This article appeared in modified form in the Maven Game newsletter. Sign up here [http://mavengame.com]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I’m in the middle of writing a book. According to Scrivener, I’ve got 27,000 words out of a projected 36,000 on draft numero uno. Tentatively entitled The Gist,

You ever get one of those spam calls for credit card consolidation where the recorded voice says “Hello…” followed by a long pause so, just for a moment, you think it might be a real person? Similarly, newsletters incorporate some elements of personal letters like using the recipient’s first

Sorry, but this isn’t the article I was going to write. Originally, I’d planned to start by quoting William Goldman’s famous Hollywood adage from Adventures in the Screen Trade: “Nobody knows anything.” Maybe as a caption over a cat executive at a desk, like so: In coining

When I was a teenager, I bought Juggling for the Complete Klutz. It came with three red beanbags. A couple of days later, I could juggle them. To this day, that stands as my greatest learning experience (sorry, Amherst!). In fact, my goal as a writer and editor is to

Authors are angry. Really angry. Now that I’m no longer ensconced within the ivy-draped, sunlight-dappled walls of the traditional publishing industry, I’ve been hearing about so much of this anger directly. (Authors get honest with editors when they discover you can’t acquire their next book.) “My publisher

I’m back from an extended hiatus working on an intense book-writing project. The experience reminded me of a fact we editors cheerfully ignore as we exhort our authors to persevere: while writing can be moderately challenging, along the lines of bridge-playing or hula-hooping, book completion is an absurdly improbable

I recently spotted this list of lessons learned from running an open-source project [http://taskwarrior.org/docs/advice.html] and found much of it relevant to creating any kind of work on an ongoing basis for an audience. If you’re interested in software development, the original post is worth

> If you read your contract carefully, you’ll see that we ask for the show to be 90 minutes in length, for it to have this many commercial breaks, and for it to be done for this budget. But nowhere in the contract do we ask for it to

This article appeared in modified form on Boing Boing [https://boingboing.net/2016/01/22/what-publishers-should-do.html]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You can’t work at a book publisher for more than five minutes without someone telling you what publishers should do. (You know, “to survive.” “Be relevant.” Something.) Even literary agents, who

This article appeared in modified form on Boing Boing [https://boingboing.net/2015/12/07/how-to-write-a-book-that-holds.html]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- User experience design is a holistic field that touches on every aspect of the experience the user has with your product, all the way down to opening the box. As a book