Do I want to try and make my art into a business? Yes. Do I want to do what I’m required to do in terms of marketing and getting an audience to do it? Do I want to create a solid brand presence, niche down, get rid of half the stuff I’m doing so I can be consistent, build a loyal following off of that, and then diversify back out later? Nope! But I will read a business book or two in order to feel like I’m actively doing something to help my cause!
This book is very much what I expect a girl boss business book to be. It feels 85% empty platitudes about how you can do anything, you’re awesome and amazing! There’s about 5% advice that is presented with the same kind of framing, with “Put it out into the universe” language without pointing out that getting your idea written down in a way where you can look at it and revise it is actually a good and practical thing. And then there’s about 10% actual business advice that I’m pretty familiar with in terms of how to find your target audience and be a brand.
Also, there were pitches for her course throughout it and I am not a fan of that inside my library books. Make me look you up, don’t try to grab my email address in exchange for information you keep alluding to and never getting to.
I like a lot of very concrete and practical advice, so this was very much not the kind of book I think I was ever going to be compatible with. The little bit of useful information that’s in there is pretty widely available elsewhere, but if you need a bit of that emotional support in your entrepreneurship journey, maybe it will work better for you.
Like most authors with a newsletter, you want more information about the people reading your books and check your newsletters out. You want to know about what other books they like so you know how to position your own books in the market, or you want more information about the demographics to know if that young adult novel is being read by young adults!
Or, you know, if they’re actually reading your books at all.
Here are some other questions you can ask that will help you get answers to your questions that people might actually answer without feeling like you’re being overly invasive. And also get some great recommendations from your audience in the process!
Question: Have you actually read any of my books?
Which is your favourite book of mine?
How do you feel about [Plot point from the 1/3 point of your book]?
Which character do you want to see more of?
Tell me what you think happened after the end of [Book title]!
Question: What some comparative titles or authors to me or my books?
What’s your favourite book?
Recommend me an author!
Recommend me a book!
Recommend me a movie or TV show!
Question: General demographic information such as age, location, etc.
What was your favourite book growing up?
What shows did you love growing up?
When is your favourite time to read?
Where is your favourite reading spot?
Question: How should I position or market my book?
What’s your go to social media platform?
How do you find new books?
On a scale from 1 – 10, how much do you hate spoilers?
What kind of behind the scenes content do you love seeing?
Question: What do you want of my books?
Do you prefer paperback or ebook? (Or whatever you have available, such as audiobook)
What are your favourite tropes?
What disappointed you about the last book you read?
What was the best thing about the last book you read?
I’m starting to realize one of the problems with posting these reviews once a week and post dating them to the next Friday is that it’s tricky to tell where my brain is in the healing process. It is not far enough, which is important to know for me talking about this book.
This book is a series of essays, which I have only just learned is written works on a topic and not arguments written in a very specific, teacher-approved format. The topics were variable, all of them coming back to horror, and I know that I enjoyed the experience of reading it! But there was one main problem.
I don’t remember a single thing that I read.
This is not a reflection on the book, but how I’ve been during recovery. Because each of these essays was focused on only a couple ideas, my brain just wasn’t able to hold onto one when I started the next. It was a fascinating experience, and one that I will hopefully never experience again.
But I do know that I enjoyed what I read, which is something! And if you were thinking about checking it out, do it! And then tell me what I read.
As I healed from my brain issues (Still going through it, it’s a slow process) I started looking at what I had of my plans and processes that I’d developed so far. For me, I know it’s good to check in now and then to see what worked, what didn’t, and make changes as necessary. Since I hit the point where I returned to work at the and of September, I took some time to look at what I was doing so far and start to think about how it’s been going so far.
Does this work for me?
Step one, of course, was going through what I had done already and determine the things that were good, bad, and maybe needed a revision. So let’s go through some of the ideas that I had put forth and figure out if they worked for me.
Hypotheses
These really did not work at all. The idea I had was that these would focus me on what I needed to do to make improvements, but I did not end up looking at them at all. Many of them were also just not good. They were things I already knew would help, so they weren’t so much hypotheses as statements.
Metrics
These kind of worked. Some metrics were definitely better than others, but having a single place for all metrics was not a good idea. Things like my budget tracking, for instance, were just for my finances for the whole month and did not account for things like when my computer died or the levy for my building. This made the numbers look like I was over spending when I was actually just hit with unexpected expenses.
The idea of tracking numbers and measurable progress is good, but the details and methodology is not something I think works just yet.
