The Plan - Part 2: The Writing

Yesterday's post about "Who Am I?" really just hit some high points. Most of us have a complicated identity, and if you try to talk too much about it, you tend to blather. (Or at least I do, and if you thought yesterdays post kind of wandered and blathered, you should see the rejected drafts....)

Taking a Look A The Big Picture: What Do I Want My Mature Body of Work To Look Like?

The first step in a marketing plan is filling the reservoir, as I mentioned in the Physics of Water post. And now I know the flavor of what I'm filling it with, but now it's time to talk in specifics. How am I to fill that reservoir, and with what?

My first overall rule for my career is this: I won't write to a schedule and I won't just churn out another book in a series because people want one, or because I think that's the way to make money. (Lawrence Block had a great post on this, explaining why people should stop asking him when the next Bernie Rhodenbarr book will come out.)


The Mick and Casey Mysteries:

Mick and Casey are the cornerstone of my writing career. That series is the most commercial thing I've written so far, but it's still out on the fringes in many ways -- it's cross-genre (mystery and western), and it tramples on expectations in ways that people don't seem to expect. (I know that sounds silly, but honestly, people do expect you to trample on certain expectations. And if you don't do it the way they expect, that tramples on their expectations of expectations.)

My main problem with Mick and Casey is a lack of momentum. I started the series a long time ago when I was trying to break into commercial publication, and I put a heck of a lot of work into it, only to be shut down. "Love it, but nobody wants westerns, and cozy mysteries are poison." So let's just say I burnt out before I even got started.

Still, even though there is only one book, two short stories and a novelette out there, you could say that Mick and Casey are a "mature" series. I may not have momentum, but I do have a bunch of partly written novellas. In every case I started them thinking they would be a marketable short story, and when I realized they would be way too long to publish (but too short for books) I would move on to another "short" story.

The novella is, I think, the natural length for Mick and Casey, just like it was for Nero Wolfe. There might be a few short novels in there, and probably more short stories, but even the short stories are likely to fill out to novelettes. The main, natural length seems to be 70-150 pages -- or 20,000-50,000 words.

In the modern world of e-publishing, there is no reason to abandon novellas. And they are quick to write. So I hope to have 3-6 new longer Mick and Casey stories in the coming two years or so.

The Starling and Marquette Mysteries

The work-in-progress (The Man Who Did Too Much) is the first book in this series. While it is quirky and probably tramples a few expectations of its own, it is the only series which is solidly in a particular, modern, commercial genre. Mostly. It kinda blurs the lines between some sub-genres. It probably borrows as much from P.G. Wodehouse as from Agatha Christie, but nobody is going to mistake it for something other than a traditional mystery.

This first book is going to come out somewhere near 90,000 words. As the "origin" story it might be a little longer than subsequent stories, but I don't think so. And this was much harder to write than I expected, probably because of the influence of both Wodehouse and Christie -- complex, intertwining subplots and psychological threads.

So I think all these books are going to be full length, and they're all going to be a bear to write -- because I am not P.G. Wodehouse -- but I don't think they're going to take years to write each.

I have at least four, and probably five books in mind before I get to the point where I feel it is a stable and mature series. I may be able to do a book a year on it, but I'm not counting on it. My goal is to have the first one published in November... and maybe keep publishing in November each year. I would really like to get the next two done, at least, to make me feel like the series is established.

"The Serial"

This is where I'm going to let it all hang out. This is going to be a repository of full-blown Camille-ness. Here is where the rubber hits the road in terms of personal branding. The mysteries at least have a genre, regardless of whether they fully fit or not.

But The Serial is, um, well, er,... I think it won't even be an actual serial, in the sense most people think. But there will be people tied to railroad tracks and spies and locked-room mysteries and nosy detectives and sword fights, and bandits, and secrets, and flights through the dark of night in the forest primeval. So far there are no aliens, and very very limited magic (just what's necessary to set up the world for the reader)... but there are giant carnivorous roly-poly bugs! (Or at least rumors of them.) Maybe ghosts.

But for the most part this is not a fantasy or speculative fiction. Magic and imagined technology emphatically do not drive anything here. I call it "Jazzpunk" -- since it driven by the culture of the early Jazz Age, and not the technology the way cyberpunk, steampunk and dieselpunk are.

So this is really where the branding comes in. And most particularly, this is where the ART comes in. Genres and brands need a look.

For right now, though, I'm just in the development stage: I'm researching and working on art, and creating a series bible. I'm collecting magazines from the period, etc. I probably won't do much in terms of writing or publishing this in the next two years, except....

I WILL be playing with it on the blog, and may even publish some of it here as I work through that larger development.

(NOTE: I did end up playing with it on my blog, and it did end up being a serial -- you'll find the first episode of The Misplaced Hero here.)

Short Fiction

Short fiction is where I think I can move my career along faster -- before I've finished filling the reservoir, so to speak. Especially very short fiction. Flash stories, jokes, poems and anecdotes are easy to read, and show people you can tell a story.

My short fiction doesn't fit a hundred percent into my branding plans, though. I write a wider variety here. I sometimes write very mainstream, fit-the-genre kind of stuff, or even literary stuff -- but that's why it helps with the overall plan. Short fiction is a way for people to sample my writing, which (unlike samples) actually shows how well I pay off on the setup. They also are something you can spread far and wide.

My main plan for short fiction write now is to write a lot of it -- as much as I can without slowing down production on my main books. I'll be submitting to some of the major magazines out there (most notably Ellery Queen and other Davis publications), which will slow down the actual publication of these stories. Not only does traditional publishing take a while, but it also delays doing anything else with the story. I will also be looking for guest posting homes for some stories, and publishing some here, as well as in small ebook collections.

The other thing that short fiction does is allow me to develop other series (or even existing ones) in a limited way. I have some really fun other series, including a quirky almost-hard-boiled young detective named Max. Even Starling and Marquette have their first short story in the Pink Snowbunnies In Hell flash fiction anthology.

Miscellaneous Other Novels

I don't intend to write any more novels for a while which don't relate to the above plans. However, I have completed drafts of various books which I might well publish if the mood strikes me. Some of them kinda fit into "The Brand" -- like the sequels to The Wife of Freedom. Like The Serial, it's an alternate world without any fantastical elements -- built from a different era of melodrama and swashbuckler.

(And, like The Serial, the sequel to Wife of Freedom -- Test of Freedom -- will soon be serialized on this blog, Mondays and Thursdays, starting October 15, 2012.)

