So I keep telling myself that NEXT BOOK doesn’t have to be good. I mean, obviously, I want it to be good. I’m going to try my hardest for it to be good, which is to say that I’m going to try my hardest to do...
This week is going to be a “things I’m thinking about” week, so let’s start with a recent Seth Godin blog post called Problems and Boundaries: All problems have solutions.That’s what makes them...
I told you I’d share the BIG PROBLEM at the core of NEXT BOOK, and here it is: You’ve probably figured out, if you’ve been reading carefully, that NEXT BOOK takes place in the real world, in our current...
When I wrote The Biographies of Ordinary People, I not only gave each chapter a title but specifically styled them in a way that both paid homage to previous works and told the reader what they could expect...
Yesterday I shared some thoughts on worldbuilding the NEXT BOOK, including whether it should take place in a specific location or a generalized/fictionalized place. Today I’m going to ask myself the same question, only...
Yesterday, I put forward the not-too-original idea that worldbuilding is about both making choices and understanding what those choices mean, and shared a couple of resources on building speculative...
So this week I want to look at worldbuilding, mostly because that’s where I’m at in terms of THE NEXT BOOK. Unlike The Biographies of Ordinary People, where the world of the story was not only...
I’m going to close out this week’s discussion of THE WORK and THE LIFE by suggesting you read Lauren DePino’s “In My Own Voice, Redefining Success and Failure,” at Longreads: It didn’t take long...
I’ve had a really nasty cold since last Friday. Technically, I’ve only had the nasty part of the cold since Tuesday; the first few days were what I usually expect from a cold, i.e. a steadily dripping nose and a...