Projects
Projects are absolutely something that work for me! I like having something firm that I can do with an end date and something measurable that comes out of them. The brain tracking for recovery was a great exercise in this and I definitely saw a lot of great things come of it. On top of that, it was great to have all of my tasks organized as a project.
Monthly wrap up routine
I started doing things on a monthly basis almost without thinking about it. It’s a habit I picked up from bullet journaling and I really liked having a routine of at least being able to sit down once a month to see my progress and make new plans to continue the momentum, or to see where I completely forgot about things.
What am I missing?
In doing all of this, I naturally found that I was missing something in this system.
Ongoing items
There’s things like habits that I really don’t have a good method of tracking. I know that drinking 2L of water a day does good things, as does going outside for a little for a walk, but it’s not really a metric that I know how to track within the existing system.
Check in routine
A formalized check in routine is going to be essential for figuring out how to make this work longer term. I don’t think doing it at the end of projects is really solid enough of a timeline, and I think that doing these revisions on a monthly basis with the end of the month wrap up might be too frequent. So I need to figure out something to see what works.
Next steps
Of course, with all of these things, I am going to start looking into things to revise. My current plans are:
Find some way to track ongoing habits within the system
Revise the existing metrics to work better for nuance
See if those metrics are being tracked in the right place, or if they are even the right numbers
Remove the hypotheses
Plan for a formal check in and revision process once every 4 months
Look. I know. But fiction is still very hard for me and these self help, how to organize your life books are significantly easier for me to get through. And I’m also very bad at sticking to my choices anyway, so I’m reading another one of them!
And this one isn’t too bad! Unlike a lot of the other books of this ouvre that I’ve read before, this book is mostly about outlining a structure over crafting very concrete rules about how to live your life and insisting that this way is the only way. And I like a book that is open to the idea that different specifics are going to work for different people.
At a high level, the book focuses on a very simple idea: Put effort into the things that matter the most to you, and figure out a way to make the rest as automated and lazy as possible. Some of it is letting go of what isn’t important, like not having your house set up in a way that looks like it belongs in a magazine. While her examples don’t match my own life, the ideas behind the rules that she’s created feel like they could be adapted to fit most people, which is more than I can say for some of the other books I’ve read in this genre.
Overall, I generally like it! While it might feel like a bit much if you’re currently overwhelmed and in need of something to get your life together right now, I think this book is a good guideline to help you refine a system into something that works better for you.
NaNoWriMo is a writing event that happens every November where the participants attempt to write 50,000 words of a novel in one month. It’s a great challenge for anyone who wants to finally get started on that book they’ve had in their heads.
I did NaNoWriMo for a decade and wrote over a million words in my time. This is my second year not doing it, partially because of the brain issues and partially because I just don’t need it as much to get things done. So these were some of the lessons I learned.
Getting it done fast meant getting it done
I had an issue before this where I would start a lot of projects, only write when I was inspired, and never finish anything off because something else would catch my attention. Putting the time limit of a month on writing meant that I didn’t have time to get distracted by an idea or anything else and I started getting things done! And realizing that was a great step forward for me as a writer.
I need to write out the whole story, beginning to ending
Some people can edit as they go, but I am not one of them. Getting the whole story out and making changes as I go meant that I never lost the momentum and had more of a chance to experiment with things. I could make the change, try it out for a few thousand words, and then decide that I did or did not like it and make a note to adjust things as I went. It certainly made the rewrites a lot more cumbersome, but I enjoyed the process a lot more this way.
A loose plot outline is a girl’s best friend
I have tried going in with absolutely no clue about what was going to happen, and I have gone in with a strictly structured, chapter by chapter plot outline. Both extremes did not work for me at all. I have found my sweet spot is a list of really loose plot points that I want to hit to get from beginning to end, as well as a few really cool scenes. That way I have a lot of flexibility to change things as I go and don’t feel either lost or trapped by my choices at the start.
How to structure my notes
Because I tend to make mental updates as I went, I struggled for a while with how to keep track of the changes so that I could fix it all up and make the story cohesive when I returned to it. That meant that I had an opportunity to figure out what information I needed so that I could actually do that, from character details that I needed to remember for later to whole scenes that I wanted to include earlier in the story.
[Workbook plug]
I made the workbook as a way for me to keep notes as I was writing for changes or things I wanted to get into the story when I wasn’t working on it at the moment, or so that I could remember details later.
You can make friends as an adult!
