I have been staring at this book at every Pulp Lit event for ages and I have finally gotten around to reading it! It looked like it was going to be so much fun and there’s a sequel now, so I figured it was time to finally get my hands on it.
The book is told as a series of shorter arcs, each following Stella as she tries to unravel one of the problems that is happening at the Fairmont Manor retirement home. She’s a restless old resident with a keen eye and who seems to not be entirely aware of why she is in the place—Until she is very suddenly reminded. There are hints woven throughout the book about the real reason for her residency, though the book focuses largely on how Stella tries to help the people who live and work under the same roof as her.
The book is a delight. It’s light, funny, and full of these tiny little details of both growing and being elderly, as well as what her life was like before she came to the manor. I especially liked that extra bit of mystery that tied the sometimes very separate arcs together. I will also mention that I guessed wrong on all of the mysteries, but I am not very good at mysteries!
Overall, highly recommend! It was a great, fun read and one that I probably needed among all of the very heavy business-y books that I’ve been diving into of late. Definitely check it out!
I have been trying to read more widely over the last couple years in an attempt to better myself, which has mostly meant that I’m reading a lot of books available at my library. Which, for some reason, has been a lot of self improvement books.
Well. I wanted to improve myself.
Thing is that I don’t really like a lot of them. The advice is very narrowly tailored to a specific audience without any consideration to intersectionality of any kind ((Such as maybe someone is not in complete control of their time)) and the most popular ones seem to have the ongoing trend of insisting that their methodology is the only one that works and that everyone else is living their life incorrectly. The studies cited don’t take into account the fuller context of what was going on, or they just eliminate the failures from the narrative entirely, if they don’t say that those failures were not doing it right.
But that’s not to say that they are all actually terrible. And I have not been putting them down, but making it through to hear them out. Which means I think I’ve figured out basically how I’m supposed to read these books now.
Understand the problem they are solving
At the start of these books is usually a thesis statement of some sort. There is a problem in your life and this book is just the tool you need to solve it.
Most people’s lives are not comprised of just one issue that needs to be resolved, though, so it’s important to get an understanding of precisely what one issue they are looking at discussing in the book. You are overwhelmed with tasks to do. You are uncertain what to do with your career. You don’t have enough money. Solving one of these issues won’t solve your whole life, but it will provide you with some insight into what some of the causes of that problem might be.
The descriptive factors of these books are usually pretty good
Over the course of many of these books, they will bring up more specific elements of the problem they are trying to solve. This is usually paired with a description of the problem and some of the underlying causes of it. I have found that, in most cases, these are pretty good insights.
The solutions are a suggestion
The place where I am constantly falling off on these books is the prescriptive parts where they talk about what the solution for the problem is. This is almost always where the lack of understanding of how people actually work come into play.
Many of these books will offer the one thing that will fix the problem they are describing. This is the way they have personally found to have worked. Often, these are worth at least trying if you have not already tried it out, just to see if it is compatible with the way you live your life. But it will usually not actually be the only way and you may need to modify it to make it better suit your situation.
It sells better if they give you a solution
One of my biggest issues with this whole genre is that the problems are what I relate to, but the solution is just not something that works either for the way my life is structured or my situation, but I am constantly reminding myself that this is the selling point.
In many cases, these books are written for the person who is running out of options, who have already tried as much as they can to resolve the issue on their own, and who are just looking for answers that they have not been able to find on their own. Having something relatively authoritative describing the thing you are dealing with and handing you a solution is going to resonate a lot better than the books that give a structure of how to solve the problem for yourself.
Take the intent and modify
I’ve found the most useful elements of the solutions offered in these kinds of books to be something where the core of the solution comes from a place of resolving the issue and figuring out how to make it work best for me.
I didn’t particularly like Getting Things Done, but I like the practice of dumping all of the tasks out onto a list and sometimes, when I’m overwhelmed, just doing them in the order they are written. I have my issues with Newport, but I do ultimately like carving out long, unbroken stretches of time in my calendar to get some deep work done. Marie Kondo rubs me the wrong way, but I really like the idea of keeping the things that bring me some joy or comfort and use that as a measure for what to get rid of when I’m decluttering.
Reading these books, regardless of whether or not I’ve liked them, have introduced a lot of new ideas into my life and some practices that I’ve continued with. It’s just a matter of making sure I’m remembering to frame the contents in the context of my own life, taking what works well, and leaving the rest as something that might work better for someone else.
I should not read a second book by a nonfiction author, I’m realizing. First was Nir Eyer, and now Cal Newport. I end up just looking at these books through the context of their last one.