But the other stuff -- like Harsh Climate and The Scenic Route -- fit mainly via a quirky point of view. I have no plans to follow those up yet, but I do have ideas.


But Wait, There's More!

Even though I am not doing any real marketing efforts, I am doing some actual traditional marketing:

*The Blog -- If I am my brand, my blog is the obvious and natural place to build it. It is important enough that I will have a whole post just about that tomorrow.

*Announcements -- I don't break my neck to do this, but when I publish something new, I do announce it. Twitter, here, maybe on Kindleboards or Mobilereads. But honestly, sometimes -- okay, most of the time -- I forget to even tell my mom.

*Review Copies -- Every so often I will send out some copies to reviewers who have an easy set up on their blog for submissions. I am not currently, however, going around looking for reviewers. I am collecting URLs for interesting book blogger sites for later, though.

*Blog tours and guest posting -- I will probably do a miniature blog tour in January for The Man Who Did Too Much. This will be more an experiment and learning experience than anything. I hope to do enough to let me know how it might work best for me, and how I might want to use such tours in the future. (I'll talk about this more in tomorrow's post about my blog.)

*Advertising -- yes, I use advertising. It doesn't work well for my books most of the time -- at least not with the main venues most indie writers tout. I have found that the right ad on the right site at Project Wonderful sometimes has a minor effect -- enough to break even maybe if you squint.

The most important result you get from advertising -- exposure -- is intangible. It's not about getting a return on investment. It's a black hole into which specifically budgeted money disappears. So a good idea is to treat it like gambling: set a budget for it and forget it.

IMHO, the best reason for advertising is to support the site where the ad appears. Be a real sponsor. (More about this in tomorrow's post, too.)

*Website -- I neglect my website because I'm not actively marketing. But I do update now and then. And I will use it more extensively when I am actively marketing.


Tomorrow, I'm going to talk about how my blog fits into my career and marketing plans. It's something I'm doing now, and it is a "mature" effort. I don't intend to change what I'm doing there much, in future.

The key thing for me about a blog is that it isn't a marketing tool, it's a product.

See you in the funny papers.

The Plan - Part 1: Who Am I?

I am my brand, so ... who the heck am I?

Or more specifically, who am I in terms of my writing and career and public life? My writing is scattered across genres, and in many ways so is my life -- but it feels unified to me, so what is that unifying factor?

In an earlier iteration of this post, I sat down and just typed the first thing that came to mind:

I write mystery swashbucklers.

That is true. It might even be a little redundant; The great cloak and sword swashbucklers (which are the kind I love most) were all mysteries on some level. If there wasn't an actual mystery ("Who is this man, this Scarlet Pimpernel?") there was at the very least criminal skull-duggery, and a lot of figuring out who was up to what and why. There was always something that was demmed elusive.

And if you think my mystery westerns have nothing to do with that, think about it: what is a western but a swashbuckler with guns instead of swords, and no plumey feather in the hat?

(For the movie-history-impaired: left to right, that's Douglas Fairbanks Sr as Zorro, Leslie Howard as The Scarlet Pimpernel, and Doug Jr and Ronald Coleman as Rupert of Hentzau and Rudolf Rassendyll in The Prisoner of Zenda.)

As the image above illustrates: this fits into one other incredibly major influence on me, which I have been told all my life to bury when it comes to fiction.

The Dream Factory

Also known as Hollywood.

The first thing they told us at Clarion was that Star Wars and Star Trek were NOT acceptable science fiction at the time. Anything seen on television or in the movies was unsophisticated, and reflected whatever was in vogue decades earlier.

The first thing the professor said in our playwrighting class in grad school was: "I want you to write what's in your heart, not what you're told to write, or what's in anybody else's heart. Break free of restrictions! ... so I don't want to see ANY science fiction, mystery, romance, fantasy, coming-of-age, action, adventure, chick lit, ..." He pretty much forbade everything you could put a name to.

Luckily I never listened to those sorts of things ... much. I mean if you hear something over and over again, and sometimes you get rejected based on it, you can't help but sighing in disappointment and putting your favorite stuff on the shelf for your own pleasure only.

But here's another thing about Hollywood: If you are an old-school movie buff, you love the story behind the story too. Hollywood itself is a part of the glamor. (It's show biz, after all.) That's part of why I noted, in the picture above that Doug Sr was Doug Jr's father. It's interesting, it's a part of the pleasure of the story.

And Doug Sr's wife (Jr's step-mother) is possibly even more relevant here than the boys are.

The first image there is three-fourths of United Artists -- on the bottom is Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and on his right shoulder is Charlie Chaplin. On his left shoulder is his wife, Mary Pickford. Those three, plus D. W. Griffith, were sick of being pushed around by the studios. They were the talent. They were the draw. So they formed their own company: United Artists. You could say they were the first "indies."

And though she is the one usually left out of pictures about the founding of United Artists, Mary Pickford was one of the major driving factors. She was the one, of all of them, with the best head for business.

But her importance here goes back even further. When she started in the movies, nobody cared about actors. They were like props. Their names didn't appear in the credits, nobody knew who they were.

Until Mary Pickford.

Viewers would send fan mail to the studio, addressed to "The Girl with the Curl." And of course, all that mail was hidden from her. But when she found out about it, she was smart enough to realize "hey, I'm the star here. I'm the brand." So she took the bit in her teeth and ran with it.

Many people call her the first movie star. Some say she invented stardom. She certainly understood the concept of personal branding. And that is a concept that stayed with Hollywood, even though publishing never quite got the hang of it to the full extent.

Mary Pickford played 12-year-old girls right on up into her thirties. Not exactly the kind of brand you want to get stuck with but 1) it worked for her, and 2) in many ways her tough, independent little girls paved the way for the next generation's tough independent flappers, and 3.) it's a good segue to another major influence on me.

I write kid's books for grown ups (aka pulp fiction)

Let's face it, pulp fiction is good straight-forward storytelling, which dares to skip the boring stuff. As you get older, of course, what you consider interesting and boring changes -- but let's face it, adults have learned to put up with boredom. Kids haven't. Adults have learned to do without humor. Kids haven't.

But the biggest, most important element of children's stories which is often missing from grown up fiction (including, sadly, even the lighter genres sometimes) is a subversive sense of morality.

