9 Ways to Make the Right Decision (from Goodlife Zen)

Over the last couple of days, I've had to make a moderately-sized decision about how to spend the next month or so. Juggling all the variables involved got so confusing that I did an internet search on how to make decisions, and found this excellent article: 9 Ways to Make the Right Decision | Goodlife Zen

It's a guest post by Patrick Burg, a neuroscientist who writes about the biology of everyday life at veryevolved.com. He has nine suggestions, that don't have to be followed in any particular order - and I found that what he says in the article is actually true: just doing the steps that appealed to me, in no particular order, really worked. So, here are 5 of the 9 suggestions I found particularly useful:


1. Listen to your instincts but don’t let them boss you around.

Write down your gut reaction to the problem. What are you feeling? But then dig deeper:

Ask “why did I think that?” or “why do I feel that way?”

2. List your alternatives.

Write down every option you have for the decision you’re making, get it out of your head and spend some quality time on each one."

3. Rephrase the question.

Whatever problem you have, try writing it down in three or four different ways. Forcing yourself to think about the problem in different ways makes it easier to come up with different solutions.

4. Anticipate history.

Remember what happened last time you were in a similar situation. Go slow and be critical with your recall – beware of only remembering your wins vs. your misses.

6. Think of this as a test.

The human brain is not isolated – it’s hard wired to function in social situations with our peers. The upshot of this is that we devote a lot of time and energy to working in groups and maintaining friends and our status. Imagine that you’re going to be graded for the decision you’re making and you will automatically pay more attention to the process. Write down why you made your decision and follow this by thinking: “This is an exam. I’m handing this in, and I won’t get another chance to change it. Others will see it and grade my logic”. Doing this makes you more likely to examine the “why” of what you’re doing and weed out poorly made plans.

There are more tips at the original article: 9 Ways to Make the Right Decision | Goodlife Zen

Long Range Thinking: How to save the world

Merry Christmas! The previous post talked about nine 'boundaries' that we have to keep the world operating inside, to first avoid environmental collapse and then to keep Earth on a stable footing. Several of these boundaries are affected by population pressure.

For the first time while watching TED.com, I saw conceptual links between three different presentations. It was very cool, because (watched in sequence) they give a clear argument and solution to stabilising world population at around nine billion people.

First up, Hans Rosling sets the stage by illustrating that an increase to nine billion is inevitable (barring nuclear war or massive die-backs). And he does it in a way that's low-tech and convincing.



After that, the obvious question is how do we lower or stabilise the birth rate? Hans Rosling makes a good case for educating women being the key.



Finally, this presentation by Sugata Mitra lays out a low-cost, resource-light way of spreading education into the areas of the world that really need it. His thesis: let children educate themselves. Warning: this presentation is wicked.



I'm going to be on the look out now for more talks that lay out simple solutions to these nine boundaries:

- climate change
- ozone levels
- ocean acidification
- levels of nitrogen and phosphorus
- freshwater use
- rate of biodiversity loss
- changes in land use
- air pollution
- chemical pollution

Long Range Thinking: Ready for the most exciting phase in human history?

This TED presentation is a must-see: it makes dealing with climate change and related problems seem achievable, and the presenter (Johan Rockstrom) delivers a fantastically engaging first half presentation via an inflatable globe and some unconventional stage moves, before moving into an assertive, more pragmatic second half.

He makes the case that this will be the most exciting 30 years in human history, as we undergo an unprecendented social and economic transformation in order to make the Earth a viable, ongoing business proposition for 9 billion people.



Rockstrom lists nine parameters (or 'safety fences') that humanity has to operate within. Basically, he sets out an owner's guide to operating the Earth. Those parameters are:

- climate change
- ozone levels
- ocean acidification
- levels of nitrogen and phosphorus
- freshwater use
- rate of biodiversity loss
- changes in land use
- air pollution
- chemical pollution

Rockstrom identifies three of these parameters as having already passed into the danger zone:


- climate change
- levels of nitrogen and phosphorus
- rate of biodiversity loss


By setting parameters that we have to operate within, and identifying the ones that urgently need to be dealt with, Rockstrom makes dealing with climate change and its related problems seem achievable.

Highly recommended (and a hat-tip to Hot Topic, where I first saw this presentation on the quadruple squeeze.)

