once in a while. 

There is no Failure: The Five Levels of Throwing a Pot on a Wheel

 

Here's  good video showing how you throw a cool shaped vase on a potter's wheel.  When I was in high school, my friend Darrin and I always sat down at the wheel aiming to throw something like this.  It didn't always work.

In my junior year at Boise High School, my best friend Darrin took pottery class.  I didn't.  Drafting was my "easy A" class that year.  Darrin got really into pottery.  By the second semester, the teacher would let him go into the pottery room at lunch and throw pots when no one else was there.  Being his best friend, I started tagging along.  We'd talk about whatever was on our minds as I watched him throw a pot.  

After a few days, he showed me how to knead the air bubbles out of a lump of clay, and I started messing around, building things out of clay on a table, as he threw pots on a wheel.  In another week or so, he showed me the basics of throwing a pot, starting with how to put the clay on the wheel, center it, and push the hole in the center.  I got that down. Within a couple of weeks, I began throwing small pots myself, usually tearing them off the wheel, and tossing them in the pug mill.  That's a machine where we threw extra clay, and things that didn't work.  The machine recycled it into new clay.  

By the end of our junior year, I was throwing pots at lunch that I could pass off as mediocre first year pottery student pots.  Since I wasn't in the class, and hadn't paid the materials fee, technically I wasn't supposed to do that.  But I took home a few small pots before I even took the class.  I signed up for pottery my senior year, and Darrin and I often went in at lunch to throw extra pots.  We both wound up making whiskey jugs that we sold to mountain men for $5 each.  Those were the guys who dressed up as old time mountain men, and had big rendezvous up in the mountains, where they'd throw tomahawks, shoot muzzle loading rifles, drink whiskey from handmade jugs, and have a good ol' time for the weekend.  

As Darrin and I talked about pottery, we thought up more ideas to try.  We started sketching ideas for different shapes of vases in our school notebooks.  Every day when we sat down at the wheel, we had some really cool vase in our head.  That was our goal.  But clay seems to have a mind of its own at times.  Sometimes we'd pull the cylinder up too high, it would get wobbly, and fall over.  Sometimes it would get too wet, and collapse.  Other times we'd just make a movement that would send the pot off center, and screw it up.  

No matter the outcome, it was always fun to sit down at the wheel to throw.  Sometimes we ended with a cool pot, sitting on the wheel to dry, and later fire and glaze. Sometimes we'd completely screw up, and scrape all the clay off the wheel with a little piece of fishing line, cutting the lump remaining clear from the wheel. We came to the conclusion that there was no failure when throwing pots.  If we screwed up, there was a next step, and a step after that.  Here are our classifications of the results of a sitting at the potter's wheel.

One- A vase.  Bottlenecks were the hardest for us to throw well, and one with a great looking profile was the goal.

Two- A spittoon.  Not as cool as a vase, but something we could glaze and take home.

Three- A bowl.  Much lamer than a spittoon, but if it was a decent size, it could still be something to fire, glaze, and take home.

Four- A ashtray.  Lots of people still smoked in the 80's.  Not hard to make, but still something to take home, and we could always find a smoker who wanted a free ashtray.

Five- A learning experience.  Even if we wound up with nothing, and scraped all the clay off the wheel, it still didn't feel like a failure.  It was just fun to sit down and throw, even when there was nothing to show for it.

In the years after, when I got really into BMX freestyle, along with my skater friends, it was the same thing.  Even if we didn't invent or land a new trick, it was still fun to get out and ride or skate.  I think the same idea applies to all creative work.  Some days you wind up with something really cool, some days you wind up with a learning experience. Most days you wind up with something in between.  

But it was still good to sit down and write, draw, paint, play music, freestyle, skate, snowboard, or just do something creative.  As worst, it's always a learning experience.  If you go at creative work with this attitude, you spend a lot less time beating yourself up when things don't work out exactly as you planned.  You just call it a learning experience, and move on, to try and create again.

What would you most like to read?

 Over the last week or so, I've been trying to figure out what to focus on.  I've written over 2,400 blog posts  in the last 12 1/2 years or so.  A lot of people have read them.  Haven't made a dime off the writing itself, but I  built a following in the Old School BMX freestyle world, and sold a bunch of my Sharpie art to people in that world.  

But life has brought me back to the area where I first decided to "get serious" about writing, and try to write "something great," 30 years ago.  Now I have a pretty good grasp of how I write (and create in other ways), and why I write.  It became obvious it's time to move into a different part of my writing life.  

These times in between projects are the weirdest.  I'm kind of drifting on multiple levels, and this is a pivot away from trying to make money with my Sharpie art, to working more on writing.  As I thought about what direction to head next, I kept thinking of one of the best novels about writing I've read.  Seymor, an introduction, by J.D. Salinger.  I won't totally give it away, but there's a part where the older brother asks the younger, "What would you most want to read?  Write that.  

So that's what I've done the last 2 or 3 days.  I wanted to find what I was actually excited about writing.  An idea, a concept came together.  I have a direction again.  Feels good.  More on this project later.

When you write a book... meme

 The one meme I've made  about writing.  Here are a few others I've made, not about writing.

We've all had that roommate with the crazy girlfriend in our 20's...

What my first zine did for me

$100 and a T-shirt is the best zine documentary I've seen.  It's pretty much the only zine documentary.  This is early 90's zine culture, and a lot like the 80's zine culture in BMX and skateboarding, except we never had zine shows/get-togethers.  We'd just meet up at competitions, and mail each other zines in between.

