Another First Draft in the Can

I'm pleased to report that I finished the first draft of my romantasy novel yesterday. In its present form it weighs in at an impressive 148,930 words, which makes it the longest thing I've ever written. Though that word count will have to come down a little, not just in the normal course of revising and editing, but because debut authors plunking down phonebook-sized manuscripts into agents' Query Manager are, ahem, frowned upon.

To put that word count into perspective, Sarah J Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses runs to about 130,000 words, while Rebecca Yarros's Fourth Wing is apparently over 200,000 words. Neither is the first book by their respective author, so I'll have some cutting to do.

The other notable thing about this accomplishment is that it took me barely three months to write it. The key factor was obviously my current lack of employment, which meant I had a lot of time to devote to it during the day, but I also think I did a better job of plotting it out than I've done with my previous attempts at novels. For example, the last novel I wrote, which ran to 98,000 words when I subbed it to agents in 2024, took about six months to write, mostly in one-hour increments at 8pm when I'd finished all my life stuff (work, dinner, tidying, etc). The novel I wrote before that was intended to hit at least 80,000 words but came out at 50k, so I cut 10,000 words out and repackaged it as a novella.

I'm not entirely sure why this one stuck in my imagination so well, but I suspect it's because I plotted it out much more thoroughly than those others, with a lot more emphasis on the two POV characters' journeys. Although who knows, maybe when I go back to revise it I'll see all kinds of glaring plot holes and infelicities. I won't know until July at the earliest...

It's also worth saying that, apart from any outcomes I may be hoping for, I just had more fun writing this than I have in a long time. Partly that had to do with the spicy scenes (if we're being honest), but those were a way to get further into the characters' heads - to me at least. My critique group might be horrified (or worse, bored) by them. But the upshot is that I'm a little sad to be leaving the characters behind for the moment - they were my main creative focus for a relatively short but intense time, and now I have to try and banish them from my thoughts for a while, so that I can come back to them at revision time with fresh eyes.

Though, one thing I've been pondering (and this might just be the bargaining stage of my grief journey at leaving them) is how this "put the book away for at least 6 weeks" thing works for authors who are on deadline? Surely when Rebecca Yarros or Sarah J Maas or Joe Abercrombie finish their first draft, they don't put it aside for a couple of months, do they? Their editors must be waiting for something, surely.

This is one of those things I'd like to learn first hand.

On the other hand, I have other projects that have started to demand attention, and I've been looking forward to revisiting and revising them, so at least I'll have other things to keep me busy for the time being. And my critique group has been asking about one of them, which is, with luck, going to be my next main project - unless my brain falls in love with something else and makes me work on it at all hours like it did with this project.

Brains are fun!

So Long, 2025: Don't Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out

You know, I've been writing these posts every year since 2016. Some of them have titles like, "Gosh, what an awful year" or "Another year I'll be glad to see gone". When I looked forward, it was stuff like, "Things are gonna get worse after 2024".

Thing is, they really all have been terrible in so many ways. We should have noticed in 2016 when all the celebrities started dying, completely out of nowhere, but by the end of that year it was clear we'd crossed into the darkest timeline. Even when we got a respite at the end of 2020 by voting out Trump, 2021 started with a deadly riot at the Capitol and the deadliest phase of the Covid pandemic was about to start.

So, uh, with that in mind, welcome to my recap of 2025! It's been another bad'un, both at the macro level and the micro level. Looking at the wider world, political chaos and violence have been the norm, and while it's been disheartening to see how many institutions simply caved to whatever nutty Trump demands came their way, it's been good to see some pushback from the grassroots level. Though it's not going to mean a thing if the Democrats don't take back the House and Senate in the midterms and impose some accountability on this administration.

Oh, and btw, it still won't mean a thing if they do. Realistically, even if Democrats sweep a supermajority in both chambers and impeach Trump, he'll get pardoned by President JD Vance, and whatever Vance can't pardon him for, the Supreme Court will just say he had immunity or something. I'm not actively worrying about how bad things will get in 2026, 2027 or 2028 because I can't change any of those things, but I still sometimes find myself wondering what absolute chaos will happen because people last year thought Joe Biden was too old.

As a final point on the political stuff, whenever Democrats regain the levers of power, I'm really worried about how hard it'll be to undo everything that's happened just this year. A bunch of agencies, like USAID and Voice of America, are probably not coming back at all, because both parties seem to have lost interest in soft power, but apart from that, the health and economic data collection isn't going to bounce back easily - even if whoever's in the White House and Congress after 2028 has any interest in resuming all the research and data collection that we had before this year, any datasets we have on, say, infant mortality or broadband penetration or basically anything will have these large gaps between 2025-2029 that'll skew our understanding of what was happening.

And that's to say nothing of the sustained cyberattack that was DOGE, in which a bunch of unelected Elon Musk fanboys got a hold of the federal government's data and can now do whatever they want with it. That situation isn't going to change when President Gavin Newsom or whoever gets sworn in, and we're gonna be feeling the aftereffects for generations.

Okay, but how was it for me?

Ugh.

As I may have mentioned, I lost my job in March - incidentally, five years to the day since my boss at State Farm told us we'd be working from home because of the then-nascent coronavirus. But we'd be back in a couple of weeks, they assured us. In my five subsequent years of work, I spent 1.5 days working in an office, and those were for office parties.

The job search sucked, with three legitimate callbacks and one that was a waste of time because it paid way too little (like, it would have meant a $36k pay cut). On the plus side, the last one then led to my first proper interview of the year, so we'll see how that went.

The first thing I did, though, was schedule out my time for every week, so that I'd ensure I was spending my time doing the things that mattered to me. This meant that I had time for writing, job-hunting, going to the gym, learning, and so forth. Of all of these, the writing is my one bright spot for 2025, both because I made sure I spent a couple of hours on it each day and because I was in that TV writing class I've talked about so much.

Compared to previous years, where I found it tough to get new projects off the ground, this year I ended up writing four TV scripts (one spec and three pilots), plus plotting out four novels (two rewrites and two new ideas). I also came up with ideas for movies, a non-fiction book, and a rewrite of a novella I wrote a few years ago. It's hard to say whether I'll be able to maintain this momentum, especially when I find a job again and don't have quite as much time anymore, but at least I know what to work on.

On the dating side, once I lost my job, this was never going to be a great year, but at the very least it seems to have been better than 2024. I went on a couple of dates, had a phone call vibe-check that was supposed to turn into a date but then she bailed, and after Thanksgiving I reconnected with someone I'd gone out with back in 2023 - we've only been texting, but it's nice to chat with her again, wherever this leads.

Fitness-wise, I got a lot more serious about going to the gym, even though I had to cancel my monthly personal training sessions. I maintained my schedule of going 4 times each week, and I way overshot my original goal to lift a total of 300,000 lbs, by hitting over 1.2 million lbs. This included that period of two months when I was in Europe and wasn't going to the gym. Not to be shallow, but the friend I've been texting noted that I looked fit when I sent her a picture of myself next to the Christmas tree, so it looks like at least all that gym work has had some effect.

On the financial front, once again, it was never going to be a great year, but I was quick to cut down on certain spending, and was lucky enough to be able to lower my rent quite substantially. All of which means that, even though I haven't had any money come in since September (when my unemployment ran out), I still have a fair bit of runway, even without raiding my retirement accounts.

As far as the life/other goals, mixed bag again - I didn't get out to as many cultural things as I'd have liked, but I got to some. I didn't leave the Bay Area as many times as I'd have liked, but traveling is expensive, and anyway, I managed to fuck off to Europe for two months, which was cool. Still didn't do enough decluttering, though.

There's no dressing this up: personally, 2025 was a shit year, and it was a shit year in part because the macro directly affected my micro (I'm pretty sure I'd still have a job if Kamala Harris had won last November). But amid the shit, I made the best of it where I could, and that's the important thing. Now... it'd be nice to have a year where I thrive, both personally and professionally. I'm not due anything, because the universe doesn't work like that, but the hope is that I unlock something, whether internally or externally, that makes that year (decade? Lifetime?) of thriving possible.

For as many years in a row have been terrible, in however many ways (2026 looks to be the 11th bad'un in a row), the hope is what keeps me going. Things may not clear up in 2026, or 2029, or, honestly, in my lifetime. But something will come along. It'll do so for me, and it'll do so for you.

Happy New Year, and don't let the bastards grind you down.

Unexpected Fecundity on Vacation

Given that this is my second time being between jobs, I've tried to improve on the previous bout, which was back in 2018. I had a lot more freelance work, then - scratch that, I had freelance work, full stop - but in between jobs I found it harder to maintain focus on bringing in business and taking care of other stuff I wanted to do. The main thing that I remember wishing I'd done more of was writing.