Books: October to November

During this time period I started to realise that not every book was worth blogging about; so, rather than a comprehensive list, these book posts are moving more towards some edited highlights.

Kashmir is a screenplay about three specialists hunting down Osama bin Laden. An enjoyable, fast read. Probably still available at scriptshadow, if you want to google for it.

After watching Surrogates, the Bruce Willis movie about people who stay at home and live their lives through remote drones that look like them, I felt like I needed more exploration of that idea. Kil'n People by David Brin is a noir version of the story (rather than an action-adventure), and it contains both a twisty mystery, great uses of the first person narrator, and a lot of excellent ideas about what would happen if you could clone yourself, live 5 different lives, and then reabsorb the memories of those clones. I was a little disapointed with the mysticism that ended the book, but (overall) a good read.

The Ask and the Answer is the sequel to The Knife of Never Letting Go. As I mentioned last time, I was resisting reading this, but Jenni told me that the book shifted from a single narrator to alternating between two points of view. That (plus the third POV she hinted would be introduced in the third book) was enough to get me reading it again. The Ask and Answer was great at getting me to like the characters again, but in terms of plotting it became a little bit plodding and event-based (this happened then this happened) without any real sense of meaning behind the events. I stopped reading it twice because I almost lost sympathy with the main male character; the author deliberately pushes the line here. However, the story built to an excellent finale.

The sequel, Monsters of Men, is just excellent. Definitely the best of the series; flipping between three different points of view means that the plot is advanced without the annoying 'knock the protagonist out' tricks of the first book. There are cliffhangers with nearly every chapter, and I'm a sucker for battle scenes of mass combat - the ambushes and strategies - which this book definitely delivers.

Overall, this Chaos Walking series has a great payoff but it was definitely a struggle for me to get there.

Exegisis is a short little science fiction tale about an artificial intelligence sending emails to its creator. An ok, fast read with one or two moments of genuine insight about how the world might 'look' to an AI.

How to Make it All Work is about looking at your life from a high-level perspective, setting goals and how to recognise when you're heading in the 'right' direction for you. I'm still figuring out how to apply stuff from this book; I think it'll be up for a re-read in a few months.
 
The Race is the second book by Richard North Patterson I've read this year. He's got a thing for writing well-researched thrillers which I approve of. This one is about a Republican presidential primary: overall, the story felt a little familiar to me, having watched Seasons 6 and 7 of The West Wing and followed the last few US elections and mid-terms fairly closely, but it's got a great final act (set at the Republican convention, illustrating the wheelings and dealings that go on). It's also interesting in that the book addresses the internal contradictions and unstable alliances between the different social groups that make up the Republican party (or at least did, pre-Tea Party).

While the first two books of Jessica Amanda Salmondson's Tomoe Gozen trilogy are fun, they didn't really move me. Her stories about a doomed female samurai have quite a bit to say about honour and feminism, but they felt a little disposable. The third book, Thousand Shrine Warrior, is infused with a melancholy mood and Tomoe becomes part of a fascinating moral dilemma: each person that Tomoe is forced to kill in order to save her life is actually part of a grander plan of revenge. That sense of doom and the awareness that violence only made the problem worse lifted this book into Yojimbo style territory. While the ending felt too easy, to me, I would love to read more Tomoe adventures (and I'd definitely want to see a film of this particular story).

Top Writing Tips

Here’s my top writing tip: visualise the person reading your article; they’re busy, suffering from information overload, and will skim read your article. Your reader wants to know why it's worth their time to keep reading.

To keep them reading, here are two more writing tips (each with a couple of suggestions):

Spend 50% of your writing time planning your article

+ Make sure you define the article’s purpose: To convince? To inform? To entertain? …

+ Do a brain-dump or mind-map of everything you want to write about in this article.

+ Summarise your post or article into four short bullet points before you start.

Make your article easy to read and understand

+ Put your main point at the front; don’t make the reader work to discover your magnificent conclusion (assume they’ll quit reading before they reach the end of your article).

+ Say what you want to say using the simplest but most precise words possible.

(Tips condensed down from a course I did a few years ago.)

