Ownership is impossible; mine shaft audiobook; surviving the ice storm: Newsletter 27 March 2024
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Ownership is impossible; mine shaft audiobook; surviving the ice storm: Newsletter 27 March 2024

Newsletter 37: Why sharing and not hoarding is the only path to happiness, translators vs. AI, 500-billion word training set, plus three people to follow and three books to read. Why nobody owns anything We spend much of our lives striving to own things. We want to own a house, a car, a smartphone, a…

Using your PowerPoint slides to illustrate your book is a terrible idea

Using your PowerPoint slides to illustrate your book is a terrible idea

Authors have often debuted their book content as a speech. So why not use those PowerPoint (or Keynote) slides from the speech as graphics in the book? After all, they’re perfectly aligned with the content and they’re instantly available. If you’re using Microsoft Word for text, why not use Microsoft’s PowerPoint for graphics? It’s a…

AI is fickle and fallible. Here’s why that’s confounding your expectations.

AI is fickle and fallible. Here’s why that’s confounding your expectations.

People have so much trouble with the flaws in AI tools because they are so different from everything else we do with our computing devices. Consider any productivity application you use: a spreadsheet, a programming language, an app, anything, doesn’t matter. All of these applications have two qualities: AI chatbots violate both of those rules….

Motivational editing checklist

Motivational editing checklist

A typical editing checklist includes things that editors should identify, like failures of parallelism, mixed metaphors, sentence fragments, and factual errors. But this is your motivational editing checklist. Follow this to make sure that the person you’re editing will understand, appreciate, accept, and address the problems you point out. Why bother? It’s a lot easier…

The ignorance enigma; billionaires fight about money; Scrabble and the human brain: Newsletter 20 March 2024.
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The ignorance enigma; billionaires fight about money; Scrabble and the human brain: Newsletter 20 March 2024.

Newsletter 37: Ignorance amid abundant knowledge, traumatic writer’s block, burgeoning book bans, plus three people to follow and three books to read. The problem with ignorance Ignorance bugs the hell out of me. The urge to eliminate ignorance is the driving force in my career and much of my life. This is a good thing….

Fair warning: Recruiter William Vanderbloemen behaves like an ass

Fair warning: Recruiter William Vanderbloemen behaves like an ass

Will your future employer treat you like a slave with no personal time? If William Vanderbloemen is recruiting you, that might be a clue. According to Business Insider, Vanderbloemen has devised a few little tests before and after job interviews to see how candidates behave: Vanderbloemen’s company uses the text-message test [sending candidates a text…

A response to Maris Kreizman: publishing runs on gig workers — just like any creative industry

A response to Maris Kreizman: publishing runs on gig workers — just like any creative industry

A recent piece by Maris Kreizman in LitHub bemoans the rise of “gig work” in publishing — and in particular the freelancer-driven model being pursued by the new publishing venture Author’s Equity. What naive and misguided claptrap. What’s Kreizman’s objection? In an essay titled “Publishing Models That Rely on Gig Workers Are Bad For Everybody,”…

The thread
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The thread

I never write anything without the thread in mind. What is the thread? It is the throughline of any blog post, essay, or book chapter. Start with the end in mind. What is the point? Write the title and the lede based on that. Then, the setup. What is the problem? What is have I…