So this time, I decided to do things a little more intelligently. I built myself a weekly schedule, which broke each day into four parts similar to how I organized my time after I started working from home during and after the pandemic. While almost each day had to feature one block of time for job-hunting, I also built in a block for writing, and I've generally managed to stick to both, plus other important stuff like learning and going to the gym.

When I decided to take an extended trip to Europe I continued with my weekly scheduling, which was easier to do when I was in London and mostly on my own. It was a little more difficult in Oslo, but I gave myself a break for being officially on vacation... and I still managed to do a little job-hunt related stuff and a fair amount of writing-related stuff.

One thing that's helped keep me on track with writing has been the sequence of TV writing classes I've been taking through the UCLA Extension since last fall. I lost my job just as the first class in the sequence ended, and I've since continued plugging away at it, because I figured that at least I'd have something to show people once I finished (I'm now in possession of a Star Trek: Strange New Worlds spec script, if anyone out there wants to get me on that writing team before the show ends).

Now that I've moved on in the sequence to the part where I write my own TV pilot, I find the ideas flowing even more freely. In addition to the outline and script I'm writing for class, I'm developing a couple of ideas that have been percolating in my head for the last couple of years, as well as looking at revising a novel I was working on a year or two ago and writing novel versions of my TV pilot ideas.

It's actually been quite exciting to have so many things to keep me occupied during this time. Also, the class allows me to break up tasks in a way that deeply appeals to my methodical nature, which means that whenever I finish one component of a given project, I can just move on to the next project, knowing that I'll return to the first one the following week. Work for the TV class takes precedence, obviously, but the structure also gives me a way to break down my other stuff and devote time to work on it when I'm up to date on my homework.

The other thing that's allowed me to do so much writing is simply time. Of course I have the same 24 hours each day here in Italy that I have in California, but I also have fewer demands on my time. I'm way out in the country, so mobile internet is spotty, even with my roaming pass from T-Mobile; not only that, but the Wi-Fi in the house only reaches a couple of rooms, so I'm not doomscrolling from every horizontal surface I can lie on.

I also don't have a car, so I can't go out and do other stuff that I'd do in Palo Alto. The most obvious thing is going to the gym - though back home that got its own block of time on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so it didn't interfere with the writing. The main thing that should take time away from the writing is doing DIY work on the house, but even with that in mind I manage to carve out a couple of hours for writing and job-hunting and even some learning on Khan Academy.

Of course, I'm super fortunate. I have a pretty big emergency fund, plus I'm spending the month of August in a pretty cheap part of the world, and I'm not even paying for a hotel for the privilege. I had the wherewithal to depart for London, Oslo and Turin for two months in the first place, which not everyone in my position could have done.

There's also the fact that the freelance stuff has been singularly thin on the ground this year. When you don't have the option of doing that to earn a crust of bread, then you fill your hours with other stuff. I've just been lucky enough that I could fill my hours with writing a Star Trek script and plot out novel revisions. 

But the main point that's worth considering here is, how easy it is to get distracted from writing, or whatever else it is you think you "should" be doing. Even when you're not employed full time, your house can hold a lot of distractions, and the ability to deal with them. There must be some way to neutralize those distractions, and when I get home I hope to continue this streak of getting shit done.

In any case, the upshot is that, whatever else I remember and/or regret about this particular period of funemployment, when I look back on it at least I'll be able to say that I took the time to get serious about the writing. And hopefully that leads to something, somewhere down the line.

Thoughts on TV Writing Classes

I've been looking for evening classes for a while, to get me either out of the house or to help improve some skill that's important to me. And then last summer/early fall I started seeing ads on Facebook for TV and film writing classes at UCLA.

Because I'm not quite on the verge of moving to LA, I was glad to see that these classes through the UCLA Extension are mostly offered online. I started off with an Intro to TV Writing course, which consisted of six weekly sessions on Zoom. As the name implies, it was an introduction to how TV is generally written, both 30-minute comedies and 60-minute dramas. Each week we had to watch an episode of one or more specific shows, then compare them with the scripts or write our own beat sheets summarizing the various plot lines going through each episode.

It was in this way that I got introduced to Barry, on HBO, and Severance, on Apple TV Plus. I've sort of fallen off with Barry, but I want to get back to it soon, while for Severance I'm currently taking advantage of Apple's promotion to get a month of Apple TV Plus for free, so that I can catch up on the first season and watch the second season. I'm even considering keeping the subscription for an extra month, so I can get to the end of Season 2.

After that, I decided to keep on doing it, so I found an Intro to 60 Minute Drama class, as that's more in line with the kind of TV I'm interested in. That's a ten-week class, so I'm still in the middle of it, but so far it's pretty interesting. Where the previous class talked a lot about theory and the business, this class drops us straight into the plotting aspect - early on we had to choose a show for which to write a spec script, and every week we've been refining the idea for our spec. Because I don't watch loads of network TV, and most of the stuff I've watched lately is more of a limited series than an ongoing (stuff like Agatha All Along and the Penguin), I opted for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

It helps that SNW is episodic rather than serialized, so I don't have to worry about fitting into something so tightly plotted - although a couple of classmates are tackling shows like House of the Dragon, which I found too intimidating (apart from the fact that I'm not watching it).

At any rate, I've enjoyed coming up with a story for my own episode of SNW, and at the same time figuring out the B and C stories, and determining how they fit into the overall whole. Because SNW's episodes are mostly self-contained, it's easier to watch them to piece together how that interplay works, and then try to replicate that in my own story.

We also have to give feedback on classmates' work, so I get to examine storytelling from that angle, too - looking at what works and what takes me out of the story. A couple of other people are doing SNW stories too, so I've mostly commented on theirs, but I've also given comments on a few other shows, though some of the ones that I don't watch are tough to find comments for.

With regard to the teaching, I think it's pretty good so far. For this week's assignment I had some questions for the instructor, and she got back to me with some helpful comments quite quickly. That meant I ended up submitting my assignment a few days early (we have a deadline every Friday), and so I can do other stuff, like this here blog.

Another thing that's been helpful about this class is that, while it seems focused on network dramas with ad breaks, the format that it teaches is still relevant for shows on streaming services, which typically don't have ads. It's one of those things that feels very "duh" when you see it, but it's been a revelation to see how act breaks work, especially with the need for a good cliffhanger to keep that audience there from act to act. This is a relic of network TV, when viewers might use act breaks as an excuse to flip to other channels, but it's still relevant when you're competing against whatever they're looking at on their phones.

I don't know if it'll lead to a TV writing job, since I don't know what the prospects are for a 45-year-old with no experience, but I'm also looking at it as an opportunity to improve my storytelling in other media. The main thing I'm taking from it is plotting out my main plot and subplots, from start to finish, and then plotting the story by putting them together. I figure that any skills that improve my writing should be transferable to whatever form I'm writing in, whether it's TV, movies, prose or comics. It's also given me a taste for deconstructing books and shows that I like, to see how they're telling their stories.

And yeah, if it does end up leading to a Hollywood writing career... that's not such a bad outcome, is it?

Change of Scene

After two years stuck at home, my thoughts recently have been turning quite regularly to getting out of the house for longer than a couple of hours at a time. The problem is that I'm still taking the pandemic quite seriously, and so I remain uncomfortable with certain activities or locations. This has limited me to places I can reach by car, but I've been discovering that I can still reach quite a few places.

I just spent the past week down in Orange County, in fact. I took my work laptop and all the stuff I needed to spend a week away from home (exercise gear, books, personal laptop, foodstuffs I didn't want to go bad while I was away), and drove down Saturday before last. I stayed at my mom and stepdad's house down there, keeping him company while my mom was out of town (she's a lot more confident with traveling than I've been, though I've had external circumstances that made that harder). During the days I'd drive down to the condo they had nearby, which they were renting out but is currently empty and typically used as my mom's office. Because I'm fully remote at work, I didn't need to get permission, just headed down and got my work space sorted out down there.

Having now been back home for one workday, it's struck me how much like a vacation it was, even if I was working my normal hours. For one thing, the commute gave me a nice sense of split between work and not-work, even if I spent about ten minutes in the car each way. I'd arrive in the morning, change out of my jeans and pour a bowl of cereal, before logging on for the day. At five, I'd log out, change back into my jeans and drive back to watch German TV with my stepdad and have dinner.

The other thing that made it feel like a real vacation was the scenery. They live in a pretty prosperous part of Orange County, not far from Laguna Beach and the coast generally, with communities sprinkled onto hillsides, so that basically every house has a beautiful view. I kept going for my daily walks last week, and quickly realized that if I walked up the hill, I'd get to a road that had amazing views east toward the mountains, or west toward the coast. A far cry from the flat suburbia that I usually walk around in Palo Alto.

That last part was a bit of an adjustment for me, because I've spent the last twenty years being down on Orange County. I went to college at UC Irvine, and always thought of it as a blinkered place, full of right-wing people and racist cops. If I've considered the merits of moving to Southern California, it's always been to Los Angeles, where there's exciting cultural stuff going on and I'm slightly less likely to run into a pro-Trump protest. However, the prospect of being able to enjoy views like that every day has made me a little more open to settling in Orange County...

