Do a review..no matter what

 This is going to sound self-serving, and quite frankly, it is.

You see, I write manuscripts for magicians.  I have almost 50 of them on Lybrary.com, covering a gamut of ideas, scripts, and tricks.

And very few of them have reviews.    And reviews are - to me - of the utmost importance.

Not because they help others decide if they want the manuscript or not, but because it helps ME figure out what my readers want to read.

I need to know if I'm unclear.  Or if I don't give enough options.  Or if my material is too...corny?, sophisticated?, literate?, whatever.

And without a review, I can't tell what the readers are thinking.

And there's 2 types of review.    

The first is a simple 1 out of 5 stars.  Which is ok, but if you give me 3 stars or less, I have NO IDEA why.  Which means I can't correct anything, or even provide you more information if you're confused on something I wrote.

I include my email address in every manuscript, and literally BEG readers to contact me....and it's never happened yet.

So please...write reviews.  Even bad ones are better than nothing.  And if there's something I'm doing wrong, maybe I can change it.

But until you tell me...I'm in the dark.

www.LarryBrodahl.com

www.BestOmahaMagician.com

A day of ...things...

Today is research for an upcoming vacation, which I've pretty much finished.

 I'll also be converting a lamp to a touch 3 way dimmer lamp.  I have the parts off of the net, just have to wire things together and not start a fire.

 Also will be practicing for the upcoming lecture for the OMS.   15 min lecture on shuffles, cuts, and forces.    Fun!

 BTW:  The quick cooking bread I made yesterday was quite delish.   Highly recommend it.

 

www.LarryBrodahl.com

www.BestOmahaMagician.com

 

Day of other things.

Today is not a particularly good magic day.  I do have a 15 minute lecture coming up, so I did run through my material a few times, but other than that???

 

• Made a new bread recipe using the microwave and vinegar.  Looks amazing.
• tightened runner on the stairs.
• Cleaned the basement
• Move some less used muffin tins, etc. to the basement to make the upstairs shelving easier to use.
• pre-baked my bacon so I merely have to nuke the frozen bacon in the mornings.
• some research on SEO.

So a quiet day.  Do have an interesting plot and move that I'm dabbling with.  Probably will never come to fruition, but maybe......

 

When it's hard to practice, maybe this will help.

 There are some tricks that are just hard to practice.   They're boring to do over and over.  

Yet to get good at them, you must do EXACTLY that.  Practice over and over.

And of course, resetting and using the bills over and over wears out the bills, which means you have to rebuild the bills, etc.   Which removes even more time from practicing.

Well one of my "helpful" ideas for this is to use dummy props.

I'm currently working on a redesign of a trick I did quite a bit about 15 years ago.   And this trick requires SPRING BILLS.    [ If you've read my other posts, you're well aware of this. ]

Well spring bills are the most annoying things to practice with.   Every practice takes about 5 minutes to reset - and that's just the bills!

This means that the 3 minute routine takes 8 minutes to practice, and most of that time is spent folding up the bills.    That's not practice, that's torture.

So, what I did was make a dummy stand in for the bills.   I took some playing cards and traced the outline of the bills on the cards.    Then with a razor knife and a straight edge, I cut out the lines.  [ Yes, it would have been smarter to use scissors, but smarter isn't always the way I work. ]

Anyhow, after I had a block of cards that gave me the same feel/thickness/dimensions as the folded bills, I taped the block together.

So I have this odd little block of taped cards that I use to practice with.  Because honestly, I could care less if I see the bills open.  I just want to rehearse.

Now, a 3 minute trick takes 3:30 to reset.

THIS is reasonable. 

www.LarryBrodahl.com

www.BestOmahaMagician.com

Did a talk -

 Did a speech in Lincoln last night at the Lied Center.   Never been there.

What a nightmare of driving.   NO PARKING, roundabouts that drop you off in roundabouts.....Lord, the designer of their streets deserves a good slapping.

The talk itself went well, I think.

About 50 people or so.  I was allocated a DEFINITE length of time I could take, and I hit shy of the mark by 34 seconds.  Which I'm fairly proud about.

But everything else about the process was poorly run and inefficient.

Won't work there again.

www.LarryBrodahl.com

www.BestOmahaMagician.com

 

CHEAT SHEET - 

 

Practicing - a fatal error

 If there's one thing that 98% of all magicians do poorly, it's practice.

 A ton of magical methods require nonchalance, and a carefree handling.   And the only way you can get to that degree of casualness is to be casual.

And to be casual means that you've done the sleight/move/script so much that you don't have to talk or think about it.

It just happens.

 I personally keep decks of cards laying around the house, and as I walk through a room, I'll pick up a deck and run through a couple of moves.  Moves that I've done for years.

But I'm in a no stress, can't-get-caught environment, so I'm practicing the moves without any worries.

And eventually, this worry-free attitude gets 'baked' into the handling of the moves and you can just not think about it.

And if you're not concentrating...if you're not thinking about...it you're not even conscious of  doing a move......the audience won't be either.

So if you think you need to practice a move 100 times to get it perfect, try bumping that by 10.   Do it 1,000 times and see if the move isn't much, much better.

www.LarryBrodahl.com

www.BestOmahaMagician.com

 

A first

 Somehow, somewhere, people have gotten the idea that I can give talks and lectures about magic.

I seriously have no idea why anyone would think that.  But they do.

So, this fall I'm giving a talk at the Criss Library at UNO about science and magic and Robert Houdin.

And this coming Saturday, I'm giving a talk on magic in Nebraska at the Lied Center.

I'm pretty sure that if I do enough of these talks, people will quit thinking that I CAN give talks like this.  /s

www.LarryBrodahl.com

www.BestOmahaMagician.com

Giveth and Taketh

 Ah, the universe has smiled - at least a little - on me.  

The domain of WWW.BestOmahaMagician.com now successfully redirects to WWW.LarryBrodahl.com.

Finally!

Now mind you, the universe also pooped on my plans to go to Alaska in late Sept.   Apparently, after Sept 15th, the entire state shuts down.

Oy!

But still batting 500!

Ah, the lovely internet....

 In a vague effort to push my website more, I decided to pick a more generic URL ( www.BestOmahaMagician.com) and have it redirect to my website ( www.LarryBrodahl.com ).

Well, of course nothing is that simple.  I went to my hosting company, looked over the instructions for doing a redirect, as it's called....seemed simple.

Purchased a domain name.    And THEN found out that the plan I had with the hosting company did NOT support redirection.

Argh!   Lovely time to find that out.

And they couldn't refund the domain cost, as that money goes to a DIFFERENT company that handles the DNS.

Fortunately for me, they understood the issues involved, and have worked with me to get this straightened out.

So, within 2 days BestOmahaMagician.com should redirect seamlessly to LarryBrodahl.com

Nifty tip on springbills

 Quick post on something I learned.  

If you are making or rebuilding spring bills, you can cut the tip off like this.

It looks the same in use, but it saves a little space, which can help when doing large loads.

 

I actually have a couple of free PDFs on Hint and tips if anyone is interested.

www.LarryBrodahl.com 

www.BestOmahaMagician.com