"Life just isn't fair" is not good enough for a children's story. And it isn't good enough for even the darkest noir. Sure, there is no God and nobody's going to fix it for you when things go wrong.... but as Sam Spade says, you're supposed to do something about it. Even if it's against your best interests. And if society is wrong -- if it's full of bullies and unfairness -- then you fight it.

Today we often miss the real message of so much Golden Age film. Listen, do you actually think that the end of It's a Wonderful Life is upbeat? Do you? Honestly? Have you seen it recently? The message of It's a Wonderful Life is very much like the message of Casablanca: The problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Where the rubber hits the road in all of these genres is a form of Existentialism: If justice means anything to us, we have to bring it to the table ourselves. And it's the same for joy.

And these various genres -- Hollywood, swashbucklers, pulp fiction, mysteries and children's stories -- all part from Existentialism in a similar way too: they believe in evil. They're flexible on the concept of good, and the actual politics waver all over the place -- but evil is a disdain for justice.

(The last two pictures up there, along side United Artists, are Slappy Squirrel of the Animaniacs and Miss Marple, as played by Joan Hickson. They are both little old lady avengers. Like Zorro, only not into rescuing, only avenging. Of the two, Miss Marple is the more dangerous. Slappy is definitely more likely to use violence, but if Miss Marple gets you, you'll hang by the neck until dead.)

One last element that I see when I look at all of the genres and influences, both those mentioned above and those I didn't touch on: the stories tend to be short. What we now consider to be a novella -- 30-40k words -- was once a full novel. And the length of story in a novella actually matches the amount of story usually in a movie.

eBook publishing once again gives us the option of writing a story to the length that suits the story.

So I've identified the flavor and nature of what I write -- or at least what influences me to write. And I've mentioned in other posts about how I shouldn't really market until I have an identifiable body of work. So what's the plan to get from here to there? Tomorrow I'll outline my writing plans (and the minimal marketing associated with it), and then the next day I'll talk about something I'm doing full-throttle now: blogging.

See you in the funny papers.

The Plan - Writing, Career, Marketing, Everything

I was asked the other day what I do to promote. Or if I promote at all. On thinking about it, I realize that's not at all an easy question to answer.

It wouldn't be accurate to say that I don't promote. But I also can't give a list the way most indie writers seem to at the drop of a hat. They usually talk about social media and tagging and review copies and more social media.

Such lists almost never involve things like, oh, reading 100-year-old copies of The Strand.

But if I were to try to make a list my my "promotion" tasks, it would have to include reading old magazines. Just this past week I came across this illustration in a copy of The Strand from 1915. Look familiar?

Did I seek out, and download, and read that copy of The Strand as a conscious and discrete task toward promotion? Was I intentionally looking for a banner head for my blog? No. I had no intention of changing the template for my blog. But I came across a framing device like the one above in a different magazine, and then this spiffy illustration, and that gave me the idea for the new header.

Here's the thing: I was reading those magazines because of who I am.

"Who I am" is my brand.

And that makes it marketing. It's wholistic, it's long term, it's big arc. And it's the only way to go if your books don't fit with an existing genre well.

So let's step back an ask the same question I asked just a few lines up: Did I seek out and download and read that copy of The Strand as a conscious and discrete task toward promotion?

Um... maybe I guess so.

If my marketing plan is about brand and content and identity, then diving head first into the stuff that influences me is what that's all about. Everything related to my writing career is marketing.

The fact is I do have a plan... or maybe let's say a "vision" of my career for the next couple of years -- including marketing.

So this week I'm going to lay it out for you, including those little things like tweeting and advertising, and the big things like blogging and writing and art.

But so as not to bore the long-time readers, I'm going give the newbies a chance to catch up on things which I have already written about. Here are some posts which may explain where I'm coming from:

Physics of Water - Why marketing is better when you're ready, and useless when you're not.

Three Part Series on Publishing in the Age of Google: Search Engines and Overeager Writers, How to Stop Worrying And Love the Algorithm, and How Readers Find Books These Days.

An analysis of my not particularly great success, what I did to earn it, and how I need to use a different approach to the business end.

My thinking on covers and art in Amateur Illustration as Brand.

On reading all that, you may get the idea that I think of the best marketing as a more passive and organic thing. It starts with what I write, and who I am as a writer.

Tomorrow I'll take a look at the question "Who am I?"

See you in the funny papers.

Monday Covers

This week, when I opened my Shelf-Awareness newsletter, I was struck by four covers immediately.

Well, five if you count the biography of Snowman - the greatest horse that ever lived. But I'm not looking at non-fiction unless I think it would be a great fiction cover. In this case, it's not a particularly exciting cover even for non-fiction -- but it does the job because if you already know the story of Snowman, then a white horse jumping over a title "The Eighty Dollar Champion" tells you all you need to know. And if you don't know the story... well, it still tells you most of what you need to know.

Favorite horse stories aside....


I took an immediate shine to this all-text cover of George Pelecanos' new book. It's a unique typographical opportunity to have such a short title, and to be able to fill half the cover with it. Even with the little blurbs, it looks very uncluttered. (In looking at other versions of the cover, I find that when they added a gray medallion next to "George" for the blurb, it then started looking ordinary again. This is a touchy thing.)

The straight black and white, with the retro-hip orange as the only color, has a modern feel -- especially with the very plain sanserif font. Usually pure font/color covers come to look dated quickly. Those elements tend to be subtle, but are very prone to designer fashion. However, the fact that the font is so very clean, and there is only one color, this one may stand the test of time longer. (Does it need to? No. The name "Pelecanos" is what is iconic. This cover is not.)


Okay, I have to admit that I think this cover for The Twelfth Enchantment is just about the worst cover I've seen from a professional in a long time.

The background illustration is fine. It's pretty standard, actually - for an historical, romance or literary. I don't recognize it, but it has the look of a public domain "classic." Using PD images is also pretty standard, especially with literary fiction, so not really a problem there.

The problem is ... what the heck is going on with all the scattered paper? It's ugly. You can't read the title in thumbnail, and even when you can read it, it isn't obvious what you're seeing is supposed to be the title. Luckily, with ebooks, you see the title right next to the cover, so you know. But if you see this in a vacuum? All four of the pieces of paper have equal weight, and the one you see first and best is "enchantment." Is that meant a illustration or text?

It reminds me of the 40's movie motif -- where the newspaper pages would swirl at you and calendar leaves would float by. Or worse yet, a bulletin board. It does not bring to mind any of the things they mention for this book: fantasy (god no), romance (litter is romantic?), historical (not if it isn't a 40's hard-boiled newspaper drama), thriller (a regency dame attacked by static cling?).