What also helped was the subtle changes from my regular routine. For whatever reason, even though I work from home and have zero commute, I usually feel a little rushed in the evenings at home, trying to fit in writing, dinner, cleaning and whatever other tasks I want to accomplish. Down there, my stepdad usually cooked and preferred that I leave the dishes in the sink, so he could put them in the dishwasher. Plus, they've got their cleaners back in once a week, so the place was more spotless than my house, which was also nice.

One other thing, not a particularly big one but fairly important now that I consider it, was the feeling of taking a break from the pandemic. Here in Palo Alto I still wear a mask when I go out for walks, or at least carry it with me. Down there, because so few people are out walking on the roads near the condo, I didn't even bring a mask along, and honestly didn't need it (it's not like there are stores nearby that I could nip into). I maintained my usual rules of masking up in stores and of not eating in restaurants, but on Friday my stepdad and I grabbed a drink at the balcony of one of the local hotels, and ended up eating dinner there.

As I said, I spent the bulk of the pandemic at home, first on my own and then with my then-girlfriend. Since I've been on my own again, I've been trying to balance staying safe (the pandemic is still out there, even if it's not quite as out of control) with doing stuff outside the house to keep sane. My first vacation away from home since 2020 was at Christmas, when I went to Orange County to see the family, and then my first long weekend away was in March, when I went skiing for a couple of days with my dad. This trip has awakened me to the possibility of decamping somewhere else to work for a few days, and really taking advantage of being 100% remote. I don't see myself becoming a digital nomad (I'm still not completely sold on air travel) but it's nice that the possibility is open.

And failing that, I've also spent some time scanning Zillow for houses within my budget in Orange County. I'd be limited to condos, but it's nice to see I'm earning enough now for it to be a realistic idea. It might be a stretch to imagine that I'll truly end up there (I have a better social network here in the Bay Area), but I'm not ruling anything out just yet.

Though if I do move down there, I'm going to have to invest in a Brita filter, because the tap water is gross, y'all.

Finally Doing NaNoWriMo

Every November for years I've seen people talking about NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but I've never joined up myself. It always felt a little gimmicky, or I had other stuff I was working on, or any number of other dumb reasons.

This year, though, I've decided to give it a try. I've felt a little directionless with my writing for the past 18 months or so (gosh, I wonder what that could be related to), even when I had stuff to revise or write down. More importantly, it's been a long time since I've felt able to work on something longer than a short story (and even those didn't seem to be coming to me), so this felt like the right time to do it.

On top of that is the realization that to properly get ahead in publishing, it helps to have longer works. I've been focusing a lot on novellas lately, but have also been finding it hard to find markets that would take them. A novel, on the other hand, seems easier to shop around to agents, which seems like the most reasonable port of call for getting ahead with my writing.

It helped that I finally had a novel idea, which I spent a little while developing earlier this year. I outlined it and wrote a few world-building type documents, that would help me get a sense of the structure of the story and the tone I wanted to strike, but then I found myself distracted by my tech/telecoms blog, and didn't do anything more on the novel idea for a while.

Incidentally, the tech/telecoms blog was so easy to work on because I knew, month to month, what I wanted to do with it. This is what I mean when I say my fiction writing has felt directionless - I had a short story idea a few months ago, and I got as far as the first (hand-written) draft, but in the transition to the typed second draft, I couldn't make it work or muster much more interest. With the other blog, on the other hand, the subject (comparisons of age-related mobile plans in various countries in Europe) dictated the structure, so I knew that after I finished writing about plans aimed at seniors in Italy, I could write about plans in Italy that were aimed at kids.

It's the same with the novel I'm currently working on. Because I spent some time figuring out the structure earlier this year, I know what I want to accomplish in most of the chapters, and can spend my precious and limited writing time accomplishing it, rather than getting hamstrung by all the possible things I can do. Of course, this is the kind of thing that works for me, so maybe a different type of writer thrives on that ambiguity.

As far as the actual NaNoWriMo, it turns out the goal is to write 50,000 words in November, whereas I always thought it was 30k. It doesn't matter either way, as the important thing is to have something workable at the end of the month, and because my writing sessions are regularly yielding much less than 1,000 words, let alone the 1,667 I'd need to average to get to 50k. It's still satisfying to go to the website and input the number of words I've written that day, and see the little meter tick up. I probably should have tried gamifying my writing ages ago...

In any case, it seems to be working, i.e. I have something to write that's holding my interest, and crucially I'm looking forward to certain scenes later on in the story. Even if I don't have the full 50k words by the end of November, I'm aiming to continue writing this initial draft into December, so fingers crossed that I'll be able to do something with it in 2022.

Tips for Writers: LinkedIn Learning

One of the perks of working for a large company like my previous employer, State Farm, is that there are a lot of resources available to employees. These ranged from discounts on stores via its Perks at Work program, to learning resources like Degreed and Linkedin Learning (formerly Lynda.com). The content on Degreed is mostly client-generated and client-collected, meaning that State Farm itself was putting together courses on subjects it deemed important, and cribbing from across the web to populate them.

But my big discovery was that LinkedIn Learning also contains a bunch of courses on creative stuff, which is why I was glad to find that my new employer also gives us access to it. There are a number of creative subjects on LinkedIn Learning, like photography, but the area I want to focus on is creative writing, because there's a fair amount of content on the platform that writers will find useful.

The first thing to say, though, is that you're probably better off accessing LinkedIn Learning through your employer's subscription, if they have it. It costs $29.99 per month for a monthly subscription, or $19.99/month if you take out an annual subscription, so it can be costly; if your employer doesn't offer LinkedIn Learning, you can find a number of the same courses on Udemy starting at around $15 per course. By the way, I found an article comparing the two, which claims LinkedIn offers a la carte courses, but I couldn't find anything on its pricing page other than its monthly prices, so that's potentially a strike in Udemy's favor.

The other point about LinkedIn is that it's better for fiction writers than screenwriters. I was able to find just one course related to screenwriting, but I stopped using it after a couple of days, because the teacher seems to have only one credit to his name, which I'd never heard about before. The fiction writing courses are run by actual authors (e.g. Jessica Brody) or writers who have made a career of focusing on the way stories work (e.g. Lisa Cron). I may never have heard of Jessica Brody before LinkedIn, but a quick google search reveals that she's published over 20 books - so at least she knows the industry and is a working writer.

Some of it can also be very basic. The first writing course I watched was Foundations of Fiction, which features a lot of explanations of types of point-of-view, exercises on writing types of characters, and so forth. But that proviso should only put you off if you're already a bestselling writer - those, like me, who are getting their writing careers off the ground can probably always stand to go over the basics again, every once in a while.

(It's also interesting how easy it is to not learn the basics if you're entirely self-taught, in any subject. At least a basic course will frequently explain these points in a systematic manner)

Jessica Brody also has courses that are aimed at the business side of writing, like how to sell your novel to a major publisher, and developing ideas that sell. I haven't gotten to those courses yet, but I am going through one on productivity hacks for writers, which is full of good tips even if your writing time consists of just an hour a night before bed.

One other course that I've bookmarked to watch at some point is on using Scrivener. I bought it a few years ago, and while my prose stories are still all in Word, I always consider it would be good to learn how to use it to full effect (I've also written screenplays in it).

Beyond the writing courses, there are some good courses on time management and productivity, which have some useful tips and approaches that can transfer over to writers. I'm also partial to the Desk Yogi series on movements you can do to mitigate the effects of sitting at your desk all day - like time management, these are relevant for writers and non-writers alike.

Overall, there's a good amount of creative writing content on LinkedIn Learning, enough that if you have a few minutes free at the end of your workday, you should be able to learn some useful tips or approaches to writing. It's also good to keep your mind thinking about writing, even outside of your normal writing time (though I don't think you should spend all your work time fooling around on LinkedIn Learning).

LinkedIn Learning may not have the brand-name appeal of MasterClass, but if your employer offers it for free it's a good resource, and I highly recommend it.

My Own Rules for Life

I've seen that Jordan Peterson has a new book out, with new rules for life influenced by his recent (negative) health experiences. I don't typically have any time for him, but was interested to read this Guardian review that presented a more nuanced and even-handed view, which, while not letting him off the hook for his own brain-fartery, also assigns blame to over-zealous interpretations of his books and pronouncements on alt-right jerks on the internet.

In the interest of fairness, whenever I've looked at the list of his original 12 rules for life, I've approved, because they are fairly uncontroversial. For example, "make friends with people who want the best for you" is pretty good advice, even if it comes from a right-wing culture warrior with unclear ideas about anything. And I can't disapprove of his final rule, "pet a cat when you encounter one on the street", which implies an appreciation for gentleness and spontaneity that is wholly admirable.