The Have Done List: November

Played Apocalypse World

Read Two Bear Mambo (Joe Lansdale), The Race (Richard North Patterson), Tomoe Gozen and The Golden Naginate (Jessica Amanda Salmonsen), The Four Hour Work Week (Timothy Ferris), a bunch of Elric stories and most of Billy's new book.

digitised my CD collection

made a tough decision about my writing future


watched Jennifer's Body (it's suprisingly good)

brainstormed a national advertising campaign

help create answers for a Parliamentary Question

watched as the end of that chain of answers led to the resignation of 'my' Minister

handed in a film funding proposal for 2011

went to Apollo 13: Mission Control, where I was interviewed by Walter Cronkite and seized control of Mission Control (best interactive theatre experience ever)

Building a Habit: Using the net less

What I became aware of was that using the internet had become a habit: something I didn't think too much about, I just sat down and surfed (at home, at work). Sometimes an hour would pass and I snap out of my netdaze and wonder what I'd been doing.

That's an hour of my life I could've been doing something with. And each of those hours could be multiplied by several times every weeks.

It wasn't just the big hour-long blocks of my life that I was concerned were slipping away. There were the 'five minutes' here, the 'ten minutes' there. The "I'll just check one thing" net-checks that spiralled out of control until I'd find myself on a website dedicated to the covers of 1970s science fiction novels with no real idea of how I'd gotten there.

My time is valuable ... and I needed to make myself understand that. So I decided to apply some basic reward and punishment strategies to my internet use. The reward was money (effectively, pocket money I'd give myself to spend on anything I wanted - guilt-free) and the punishment was working extra time at work, unpaid.


I started by giving myself a certain number of checks per day; I tried to make this number quite large, so it'd be easy to achieve. So I started with giving myself 10 trips to the internet every day. Not only that, but I decided to be generous: checking the internet at lunch-time and between 7pm and 7.30pm would be ‘free’. They wouldn't count against my 10 trip limit.

I also introduced 'penalty zones', times when using the internet counts for double. For the first hour after I wake up, between 10 and 11, and between 3 and 4; these are the times when I really want to be working on my own stuff.

After two weeks, I dropped down from 10 internet visits per day to 9 (and then kept dropping it every two weeks after that). That's when the tension really began. I started feeling the limitation, but I also started to feel the habit breaking.

I discovered two things about myself through doing this:

+ a lot of my internet time is ego-driven; I'm checking to see if anyone's replied to a post I've made, or to an email.
+ I completely under-estimated the perniciousness of 'just wanted to check just one thing', that impulse to google a random piece of information and then be led astray into the glorious and seductive wilderness of the internet.

I'm at 5 internet visits a day now, and I'm going to keep it at that level for a while to consolidate the habit. This feels like a behavior I'm going to have to manage for the rest of my life, because I suspect it'll be very easy for the browsing and googling to slowly creep up if I don't pay attention to it.

Doing this has felt good though - I definitely have more disposable time, and I've been feeling less stressed.

How to get things done: Stop getting things done!

One piece of advice about setting up a system to get things done (GTD) more efficiently: be prepared to experience a combination of ‘adrenaline from *doing* stuff’ and ‘feeling overwhelmed by the amount of stuff you have to do’. I’ve experienced this twice now: the first time I set up my GTD system, and just last month (when I radically simplified it).

Both times, I was left feeling stressed by the amount of stuff I’d taken on.

Which reveals one of the secrets to this whole GTD system: be careful about what you take on and decide to do. Taking an inventory of all of your commitments will reveal exactly how much stuff you feel obligated to finish and achieve.

Last year I read a book called Margin, which described the feeling of free time in your life as the white margin around the pages of a book. The more stuff you pack into your life, the less margin you have, the less freedom to relax, unwind, contemplate.

If you want margin, you’ve got to push back against obligations:

+ push some of them into your ‘Someday/Maybe’ list rather than doing them right now

+ drop some of them (or renegotiate to do them later)

+ take a break from using this system; just vege out for a day or two.

My mind, at least, is not designed to be productive all the time. It needs ebbs and flows. Being aware that sometimes you don’t need to get things done is key to this.

In that spirit, I was originally going to end this series of posts with an offer to help people who are interested in this stuff set up their own GTD systems. Instead, if you’re interested in this stuff, let me know and we can discuss it sometime.

In the meantime, ‘How to Get Things Done’ is available from the library (and from me); you can also read the Simple Dollar’s review of How to Get Things Done.