There is a slightly later Victorian style this could have emulated, but that painting blows that choice out of the water. (They should go for etchings if that's what they want.) This may well illustrate something that goes on in the story well, but if you have to read the story before you "get" the cover, the cover fails.


This cover for Trackers does a nice job of telling you right off: African thriller. The overall image says "Thriller" with color and lack of detail. The Rhino says "Africa."

What I really note though, is the typography. It doesn't quite bleed off the page, but it fully uses the space with almost no buffer at all. The tracking (space between letters) is very tight, and there is negative leading (the space between lines). The only place it has buffer is in the lower right, where DEON blends in a little with the red-orange above -- the little bit of black on the right margin helps make the N more legible (and if you do it to the N, you have to do it to the R below that).

Text that goes all the way to the edge like that is a tricky thing for printed works. There is little margin for error for the exact cut line. For an image, you can just use a "bleed" where the image extends a little beyond the edge of the image so you can't tell if you cut a little wrong. But text? Text has defined edges. If you miss the cut by even the tiniest amount, you screw it up.

(So Indie Authors? You can do this with your ebook covers, but if you are going for print, modify your design.)


This last cover, for Duty Free, stands out for me because it suggests two genres but doesn't quite fit either. Instead it seems to merge them. I hope the style is coming into fashion, because it is attractive.

The first genre it suggests to me is chick lit. Chicklit these days usually has a vector drawing of an attractive woman. While a lot of designs put more emphasis on the legs, but the woman is always prominent, and if she isn't happy, she's at least doing something which is a part of the chick dream-life.

This is not a vector drawing, but it is heavily posterized (that is simplified to flat color areas). The woman may not be classic chick lit, but she does suggest a happy woman shopping or traveling -- having a chick adventure. (Plus the font suggests chick lit all over the place.)

The other genre this suggests to me is the lighter end of the more highbrow kind women's books: non-fiction adventures. Travel, biography, cultural experiences. The covers for these are usually photographs of the location or subject -- suggesting it's about the experience and observations of the character more than the character.

From the description, this book is pure chick lit -- but the main character is a Pakistani society woman. Chick lit which, for Americans, also broadens your horizons. So, imho, it's good that it reminds a little of each genre.

Well, that's it for covers this week.

See you in the funny papers

Important Vs. Urgent

Priorities are not always obvious. When you work in a service field, especially one where some things are more urgent than others, you start to see how complicated setting priorities can be.

At the day job, we serve seven computer classroom/studios, two photo studios, three art studios, one drafting classroom, and a little service lab. I think the max capacity of all this is something over 150 students and a dozen faculty -- and up to twice that at times where classes switch over.

As a part of serving these classrooms, we check people and equipment in and out: pens for graphic tablets, lighting equipment, tripods, light meters, disks, card readers, scanning projects.

AND we're the central instructional center where people go to get help.

AND we are the triage center for equipment problems (computer and non-computer).

AND we are Obiwan Kenobi... the only hope for lost souls who took a wrong turn on their way to the rest of campus. The maze of a building leads everyone into a cul de sac where our service center is a tiny beacon in the endless circling hallways. They are often in tears when they reach us.

We have other work we do, when things are quiet (and yes, they do get quiet sometimes), but when a hundred people hit the window all at once, with pens and equipment and IDs and paperwork, and some in tears, it is important to be able to prioritize on the fly.

The person in tears is important, but we may not be able to help him or her until after we clear out the crowd. The person checking into the studio will need to be accompanied to the studio -- so can only be served when someone can be spared from the window. The person jumping up and down shouting "The computer is on fire!" probably needs to be seen to NOW, but if the computer is dead, that may be able to wait for even a few hours if there isn't a class which needs that computer for a while.

And the patient person who just wants to sign out and get his ID back but doesn't mind waiting, just might be served before all of them, because it's really fast to get him served and out of the way.

I wrote a few weeks ago about how urgency is the enemy of the writer -- but that was about the emotional feeling of urgency. Even when things are urgent, a feeling of urgency can be your enemy because it makes you less logical.

But on a rational level, there really are things which are urgent, even if they are not always the most important thing. And important things which seem urgent are not always as urgent as they seem. For instance:

• Your grocer is offering free ice cream, but it will be gone if you don't get it right now -- that's not important, but it is urgent.
• The crazy guy stalking you shows up at your door with a knife -- that's urgent and important.
• The crazy guy who is in prison for stalking you will have a parole hearing next week -- that's important, but it isn't actually urgent, even if you just found out. It feels urgent, but you can't even effectively respond to it yet. It's just something you have to deal with in a timely manner.

So when you're prioritizing, try not to let your emotions rule too much. First, look at the logistics. What has to be done? What do you need in order to do it? When is the actual deadline?

That last one is the kicker. I had a co-worker who use to write "ASAP!!" on every work request. She figured that reflected how important the job was (and how important she was). It was a stupid thing to do. ASAP stands for "As soon as possible." Well, if you don't have an actual deadline, then everything with an actual deadline comes BEFORE "possible." In other words: ASAP means "take care of me last."

Which is a lesson for everyone: never ever ever ever ever write ASAP on something when you'll actually need it soon. Write the date and time you are going to need it. You can put in a buffer if you like, but please stop to think about when you are going to actually make use of whatever it is. If there is no urgency, no deadline, then ASAP is fine, but don't expect it soon. Just sayin'.

And that brings me to writing.

You are the client and the worker. As the client, don't be the fool who writes "asap" on everything. We writers are often hazy about our process, anyway. Instead of pushing further into hazy, undefined urgency, stop and think about the tasks ahead of you.

If you're blocked on a tough scene, for instance, start breaking the darn thing into steps. Instead of thinking "I'm going to finish that scene today," think about what the first step is, not the last. Do you need to do research? Are you hazy on a detail? Have you bothered to figure out what you're trying to convey?

One thing that has helped me with this minute-by-minute dare is that on some days I just read and take notes. I'm not editing or resolving issues... I'm just identifying them. Strangely enough, I find that by first pausing to identify problems, I make it much easier to resolve them the next day.

But thinking it through is always a good idea, even with the truly urgent things. (But if the knife wielding maniac is at your door, it might be good to think fast.)

See you in the funny papers.

