I have discovered a corollary to Parkinson’s Law. If you don’t know, Parkinson’s law is:
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
My discovery, which I shall call the Researcher’s Corollary to Parkinson’s Law, is:
Research material expands to exceed the time available.
In my experience, the factor by which this material expands (aka the KRAG Coefficient) ranges anywhere from 50–100%, but in theory, it’s an open-ended scale.
Posted in Writing | Tagged biography, book doctor, creative writing, editorial services, freelance writing, ghost writing, novelization, Writing | 3 Comments »
As regular readers have deduced, my current WIP, The Wolf Tree, has been languishing, left untended due to a variety of life events. I should probably call it a “work-in-stasis” rather than a work-in-progress. Now it’s official: The Wolf Tree is on the back burner.
The reason: I received an email asking if I’d like to write a book.
As a self-identified author, I’ve received pitches like this before: a guy has a “great idea” for a book, and all I have to do is outline it, write it, edit it, market it, sell it, and then (of course) give him a cut of the profits as payment for the use of his great idea. Win-Win, right?
Wrong. Continue Reading »
Posted in Writing | Tagged biography, book doctor, creative writing, editorial services, freelance writing, ghost writing, novelization, Writing | 3 Comments »
I’ve always taken pride in being a generalist. Robert Heinlein, in one of the few quotes of his that I like, said “Specialization is for insects,” and for myself, this feels like truth. For me, it fits.
While I am thoroughly capable of obsessing about…well, about pretty much anything…I am not capable of concentrating on one topic, to the exclusion of all others, for the years it would take to become an expert. My freewheeling curiosity is impossible to constrain lest it becomes bored, not through having learned all there is on a topic (far from it), but because my mind tends to wander as I wonder, leading me astray from the path on which I began.
As a result, my history is littered with cobwebbed interests and skills, all of which were at one time a grand passion but which now have been shunted to the side by the necessities of surviving in our rapid-fire and increasingly frenetic world. So, while I can play a concerto, compose a sonnet, cure a pork belly, repair a pocket watch, restore a fountain pen, landscape a garden, tune a car (or a piano, for that matter), cook a goose, shoot an arrow, renovate a kitchen, arrange flowers, write a novel, and make beer, I am at best (by my standards) a journeyman in these subjects, and far from expert.
Unfortunately, generalization is not a valuable commodity in today’s world. Where once being a “Renaissance man” was a thing to be admired, now it is an anomaly, a throwback to an earlier time, anachronistic and useless outside of dinner parties and a guest spot on QI.
Normally, none of this bothers me, but this past year has been a tough go, fraught with missteps and failures, chock-a-block with mediocre results born of my mediocre talents. In many cases, were I to do as my grammar school teachers instructed and simply “apply myself,” I might be able to acquire the expertise needed to achieve my desired goals, be they in the kitchen, in the garden, or in the writing studio.
This isn’t a pity party, though. Nope. Check your sympathy at the door. I don’t need it. Thanks, but no thanks.
I don’t need sympathy because, when I begin to doubt myself like this, it’s because I’m judging myself by yardsticks of others instead of by my own, and that’s a sure sign I need to step back and reevaluate.
I’m a generalist, and I prefer it that way. I just need to come to terms with the ramifications, and remind myself of the advantages that decision brings.
This above all: to thine own self be true…
k
Posted in Culture | Tagged man of many talents, mediocrity, modern life, renaissance man, specialization | Leave a Comment »
As regular readers know, I have what I call The 40-Page Dropkick Rule. When I begin reading a book, it has forty pages to grab me, draw me in, and make me want to keep reading. For exceptionally long books, the forty page limit can be extended to fifty, sometimes eighty. Regardless the limit, if I’m not hooked by that time, the book gets tossed aside.
I created this rule because, growing up, I had a hard time putting down a book, even if I wasn’t enjoying it. It took me six months to finally finish The Agony and the Ecstasy, a book I might very well enjoy now but, when I was sixteen, it really was a slog.
Six months! One book! That’s a long time, time during which I might easily have read several other books if I’d just allowed myself to put Mr. Stone’s opus to the side. But I couldn’t. With my completionist nature, my overriding urge to “see the job through,” I couldn’t not finish the book. As years passed, my self-confidence helped me override these urges, and thus was born my 40-Page Dropkick Rule.
Once in a while, though, a book passes the Dropkick limit, only to falter farther along. Such was my experience of The Goldfinch, the Pulitzer Prize winner by Donna Tartt. Continue Reading »
Posted in Books | Tagged book reviews, books, Donna Tartt, Pulitzer Prize, The Goldfinch | 4 Comments »
America is getting me down and I need a distraction. Perhaps you do, too.
To help us get through the week, instead of a pithy post about some socially relevant concept or [snicker] a staggering work of artistic prose, here’s a diversion.
My wife. Continue Reading »
Posted in Culture | Tagged animated short subjects, bill plympton, enough of politics, your face | 1 Comment »
I’ve been having difficulty selecting topics for my blog posts lately.
I’ve been having difficulty not because I don’t have ideas. I have plenty. My problem is, the topics that have been consuming me of late have been political, and I really really try to avoid partisan politics on this blog.
Why avoid politics? Continue Reading »
Posted in Politics | Tagged avoiding politics, blogging, Clinton, Cruz, FeelTheBern, generating ideas, presidential politics, Trump, Writing | 11 Comments »
I was about halfway through Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch, when I stumbled while reading the following:
Whenever he was gluing up a piece of furniture it was my job to set out all the right cramps, each at the right opening, while he lay out the pieces in precise mortise-to-tenon order—painstaking preparation for the actual gluing-and-cramping when we had to work frantically in the few minutes open to us before the glue set, Hobie’s hands sure as a surgeon’s, snatching up the right piece when I fumbled, my job mostly to hold the pieces together when he got the cramps on (not just the usual G-cramps and F-cramps but also an eccentric array of items he kept to hand for the purpose…
The reason I tripped over these lines is due entirely to the use of the word cramp. It popped me out of the story, puzzled me, and continued to nettle me through the ensuing days, enough so that it engendered this blog post.
The stages of my reaction were as follows: Continue Reading »
Posted in Books, Writing | Tagged copy editing, Donna Tartt, editing, Pulitzer Prize, self-editing, The Goldfinch | 23 Comments »
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 