How to get things done: Review everything at least once a week

Now you’ve got your organizational system set up, and it includes:

• a lists of projects you want to tackle
• a way of reminding yourself about things that are coming up (your calendar, a tickler file)
• a list of next actions to take

But this isn’t the sort of thing you do once and then forget about it. You’ll always be having new ‘stuff’ coming in: emails, appointments, news that ranges from surprising (your mum’s in town) to life-changing (your flat is being sold).

The trick, then, is to set aside an hour or two every week to catch up on everything that’s new in your life. You’ll have to review that new stuff (and look over your existing obligations and items on your to-do list). The idea behind this weekly review is to make sure that you know everything that’s going on in your life; the consequence of that is that you’ll feel confident that the things you’re deciding to do right now are the best possible uses of your time.

I’ve come across a couple of philosophies about what to do with the realizations that come out of your weekly review: they boil down to (a) schedule fixed amounts of time into your calendar to deal with particular issues or projects, or (b) rely on checking your to-do list to figure out what your next action should be.

I’ve tried (a) for a while, especially in a work context, but at the moment I’m more a fan of (b) … playing things a little looser is feeling both easier to maintain and easier to adapt to changing situations.

There’s a couple of deeper level reviews that you can do as well; the only one I’ll mention in any detail is that after I finish my two ‘New Things’ – the projects that I’m especially focusing on at the moment, I review my projects lists and goals for the year, to decide what my new New Things should be.

How to Get Things Done: List out all your projects

This is the third of four posts about How to Get Things Done, a book by Dave Allen that shows you how to set up a system to feel more on top of everything in your life.


Today I want to talk about the one element of the Getting Things Done (GTD) system that I resisted for years: having a complete list of all of the projects you want to do.(*) Through a combination of OOS/RSI and scattering information about my projects in handwritten notes spread through 10 different manilla folders, I found it really difficult to review everything that was going on in my life, or that I wanted to do.

* Allen defines a project as anything that 

needs more than 2 actions to complete.

My series of posts on 'The New Thing' started to change my mind though. I've come to the conclusion that I can really only consider two things at any time as being my main priorities. What I needed to do was figure out how to present all of my commitments and things I wanted to do so that I could easily choose what to focus on. Here's what I've done (and this is still a work-in-progress, liable to be refined) ...

Two massive Word documents: Vital and Wild

I decided to divide my projects into two categories. First, there are the things I consider to be vital; they're either urgent, necessary, or they feel essential to my growth as a person. Second, there are the things I'd like to do, the wild and crazy ideas I've had, the things I'm not sure about yet, the goals that once seemed really inspiring but now I'm left a little bit cold by them.



What I've done is created two Word documents (one called 'Vital' and one called 'Wildcards') and put very brief descriptions of each project into them, like this:

• Buy a new cellphone (*)
• Digitise my CD collection

The (*) indicates that that project has some supporting material attached to it; sometimes I write down some notes or brainstorm some ideas about a project, and I want to keep it for when I finally start to work on it. I store these in two manilla folders in my filing cabinet (one for 'Vital' and one for 'Wildcards').

Sometimes I'll write down the next action I want to take with the project, just as a prompt:

• Learn how to edit on Adobe Premiere: ask Norman for footage

I'm storing these files in Dropbox (and I should totally set up a project to figure out how to make the files automatically sync every time I make a change).








A list of the projects I'm actively working on

Out of all of those possible projects, there are going to be somewhere between 8 to 100 that I'm working on at any one time.(*) I record these in a notebook I've set specifically aside for my list of 'Active Projects'.

* 'Up to 100' is Allen's number; so far 

I've found it sets between 5 to 20.

Each of these Active Projects has a manilla folder filled with all the supporting material I need for them, and I store these in a separate drawer of my filing cabinet, for easy access.

As part of my Weekly Review (which I'll talk about in the next post), I make sure that there's at least one item in my to-do list that tells me the next action I need to take for each project.

Why am I going to all this trouble? It's simply so I can feel like I'm aware of everything I've got responsibility for and I can easily spot if anything's falling between the cracks. The end result is simply that I feel on top of stuff, and I'm confident that I'm moving stuff forward and finishing things.



