justin brown amazon Archives - Page 5 of 42

Harry Potter

Philosopher’s Stone – 77,325
Chamber of Secrets – 84,799
Prisoner of Azkaban – 106,821
Goblet of Fire – 190,858
Order of the Phoenix – 257,154
Half Blood Prince – 169,441
Deathly Hallows – 198,227

Lord of the Rings

The Hobbit – 95,022
The Lord of the Rings – 455,125
The Two Towers – 143,436
The Return of the King – 134,462

Other Famous Books

22,416 – The Mouse and the Motorcycle – Beverly Cleary
30,644 – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
36,363 – Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
46,118 – Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
47,094 – The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
49,459 – Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
59,900 – Lord of the Flies – William Golding
63,766 – Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
64,768 – The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury
66,950 – Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
67,203 – The Fault in Our Stars – John Green
67,707 – The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
73,404 – The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
78,462 – The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
80,398 – The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
84,845 – Gilead – Robinson, Marilynne
85,199 – The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
87,846 – Pere Goriot – Honore de Balzac
87,978 – Persuasion – Jane Austen
88,942 – Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
91,419 – Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan
97,364 – Anne of Green Gables – Lucy Maud Montgomery
99,121 – To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee
100,388 – To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee
112,815 – The Golden Compass – Philip Pullman
123,378 – Atonement – Ian McEwan
127,776 – Life on the Mississippi – Mark Twain
134,710 – Schindler’s List – Thomas Keneally
135,420 – A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
138,087 – Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
138,098 – Snow Falling on Cedars – Guterson, David
138,138 – 20000 Leagues Under the Sea – Jules Verne
144,523 – One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
145,092 – A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith
145,265 – Cold Sassy Tree – Olive Ann Burns
145,469 – Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
155,887 – Emma – Jane Austen
155,960 – Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
156,154 – Watership Down – Richard Adams
157,665 – Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
159,276 – The Kitchen God’s Wife – Amy Tan
161,511 – Cold Mountain – Charles Frazier
166,622 – Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
169,389 – White Teeth – Zadie Smith
169,481 – The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
174,269 – Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
183,349 – Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
183,833 – Little Women (Books 1&2) – Louisa May Alcott
186,418 – Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
198,901 – A House for Mr. Biswas – V.S. Naipaul
206,052 – Moby Dick – Herman Melville
211,591 – Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
316,059 – Middlemarch – George Eliot
418,053 – Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
591,554 – A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

I don’t have shares in Stayfocusd but I wish I did. It’s a Chrome app. Here’s how they sell it. ‘StayFocusd increases your productivity by limiting the amount of time that you can spend on time-wasting websites.’

I downloaded it because I was addicted, mostly to Twitter and Facebook. I’d jump in first thing in the morning and before I knew it I was stuck to the newsfeed like chewing gum on a car seat. Here I was trying to write a treatment for a doco, or trying to finish a scene in a novel, but instead I chose to effectively work for Facebook and Twitter. For free. I was their slave – but I had shit to do.

Since downloading the Stayfocusd app, life is far cheerier, thank you very much. I have limited myself to ten minutes of social media per day. Sounds pathetic, right? Na, come on. It just means I need to get a hurry on. It’s a quick hit. Like getting served in the pub when you’re 15. In those ten minutes I can see all I need to see, check notifications and even upload a status.

Perhaps not this piece.

Most importantly, I get shit done. The app will tell me when I have 60 seconds left. There is no aimless wandering. It also tricks your brain into having to think of another sentence or thought over the typical reaction of heading to the URL bar and typing www.fac….

If you want to get really gnarly, turn the wifi off at the source. I know, crazy, right? I’ve told myself I’m only allowed another hit once I’ve reached 1000 words on whatever project I’m working on. No email, no web, cold turkey. Please note, this technique is not for the faint of heart, but trust me, make it through to the other side and the feeling is akin to that well-deserved first cold beer after mowing the lawns.

Damn, I’d love to devour those little red notifications right now but that bloody app won’t let me back in.

In almost every Neil Gaiman interview I’ve seen or heard he is inevitably asked the question all creative types despise. Where do you get your ideas from? At least Gaiman has a sense of humour. In the past he has answered this by saying, ‘From the Idea-of-the-Month Club,’ or ‘From a little ideas shop in Bognor Regis.’ Nowadays he keeps it simple: ‘I make them up. Out of my head.’

Because the truth is no one knows where ideas come from. I once heard a poet say his best poems fizzed past on a runaway train and if he didn’t grab them with both hands, at that very second, they would be gone forever, never to return.

I always loved the way John Cleese and Michael Palin used to write. They knew ideas don’t arrive fully formed. It takes work to find them. The stars of Monty Python would sit in a cabin in the woods and talk absolute shite, sometimes for hours, before the bare-boned idea for a sketch popped out. They’d worked out the magic ingredient. Riff and talk and riff and talk and risk.

Sometimes you’re lucky. Sometimes, for whatever reason, ideas do just arrive. But it doesn’t mean they’re any good. How many times have we scribbled down an idea at two in the morning and woken too embarrassed to even read it aloud to the dog.

The master of surrealism Salvador Dali pushed the limits of creativity, almost forcing his brain to dance on the spot. He used to slouch in his chair and in his right hand he held a key. Beneath his hand was an upside-down plate. The second he fell into a deep sleep, his hand released the key which clanged onto the plate, at which time he awoke to a fresh pallet of ideas. Which is cheaper than drugs.

Feel free to share what works for you in comments. I’ll think about what’s worked for me and post some more ideas next time.

Over and out.

Justin

Justin Brown

Fascinating word counts from your fav books

Screw you, Facebook – I got sh*t to do

The question no author or artist can truly answer