There are some even better ones in his latest book, Beyond Order (which I haven't read, just as I haven't read the previous one). My favorite is "abandon ideology" - physician, heal thyself! "Do not do what you hate" is also deceptively simple but worth remembering.

But it still sort of irks me to let a favorite of the alt-right have this "rules for life" business to himself, so here are mine. They are a combination of my own, and ones that I like from other writers:

• Know what you should be working on at any given time
• This one is adapted from Chris Hardwick's The Nerdist Way. I set a lot of goals, especially for my nightly writing, and it helps to remind myself what I want to work on now, rather than getting lost chasing and not finishing a bunch of different things
• Increase the good, instead of decreasing the bad
• This is from Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You to be Rich. It's more widely applicable than finance, and it's also quite simple. One of his examples is to increase the healthy food that you eat, rather than focusing only on decreasing the unhealthy food. I don't always follow this one as well as I'd like, but it's always on my mind.
• Articulate what you do want, and don't waste time thinking about what you don't
• I got this from Goals, by Brian Tracy. It reminds me to think positively about my goals, rather than trying to articulate what I want by ruling out what I don't. It's applicable for everything from what I want in a partner to where I want to go for dinner (with my partner, of course).
• Better one pleasure than a hundred displeasures
• My dad sometimes repeats this, in Piedmontese dialect, but it's one of those obvious ones that are sometimes easy to miss. And it's related to the ones just before it, so points to me for being thematically consistent
• Stay off social media after 10pm
• This is my own personal rule, and it falls within a broader "no internet before bed" rule. It's not just about sleep hygiene, as the main example I can think of is seeing something that enrages you just before you go to bed. It's bad to subject yourself to such things at most times of the day, but when you go to sleep your brain is free to think about everything it's seen all day, without mediating influences like work, your family or anything else.
• If your mother says she loves you, check it out
• They used to say this around my journalism school. It's not really about your mom, or my mom (who I'm reasonably certain does love me), but a call to really check on things that you learn. It's especially important these days, when right-wing provocateurs have made an industry out of presenting anything done by the left as an affront to common sense. There's always something to dig into. And that goes double for when people are trying to tell you that "the establishment" is lying to you about something (e.g. climate change, fluoride in water, vaccines, etc).
• Check in with your friends
• This is kind of obvious, right? It's been brought home to me in the past year when it's been basically impossible for me to see them physically - at the moment I play Dungeons and Dragons with a group of friends, and the weekly check-in feels good, even if we're not talking loads about our daily lives.
• Ask for help
• And finally, one that I've blogged about. When I lost my job a few years ago, I took immediately to Facebook to let people know, and the response was great. One friend took me up to Foothills Park for beer and weed, another went over my resume with me, and a couple more hooked me up with job contacts, one of which panned out. It doesn't have to be as dramatic as that, but when something big happens, it's easy to put it out to your social network that you need help with something, and even if nothing comes back, then at least people will commiserate.

These aren't twelve rules, because that's Peterson's schtick. They might be banal or repetitive or stolen, but they're some of the most important rules I think about all the time, and because they've helped me so much, I think they could help others. Let me know what you think in the comments.

2019: The Decade Wrapped

I chose that title on the fly because I'm listening to the "decade playlist" that Spotify has auto-generated for me, but it also reflects what I wanted to chat about for this post, the first of this new year and decade (which should have been the last of the previous, but that's what happens when you're busy having fun).

I've seen a lot of people, both friends and media outlets, talking about the decade that began on 1 January 2010 and ended last week, but the more I thought about these past ten years, the more I had to expand my definition to include 2009, because in so many ways that's when a lot of the things I'm doing started.

The main one is dating - I'd asked women out before then, but until 2009 I hadn't been on a proper date, where both parties knew and accepted that it was intended to be such. I'd been on various dating websites before then, but what clicked was getting onto the Guardian's Soulmates service, and then taking great care to write a decent profile - the first woman I went out with started strong, leading to four dates and kisses (including a makeout session at Angel Tube Station a week before I turned 30), but I can't say I maintained that momentum for the next few years. There were a few more women I went on multiple dates with, but none so fun until I met my girlfriend in mid-2019 - and as she reads this blog sometimes, she'll be happy to hear that she was worth the wait.

[Awwwww]

2009 also marked the start of my travels, at least in their current form. I'd had some good trips in the years before then, when I had lived in Southend, but none of those had been very far afield, and as I grew more concerned about saving what little money I earned I found it harder to justify spending on train trips and hotel stays to increasingly marginal spots in Southeast England. So it took romantic rejection in 2009 to finally say, "Fuck it," and book a week away in Paris.

Reader, it was amazing. I know there are those who claim that Paris is overrated, but my experiences with the City of Light have been uniformly wonderful. I decamped there with my shoulder bag, a week's change of clothes, and four books - I spent that week traipsing around eating good food, reading obsessively and hitting as many sights as I could stand. I even managed a couple nights up in Normandy to see the D-Day Beaches and the Bayeux Tapestry.

That trip set the template for others that I took in the following years, notably Singapore, Portland, Buenos Aires and Tokyo: I would decamp alone (more or less), and spend my days exploring, eating and most of all, reading. By then I'd gotten a smartphone and encountered the delights of reading Kindle books on it, so I didn't have to repeat my feat from Paris of finishing my fourth book with a couple days to spare and needing to find a new one.

Now that I'm with someone, I'm looking forward to having a travel buddy, and eventually to taking any notional children on interesting adventures.

The other big thing that started in 2009 was my running, and generally my approach to fitness, though I think it only kicked into high gear a couple years later when I started working with my first trainer. But since then I've consistently been a member of a gym, and for a lot of the time I've also had a trainer to work with, usually preparing for a big run. I've eased off a little on the longer-distance runs, because I don't enjoy how they eat my life, but fitness remains something I crave (even if my diet doesn't quite show it).

There were a couple of big work transitions during the decade, starting in 2011 when I was made redundant from my job at the Regulatory Affairs Journals, where I'd been working (mostly unhappily) for five years, and landed instead at Informa Telecoms & Media. That marked a transition from healthcare, which had been the focus of my career from the start, and from journalism, which had been the focus almost as long. Instead I found myself working on tech, and as an analyst rather than a reporter, a transition that suited me down to the ground.

To put it another way, I hadn't understood how stimulating and rewarding a job could be, until I found one I was actually good at. Though it would have been nice if it had been more financially rewarding.

The other big work transition was in 2017, when I was abruptly made redundant from that telecoms and tech analysis job. I'd been unhappy in my team, and at the company, for about a year, so the change, while shocking at the time, was ultimately for the best. The aftermath let me go back to London for an extended period in early 2018, earning more than I had in my previous London jobs; it also let me experience the freelance life for a short period, and led to the current job that I have.

Speaking of money, despite being paid terribly at Informa, by 2011 I had managed to draw down my student loans and increase my savings enough to get back to a positive net worth, while still enjoying the odd international trip. By the time I was laid off from Ovum in 2017, I had more in the bank than I was earning per year, which felt quite clever.

And last, but not least, I think in the past decade I turned a corner with my writing. I started paying more attention to story structure, and craft in general, which I believe led to my first paying credit in 2013. I branched out from novels and short stories to screenwriting and novellas, and while I'm not quite there with getting stories accepted regularly (and frankly I could do with submitting them more), I'm proud of the stories I have written, especially in the last couple of years, so as long as I keep up that momentum, I think I'll find some success.

Coming into this new year, and decade, there are things to be optimistic about, even if the global geopolitical situation is getting more chaotic. That said, one doesn't need to wait for the start of a new decade, or new year, or even new week, to target their future - Chris Hardwick may have been tarnished for me by his own #MeToo moment, but he loomed quite large in the past decade because of his book, the Nerdist Way, and its key message was "Go out and do the thing you love."

So I'm going to plug away at all the things I love, whether or not I reach them, because life would be boring without them.

Top of the Funnel, or Why We Aren't Successful

As I'm fond of noting, I've spent a lot of time over the last few years consuming self-help and productivity books, blogs, podcasts, what-have-you. For the most part I think I've been lucky, because most of it has been transferable to my own life, even if I still have trouble with the concept of not checking my email first thing in the morning.

But I think that we, or at least I, sometimes lose sight of what we're trying to accomplish when we adopt life hacks and come up with really complicated ways to accomplish things. And then we, or at least I, get pretty frustrated at the perceived lack of progress in our chosen areas, which means either giving up the self-help stuff or getting more of it.

Still, the most insightful thing I heard on this topic was on Tim Ferriss's podcast, where some internet entrepreneur (I'm too lazy to go look it up) mentioned the concept of "top of the funnel". Someone out there is probably shaking their head right now at how basic this is, but bear with me, because everyone who's not where they want to be is doing this.