Focus on two things

Finally, to make sure I'm making progress, I choose two things and work on them for 20 minutes first thing in the morning, and first thing when I get home. Mark Forster calls this the 'current initiative', and I've found it a great technique.



Only once I've completed both of those 'things' do I choose what to do next.



One more post. In this one, I'll talk about how I use all this stuff (the Weekly Review, which I mentioned above).

Apollo 13: Mission Control is a must see

I am still recovering from how good a time I had at Apollo 13: Mission Control on Saturday night. This is a play at Downstage recreating the Apollo 13 disaster: audience members play members of Mission Control and have to perform vital tasks throughout the night in order to bring the astronauts back home again safely (I’ll talk a bit more about this merging between being an audience member and a performer in a few paragraphs).

Here’s who I think should go see this: Jenni, Lee, Norman, Luke, Sam, Matt, Debz, Mike Sands, Bryn, Jacqui, Karen, Malcolm, Donna, Sophie, Simon Shuker and anyone else who thinks it might be quite cool to pretend to be part of Mission Control for a couple of hours.

Without going into spoilers, I totally got to be a hero during the course of the evening: identifying a potential danger on the ship; representing Mission Control during a TV interview with Walter Cronkite, and (eventually) taking charge of Mission Control itself for about 5 minutes – which meant I was spotlighted on stage with about 200 people watching me as I averted a complete and total meltdown.

(Actually, I just re-read that paragraph and I reckon there are spoilers in there, so ... inviso-texted).

Fracking brilliant.

The Audience / Performer Split

Talking about it with Jennifer afterwards made me aware of something I hadn’t considered about attending an ‘interactive theatre experience’.(*) She said that she never forgot that she was an audience member, watching a performance. I, on the other hand, really got into it; I took my role as Guidance Comms Officer really seriously and totally brought in to the drama of the mission.

                                                                                                 (*) It’s basically a LARP.

In some ways, it’s like the observation that people play games for different reasons: some people play to hang out with their friends; some people play to win; in the case of role-playing games, some people play to stay in-character while others play to construct a challenging story.

Your reason for being there and what you want out of it will give you a completely different experience from someone sitting right beside you who’s there for different reasons.

In my case, taking it seriously and buying in to the reality of the show had the benefit of getting me “into character”, so that when I was chosen to take part in a live interview on TV with Walter Cronkite(invisotext), I was totally in the zone and able to entertain the audience with my answers. I also, seriously, wanted to win: I have no idea if you can ‘fail’ Apollo 13, but I wanted to do everything we could to help it succeed; in effect I was trying to clock the performance.

Digging in to why it was so good

I had no idea, when I arrived at Downstage, that I was going to have one of the best creative experiences of my year to date. I expected to have heaps of fun, and I fully intended to get into it as much as I could … but to have it affect me this much?

So, it’s resonating but I’m not sure why. There are a lot of different factors at play here: my life of science-fiction and space flight; taking charge in a crisis; being in the spotlight; acting; a bit of improve and script-writing.

It seems important to me to dig into this a bit deeper to try and figure out exactly why I’m so stoked by this. If anyone wants to help me figure it out, please feel free to ask questions in the comments.

Some advice to myself

I’ve just handed in an application for a NZFC Talent Award (one of the goals I set myself earlier in the year when I was posting about the New Thing). It’s at moments like this that it’s easy to rest on my laurels (n. an honour won, in a field or achievement).(*)

(*) I thought it meant ‘arse’.

But: working on the assumption that the future is, you know, whimsical, here’s some advice I gave someone earlier this year; hopefully I can take it too:

1. 

If you're interested in applying for this Talent Award again, my advice would be to start writing for it now. It will come around sooner than you think, and your projects will be much stronger if you've developed them for 6 months.

2. 

I'd also suggest actually working on your projects, developing them (and making some of them). That’ll strengthen the case for giving you an award next year.

3. 

Get your ideas to peer reviewers early. My suggestion: in your head, make the deadline two months earlier than it actually is. That'll give you a chance to really reflect on and incorporate any feedback you're given.

I have follow-up goals from making this application; I’ve decided not to share them (taking on board that advice about how telling other people about your goals – as if you’ve already achieve them - makes you less likely to do them). But things are moving.