Week in Review-Preview

In Week 2 of the 600 Minutes a Week Dare, I failed the goal by 18 minutes. It was tougher than the first week. I am really dipping into the persnickety issues which I've avoided, and I'm making really good progress on them... but they're hard on the brain. This week should get me through most of those.

Will it get me to the end? Not sure. Frankly, I'm not sure the persnickety issues weren't hiding other persnickety issues... but I think not. But I think it's going to take me a little more than a week, so introducing:

The 800 minutes in 10 Days Dare

Yep, I'm hoping to finish this darned book by Talk Like A Pirate Day!

I have no idea if this is realistic, and furthermore I'm throwing in a new wrinkle: Saturdays, from now on, are going to be Blog Like Hell Days, and therefore won't contribute much to the rest of the goal. (See more about Blog Like Hell Day below in the "preview" section.)

Lookie, lookie, up at the top of the page! A new header image!

I had a sudden inspiration earlier this week, even though I was not looking for one. (Hey, I'm fine with "Simple" template.) But I was browsing through various old magazines, and I was first inspired to create a retro header with the two side-by-side frames. But I needed an image for one of the frames. I was planning on drawing something WPA-ish, if I could come up with the concept images I wanted to put in.

Then I came across a public domain image that I just fell in love with. It was in a 1915 issue of The Strand Magazine (I think August, I have to look it up and also put in artist credit).

It's not finished, but 'tis good enough for now. When I do more work on it, I will probably talk about it in one of my Monday Night Cover posts.


Preview of the Coming Week:

The goal of my new Blog Like Hell Saturday will be to have the postings for the whole week mostly done by the end of the day. This not only allows me to get all the blogging work out of the way in one day. (Well, most of it.) It also allows me to put up a schedule of postings for the week. And it allows me to limit what I do on the blog.

• Sunday -- Important Vs. Urgent, another Layer in Productivity
• Monday -- "Monday Night Covers" - I look at four new book covers.
• Tuesday -- The Plan - Career, Writing, Marketing, The Whole Enchilada.
• Wednesday -- The Plan - Part 1: Who Am I? Laying the Foundation of My Personal Brand
• Thursday -- The Plan - Part 2: The Writing and the Art
  
• Friday -- The Plan - Part 3: The Blog

Next week I'll be instituting a new schedule, but I'll wait until then to tell you about it.


The Video Of The Week - Buster and Tacos

This particular YouTube video always amuses me. It seems to be someone's sound editing exercise -- they've taken a clip from Buster Keaton's THE GENERAL, and edited in sound effects and dialog.

Since I do a lot of writing at Taco Bell, and since I am talking about my personal brand (and how it springs partly from classic Hollywood), I give you this video:



Who knew that Buster was really doing all that just to get at some free tacos?

See you in the funny papers.

Michael Hart, The First Ebook Publisher Ever, RIP

Long before the Kindle, before the Nook. Before laptops and PDAs, before, frankly, the personal computer was invented, Michael Hart had a vision of transmitting books as text, via computer. This was 1971, and that first book was the Declaration of Independence.

Michael Hart died this week.

I hear people be dismissive of Project Gutenberg these days, and it always makes me think less of the person who says it. Clearly they have no understanding of just how important PG was to the development of the ebook, and how important their ongoing efforts still are.

Think about this: Project Gutenberg was already publishing ebooks when you had to go to a computer lab to read them. Michael Hart wasn't just a little ahead of his time, he was decades ahead. He started publishing ebooks before there were scanners with OCR software. They had to type them in.

But even that early he had more than a vision of books on computers. From the start he understood some things that many current ebook publishers do not: full cross-platform compatibility. The whole point of putting a book on a computer was to make it available. Not just to preserve it, or have it for a select few. Maybe their presentation isn't so slick, but frankly, slick formatting almost always requires a more advanced and specialized reader. And MH was always sending out newsletters, asking for more innovation, more ideas, more ways to serve these books to more people. More formats, more media, more access points.

The other thing that Michael Hart always did was use open source principles right from the start. It is an army of volunteers who do the work on Project Gutenberg. All of us feel a great deal of frustration when people take advantage of the work, and then bitch about an error -- guess what, you can report the error. If you want a perfect FREE library, then do your part. It's not like it takes much effort.

In honor of Michael Hart, I'm going to ask you all to do something which will make helping out Project Gutenberg quick and easy and fun. Consider please joining the Distributed Proofreaders.

Distributed Proofreaders works on the same principle as a distributed computing network. In computing, if you have some effort that takes huge amounts of computing effort and time -- like decoding the human Genome, or major math and physics problems -- you may not have a single computer big enough to handle it, even over years of use. But if you can get a million little computers to join in a network, then you can distribute out tiny parts of the big task to be done in the spare time of each of the smaller computers -- and you'll have more computing power than even the biggest computer in the world.

With the Distributed Proofreaders, they have put this principle to use in proofreading texts for Project Gutenberg. Volunteers do not have to take on the job of proofing an entire book, but only a page or so at a time. You can devote 5 minutes a month, or hours a day. However you want to do it.

The cool part is that you don't even have to be that good of a proofer to do a great job. They put up the text and the image of the page side by side, and you correct the work to make them match.

I believe you can also do scanning or OCR work for them, or post processing, if you're interested in a bigger project.

We will all miss Michael Hart. I ask you to help keep his dream going.

And next time you open your Kindle or Nook or a reader on your iPod, think about the man who, 40 years ago, thought it would be a neat thing to distribute a book via computer.

Necessary Doesn't Mean Productive (and Vice Versa)

Yesterday's post was about down time. And I'll just repeat the main point because I think people overlook it in their quest for more efficiency and all that. It is necessary to have real down time -- not just time you get to pack full of other tasks. I mean time which has no good use except to be used as slack. Having slack is the key to efficiency. If you pack it full of secondary tasks, it can't do it's job of providing for a margin of error.

Today, though, I wanted to talk about the related matter of those secondary tasks. But I'm too exhausted to even make sense of my original notes for this post. But maybe that is an example of what I want to talk about. (And to paraphrase Mark Twain: I'm sorry I don't have the time to write you a short blog post, so you'll have to make do with a long one....)

Three groups of tasks we often get mixed up: productive tasks, necessary tasks and slack time.

I am very out of shape right now. Part of the reason is because, I made a lifestyle change a year ago that makes my working time much much more sedentary. This has helped one set of repetitive stress injuries, but prompted another.

So....