The example in the Ferriss show was getting a new router, to make sure you're downloading the internet at the most optimal speed - everything else you do, from buying Wi-Fi range extenders to upgrading your laptop or whatever, can deliver only incremental gains but replacing your router (ie improving the process at the top of the funnel) means those improvements can deliver even better value.

It's not a 100% match to what I'm thinking of, but at heart it's an illustration that if you want to fix something, you have to get the basics right. If your internet is slow, then the basic thing is to get a new router (I'm not saying to get a new ISP because if you're in America you don't have any choice).

Here are some examples from my own life:

• So why am I single? Because I don't know enough single women. And because on a Sunday evening I'm writing this blog rather than meeting more single women (though in fairness I was out and about in downtown Palo Alto last night).
• Why am I not the shredded Adonis that I think chicks would dig? Because I eat quite a lot of crap and sit at desks all the time, either working or writing this blog.
• Why haven't I sold the proverbial good fantasy novel? Because I don't write enough and I don't submit enough. Simple as that. And when I say write, I also mean edit, revise, fine-tune, etc.
• Why am I broke? Because I spend too much money on frivolous things and because I work at a job that doesn't pay well.

Now these may apply to me but they're also universal. People are fat, sick and nearly dead in developed societies because they eat crap. They don't have good relationships because they sequester themselves behind their computers or smartphones. And they don't have cash because they don't learn how money works.

The financial basis of the internet, according to another Tim Ferriss guest (I think it was Ramit Sethi this time, but again - too lazy to go check) is to help people get rich, get skinny or have sex. That's besides porn, of course. But nobody would buy any of it (except for porn) if the advice consisted exclusively of "Get a well-paying job and don't spend money stupidly; eat more fruits and vegetables and move around once in a while; and be a nice person who has lots of friends."

I'm aware that this may seem to contradict previous posts I've written where I talk about doing less and not being too tough on yourself. This post is also borne of my own frustration at not accomplishing as much as I think I "should" have. But it doesn't contradict those earlier posts, in truth, and it carries a hopeful message, which I'm going to share with you now.

Being in good shape may seem unattainable, but it's not an arcane thing - all you have to do is eat better and move more. Meeting romantic partners is only possible if you make some effort to go out and meet them, whether by getting shot down in bars or by swiping all night on Tinder. And having money is as simple as getting a job that pays you enough to live off, and not spending so much that you can't support yourself.

You may say there are external factors stopping you in one or more of these cases, and for individual people there may well be. But the hopeful bit is that it's in your control, at least to a certain extent.

One of my favorite parts of Brian Tracy's book, Goals, is when he refers to Barry Sears's Zone Diet, and specifically where he notes that falling off the wagon and eating something not Zone-approved isn't the end of the world. Instead, he says, getting back into the Zone is as easy as eating another Zone meal.

For our purposes today, getting back on track is as simple as taking the actions needed to get back on track. You don't have to build it up into anything more complicated than that. And once you have the top of the funnel sorted out, then you can start making the incremental changes to see even more success.

Let's All Do a Little Less

As anyone who knows me might be aware, I'm into Tim Ferriss's books. I read the Four-Hour Workweek every year, and have the Four-Hour Body, Four-Hour Chef and Tools of Titans on my Kindle app on my iPad. I listen to his podcast regularly, though not religiously, and like catching him on other podcasts - his chats with Chris Hardwick on the Nerdist and Marc Maron on WTF are particularly good.

I also listen (sporadically) to a podcast called the Side Hustle Show. It's hosted by Nick Loper, and features people who have turned their hobbies or whatever into paying side businesses. He references Tim Ferriss from time to time, though to my knowledge hasn't had Tim on his own show.

The reason I mention both here is that there was an interesting confluence of ideas between them, which I've been thinking about ever since. Because Nick Loper expressed it in the most digestible form, I'll call it by the name he uses, though with the understanding that Tim Ferriss also advocates it. Specifically, it's in the Side Hustle episode called "Too Small to Fail", and Nick Loper refers to it as micro-habits.

Micro-habits are too small to fail because, ideally, they are binary - you either accomplish them or you don't. The time investment is small, which means the attention investment is also small, and therefore the habit is easy to create. It can be drawing a single line of a picture per day, writing a single line of your novel, or doing a single pushup per day.

That last one comes from Tim Ferriss, via his chapter on Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress founder) in Tools of Titans. Mullenweg apparently does a single pushup before bed every night, which has helped him get in shape. It is, in fact, so easy to stick with that I've been doing it for a few months, and have seen a great improvement in my pushup form (though on occasions where I've tried to work out my max number of reps, the best I can do with good form is eleven).

Tim Ferriss mentions other micro-habits and ice-breakers in his books, including the fact that IBM sales people used to have a target of one call per day. He notes that keeping the habit small is intentional, because it means it's easy to say you've accomplished what you wanted to do, and because surmounting that initial hurdle makes it easier to pick up the phone again, or finish your picture, or whatever. It's not necessarily better for your pushups, but let's leave that aside for a moment.


Any big endeavor requires a significant investment of time, energy, attention, or whatever you want to call it. Breaking it down into its smallest component parts reduces the complexity and makes it less daunting to just begin, and when you begin you find that momentum carries you on over a long time.

I've made reference before to methodical ways of writing, so this is probably not a surprise to any readers out there. But I suspect it's not obvious to everybody - even Tim Ferriss sometimes blabs about how you need blocks of hours and hours for creative endeavors. Three hour blocks of productivity are probably great, but at least with micro-habits I've been able to check off the box of writing and doing pushups almost every day for several months, and if I don't always write for a full hour, or have the ability to do more than eleven pushups with good form (yet), at least I know I'm getting things done.

In Defense of Learning Useless Skills, or, Why You Should Learn Portuguese

So here's a weird thing that's been happening all weekend. Whenever I've mentioned to someone that I'm learning Portuguese, their first reaction has been, "Why?"

My response has generally been, "Why not?", which I'm told isn't always a satisfying answer (my reply to that is invariably also, "Why not?"). But I find it striking that one of the world's most spoken languages is so invisible.

Brazil has 205 million Portuguese speakers, there are 10 million more in Portugal, and this number goes up when you include speakers in Africa (like Angola) and Asia (like East Timor). Brazil is the largest country in South America, and the largest economy, which is why Portuguese is one of the official languages of Mercosur, the regional trading bloc.

This all makes Portuguese the sixth most-spoken language in the world, and Brazil is the fifth largest country by population - more people speak Portuguese than Italian or German, for instance, both languages that are much more popular among language students. And yet here in the US, we don't have any real understanding of the place. Europe has maybe a tiny bit more understanding of Brazil, but I'd argue that (Portugal aside) that's mostly because of all the Brazilian footballers who pitch up to play in Europe.

But I'm not here to talk up Brazil or the Portuguese language, or even to defend why I'm learning it. I'm actually slightly more interested in the question of why I need to defend learning it in the first place.

It turns out to be a really interesting moment for language learning. Like a lot of folks, I'm currently using Duolingo, but also other apps (like Mango or even YouTube). I believe these apps are so popular because they're free and don't require users to learn languages in specific places, at specific times. Duo's particular genius (beyond gamifying the process of language learning) is also to crowdsource the creation of language courses, which means that if you can get together enough people you can design a course in Dutch, Turkish, even Irish or Esperanto.

I think for the dedicated language-learning community, there's probably no language that needs justification. But whereas knowledge of certain languages used to be assumed among the erudite (French, Latin and Greek, to be precise), now there seems to be this idea that you have to have a specific purpose for learning a language, and that it has to be "useful". For instance, I recently saw a post from Robert Reich on Facebook lamenting that he'd learned French instead of Spanish, because of demographic pressures that mean Spanish is the most widely spoken second language in the US.

But by knowing French, Robert Reich has access to the wide range of French art, literature and cinema that have come down through the years, and he can go visit not only Europe, but large parts of Africa and the Caribbean, as well as parts of Southeast Asia (and Quebec or Louisiana). This isn't to slight the literary and cultural canon of the Spanish-speaking world, but I find his comments a tiny bit odd.

In my own case, I chose to learn German for the noblest of reasons (a crush on a German-speaking Swiss girl in high school), but it ended up opening a bunch of doors that I never expected it to - by continuing my German studies in college, I was then able to go study in Germany for a year, which led to my first job, my graduate school course and all of my subsequent jobs.

This is because nobody seems to be learning German anymore (my high school no longer offers it). Yet Germany remains one of the world's largest economies, even if it's not on the level of China or India. Also, while English-speakers are pretty common in Germany, I wouldn't say English-language skills are as universal as they are in the Netherlands or Scandinavia. So if you need to find out what's happening in Germany's pharmaceutical or telecoms sector, you're better off finding someone who knows the language.

