I recently opened the “unfinished drafts” section of my blog and discovered that I had 52 unfinished posts in various states of completion. Some of these resulted from dumping a quick idea using the WordPress app on my phone, little more than three of four words to be fleshed out later. Some are just a […]
I opened up for Freelance Cover Design Work last week because our cat had an unexpected vet visit and it wiped out my emergencies fund. However, with my small business grant running out towards the end of October, I’m also preparing to open up a few more side-hustles to keep things afloat while I’m looking […]
My favourite headline doing the rounds right now: Is Salman Rushdie’s decision to publish on Substack the death of the novel? It seems to originate from Julian Novitz’s article over on The Conversation, taking a quick dive into Rushdie’s decision to publish his new novella through Substack on a Pro deal (where Substack pays creators […]
I’m a big fan of running playbooks to take decision making off the table, especially on low energy days when I don’t have the spoons for self-management. There’s a larger piece in the works on this—part of a series that’s been going through my newsletter of late—but it remains a work-in-progress because there’s a bunch […]
Trace the origins of the “ten thousand steps a day” health advice, and you’ll find a marketing campaign. A Japanese company built a step counter and invented a reason to use it, with the brand name—Manpo-Kei—translating into 10,000 steps. Trace the origins of the oft-repeated writing advice to show, rather than tell, and you’ll find […]
I’ve got a long history of advising writers to clarify their goals and vision around writing, and a recurring question is often how? It’s too big a question to tackle in blog posts, but something that occasionally gets some clarity during the longer, face-to-face (or email-to-email) conversations that take place with friends. One insight is […]
So I’ve started publishing books again, after an unintentional hiatus. The weirdest thing about publishing is this: you don’t pay for your mistakes in real-time. Stopped writing because of a serious illness? The books and stories you’ve already sold will keep appearing for another six months to two years, after which there will be a […]
’m sufficiently old that I feel like the window for talking about We Are Lady Parts is over, what with the series coming out in May of 2021 and our engagement with it taking place in early September. I’m old because I’m trapped in a cultural paradigm where immediacy is a primary virtue when recommending […]
I’m a lot angrier than I used to be since the start of the pandemic, and I suspect I’m not alone. There are nine potential triggers for anger most people experience, and the one that inevitably catches us off-guard is being stopped. We are hard-wired to respond to any subversion of our forward progress by […]
Me, three weeks ago: “Time to replace my phone. The battery isn’t quite enough to get through a busy day without charging, and everything’s running slow.” I resented the expense, and the time required to switch everything over, but it felt like a necessary upgrade. Then I went through and cleaned off apps I didn’t […]
There are projects that feel like you’ve captured lightning in a bottle, and they’re only partially fueled by talent. The biggest story in professional wrestling right now is the return of CM Punk. A man who walks down to the ring to talk, and gets a standing ovation from ten thousand fans that lasts through […]
What does a recipe look like? If you looked one up in the old pen-and-paper days, there’s a familiar layout: ingredient lists; procedural instructions; a photograph to make your mouth water. These days, on the internet, the recipe has all those things… and a long, digressive story up top that contextualises how and why the […]