How to Get Things Done: Write Everything Down

I'm talking about How to Get Things Done, a book by Dave Allen that changed my life by showing me how to set up a system that captures everything that's going on in my life, helps me figure out where it all fits, and then gives me a way to prioritise what to do next.

Capture everything

If you're like me, you have a crapload of stuff going on in your life: things to write; people to see; obligations to fulfil; (hopefully) holidays to plan; kids to raise; emails to send; bills to pay; and more, and more, and more ...

The theory behind the Getting Things Done (GTD) system is that you need to write everything down and review it. Writing it down means you've gotten it out of your head. If you've gotten the idea out of your head and you can trust yourself to review it, then your brain becomes a lot calmer and stops thinking about the idea over and over again.

I've had this happen to me many times when I can't sleep because I'm thinking about something. If I just take the time to turn on the light and write it down, I usually find I pop off to sleep five or ten minutes later.

If you've known me for a while, you'll know that I write everything down in a hipster pda that I carry around everywhere. This is why - I want to capture every idea and look at it later to see if it's worthwhile or something I want to commit to doing.

Here's how to build a hipster pda:

1. cut up a bunch of paper or get a bunch of 3"x5" file cards
2. clip them together with a binder clip
3. there is no step 3

There are other sources of information I have to collect from as well:

• my intray
• emails
• texts and phone messages
• meetings and conversations

Organise Everything

Once you've captured everything, the next step in the GTD system is to figure out where it goes. Is it something you should do right away? Is it something you need to think about for a while? Is it a project, and if so is it urgent or more something you might do someday?

There's a place for everything in the system, and How to Get Things Done goes into quite a bit of detail about how to set up a filing system, use a calendar, and set up something called a tickler file (which effectively allows you to 'post' things to yourself):



Every item you've captured will go somewhere: into your to-do list; into a list of actual or potential projects; into your calendar; into the trash.

Next up, I want to talk about those project lists - because that's something I resisted doing for years ... and I was wrong.

How to Get Things Done: What's the Next Action?

There's an observation in my previous post about economics that really sticks with me: most people are too busy dealing with the day-to-day tasks in their life to lift their heads up every once in a while and see the bigger picture. I've certainly felt like that, and its that feeling - coupled with setting up a new organisational system at my work - that's motivated me to talk about one of the books that really literally changed my life.

How to Get Things Done by Dave Allen is a book that - at its most basic level - is about how to set up a filing system. But really its about how to set up a system that captures everything that's going on in your life, helps you consider where it all fits, and then gives you tools and routines to help you prioritise what to do next.

I've been using it since 2005, and I only now feel like I'm beginning to apply some of the deeper lessons from it (and that's after doing some extra reading and thinking about it).

What I'd like to do in the next few posts is talk about the basics of the version of the system I use. Perhaps it'll be helpful; most of it will probably be similar to (or an extension of) things you're already doing.

The Next Action List

Over the last few years, I have shifted to a single to-do list, which captures everything that's going on in my life.

However: the items on this to-do list are all written using one of two basic principles of the Getting Things Done (GTD) system; each item describe, in very specific terms, the next physical action I need to do. For instance, it doesn't say:

• Sell spare clothes to the Costume Cave.

Instead it says:

• Call Costume Cave (385-9682)

The item before that might have said:

• Google 'Costume Cave' and find out phone number.

The other basic principle is that if an item can be done in under 2 minutes, do it then and there. You'll make more progress, and it'll be easier and faster than writing it down and revisiting it.

I've tried a lot of systems for organising my to-do lists but the best version I've found is called 'Autofocus', developed by productivity expert Mark Forster. There's an online demonstration of how it works, here.

Essentially, I have one to-do list stored in a 1B5 notebook. In the next post, I'll talk about how things get into that notebook.

Books: April to June

The Knife of Never Letting Go is the first in a trilogy of young adult novels. It should be right up my alley (which is a reference that seems much more relevant to me now that I've moved to an apartment in an alleyway): the series is set on a world that's been colonised by people from Earth, who have had a nasty conflict with the indigenous species, and as a result been infected with a disease that has given everybody uncontrollable telepathy. Coupled with that, the protagonist is trying to escape from the village he lives in, a village populated only by men, most of whom are homicidal patriarchal fascists.