As a person who was growing into adulthood, I knew that making friends was going to be difficult the older I got. With NaNoWriMo, I was able to find people who shared my love of writing who all came from different areas and lives. It’s been the place I’ve gotten many of my friends as an adult, and I’ll always be grateful to it for that.
Today in books that I’ve had on hold since before I got sick and was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to actually read because I wasn’t sure how good my brain was! I really had no idea what I was getting into and, yet again, I did not read the blurb and just dove right in and hoped that I would be okay in the brain to read it.
This book doesn’t quite have a main character to follow, or a solid plot line to talk about. It is about a world where there are monsters hiding among humans, who fear for their lives and their discovery, and who know they will be persecuted for their mere existence. With a single video of a police officer shooting a black man that also happened to be a werewolf, their existence is exposed to the world and the different groups and individuals of this world struggle to find a way forward, to live in a world that wants them gone.
I have looked at other reviews, but I am not quite at a point where I was able to pick up the probably very clear allegory between minority groups and monsters, mostly because many of the monsters we see were also minorities or people who were under privileged to start with which made it hard for me to put a lot together the way I think I was supposed to. We’re going to blame that on the lingering brain damage.
As a narrative, it had a delightfully ethereal feeling to it in the way it was told. It was a little harder for me for the moment, but I really do like the idea of the story being told as what was happening to a whole lot of different individuals that happen to cross paths rather than as a core narrative with a solid protagonist. It felt like the correct choice for the story being told, and made it feel like a bigger and more complex thing than it might have told any other way.
Overall, I really did enjoy it! If you get a chance, definitely check it out!
I have known a lot of people who swear by the Getting Things Done methodology. I have heard that there is even a course on how this works taught at my company! I work in tech, and the reason why so many people in this industry specifically have gravitated towards this method with such zealous dedication ((The number of times I have heard that the only reason the method doesn’t work is because you’re doing it wrong…)) is a lot more clear after having read the book.
The method essentially requires that you gather all of your tasks in a single place and assess everything on your list with a flow chart. The first thing you wrote down is the first thing you do, then the next, then the next, without prioritization until it is all done. If it is a big task, it is a project that is broken into smaller tasks, and there’s an emphasis on figuring out what the next action is and just, well, getting things done. ((Also a bunch of stuff about keeping tasks to zones, which is one of those relics of the time when you didn’t have devices that allowed you to do things in different places.))
It’s a process that’s fairly standardized and explained with just enough vagueness that it could, in theory, be applied to anything. But also enough complication that I think it draws a certain type of person who is also very drawn to software development. And I think the fanbase of this methodology might be part of the reason I have a weird feeling about it.
I think it’s fine as a starting point, but it is a method that should be adapted and adjusted once you have the initial panic of needing some place to start settled. Getting all of your tasks in one place is a good thing, as is taking time to look them over and assess whether you have to do this now or if you can delegate or get rid of it all together. As a whole, it’s fine for if you have a fairly straightforward life, or if you don’t have a need to get into a flow or have interest-based attention, or even have a lot of interest in doing anything you’re working on. But life my life is a bit more complicated and nuanced, so I don’t think I’ll be taking this method on.
Another YA fiction book for me! Because that’s what I could handle at the time, and it was still taking a bit longer than I’d like to read. It had an interesting concept, and it was for a younger audience so I figured it was about at the range where I could check it out.
The book follows Michael, a kid who has just moved into a new house that needs a lot of work, and where the whole family is very stressed about his baby sister who is suffering from several health problems. Michael discovers a strange being in the shed that likes Chinese food and doesn’t seem quite human, but does appear to also be dying.
There’s a very passive and dream-like quality to the book, where things just happen more than Michael taking any actions to drive it onward. There’s a girl named Mina who takes a more active role in the story and actually takes more action in the book while Michael seems to just sit back and stress and wonder and observe the events around him as they happen. He does some mild things, like figuring out and ordering the right food or adding a few vitamins to Skellig’s recovery, but it doesn’t ever really feel like anything would have changed if he didn’t do anything.
Although some of this might be more about the fact that I didn’t really know how old I was supposed to interpret the characters as. I have since found out that he was intended to be 10, which does make a lot more sense, but I just wasn’t sure while I was reading. Which made the book feel more okay than really good. Also, it might be because it was really intended for much younger readers than me who probably wouldn’t have been as bothered by that.
But overall, it was an interesting read. Not something I’d pick up a second time, but definitely something that was enjoyable at the time and worth at least checking out.
