Figure out what your gift is, and give it to people on a regular basis. ~Hugh MacLeod.
Blogging has given us a world full of people who have a lot of mostly nothing to say and a strong desire to say it. Successful bloggers are the ones that stick with it, get an audience, and keep giving that audience whatever it is that they liked in the first place. This is a good deal harder than it sounds-as the countless failed blogs littering the internet can attest to. Even if you happen to have the chutzpah to keep blogging every day, or every other day, there is still no guarantee that you will get readers, get rich, or get anything at all. God I love blogging.
Hugh MacLeod is not a particularly good writer. Neither is he a particularly good cartoonist. And yet he makes a living from selling his cartoons and he has a couple of books under his belt, one of them a bestseller I have never heard of. This is not exactly sour grapes, or jealously, this is pure bafflement-the same bafflement I find when I look at LOLCats or Little Green Footballs. These people have found niches for their little bits of madness and made good. I find myself in among the vast horde of bloggers that have not cranked out bestsellers. Yet.
Evil Plans is a brilliant title. It brings to mind one of my favorite cartoon characters, The Brain, who was famous for trying to take over the world on a nightly basis. But Pinky and The Brain are not mentioned in Evil Plans, and neither is much of anything in the form of concrete advice or instruction.
The closest Hugh comes to offering instruction is when he occasionally asks that you do some deep thinking about some Serious Question. Basically Evil Plans is a blog in book form. A small collection of blog posts and odd little single panel comics which look like doodles. He makes a number of interesting points and the ideas are the standard issue self help message of I did it this way, maybe you can do it this way as well.
Evil Plans was mostly empty space, large type, and comic panels. I guess I am a bit disappointed that the Evil Plan is vague to the point of nonexistence. I remember watching The A-Team many years ago, this was a great show about a group of misfits that did good deeds. Every episode feature our heroes as the went about perfecting The Plan-and they loved it when A Plan Came Together. I would have liked Evil Plan better if there had been some hint of a plan in it.
