Photo Credit: Scarleth Marie via Compfight cc
Successful people know that hours, like capital, can be consciously allocated with the goal of creating riches—in the form of a changed world, a life’s work—over time. Indeed, successful people understand that work hours must be more carefully stewarded than capital because time is absolutely limited. You can earn more money, but the mightiest among us is granted no more than 168 hours per week, and it is physically impossible to work for all of them.
~LAURA VANDERKAM, author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think
WRITING
Think your story is falling a little flat? The problem might be that your conflict is too one-sided. The most interesting stories are always those that result from the complex interweaving of various threads of compounding conflict.
→Elements of Fiction Writing – Conflict and Suspense
- Funny grammar rules, My Bookish Life | Tweet
Here is a collection of funny grammar rules guaranteed to put a smile on your face.
→The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need: A One-Stop Source for Every Writing Assignment
- 3 Ways to test the tension and pacing in your scenes, Live Write Thrive | Tweet
Let’s take a look at the ways pacing and tension play out at the scene level. Your first draft may contain lots of unnecessary scenes. But when you revise, test your draft against these three points when deciding if a scene should stay or be cut (or reworked).
→Make a Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time
- How to avoid ‘episodic’ writing, Pat Verducci | Tweet
Unless you’re writing ‘episodic’ television, this is not a word you want applied to your writing. But it’s actually a very common issue among screenwriters and writers of fiction/memoir. How can you avoid having your story play like a series of disconnected scenes, but instead link them so they create rising conflict that leads to a climax? In other words, how can you make your story build?
SCREENWRITING
- Script Angel: Creating a story for your character, Script Mag | Tweet
Story is something that happens to someone. Even if the someone isn’t human (a toy, a lamp, a fish) we imbue it with human qualities. Whether it’s news stories or fictional ones, we are moved by bad things happening when they are personalised, when they are happening to individual people.
→Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting
- Daily dialogue: No Country For Old Men
, Go Into The Story | Tweet
, SELF-PUBLISHING
- Cool and not so new social media networks for Indie authors, The Book Designer | Tweet
Do authors need to pay attention to the coolest new social media networks on the block? Or should you wait to see whether they take off or fade away without so much as an hasta luego as so many applications do? Well, that depends.
→Social Media Just for Writers: The Best Online Marketing Tips for Selling Your Books
- How publishers make decisions about what to publish: The book P&L, Jane Friedman | Tweet
In a widely shared excerpt from his memoir, My Mistake, publishing industry veteran Daniel Menaker described his first experience trying to acquire a book at Random House. His boss told him, “Well, do a P-and-L for it and we’ll see.”
FREEDOM
- 5 Steps for managing your emotional triggers, Psychology Today | Tweet
Your Guide to Gaining Emotional Freedom
→Outsmart Your Brain! How to Make Success Feel Easy
PSYCHOLOGY
- Why we sleep?, The New Yorker | Tweet
It’s strange, when you think about it, that we spend close to a third of our lives asleep. Why do we do it?
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
It’s one thing to give advice to someone else, dispensing thoughtful words of wisdom over Gchat. But try applying those same suggestions to your own life and it often falls apart.
→Irrationally Yours: On Missing Socks, Pickup Lines, and Other Existential Puzzles
SCIENCE
Short answer: Sort of. Call it a noseworm.
→The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell
TIME MANAGEMENT
Working more didn’t require shortchanging her family or herself. It just required focusing on what she did best.
→168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think