Where Deep Work was about how you should be spending your time on good, meaningful deep work and not on bad, meaningless shallow work, Digital Minimalism is about the exact opposite thing. It is about how you should not be spending your personal time on low-quality, casual technology usage and instead use it on value-generating, high quality activities.
There’s a theme here.
There is a core of this which is good, but that core isn’t enough to fill a whole book. The idea of being intentional about your technology usage and don’t let it consume your life is a good thing. The rest of the book where he moves from descriptive about the problem to prescriptive about the solution is frustrating.
I did end up looking the author up, mostly because I had such a strong feeling that he had a wife that took care of the normal housework and child care ((He says he watches the kids, but never mentions groceries, cooking, cleaning up after them, taking them to activities, planning things to do with them, all of which I would assume a family man would want to be involved with and would think of as valuable use of time…)) that I wanted validation on that ((No, it is not good practice to look something up for the purpose of validation)) and discovered he was a comp sci professor. As someone who has spend her career surrounded by comp sci grads, I understand why his work feels frustrating in such a strangely familiar way.
I do have one more book of his in my TBR. I am debating if I can actually read it fairly.
It’s Valentines season and I am not a romance person whatsoever. Still, I thought I should do something in the spirit of the season and to capitalize on the keywords, so I offer you this. I have been saying for years to anyone who asks that if you want to be a successful author, you should follow the romance author community because they have the business down. So here’s some takeaways I’ve gotten from following the community from afar.
Networking with other authors
Watching the majority of the community come together to lift up one another has been amazing over the years. This community was the one to introduce me to the idea of newsletter swaps, book boxes, and also inviting other people to Facebook launch parties in order to network and share audiences rather than compete over them. There’s a lot of this understanding that audiences are vast and there is no real competition—If someone gets one book, they are likely to get many books and you are not going to lose that reader if you showcase someone else once in a while.
The power of branding
Many of the authors in the community have such a solid, clear brand that it’s almost like they are able to step into being this completely different persona. I’ve seen successful authors exist on mostly a name and tagline without much social media presence, but their audience is still able to recognize their works at a glance. There’s a consistency that exists in some of these authors to be able to be their brand, whatever that brand is, and make that accessible to their audience in a way that still allows them to not have to share as much of their personal lives in order to promote themselves.
It’s totally okay to be repetitive if that’s what the audience wants
This is obviously not something that I am good at, but romance authors as a community understand that their audience wants to read those same, feel good stories over and over again. The way some of these authors have niched down so specifically and have made their whole career on what from the outside as someone who is not reading these books looks like the exact same story over and over again is fantastic. I have heard from other authors outside of the genre that they are worried about boring their audience, but romance authors know how to give their audience exactly what they are looking for.
I’ve gotten a bunch of book recommendations lately, and they all seem to be in a very familiar theme. Apparently I give off the vibe of someone who likes to do a lot and might have a career of doing a lot of things. Which, well, in the past decade I have been a community manager, retail employee, author, full stack developer, UX analyst, jewelry maker, zinester, product designer, and… no, I think Youtube was more than a decade back at this point. But they may have a point, so let’s check out some of these career books!
How to be Everything is a book for something called multipotentialites, or people who have a lot of interests and are still trying to decide what they want to be in a world where the expectation is that there is only one answer to that. The argument here is that it’s okay to have a lot of different interests and there are different ways to make that work for you.
What I found really interesting is that there is much acceptance that some people just don’t need their main source of income to be that thing that is fulfilling and you can use that as your source of income while you pursue your interests on the side without the money stress that might cause, which has been the thing that has ultimately made many of these kinds of books fall flat for me. It is only one of the four directions that is talked about, alongside a few other things I don’t often see such as building a career by pursuing several interests separately at the same time as a collection of part time jobs that add up to a full time income, or just letting yourself completely change careers as your interest wanes. It’s just not something that I see that often.
I really enjoyed this book and I always appreciate a book that will acknowledge that it is not the one answer. The addition of nuance to the conversation and that different people are different was refreshing and, given I’m at a strange point of my career where I want to make some bad choices, I am going to actually try out some of the exercises in here to see if I can figure out what works well for me.
Magic is so much fun to write, but so often the conversation about fantasy ends up in one of two places: The traditional high fantasy space of elves and dragons and drama between rival nations, or that modern day urban fantasy where there are magical beings living alongside everyone else in secret.
There are so many other types of fantasy subgenres that you can explore! Here are a few ideas to get you started if you’re looking to try something a little different.