I did something necessary. I converted my desk to a standing desk this week. This is at my day job -- where we don't have budget to go buying furniture. But I could spring for a $10 set of bed risers. All it required, then, was for me to pack up my office and disassemble my computer and then lift the table to put the risers under each of the legs... then reassemble everything.

This is not what I would call productive time. This is, actually, one form of "cat vacuuming," which you can use to look busy and fill up your time rather than doing the job at hand. And it's certainly not slack time. In order to get it done, though, I certainly did have to stop and lean on a shovel a few times.

What I was doing, though, was necessary. I can't do the job with an RSI, and without being reasonably energetic and healthy. There are a lot of similar tasks which are necessary but not productive: Creating to do lists, dealing with email, research, studying, learning, practice, eating, sleeping, reading, sharpening pencils, shopping, filling out paperwork.... these are all necessary things. Some of them very necessary, and even immediately relevant to the task at hand. But they are not the task itself.

Research is not writing. Thinking while doing dishes (or taking a bath, or driving or shopping) is not writing. Generating ideas is not writing. They may be necessary to writing, but they aren't writing.

Now my day job is not like writing: Mine is an on-duty service job. People come to me with questions and problems. So technically, I am not in control of the "productivity" aspect of my job -- if nobody has a question at the moment, I'm in slack time. Which is when I do the "necessary but not productive" parts of my job.

But for most jobs, and for writing, you usually have something to get done, and the "necessary but not productive" competes with the time you have to do your main job. Bad managers often think the key to better productivity is to cut back on the time for other tasks, and at the same time, employees fight back and use "necessary" to justify more slack time.

But it's not a good idea to blur the definition between these tasks. What's necessary is necessary. Leave enough room for it. And leave slack in both the necessary and the productive parts of your schedule so that you have elbow room to work.

The Chinese have a saying about a wise man who gives full attention to what he's doing at the moment -- if resting, he gives his full attention to rest, if traveling his full attention to travel, etc.

I think these three are your boulders and pebbles and sand. You need to manage them so that there is room for all of them.

Tomorrow I will talk on yet another closely related topic: The Difference Between Important and Urgent, and setting priorities accordingly.

See you in the funny papers.

Thinking of a New Blog Design

Looking at all these old magazines made me want to go for a retro look on the blog. Not a big change, really, more just the header.

I may do some artwork of my own eventually, but for now I may just go with public domain. Here is an early version of the design, with an illustration from The Strand from 1915. (Even if I don't go with this for this blog I might do it for Daring Adventure Stories....)


I chose the colors purely to go with the existing template. I could end up changing the colors on the whole blog.

Feedback would be appreciated.

(Tonight I'll post that second productivity post.)

See you in the funny papers.

Productivity: Not About Making Every Minute Count

My very first job, outside of our own barn, was as a soda jerk. Or more specifically, a waitress/cook at an old fashioned pharmacy lunch counter.

It was summer in a college town, so the store side of the business was not that busy, and the pharmacist tended to use up his time micromanaging the waitresses. Not in a nasty way, just giving excessive "encouragement", pushing everybody to work faster and better. And he was always riding me to the point where I finally went into his office and tearfully gave him my two-week notice.

He was sorry. He was just trying to help me be a better waitress. He didn't mean to create stress.

During that last two weeks of employment, he left us all completely alone. We didn't hear a peep from him. But he would always be watching from his high pharmacy desk, and every hour or so he'd sneak out (this tall gangling guy in a white coat, tippy-toeing like a cartoon character) and grab up the used orders from the spindle.

Then, when those last two weeks were almost up, he called me into the office and showed me two piles of order slips. There was one pile which was about four inches high, and another that was maybe an inch and a half. The four inch high stack was mine, the short pile was both of the other waitresses combined.

Which was a surprise to both of us. See, I'm not a fast worker. I don't hurry. I'm very relaxed by nature. I also have trouble learning things by rote, so I can't just do things automatically. I pay attention to what I'm doing. If something doesn't need my attention now, I don't fuss at it. I leave it be. Which means I have mindspace to be alert to other things -- which in turn means I notice the customer who needs something first.

I learned two things from this: A) working in a relaxed manner beats the heck out of looking busy every time in terms of productivity, and B) if you work in a relaxed manner, you have to protect yourself via documentation.

(That second lesson came in handy when I was in a hostile work environment. The back-stabbing co-worker who instigated the situation learned a lesson too. If you are the sort of person who spends your effort looking busy, documentation is your enemy.)

In the many years since then, I have seen it over and over again. Slowing down to speed up. What's interesting is that people who use the motto "Work Smarter, Not Harder" get a screwed up as those who are scrambling around looking busy. Just working smarter doesn't help -- at least not if you are in the "make every minute count" mindset.

The reason, I think, that the Work Smarter crowd also get themselves into trouble is that they are still too hyped on efficiency -- on making every minute count. What they fail to realize is that real efficiency depends on margin. You've heard of "margin for error"? That's what we're talking about here. If you book up every minute, you don't leave any elbow room to maneuver. It's the silences that make a symphony work. It's the dark that makes the light standout. It's the runway that allows the plane to get into the air.

If you don't have downtime, you can't do the exact right thing at the exact right time.

I'll finish off with one more story, which Steinbeck used to tell about how a relative of his used to bitch endlessly about those lazy, shiftless ditch diggers employed by the WPA. "Every time you look at them, you see most of them leaning on a shovel," said the guy.

"Hey, when you're doing that kind of work, you have to pause to rest," said Steinbeck, and when the man scoffed, he challenged him to spend fifteen minutes straight digging a hole without pausing to rest.

Steinbeck won his bet within five minutes.

When you pause to rest, you might gain benefits other than resting -- you might see things to be done, or a better way of doing things, for instance -- but here is the kicker, if you try to USE that rest time for other things, if you schedule it up tight... it no longer works as rest.

So leave time to lean on a shovel. It will improve your productivity.

(Tomorrow I'll take on another topic in Productivity: "Necessary Is Not The Same as Productive.")

See you in the funny papers.

Update and Some Covers I Like

Still about a half hour away from my goal for the night. Today I've been going through some sticky stuff. I almost gave in to the temptation to get back to reading through what I've got, but I really need to save those "easier" tasks for Wed and Thur.

