I am so there for this: Efficiency is the Enemy: There’s a good chance most of the problems in your life and work come down to insufficient slack. Here’s how slack works and why you need more of it. Yes, absolutely, the need for wiggle room and redundancy in systems.
But I am also here for this: Embrace the Grind: 'The only “trick” is that this ( Read more... )

I thought I might be reduced to bemoaning the fact that I was obliged to, after resisting it for months, months, go onto Zoom in order to attend the virtual AGM of an organisation of which I have somehow become a trustee.
However, dr rdrz, your hearts will be gladdened to hear that instead of this, I perchanced to come across an interview with the ( Read more... )

There are six and sixty ways (at least) of constructing tribal lays...
But I am not sure whether it was a case of, larf, I fair lay on the ground, or, I beat my head upon the desk, when I read a list of the very detailed things A Writer Needed To Do to get inside their character -
- you know, having a complete dossier on them before you even ( Read more... )

Don't worry about 'rewriting history': it's literally what we historians do.

It's not even re-writing - writing history is a continuing process. New sources appear. Old sources which have lain untapped are delved into (I'm an archivist, tell me about this). People revisit already visited sources with new perspectives.

Historians are standing in ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

If I were to be publishing the short stories of a given author in three volumes, with introduction and critical apparatus, information I think might be helpful to people interested in these volumes would be:
A LIST OF THE CONTENTS OF EACH VOLUME.
Okay, my own motivation in the matter was actually trying to find the title of a particular story by ( Read more... )

When stag nights go wrong: Now, stag dos are a ritual of male friendship. “The stag passes from unmarried man to married man. The cultural urge to mark that transition causes all the hedonistic and ostentatious behaviour you see on stag weekends.
I would find this a more compelling argument if I didn't suspect that in many cases, the intending groom ( Read more... )

I was synchronicitously pleased to find this blog post crossing my line of sight earlier today: Prospecting for kryptonite: the value of null results, because I had been thinking about incrementality and the time it takes for things to see results, and this is not just about scientific research.
Lately, at a symposium-thing I was speaking at, in ( Read more... )

I was at A Thing earlier today in relation to a projected performance thing relevant to my spheres of interest -
(no, it's not 'Sid: The Musical!')
- and we all took part in a free-writing exercise, which in my case turned out very free indeed, more like word associations, very little that might be considered coherent phrases or sentences -
Which ( Read more... )

So far, comments to my post yesterday about the concept of 'books that changed my life' pretty much confirm my own feeling that if books do affect us, it's by a process of influence or catalysis -

I.e. it's about what a reader gets out of a particular text at a particular time in their life (and it may not be a high-culture text at all, says woman ( Read more... )