At the end of August in 1985, I finished my summer job at the Boise Fun Spot, packed up my gigantic, 1971, shit brown, Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo down to San Jose, California.  My family had moved there in June.  I unpacked, got situated in my new room, and lined up a job at a Pizza Hut within a couple of weeks.  My focus then was on how to find and meet the riders of the San Francisco Bay Area BMX freestyle scene.  It was the home of the Curb Dogs and the Skyway Factory team.  Pro freestylers Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer, Robert Peterson, Hugo Gonzalez, and Rick Allison lived somewhere in the Bay Area, along with a bunch of great amateurs.  BMX freestyle was my life then, at age 19, and I wanted to meet the other riders around.  

Goofy AF photo of me balancing on my Skyway T/A, at the Boise Fun Spot, summer of 1985.  Photo by Vaughn Kidwell.

I'd read about zines, little self-published booklets, in an issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine.  For some reason, the idea appealed to me.  I didn't think of myself as a writer then, I kind of wanted to be a photographer, but I only had a Kodak 110 Instamatic camera.  I went to the huge San Jose swap meet, and bought an ancient, manual, Royal typewriter, that came in a carrying case, for $15.  I launched my first zine, San Jose Stylin', with the Kodak and the Royal, and money from my Pizza Hut job.  

I used a bunch of photos I shot in Boise, and on a trip to an AFA contest in Venice Beach that summer.  I laid out where I wanted the photos to be on a sheet of typing paper, traced around them in pencil, and then put that piece of paper into the typewriter, and typed around the photo spots.  Then I put the actual photos on the paper with Scotch tape.  I didn't even know zines were supposed to be folded in half at first, like little books.  I'd never actually seen a real zine, only read about them.  My first 2 or 3 zines were just three sheets of paper, with Xeroxed photos and words on both sides, stapled in the top left corner, like a school report.  

I worked the second shift at Pizza Hut, and most of my zine work was done late at night, after I got home, from about 1:30 to 4:00 am.  The process of producing a zine did a lot for me that I didn't realize then.  First of all, it gave me a creative outlet to focus on.  Secondly, a zine is only a zine if you finish it, and have something to hand out. I had been a big daydreamer my whole life.  But I rarely followed through on anything.  

I grew up in small town Ohio, then New Mexico and Idaho.  Doing creative work for a living wasn't a thing.  I only met one professional artist as a kid.  People I knew, and then my friends and I, would hang out, drink beer, and dream up all kinds of crazy ideas.  "Hey, we should make a soap opera about stoners and call it, 'As the bong bubbles...'"  "We should start a fishing TV show."  "We should invent a new kind of fishing reel that doesn't get the line all tangled."  Being an artist or filmmaker or something like that simply wasn't an option where and when I grew up.  You maybe went to college, then you got a job that you didn't like at one of the big companies in town.  After 40 years of misery, and good pay, you got a retirement party, a gold watch, and a pension.  That was the life I was told I would have growing up.  

But my zine was fun.  It was work.  It was creative.  It broke me out of my repressive shyness a little.  I could write whatever I wanted.  I could publish my own photos.   I could interview pro BMX freestylers.  I had to follow through and finish each issue, because people kept asking me about the next one.  That's the biggest lesson from my first zine, I learned to buckle down and actually finish a creative project.  After a while, it became a habit.  That's a big lesson of BMX freestyle, and action sports in general.  No one pushes you to do them (or at least then they didn't).  Riding was self-directed, we pushed ourselves.  When we fell and got hurt, we had to get ourselves back up, and keep trying. You don't get good by sitting around and thinking about it, it was something we had to physically get out and do.  And with my zine, I learned to follow through, and finish it, issue after issue.  

As an up-and coming rider, I decided that I wouldn't ask pro riders for autographs, like most riders did.  I would ask for a handshake, "Hey, I'm Steve Emig, I make a zine, nice to meet you."  That makes a huge difference.  I also had the sense to send a copy to EACH member of the editorial staff of the three main BMX publishing companies.  Wizard Publications put out BMX Action and FREESTYLIN', Hi-Torque put out BMX Plus, and later American Freestyler.  Super BMX had their mag, and later a freestyle magazine.  I wanted the editors to go out on their coffee break and say, "Hey, did you guys get the new San Jose Stylin' zine?  It's pretty cool." 

 The "Zines" article in the August 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine, where San Jose Stylin' was listed first.

 Much to my surprise, that simple idea worked, and I got a chance to write a freelance article for FREESTYLIN' after about six zines.  By the time it got on the news stands (about three months lag time back then), I got hired at Wizard, working for both BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines. My zine, started with a manual typewriter and a Kodak instamatic camera, changed the entire course of my life.  Suddenly, a month after my 20th birthday, I moved to Southern California, and was part of the BMX industry.  That was a big jump from a kid riding in a few parades, in a city with three freestylers, in Boise.

My 11th and final issue of San Jose Stylin' was maybe 20 or 24 zine pages, and I had a (snail) mailing list of 120 people across the U.S..  I still didn't think of myself as a writer, but I had moved up to a Pentax 35mm camera, and was getting better at taking photos.  More than anything, finishing creative projects had become a habit.  Instead of dreaming new ideas up every couple of days, I actually got to work on some of them.  It's easy to start a great creative idea.  But working artists of any kind have to actually FINISH projects, often on a deadline.  My first zine really helped me figure that out.