Folklore or Fairytale Fantasy
These are stories based on traditional folktales, legends, and myths. They often include some reimagining or adaptation to bring it more to a modern audience. I tend to also think of stories that are based on non-western cultures that are brought to a western audience in this category as well.
These are stories in which the characters travel between different worlds or dimensions. Sometimes they can go back and forth between the worlds and sometimes they can’t.
These stories are set in a world that is powered by steam and clockwork technology. These don’t necessarily have a magic system, and sometimes the steampunk-inspired technology serves the purpose of magic in the story.
Have I had this book on my TBR forever? Yes. My bad! I got it with the intent to reward myself for finishing the trilogy with reading it and then, well, last year was not the best year for me in general. But I picked this up from a Pulp Lit event directly from the author and we had a great chat that had me excited for it.
We follow Basil Stark, Captain Hook’s first mate and only surviving pirate who has now settled into the land of Everland, a place very different than Neverland was, and has been working as a private detective in a world of corruption and dark history. When the woman he’s been asked to track down turns up dead, he falls into a mystery involving magical research that they all thought had no merit and uncover some mysteries of the island.
This was so much fun. With my brain, I can’t follow a lot of mystery stories well and I found that I was perfectly okay with just coming along for the ride without trying to keep track of the clues that had been laid throughout the story. Between the characters and the way the world came together around the central story, I was fully engrossed and wanting to keep going right until the end.
I really loved it. It was so much fun, and I love a reimagining of a story. The choice to use an evolved Neverland as a backdrop to the story and taking inspiration from the original made for a lot of new ideas and it was a fantastic ride. Absolutely check it out.
The last of the patterns went up this month, and I’m out of art to put up for a little while as I start to try to write more!
Medium
Not really a release, necessarily, but I’ve been experimenting with Medium! I’ll be cross posting my old articles, but also doing a little experiment with trying to figure out what direction I want my career to go in!
I have an ongoing complaint with my day job that I have far too many meetings, many of which absolutely could be an email or done in a different manner that is not a meeting. This has prompted a friend of mine to introduce me to the concept of deep work and she has also now loaned me several Cal Newport books, so expect to see a few more thoughts about these reads to show up over the next little bit.
Deep Work is the oldest of his books and it talks about how the best kind of work is deep work, which is done by taking long stretches of time being spent in deep concentration and working on something. He argues that shallow work—which requires less cognitive effort and focus—is… bad? He says there’s a place for it, but it does feel very much as if this kind of work is beneath him, as is social media and several other things.
Like most books in this genre, it’s someone who has found the one thing that has worked for him and he insists that his way is the only way. There are some good ideas in here, but there’s an element of lecturing people for habits that he doesn’t approve of and making concessions if you must but you are not going to be as successful if you aren’t following this method.
Overall, though, despite the voice of the author I did ultimately find some interesting ideas in this book. If you’re looking for something that doesn’t emphasize just completing tasks and looks more at how to cultivate your time to get a deeper understanding of something you’re interested in, this might be worth a read!
Creating fantasy worlds can be hard! There’s a lot to consider in universe building and trying to make your fictional world feel fantastical, but also ensure that the world itself does not become a distraction from the story you are trying to tell.
Sometimes it’s a lot easier to make a believable fantasy world if you have some foundation in the world we know so that there’s something familiar to use as a benchmark. Doing this can help make sure that people can get pulled into the narrative rather than wonder about things that might not make sense about the worldbuilding.
Here are a few ideas that you can use to help you figure out how to create that magical world that makes just enough sense by using the real world as a basis.
Magic as a skill
This one is a pretty common strategy. In the same way as you get better at art or education or physical activity with practice, magic can be like that. Some people start out naturally more gifted, but with work it can be built on and grow into specializations. Sometimes there are ways to artificially enhance those skills with outside forces, such as a drug or better tools.
Royalty structure
You do not need to make your own complicated way that power is passed from one person to another unless that is the point of your story. There are lots of different existing hierarchical structures that already exist in history that you can draw from, from the Thai monarchy to the British parliament. If you use something that already exists to form the structure of your royal family or how the government in your universe works, it has the added benefit of already having most of the rules in place in case you want someone to abdicate the throne or marry in!
Foliage
If you want to create some unique foliage for your world that still makes sense, there are some really weird plants out there. If you look up unique plants that currently exist in climates similar to the universe that you are making, then you can use those to pepper your world with your own versions of them that make more sense for how the universe works. Or you can just use them directly and give them some mystical properties, like I am definitely going to do with the Phantom Orchid in a future story.
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