But the book really bugged me. While the author made me care about the main character, he also stuck strongly to a first person POV coupled with a few 'unreliable narrator' tricks. As a result, I felt cheated by the frequency with which information was withheld that the main character knew (or should know), and annoyed at how often the author had to knock the main character out in order to advance the plot.

I've been on the fence about trilogies for many years now - reluctant to read them because for the most part I think they're padding. At the end of Knife, I decided not to read the next two books in the series: while the main character was trapped, indebted to the men he'd spent the whole book trying to escape - an army of men who'd just taken over the whole planet - I wasn't particularly interested in how he would get out of this situation. I just expected he would, and felt no obligation to read two more books to find out how it happened.

It took a few months, but Jenni changed my mind about this (more to come in the next book review post) ...

Reading Knife also reinforced my hatred of modern dust jackets on books. Sure, the design work that goes into a contemporary book is top notch, but I swear that the blurbs give away plot spoilers up to about page 200. It's infuriating.

Jenni lent me What's the Worst that Could Happen? It's her novel about a super-hero whose power is that she can see the worst case scenario for every course of action. I enjoyed reading it, and quickly saw the potential in it. Jenni blogged about our feedback session.

Then I organised a trans-humanist science-fiction death match. I got out two books from the library, read the first chapter of each and then chose which one to continue.

I chose Newton's Wake by Ken McLeod because its Scottish protagonist seemed to have more of an edge. It's a fairly interesting soap opera about the aftermath of a war with AIs and first contact with a distant colony, but by the end, the story was a little confusing and felt like a failure.

Then, when I switched back to Glasshouse by Charles Stross, I was impressed by how smart it was. Our hero needs to go into the 30th century equivalent of witness protection. He signs up for an experiment to recreate 20th century society, where our social and moral codes are enforced by a points system. Things quickly deteriorate as the experiment's participants decide to play to win (and ignore the fact that there's a darker agenda going on). A great examination of how our culture ticks, and a tight little thriller.

In my last book review, I mentioned that there was a book that scared me. Kindred by Octavia Butler is it. It's the story of an African-American woman from the 1970s who's thrown back in time about 150 years to the Antebellum South. What I realised is that I can watch trashy horror films and read Thomas Ligotti short stories all I like, but this story - about this character who seemed very real and very human, thrust into absolutely the worst environment for her - well, this story didn't feel safe. After the first two chapters, I had no idea where it was going or how far it could go, and I ended up putting it down.

I switched, instead, to The Bohr Maker, a science-fiction novel about nano-technology, that felt ... superficial to me in comparison to Kindred (which I was still thinking about). The story follows two protagonists - well, one of them's mostly just a character who things happen to for the majority of the book, and the other is so unsympathetic that I wouldn't have been unhappy to see him/it fail entirely. Perhaps that's a good technique ... it certainly kept the outcome I wanted the book to have alive and in question for me, but made The Bohr Maker a bit of a tough read

Afterwards, I went back to Kindred, and read another two or three chapters. Just when I thought it was settling into a predictable groove, Butler threw a massive curveball into the situation, one that I found very compelling.

After reading to see how that resolved, I had to decompress for a while. I ripped through Roadside Picnic by Stanislaw Lem. My memories of this have faded now, but I found this a tight, fast read infused with melancholy and a sense of transcendence. Actually: recommended. It felt like good Philip K. Dick.

Finally, I finished Kindred and was satisfied with how it all wrapped up. If you're familiar with the RPG Steal Away Jordan, Kindred is one of the media inspirations for that game.

The Sparrow is a definite contender for the best book I've read this year. It's a first contact story: humanity has picked up radio broadcasts of music from the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. The story follows (and deals with the aftermath of) an expedition funded by Jesuit priests to Rakhat, the world that is sending the music. What struck me most about this story was its sense of humour, the lightness of touch and sense of truth in its characterisations and the way it deals with issues of guilt, celibacy, the nature of God and faith - all wrapped in a vivid writing style. Jenni, Helen R: you might like this one.