(As an aside, I feel this is a great example of why immigration helps a country. As an immigrant in the UK, I wasn't taking jobs away from British graduates - because there apparently weren't any who spoke German and were looking for these kinds of jobs. My employers - three of them in this case - were all forced to hire me, an immigrant, because the supply of native-born German-speakers was insufficient. Food for thought).

The point I'm making with my own history is that if you make an effort to learn a certain skill, regardless of how "useful" it'll be, having that skill opens up opportunities that you may never have considered. Wanting to do something specific with a language skill (or any other skill) is fine, but if someone has to choose between learning a "useful" language and one that interests them, I'd always go with the one that interests them. It'll help them keep going when they run into difficulties, for one thing, and the uses will come up later, when they've mastered the skill.

Just as importantly, it shows the importance of fishing in waters that aren't too crowded. A friend once suggested that he'd want his kids to learn Mandarin Chinese, so that they'd be better placed to get jobs when they grow up. This isn't faulty reasoning, but how will that differentiate them from all the other graduates their age whose parents had the same idea? I told him to get them started on coding instead, because there's still likely to be a skills gap for that when they're older.

I'm finding that, more and more, the thing that makes someone attractive to employers (and possibly to acquaintances, romantic partners, etc) is a mix of skills, rather than specialization in one specific thing that everybody's also doing. And learning languages - particularly the "less useful" ones - is going to be a force multiplier as the globalized world becomes more connected.

Training Smarter vs Training Harder

Slightly quick one this week, because I'm typing this out on my work computer after-hours - my home phone line decided to die this weekend, taking my DSL with it. But I'm not here to focus on the negatives.

I ran my fastest 10k ever on Saturday, breaking my previous record by about a minute to do it in 53 minutes and 4 seconds. It was kind of a relief, to be honest, because my running experiences last year weren't awesome. After having (finally) broken the 2-hour barrier for half-marathons in 2013, not being able to repeat that feat, much less break my record, was pretty discouraging.

And particularly when I considered how hard I'd worked - my second run took place in November, and I started training for it in July. I even logged over 86 miles of running in October, as I built up to it... only to discover that I hadn't trained for hill running. At all. Fu. Cking. Balls.

So I made a couple of changes to my routine for this run, with a focus on improving my endurance (I'd noticed that my pace tailed off sharply in the second half of a run). Given that a 10k's a little under 50% of a half-marathon, I was able to do three runs a week without spending too ridiculously much time on it, and gradually got my distances and speed up to the levels I wanted.

And the funniest part is that I did it all without a trainer.

I don't want to bash trainers here, because I only managed my previous personal bests because I was working with someone who really knew what she was doing. But it just underscores how important it is to work with a good trainer - I worked with three last year, one of them for about my entire training regime for the second run, and ended up getting pretty lackluster results.

The difference this year, I guess, is that I took more responsibility for directing my own training and got serious about fixing my specific shortcomings (core strength, endurance). Which, I guess, just illustrates the point that you can have the best equipment and support ever, but it's just a prop - you have to do the work, and figure out what works best for you.

Note, by the way, that this doesn't even necessarily mean longer hours - by the end of November, I was at the gym or on a run five or six times a week, whereas this year I stuck with four workouts a week, and didn't run at all in the week leading up to Saturday.

This is all transferable, of course, to setting goals elsewhere in life. Figure out what's holding you back, and then figure out how to get past it; working harder doesn't always beat working smarter (cliche, I know); and when things don't go as planned, give yourself a break and learn from the setback.

The other important thing is, when you do reach your goal, allow yourself that moment of feeling awesome, before targeting the next goal. But don't forget to get back to work.

Getting Back Into Novel-Writing

Tomorrow, a couple of days earlier than scheduled, I'm embarking on a big new project - my first new novel in four years. I've set myself the goal of writing it in three months, for a total of around 90,000 words, which comes down to 30,000 words per month and 1,000 per day.

I'm feeling a certain amount of trepidation with this, as it'll be my fourth novel (more if you count the ones I started but never finished), and the first I attempt to write in such a short time. Those other books all ended up being trunk novels, although I'm reusing some characters and settings from the very first one, The Golden Circle, which I started writing in the fall of 2001, when I was fresh out of college, newly living in London and aiming to write my own answer to the Lord of the Rings.

This book won't be another attempt at that rather lofty goal, of course. In fact, I'm going for something a little easier and breezier, more swords and sorcery than epic fantasy. I'm also thinking of having it be the first in a wider series, but I haven't spent much time thinking about the next books, as I'd really like to get through this one first.

Another reason for my trepidation is the above-mentioned goal. I've never written a draft of a book that quickly, but I recently read Stephen King's On Writing, and he recommended banging them out as fast as you can, so that you can't second-guess yourself or spend too much time waffling on. It sounds like fun, to be honest, and I've scheduled all my other writing projects in such a way that for April, May and June I should (hopefully) be able to concentrate on it alone.

The other thing I'm trying out with this book is a slightly new approach to plotting. I've spoken here before about story structure, particularly the three-act structure favored by Hollywood films, and this book represents a lot of what I have hopefully learned from books like Syd Field's Screenplay and Blake Snyder's Save the Cat. I'm not following the structure slavishly, but I'm at least giving it a backbone, to try and hold everything together. So far, so good.

I've even written an 8-page treatment, of sorts, similar to the 20-page outlines I've been doing for the movie ideas I've come up with. It isn't even broken up into chapters or sections, as I usually do, in favor of trying to get everything down and then worrying about the rest when I start on the edits.

It's fair to ask if I'm going to meet that deadline I've set for myself, of 90,000 words on June 30th, but it's probably not that important in the grand scheme of things. I will, of course, set aside an hour a day to crank out my thousand words, and hopefully this goal hanging over me will keep me focused when I'd rather be watching superhero cartoons on Netflix. But I'm letting myself off the hook if once or twice I miss a weekly word count or something like that (I'm trying to balance this writing business in with work, dating and fitness too, you know).

As far as working on other stuff, I expect I'll find some time for some vague plotting and odds and ends, as well as blogging, of course. But I don't plan on cranking out any movie treatments or anything too sizable until July at the earliest.

Wish me luck!

Hoping 2015 Will Be the Year

Quick one today, as I've been flat on my back most of the weekend (and large parts of last week) with my traditional post-CES illness, with the added fun of something I picked up off a fellow party-goer on New Year's Eve (and not the fun way, either).

But in all that rack time I've been accruing, my thoughts have ranged across the insanely ambitious array of writing projects I've set for myself this year. Folks, it's gonna be a tough one:

1. Revise/rewrite last year's 4 screenplay treatments
2. Write 3 new screenplay treatments
3. Write a 4-6 issue comic based on one of last year's treatments
4. Write a 90k-word novel I've had gestating for a while now, and do it in 3 months
5. Submit short stories 20 times (which is turning out to include revising and rewriting certain stories, because my current pool of submittable stories is two)

And that doesn't include my reading goals, or blogging, or getting out to SF/F author events. It also doesn't include my goals in other areas of my life, like dating and fitness and travel.

Now, I'm not mentioning this to boast about how busy I am, but rather to note that I'm really hoping all the reading I've been doing on story structure, and all my practical work outlining my movie ideas, will translate to the comic and the novel. Comics are a new (ish) medium for me, and although I've written novels, I've never attempted to plot so much out before I write the damn thing. It might work, or it might be an epic disaster.

In essence, I'm hoping to put to use all the stuff I've been reading about the last couple of years now - Robert McKee's Story and Syd Field's Screenplay and talk of plot points, inciting incidents and act transitions. Lack of three-act story structure may not have been the crucial factor in why those early novels didn't work, but it can't hurt to know how it works now, right?

And the real goal, which I left out because it's hard to articulate in a non-vague form, is for this to be the year that I finally start down the road to writing for a living, rather than as a hobby. To be honest, it's been my goal every year since I started writing long-form fiction back in 2001. But, although I haven't quite achieved it yet - I'm still makin' money for the man in my 9 to 5 - I hope I'm making progress.

Frankly, that's all I can hope for - writing is a subjective enough thing that one can be really good but really unlucky. I may or may not be good, but as long as I stick to the old Robert Heinlein rule (read a lot, write a lot, send out what you write), I should be able to make my own luck.

Fingers crossed!

Balancing Conflicting Goals

Like everybody, I've got a bunch of different priorities pulling me in multiple directions - social life, dating, health & fitness, work, and hobbies, to be precise. It's been like this for the past several years, as I've gotten serious about, variously, dating, writing, running and slimming down.

But every once in a while it gets frustrating to try and balance all of these things, because some of them are actually in opposition to one another. For instance, I know that to meet more girls (and, hopefully, down the line, go on dates with them) I need to get out of the house and go where they are. At the same time, if I want to get my stories published, I need to actually block out more time to write them, but that means less time for going out. And so on.