So I'm finding those sticky little moments -- those hard little problems which I put in a placeholder and then skipped on first writing -- and solving them, one at a time. This is burning up my brain, so I've been working in 15-20 minute bits, and then taking a break to read a chapter of this rather fun pulp novella from 1916 called "The Princess of the Balkans." Though it starts with a big politically incorrect slap in the face, it makes up for it by turning the character introduced as a "poisonous-looking Jew" into one of the most admirable, and fun, antagonists I've read in a long time. If you crossed the sidekick Sallah from Raiders of the Lost Ark with Captain Renault from Casablanca, you might come close to what this guy is like.

The story is only available as image files of the individual pages, an I have to read it in Photoshop -- but that means it works out great to keep me working because I can't just wander off with my Kindle to read it.

Anyway....

I want to start talking about covers every Monday, now. (Which are posted at the end of the day, so I suppose that makes it a Tuesday post. I'm off my schedule....) But this week I didn't find much of anything that intrigued me in the new releases, at least not for mysteries, or fiction.

I did find this really wonderful cover for a non-fiction book. I'm assuming it's about Richard Feynman, the colorful scientist. This would be a very attractive cover for a novel as well -- but it screams "colorful personality." This is clearly a book about a character. So if a particular character were not the complete focus of the story -- that is, not just the subject of the story, but the object of the story -- it wouldn't do.

Two things I find particular interesting about this cover. Red, of course, is a very aggressive color, and it jumps out at you, but here it is intensely dark -- and because the lightest color in the face is a deep red, the face almost looks like it's in shadow. Like a photograph with a bright blue sky behind and an under-exposed face in front. But because the shadowed face is RED, it still grabs and holds your attention. The color scheme falls between complementary and split-complementary -- red is opposite of green, but by making the background a blue green, there is some room for that little touch of gold.

The other element I really like here is the typography. The title is almost like negative space -- no stroke (or outline), and it bleeds right off the page. It looks almost like a cut out.

For my second picture I went hunting. I didn't like my choices in mystery, like I said, so I went to Amazon and began to look at the list of best sellers in mystery. I just scanned down the page for something that stood out... and to my surprise, nothing did. At least not for the top 40 titles. Then at 41, James Lee Burke came to my rescue.

Before I get to this cover, here's the thing that was wrong with the other covers: Nothing.

All the top covers basically did their job. They were just... generic. As in expressing their genre. Most of them were all typography -- just author name and title, with a little something thrown in to give it brand for the author or series. Some of them -- the very few cozies in the bunch -- depicted a cozy type murder setting. Nothing exciting, just declaring the genre.

Mysteries in particular sell themselves based on series -- so let's be honest and say that a book which says "EVANOVICH!" and has a title with a number in it does not need a grabber of a cover. The audience just wants a clear indication of the series.

James Lee Burke could do the same thing, frankly. But look at that cover. It's beautiful. It doesn't express genre. It looks rather literary. Again, this one uses color in a surprising and intense way. Here the background is a hot red-orange, which jumps out at you. The foreground cross is very cool and dark -- but it's also highly saturated and intense with color. Once again, it's a split complementary color scheme, with a bluish-green and greenish blue in contrast to their opposite red-orange. And once again unified and defined by a small amount of yellow. Complementary colors have a tendency to be hard to look at when they actually touch, and the yellow gives some definition to the "battle line" between them.

See you in the funny papers.

Research - The Joys of Public Domain Archives

As some of you know, I am slow cooking an adventure series I sometimes call "The Serial." It's called this not because it will be a serial (thought it might be), but because it takes place in a world made to resemble the fictional reality of the old serial adventures -- both books and movies -- of the hay day of the Silent Movie Era. That is, about 1914-1927.

The majority of that time frame (up to1922) is a period where most intellectual property is in the public domain. Which means that there is a ton of material from that period online.

That is the best kind of research you can do, you know. Not just reading up what historians and scholars have to say, but reading the actual magazines, newspapers, books and pamphlets of the time. The ads themselves can be very enlightening too. This tells you not only what we know now about the period, but what they thought and knew, and didn't know, then.

So, while I'm concentrating my writing on my current series, I am seeking out a big pile of reading material to get me in the proper frame of mind for that period. Bookmarking it, downloading it if possible. I have a bunch of old magazines on my Kindle and on my computer.

Doing this kind of research is a lot like hanging out in a very old library, or the attic of your great-grandmother's house. Finding stacks of magazines and dusty old books. But without the dust, and without a risk of damaging the material either. Or the need for a lot of shelf space.

Here are a few of the places I've had the most fun hanging out recently:

Project Gutenberg

The grand-daddy of all ebook sources and of public domain archiving is not just a place to find the classics you read in school. Or even a place for pulps and penny-dreadfuls. There are also magazines and newsletters and political tracts.

Their goal is to have everything which is in the public domain, available to everyone in the world. It's all volunteer work, and it's all free. It can be a little hard to find stuff when you don't know what you're looking for, though. However, it can be fun to just browse through the books released on the Gutenbooks Twitter feed every day.

Aside from random books I find in the Twitter feed, I've mainly been collecting issues of the French magazine "L'Illustration" -- which is kind of like a previous century French "Life" magazine -- and the famous UK humor magazine Punch. Punch in particular has been great for views of both large and small events of the day, and the sensibility of the time. (It's kind of like a lowbrow New Yorker -- with more cartoons and silly bloopers and clever comments, but also some articles on politics, theater and stories which are more "slice of life" that full plotted stories.) PG has issues of Punch as early as 1887, and all the way up through at least 1920. There are lots of holes in the collection, and I'm always on the lookout for when they get more.

The illustrations/cartoons in Punch, btw, are purely black and white, and display relatively well on the Kindle screen-- though they usually loose some resolution.

Archive.org

This is an even bigger repository than PG, if only because aggregate others. They have links to PG, libraries and other archives. They also are a wonderful source of film, and other kinds of media. It's not always easy to find stuff there, partly because some of their best items are things you may not think to search for. I have had a lot of luck in finding interesting things by searching on "magazine" and the year I'm interested in.

I've found ALL of the issues of The Strand from first issue up through 1922, plus scattered issues of fiction magazines like Top Notch and The Popular Magazine. There are also film magazines, etc.

And I find quite a lot of movie serials (and standalone movies) though they are often fragementary. (Most films were made on combustible nitrate film up until the late 1940s -- so an awful lot of material has been lost.)

Shorpy

This archive describes itself thusly:

THE 100-YEAR-OLD PHOTO BLOG
Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.