The Have Done List: September to October

Here's some stuff I've done in the last month and a half that I think's notable:

• defriended a couple of people on Facebook (if you're reading this, you're unlikely to be one of them)
   
• gave feedback on Jenni's novel
   
• asked Matt if he would digitise episodes of lovebites for me (which he very kindly did)
   
• decluttered, massively
  
  
• got an exciting comment about people who are interested in playtesting Left Coast
  
  
• got good feedback from Jenni about my feedback on her novel
   
• bought a desk and assembled it myself
  
  
• broke a desk
• went on holiday
• stayed reasonably dry in the middle of a three day storm
• re-learned how to build a fire
  
  
• introduced Jennifer to story games
  
  
• cleared all of my emails (believe me, this is a big thing!)
  
• fixed a desk
  
• broke a filing cabinet
  
• threw a temper tantrum (which fixed the filing cabinet)
• set up an filing system at work 
• deposited 20 boxes of emails and script notes from the lovebites TV series at the Film Archive (closure, baby! Yeah!)
• learned how to give effective feedback in a personal/non-literary context (Describe when it occured; Describe exactly and objectively what happened; Explain the impact it had on you).
• Decided to write a scholarship application in 24 hours
• Had a lot of fun with Jennifer on Halloween weekend, including becoming a raving fan of the pies at Sweet Mother's Kitchen
• Inspired mcdaldno to write more of his game: Monsterhearts.
  

Characters need a "Thing"

While reading Scriptshadow's review of 'Retreat', a Dead Calm-esque thriller on an isolated island, I came across a great little insight. (One of the great things about Scriptshadow's review format is the little insight at the end of each review; quite often there's something that sticks with me.)

Anyway, this idea is relevant to the work I want to do on Left Coast, making the supporting characters that surround the lead character as real and pro-active as possible.

[E]very character should have a “thing” going on.

Everybody’s got a “thing.” My friend Dan’s thing is that he’s obsessed with women, to the point where it’s ruined a marriage and a couple of other great relationships he’s had. My friend Claire’s thing is that she refuses to rely on other people for help. She has to do everything herself, even when at times it’s impossible.

Kate’s thing [in this script] is that she can’t forgive her husband for putting his work before her.

Think about all the friends in your life. You can probably break all of them down into having that one “thing” that identifies them. This “thing” is what you use your screenplay to explore. Sure this [script's] concept is about a deadly virus that could potentially end human existence. But really this script is about a woman trying to come to terms with what her husband did to her, forgive him, and move on.

OPost Optionsnce you identify what your main character’s “thing” is, you can use your screenplay to explore it. If you’re not doing that, I got news for you, you’re going to have a hard time writing a good screenplay.

"A meaningful prosperity": Changing the economic system

I found this 20 minute talk by Tim Jackson about the limits of growth in our economic system to be worthwhile. Essentially, it's a clear explanation of how we could handle a global population of nine billion people all wanting a 'good', 'Western' lifestyle.



The talk points out the intersection between economics and the desire for novelty, which leads to resources being used to create new, shiny consumer goods.(*)

(*) Like iPads, which I'm still restraining myself from buying.

When Jackson couples this observation with a discussion of the levels of consumer debt leading into the financial crisis, he comes up with this pithy summary:

This is a story about us, people being persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about.

There's lots more to this talk, but the thing that really stuck out to me as relevant to the idea of developing our long range thinking is the observation that we're too busy taking care of the small-scale, day-to-day stuff to deal with the bigger picture or more intractable problems.

The Long News

A three minute talk about gaining some perspective on world events.



www.longnews.org

The deep dive

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of giving Jenni some feedback on her most recent novel. Towards the end of our session, I tried a technique that I'd heard about in a governance seminar last month; it's called a 'deep dive', and all it involves is taking the time to dig into one particular issue, asking questions about and exploring its various facets (without having a particular agenda or wanting a particular outcome), and seeing what emerges.

For Jenni's novel, I asked her about the various ways she - as the author - had used 'anger' in her novel. It's a bit of a recurring motif, and it's something I have a particular interest in; The Limit is all about anger, and in fact writing The Limit taught me a lot about dealing with anger in my own life. That one question revealed a lot of things to me that weren't clear from my reading: in particular, the use of anger as one of the stages of grieving, and the repressed anger of the novel's love interest.

Pretty much all of the stuff that came out of our wandering conversation during this deep dive, I was able to think of ways to apply to the rewrite of the novel, hopefully strengthening the elements that Jenni already has in there.

It's not a technique that I'd do very often; maybe once every couple of script meetings; but I think the deep dive has a real place at the writers' table.