I've heard it said that you can either be successful professionally or personally, but you can't have both areas of your life be perfect. I don't know if that's true or not, because there are plenty of anecdotal examples of both (and it depends on your definition of success, of course), but I try and conduct my life like it isn't. Although given a choice, I think becoming a successful writer just edges out personal satisfaction, if not by much.

One thing that helps is reminding myself that success in one area can actually help in other areas. Getting fitter, for example, would help in becoming a more attractive guy, for instance, while succeeding in getting published is also something that could help attract women (the kind who'd find that attractive, at any rate, but that's who I'm after). I suppose that's all a pretty long-winded way of saying that I've kind of de-emphasized dating, in favor of the other stuff.

One of the self-help books that I go back to from time to time is Goals!, by Brian Tracy, which looks into goal-setting, and how to do it successfully. He advocates regularly writing out a list of your goals in life, but also suggests looking at each and deciding which one, if you accomplished it, would have the greatest positive impact on your life. This is your major definite purpose.

To apply it to my own life, while meeting someone would be great, I don't think it would have as much of an impact on my life as selling a novel or a screenplay. Or to put it another way, publishing a novel would make it easier to meet a like-minded woman, but getting married and having kids would probably make it harder to set aside the time to write the novel or screen play.

(And yes, I'm aware of Elmore Leonard's advice to wake up at 5am and write for two hours at the start of every day. I tried it for a couple of months, and was miserable for every minute of it, not to mention not particularly productive. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman, I want to be a writer so I don't have to get up in the morning.)

That understanding doesn't make my disappointment at continually failing to meet someone less keen, of course. And if I'm honest, sometimes it feels more like a rationalization of why I'm not as proactive as I'd like to be on the dating front. But it helps a little bit.

Although, now that Brian Tracy's gone and written his book about setting goals, I wish he (or somebody else - Tim Ferriss? Chris Hardwick?) would write one about balancing your various goals. That's one I'd devour in one sitting.

Putting in the Hours

I'm not saying anything radical when I suggest that the American mindset seems to be "more = better". This is why we've gotten so fat and unhealthy, why we keep buying too much crap that we don't need, and, maybe, why we spend too much time at work or at school.

Now, to put things into perspective, I'm told that in Asia they work even harder than Americans do, so we'll have to put this all into perspective for a moment, and try not to fall into cultural selection bias traps. But the principle remains the same - we have this idea that time spent at our desks means we're working hard.

You could suggest I've been reading too much Tim Ferriss lately, and you'd be right, but that doesn't invalidate the point. A Bank of America intern recently worked himself to death here in London, which has prompted a lot of hand-wringing about "presentee culture" and requirements for interns, but it seems like something that'll blow over soon and the financial industry will be back to business as usual (no pun intended).

The reason for that, of course, comes down to game theory and the prisoner's dilemma: no matter how many programs Bank of America puts in place to send people home at a reasonable hour, there'll always be some grasping asshole who reasons that staying at his desk an extra hour will get him favorable reviews from his bosses, and some asshole supervisor who'll reward him for it.

Don't get me wrong, I understand when you actually work in a high-pressure environment there's sometimes the need to stay at work late and get things done. But this becomes an arms race where even people in regular jobs get coerced somehow into putting in late hours, even if all they end up doing is playing solitaire or updating their Facebook profile. This isn't just a money-saving or productivity issue, though - it becomes a health issue when the company's presentee culture leads to stress-related illnesses and burnout.

I've been reading about this stuff in an e-book I picked up recently, called Brain Rules. It's by a developmental molecular biologist called John Medina, and among his chapters he talks about how stress affects the brain and learning. He makes a couple of good points about getting more efficiency out of employees by moving away from the straight-jacket schedule of 9-5 (or, for financial folks, 7am-10pm), and helping them manage stress at home to avoid burning out at work.

One of the points where I think it falls down, though, is when it comes to education. He suggests a different repetition-based model, where a concept is introduced at the beginning of the school day and repeated at different points throughout the day (this is a gross simplification). So far, so good. But then he suggests that this means the school year should be lengthened.

To be honest, we're already lengthening it, and I don't believe that's a good idea. As part of President Obama's Race to the Top program in education, not only are we effectively doubling down on teaching to standardized tests (another delightful holdover from President Bush), but we're also starting the school year earlier, ending it later and keeping students behind desks for more time.

There's apparently good research behind this, explaining that the longer kids stay out of school over the summer, the more they forget what they learned the previous year. But given that we stubbornly remain at the bottom of the rankings for math, science and whatever, compared to other industrialized nations, I don't know if this solution of increasing the workload and the time commitment is really the answer.

So it seems to me like Dr Medina's suggestion is to do away with even more summer time, to make learning more efficient. I can't argue with him on scientific grounds, but surely we could do what they do in Europe instead, and assign kids homework to do over the summer? This is, naturally, something I would have rebelled against when I was in school (and to be honest the idea is still pretty unappealing), but it seems a lot less onerous than forcing kids to sit in school for even more of their lives.

Because it comes down to a cultural issue, too - free time is when we're free to be who we really are, or want to be. This is why I believe that employees need to have more vacation time, and more time outside of work in the evenings. I'm lucky enough to work someplace where they don't mind that I leave every night at 5.30 on the dot, because they see that I get my work done - but I think a lot of my colleagues could do with organizing themselves better, so that they don't have to stay late either.

Unless they want to, of course. To each their own.

Jeet Kune Do and the Art of Productivity

Kind of a quick one this week, since I'll be heading out to Amsterdam for work tomorrow (so no red light district and no coffee shops, presumably). But I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the productivity books and/or systems I've been reading about for the last 18 months or so, with some thoughts about the key things I've learned from them.

Productivity and time management are two things dear to my heart these days, as I feel they've helped me a lot, mainly at work but also in keeping myself broadly organized at home. I will admit, as well, to sometimes talking of nothing else, so I suppose it was a matter of time before I wrote this post.

Another quick point about the title: Jeet Kune Do was a system, or philosophy, or whatever you want to call it, coined by Bruce Lee to reflect his approach to martial arts. After having spent years studying wing chun kung fu with Yip Man in Hong Kong, Lee spent some time looking at the effective parts of other styles, and at last settled on a non-style, or jeet kune do, where he took the best things from each discipline and discarded the rest.

It's applicable here because I've tried to take the most useful points from each book or system, rather than slavishly sticking to only one thing. Credit for the idea has to go to Chris Hardwick in the first instance for connecting time management/productivity with jeet kune do in The Nerdist Way, and to Tim Ferriss in his books in the second instance. Anyway, without further ado:

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey

This is kind of the grand-daddy, and also the latest of all the ones I've read. It's not entirely a productivity book, but the first three habits are crucial to managing your time effectively, and Covey spends a lot of time defining what he calls "Quadrant II" work, or tasks that are important but not urgent - as opposed to the perpetual firefighting that comes from doing urgent + important tasks, or the time wasting that comes from doing tasks that are neither.

In any case, the first three habits are as follows:
1. Be proactive
2. Begin with the end in mind
3. Put first things first

They're pretty straightforward: if you want to accomplish stuff, get off your ass and do it. Once you've decided to take action, think about what you actually want to achieve (Covey was fond of saying something to the effect of, when making your way up the ladder, make sure it's leaning against the right wall). And when you know what your goal is, focus on the first tasks, rather than trying to accomplish everything at once.

They've been particularly useful for me when I have a lot of stuff to accomplish in the course of a day; I stop and ask myself what the desired end-state is, and then ensure that I know what the first things to accomplish are. Just stopping and spending a moment thinking about these points is enough to set my mind at ease (what David Allen calls "mind like water") and allow me to get through my tasks without freaking out about them and potentially forgetting important ones.

It's also worth mentioning Covey's seventh habit, "sharpening the saw", which is essentially sharpening your skills, through learning, relaxing, and detaching yourself from your work. It's an important one, but oddly enough, not one that I feel I've completely mastered.

The Four-Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferriss

From the grand-daddy to the rebellious son. 4HWW is probably the most fun of all of the books I've read, simply for the manic ideas behind it (outsource everything to India! Check email twice a week! Drop everything and go!). Ferriss comes off as kind of a snake-oil salesman at times, but it's all part of his charm - and since I've bought his two subsequent books, it's clearly not that off-putting for me, right?

Ferriss's four principles are as follows: Defining, Eliminating, Automating and Liberating, or DEAL. In common with the Seven Habits, you start by defining, or figuring out what you want (eg, to quit your job and go travelling), then increase your personal productivity through eliminating time-wasting activities. Automating is a bit more advanced, as that's where the outsourcing stuff comes in, and liberating talks about the actual implications of jumping ship.

For my purposes, eliminating has been the most influential concept, specifically what Ferriss calls "batching"; he advocates taking certain repetitive tasks and performing them less often. For instance, I've found it useful to turn off the auto-alerts on my Outlook at work, so that I don't get distracted every time an email comes in, and to check my email only every 30 minutes or so (I couldn't get away with checking it only twice a week).