Most of the images seem to have come from Archives in Detroit -- the newpapers there, and also various publishing companies. They are beautifully restored, and extremely high-rez. And the Shorpy fan-base is always adding more information in the comments section on each photo.

I can spend all day browsing photos on Shorpy. (Note: although the original photos are largely in the public domain, the restoration work done on the negatives is under copyright, and it is not acceptable to simply take these images and do what you will.)

(Addendum: these days Shorpy has been displaying images from the Library of Congress images library. If you see a picture you like that you'd like to use for something, look closely the information on the blog post about it -- many of the Library of Congress images are in the public domain, although not all are, so you should look at the LOC notice on the page.  Also many of the images need a little correction on the contrast and "gamma.")

You can also find a lot of material -- photos, film, books, magazines, newspapers, public records -- on university library sites (look for archives and special collections in particular) on government sites (local governments often have a little archive/museum/website with material too), and websites created by history or geneology buffs. Even YouTube can be a good place to find film archives, although again, you almost have to know what you're looking for before you can find it -- and the results are often incomplete and choppy.

See you in the funny papers.

Week In Review: Funny Bunnies, Heroic Horses and a Sketch

This was a grand week for me, because this new dare and the whole 90 minutes a day thing has not only worked, but it also has freed me up for other things. Among the "other things" is a return to daily posting... although it will be slightly flaky daily posting.

I have a couple of interesting series in the works, but this week I'll just do a light set of musings on productivity. Not a "how to" so much as thoughts on some of the ideas which steer us wrong. Things like the fact that you probably shouldn't even try to make every minute count, and how "necessary" doesn't mean productive, and how top priorities are not always the obvious priorities. I'll get to those Tues, Wed, Thurs.

Tomorrow I may talk about some of the fun stuff I've been finding on Project Gutenberg and Archive.org, and then Monday I may start a series of cover posts again. This time I won't be looking at my own covers, but instead at some commercial covers that in a "new releases" newsletter I get.

In the meantime you can see the sketch of the week below, but first a pause for amusement:


Make Up Your Own Joke

The Pink Snowbunnies anthology has been published! (More later, when I have more time -- in particular an interview with the collection's instigator and editor, Deb Geary.) It can take a while for a book to get processed through the system, so on Thursday, I went to see if it had made it to Barnes and Noble. It hadn't yet.

I searched for "Pink Snowbunnies In Hell", which it didn't find. But it did show me a large promo for Dick Cheney's book.

I shall not make a comment. I shall leave it to you to make your own joke....

But really, honestly, do you want to read more hellish blatherings from an old and foggy politician, or do you want to read new and shiney hellish blatherings from twenty up and coming writers? I mean, really, compare them. Which of these would YOU rather read?



Video of the Week: an Heroic Horse and Rider

They needed some medicine in one of those isolated towns in Vermont.




Sketch Of The Week

I actually did this sketch a week or two ago, but the one I'm working on now is more involved. For this sketch I wanted to play with doodling for shading an image. The technique was basically making black scribbles all over any shaded area -- making them too dark -- and then scribbling over with white ink (Or an eraser, I can't remember which) to pull it back to a lighter gray.



It looks nothing like the image I used as a reference, which was a blurry screen capture -- very low rez -- of an image from the first Bulldog Drummond film. (They had some interesting lighting effects.) The heroine was young and pert. This woman has character.

But now I have a half-hour or so left on today's goals, and the cat is making alarmingly funny sounds in the kitchen....

See you in the funny papers.

600 Minutes Accomplished!

Thus ends the first week of my new dare.

I'm going to continue with this for two more weeks. I think that will bring me to the end of the book. The goal seems just about right to keep me productive while still handling everything else in my life.

600 Minutes a week means 90 minutes a day on every day except Wednesday (which is my long day) when I'll do 60.

After that I will take a short break and then finally get back to the next Mick and Casey. (Actually probably several Mick and Casey's -- although most will be shorter works.) The book I'm working on -- DEVIL IN A BLUE BUSTLE -- may well turn out to be a short novel. It's already novella length and I realize that some of the things it's missing could expand it quite a bit, plus leave a lot of nice opportunities for Mick to get himself into trouble.

See you in the funny papers.

Boulders, Pebbles and Sand

This 600 Minutes A Week Dare has finally given me the tool to make use of a lesson I learned a long time ago, but never could quite implement right. It's the principle illustrated in a famous Zen koan (or teaching parable) which, like so many koans, which makes it's meaning so obvious that you come away thinking you've learned something.

Except I've never been able to make good use of the lesson.

Here's the story:

A teacher (who appears to be teaching on a beach in New England, as far as I can tell) fills a bucket with large rocks. He puts the rocks in to the bucket until the bucket can hold no more.

"Is this full?" he asks his students.

"Yes, it is full," say the students. "You can fit no more rocks into the bucket.

So the teacher starts picking up pebbles and dropping them into the bucket to trickle down between the large rocks. He shakes the bucket a little to make sure the stones filter down properly, until he can get no more small stones into the bucket.

"Is it full?" he asked.

"Yes, teacher, it's full. You can't get any more pebbles into the bucket."

Then the teacher pours the sand into the bucket, and it filters down between the small stones and the big rocks, and he shakes it to make sure every little pocket is full of sand.

"NOW, is it full?"

The students hesitate, but on looking around they see nothing more that the teacher can fit in between the sand, and they say the bucket is indeed full.

And this time the teacher agrees with them. But he's not done with the lesson.

He pours the bucket out on the ground -- the sand, the pebbles and the rocks -- until the bucket is completely empty. Then he fills it again, but this time, with just sand and nothing else.

"Is it full?" he asks.

"Um....no?" say the students.

"Oh? Then try to get any more of anything -- rocks, stones or sand."

And of course they couldn't. Sand fills every empty bit of space, and leaves no room for anything else.

The lesson of this story is supposed to be that you need to reserve space for the big important things by putting them in first, and then letting the little unimportant "sand" things take care of themselves.

I've never been able to quite make that darned story apply to real life. Boulders and tasks are just two different beasts. Blocking out time just leaves an empty space in the calendar for sand to get in. And I can't put the most important tasks first, because I don't do those things well first thing in the morning.

But now enlightenment has struck.

This by-the-minute dare has been the first time I have really felt that I've made this thing work. The key was to realize that the thing boulders and tasks have in common is not size -- but definition. A boulder is well defined. Sand isn't.

By defining the task as "nose in book" I empowered myself to actually manage it.

Whoopee!

See you in the funny papers.