Category: Smart Advice from Smart People

Interesting post about the omnipresence of grief here in the age of contagion, over at the Harvard Business Review. Emotions need motion. It’s important we acknowledge what we go through. One unfortunate byproduct of the self-help movement is we’re the first generation to have feelings about our feelings. We tell ourselves things like, I feel sad, but I shouldn’t feel that; other people have it worse. We can — we should — stop at the first feeling. I feel sad. Let me go for five minutes to feel sad. Your work is to feel your sadness and fear and anger whether or not someone else is feeling something. Fighting it doesn’t help because your body is producing the feeling. If we allow the feelings to happen, they’ll happen in an orderly way, and it empowers us. Then we’re not victims. That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief, Harvard Business Review It’s a useful thing to consider as I’m figuring out the impacts of the

I’ve put my weekly newsletter on hold for the holidays season, scheduling a return date in 2020 that just so coincides with the release date of These Strange & Magic Things on January 8. One of the recurring features in my weekly missive is a list of seven interesting things I wanted to share with people. Sometimes they’re round-ups of things I’ve posted here, or capsule reviews of books that I’ve read. Quite often, of late, they’ve been links to Austin Kleon’s blog where he talks about creativity and process in some really nuanced ways. If I were writing a newsletter this week, you can bet that Kleon’s latest post about the new Star Wars film and the Japanese art of Kintsugi would be going front-and-centre. For the record, if you want to subscribe and get the newsletter when it returns (in addition to a starter library of neat ebook swag you see below), head this way.

Last week, I ventured out into the streets of Brisbane to see Garth Nix in conversation with John Birmingham at the Brisbane Square Library. The in-conversation was nominally about Nix’s new book, Angel Mage, which got described as “Three Musketeers meets Joan of Arc with Angelic Magic and Kick-Ass Heroines.” As these events are wont to do, the conversation took a turn through inspirations, process, and industry lore, courtesy of two career writers digging into one another’s work and trying to figure out how they did what they did. Nix is largely a make-things-up-as-I-go-along writer, and Birmingham is not, and the disconnect in their respective approach proved fascinating. I walked away with two quotes from the event, both marked in my notebook so I wouldn’t forget them. Nix got the first of them, when talking about “research” and the slow filtering of everything he reads into his process: “We are all descendants of everything we’ve ever read.” Which is one

I spent a good chunk of last week writing about symbolic capital in the publishing industry, then read Nic Mamatas Ask Nick column over on LitReactor where he answered about why some writers get multiple failures on their resume and still draw advances. The answer, of course, is that publishing isn’t an even game and some people are “special.” Largely because, frankly, publishing is an industry where Symbolic Capital matters and there’s a whole lot of people involved who come from money and treat that capital like it’s very important. But that belies the intelligence and wit that Mamatas brings to the topic: Are you special? Depends. Where did you go to school? Who did you meet there? Where do you live now? How close is it to the L? Who are your best friends; who do you date? Do they all have the same “publishing haircut” (asymmetrical bobs for women, Princetons for men)? Is exposed brick good or bad?

I found myself falling through a blog hole over at Kristine Katheryn Rusch’s blog yesterday, going back and reading earlier posts she kept referencing. Along the way, I discovered a three-paragraph section that was immediately snagged for my thesis: Then there were the series that I had to abandon because of the changes in publishing.  In the 1980s and early 1990s, book publishers loved series.  More than that, they loved poaching series from another publisher.  Publisher A couldn’t make your series work? Publisher B was happy to snatch up the next book—mid-series—and prove to Publisher A how stupid their marketing department was. But with the collapse of the distribution system in the late 1990s, the consolidation of publishing houses, and the layoff of countless employees, suddenly this poaching practice stopped.  A series wasn’t doing as well as it could for Publisher A? Well, then no other publisher would touch it.  A series was doing passably well for Publisher A? Then

Mike Shazkin’s recent post about the 7 Ways Book Publishing will change is a great read (albeit one that’s influenced by his relationship with the distributor Ingram). I wanted to pull one entry out for here because it’s a really useful way to look at the the shifts in book retail: Books have a ton of characteristics that make them perfect for online shopping. You want to shop from a full selection no store has. It is very seldom when you must have a book right now. And books are heavy, so you don’t really want to carry them around if you can avoid it. The view from here is that it will continue to be very challenging to make physical book locations commercially viable. As a bookish person who has a bunch of friends who work in book retail, many of whom are doing it tough right now, that’s the kind of idea that’s not going to entirely welcome

Craig Mod’s latest Roden Explorer newsletter features excerpts from a long speech he delivered about dopamine, smart phones appholes, and the social contracts of entertainment. You can check it out via his newsletter archive, and I’d suggest it’s as required reading if you’re an author trying to forge a living in a social media world. Part of what interests me about the speech is the way he charts the progression of certain media outlets into dopaminergenic publications–a frequent problem with legacy media outlets transitioning into an online space, forcing them to at least partially shift their business model to capturing your attention and keeping your eyeballs on their sites in order to reap sweet advertising bucks. When these incumbent newspapers were print only, there was only one way to “enter” the content: Through the front page. The front page was all you could see on the news stand. Once you bought the thing, you were converted to a paying participant.

I’ve been having an anxious week this week, which is not exactly a surprise given I had a big weekend of socialising and navigating responsibilities around devoting time to GoPlay, but it’s interesting to look at what boundaries have been crossed recently and where I’ve been letting myself make choices out of a place of worry. It’s also useful to be reading Nassim Taleb’s Fooled By Randomness, brought to mind after writing the recent post about Black Swan thinking, which contains some rather useful reminders if you’re inclined to anxious thought patterns: Things are always obvious after the fact…It has to do with the way our mind handles historical information. When you look at the past, the past will always be deterministic, since only one single observation took place. Our mind will interpret most events not with the preceding ones in mind, but the following ones. Imagine taking a test knowing the answer. While we know that history flows forward,