The other big concept he advocates is focusing on the most important task you have to accomplish each day, and getting that done first of all, even before checking your email. It's a concept we'll look at again below, but it's worth repeating (prepeating?) here: focus is a big part of getting things done. In my case, I spend my first 30 minutes of each day looking for and writing news items (on weekends I go for a run and/or throw my laundry in the washer before checking email).

Getting Things Done, by David Allen

This brings us nicely to David Allen's GTD, which is meant to be a full-blown productivity system. Allen talks a lot about defining "next actions" on specific "projects", instead of filling out a to-do list. The difference between the two is that a to-do list is what he calls amorphous - "get the car fixed", for example, is so vague that your brain immediately wants to ignore it whenever it sees it on a list. Instead he advocates breaking each to-do item into its constituent steps: check Yelp/the yellow pages for mechanics, set up an appointment, take the car in.

More to the point, he recommends taking stock of everything in your office and/or home, deciding what needs to be done with it (if anything) and building your list of projects, goals, areas of focus and so forth from there. This is as opposed to figuring out your goals first, and then determining what you need to do to achieve them; once you know what all your "open loops" are, you can decide whether or not they fit in with what you actually want to do in life. If not, dump or delegate them.

To be honest, I've found it a little too time-consuming (ironically) to keep an updated list of 50+ next actions, as he advocates. But it is worthwhile keeping an eye on my overall projects, and figuring out the next action attached to each. He also uses a good decision tree for actions - dump, delegate, defer or do now. If an action will take 2 minutes or less, Allen says, just do it and get it out of the way. This is very powerful.

On an even dorkier note, one of his best pieces of advice was emptying out my email inbox. It fits in with the dump/defer/do thing, because I've created folders for reference stuff, things that I still need to take action on or read (two separate folders) and thrown a lot of crap away once I don't have to do anything with it. I can attest to a warm glow of satisfaction when I open my email in the morning and see everything that needs to be addressed on one screen (but only after I've accomplished a task as per Tim Ferriss's instructions).

Goals, by Brian Tracy

Goals isn't so much of a time management book, but it has a couple of good insights that apply. One of the best, which is probably well in line with Tim Ferriss's principles, is to determine what your most valuable tasks are at work and focusing on those. More globally (and in keeping with Covey's book), Tracy says to figure out what your most important goal is - the one that would have the greatest effect on your life if you accomplished it - and focus on that.

Tracy's also worth mentioning for another book he wrote (which I haven't read) called "Eat That Frog!" That title is taken from a quote by Mark Twain suggesting that if you start each day by eating a live frog, everything else you have to accomplish for the rest of the day doesn't seem too bad. For Tracy, eating a frog is tackling your most unpleasant task of the day first (ideally, as Tim Ferriss would say, finishing it before lunch).

The Nerdist Way, by Chris Hardwick

So yeah, honorable mention goes to the Nerdist Way, for starting me off on using my time more productively. His own approach is similarly catholic (note the small C), taking ideas from each as long as they're useful. For a good example, have a look at his Wired article from a few years ago, "Diary of a Self-Help Dropout", which was kind of an inspiration for this post.

BTW, another honorable mention goes to Lifehacker, although I have to qualify this a little bit. You'll find a lot of time-saving advice (my favorite's the Ian Knot, for tying my shoes), but it's so full of good stuff you'll blow a lot of time reading it all. Which just drives forward the vicious circle of forcing you to manage your time ever better.

If This Is Sick, I Don't Wanna Be Well

Anyone who's talked to me in the last year or so will probably be aware that I've been spending a lot of time on self-help stuff - productivity, time management, confidence, talking to people... I've spent a lot of brainpower on getting to where I think I ought to be.

A lot of this advice is good (especially the time management stuff - I can confirm that working from an empty email inbox, both at work and at home, is just about worth the price of admission). Some of it is less good - either hacky or just too broad to be of use to me.

But the thought I've been having a lot lately, and it's echoed in some of the stuff that I listen to or read about, is the connection between unhappiness and creativity.

To be clear, I don't believe in stereotypes of tortured artists - but I also sometimes worry that if I got too happy, would I still be driven to write, or tell jokes, or whatever the hell I do when I'm not in the office?

I've heard it said that those who perform for a living are seeking approval that they were denied when growing up; this has been applied to actors as well as comedians. On the face of it, it rings pretty true to my experience too - as a child I wanted to be a movie star, but having since grown into a face for radio (and, to be less self-deprecating, not really enjoying the terror of being on stage and learning lines), I've found that I wanted to tell stories.

So that's what I've been doing since I was about fourteen. In that time, there have also been instances where I was more or less happy with my station in life. Some of the best times included my first and last years of college; the years in between were worse, as were the years after I left graduate school.

I can say that the very happiest times weren't necessarily my most productive in terms of writing, but neither were my unhappiest times that good for my writing. But I hold onto this fear that if I were ever truly satisfied, that I'd stop, and then my chance at greatness would be gone forever.

But does it matter? If I'm happy with my life, would I really need to leave behind a body of work? Because that's what it comes down to: being remembered, either in the form of children or of my work.

I'm hoping I can manage both, despite suggestions that you have to choose between professional success and personal success. I know which I'd choose (I've effectively chosen already, at least for the moment), but I also hope there's a third alternative.

Out of Your Comfort Zone

One of the requirements of my job is that I interact with clients from time to time. Usually this takes the form of answering their questions about the data we sell them; every now and then they want to talk to us on the phone. I've also met them in meetings or at conferences, but that is, of course, not enough.

No, we're expected to give presentations at some point. That can be at conferences or in client meetings, but my card is marked: I will have occasion to stand in front of telecoms industry people and spout my ill-informed opinions at them. It has been decreed.

Frankly, this is the only way to get any sense out of me.

To that end, I spent the last two days in a training session designed to give me the knowledge and skills to do just that. When I signed up this summer, I was kind of dreading it, because (let's be honest) everybody is kind of expected to.

In the event, when I was able to break it down into specific and discrete techniques (eye contact with one person, deliver one thought to them and then move on, etc), it felt a lot more doable. It was still nerve-wracking to stand in front of strangers and hold forth about various topics, but not as bad as I'd thought (and clearly not as bad as some of the others on my course found it; one or two looked like they were ready to start crying). It also proves my suspicion about myself, that if I can break a task into its component parts, then I find it a lot easier.

But the most important thing I took from it came from something the instructor said on day one (yesterday). One of my colleagues was saying how the techniques felt strange or uncomfortable, and the instructor - a tiny French lady who reminded me of various language teachers I had in high school - said that of course the techniques would feel strange, because we've never used them before. The implication being that it isn't a bad thing to get out of your comfort zone from time to time.

I've been thinking about this idea a lot recently, because it applies to my life in two specific areas, and because I've heard the same advice with regard to at least one of these areas. The areas I'm talking about, incidentally, are dating and health.

My main problem with dating is the same as almost everyone else's, namely that I'm not doing enough of it. I've done some reading on non-creepy and non-assholish ways to increase the number of dates that I go on, and done a lot of thinking about more ways to meet women. At the same time, intriguingly, ITV here in the UK has been showing the 40-Year-Old Virgin a lot in recent months; apart from being a really funny movie, it also dovetails nicely with a lot of the stuff I've been thinking about lately.

What a champ.

Its relevance for our purposes, incidentally, is when Andy (Steve Carell) complains that all of the stuff his friends are telling him don't feel right, and Jay (Romany Malco) answers that these things don't feel right because what he is comfortable with hasn't been working. If we ignore for a second that a lot of Jay's advice is pretty terrible, not to say misogynistic, that one insight is spot-on.

When I was training for my marathon, I started having serious pains in my knees, to the point where I wouldn't be able to walk for a couple of days afterward (which is pretty terrible, when you consider I was only running for an hour at a time). When I told my trainer, she looked at my posture and immediately zeroed in on how I stand with my feet turned outward. She suggested I walk with my feet pointing straight, and in the first few weeks of this I kept thinking about that line from the movie: Walking this way feels weird, but it only feels weird because they way I've been walking up until now was wrong.

In any event, changing the way I walk and stretching those muscles helped a lot, to the point where my knees were actually fine after I ran the marathon; the worst-hit parts of my body were my lower back and my leg muscles.

So, to wrap up a long and rambling set of insights, I've been thinking a lot about this business of getting out of your comfort zone. It seems like a lot of people are unwilling to do it (me included), and it feels like there are people out there who are happy to encourage you to stay within your comfort zone. Stick with what you know, right?

But all the reading I'm doing, and all the advice I'm hearing, says the opposite. And when you think about it, it should be obvious that trying new things, that make you uncomfortable, is how you grow as a person. Maybe not everybody sees it that way, but I'm increasingly convinced it's the only way to go.

Which means, I guess, that it's time to hit the singles bars. Who's up for it?