What I learned this week
Sometimes, surprise yourself.
Similar Posts
On finding balance
Some of my colleagues have been talking about finding balance, and they don’t actually burst out laughing when they talk about it, so they must mean it. To me, it sounds like just one more thing to beat yourself up over, your regrettable lack of balance. Look, the only people who do good work are…
Dojo Wisdom: Embrace the Dragon
As regular readers know, I am very excited about the re-release of Dojo Wisdom, which will be out July 1. (You can preorder it here.) To that end, I’m planning to excerpt a few of my favorite lessons from the book. Here’s one. #84: Embrace the Dragon According to martial arts legend, Shaolin temple…
On how I work, illustrated
I spend a lot of my writing time doing this: By which I mean I spend a lot of my time staring out the window, not that I spend a lot of my time drawing sketches, although these days I spend a fair amount of time doing that, too. I call this, “Sometimes you have…
On what to do when you get there
“No horizon perceived by human eyes is ever the shore, because beyond that horizon is another.” —Flaubert If you’re like me, you’re accustomed to setting goals and achieving them, and you know all the rules, that your goals have to be Specific, and Measurable, and Achievable, and Relevant, and Timed, or some iteration of that,…
How a Book Is Born – Part 2
So, I had my assignment, 50,000 words by December 3. But they couldn’t be just any words; they couldn’t be just a first draft. They had to be final, ready for an editor. I don’t normally write perfect first drafts; generally, I write an extended outline so that I know how the plot works out…
Accentuate the positive
There’s a lot of doom and gloom in publishing these days, although if you’ve followed along on this blog, you’ll know that book publishing has been doomy and gloomy since about 1847, and that I encourage people not to get too bent out of shape over it. “But!” you exclaim. “This time it’s different!”…
