David Moldawer

Book collaborator and ghostwriter specializing in business, personal development, and self-help.

📍 Montclair, NJ https://bookitect.com

publish till you can’t publish no more

Iteration. Good for iPhones. Also, Terminators. The T-800 is a perfectly adequate time-traveling murder robot, but Skynet gave the T-1000 a crucial feature: laminate flooring mode [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXsyn-9VLVA]. (Who needs to transform into a beat-up Chevy? Bumblebee’s got nothing on Robert Patrick.) Plus, the

compare and despair—with flair

Compare and despair: maybe there’s no use fighting it. A college writing prof once told me that fury about the success of her peers gave her the strength she needed to continue working. Comparisons tire me out, personally, but if resentment fuels you, why not use it? Even the

tuck yourself in to write your cozy masterpiece

Roald Dahl was not a nice person. In fact, he was a real BFG. (The F does not stand for “friendly.”) The legendary Bob Gottlieb was Dahl’s American editor at one point. When Dahl threw a fuss about pencils—we’ll get to Dahl and his pencils in a

adios, zeitgeist—or should I say auf wiedersehen

> The funny thing is, you don’t know when you’re at your best. You can wake up with a hangover and then go to work with three hours of sleep, and do great work. Or you could be rested up for a week and come down here and

capturing creative genius like a Dyson Sphere

First, a couple of apéritifs to whet your appetite: Todd Henry invited me on the Accidental Creative podcast for a chat about getting to the best idea [http://www.accidentalcreative.com/podcasts/ac/getting-to-the-best-idea-with-david-moldawer/] . I was Todd’s editor on his first book and it remains a fondly remembered collaboration

tone, pacing, and the occasional magic axe

Trinitarily, my father, my son, and I went to see Avengers: Infinity War yesterday. Did I enjoy it? ¯\(ツ)/¯ There was awe. I’ll give it that: awe at the film’s scale, its craftsmanship, at what so many people had collaborated to create. The post-credits scene—with its geektastic

on text with texture and getting essential with the extraneous

It’s Saturday! Lose the digital avatar. Time to be human again. Take off that VR headset and return to your body. Select some premium vinyl—Bach’s Inventions and Sinfonias, perhaps—and lay it down on the turntable. Drop the needle gently; you don’t want to scratch it.

coping with writing’s bitter aftertaste

Ship! the gurus tell us. Everyone should ship, all the time. Always Be Shipping. For writers, this means, essentially, share your work with the public. Early and often. Better to publish an unbaked draft, solicit feedback, and then refine that published work over time. It’s trivial to change an

creativity is overrated

There I go with one of my disingenuous, clickbait subject lines again. Except…psych! I totally mean it. (When’s the last time anyone said “psych”? The last time ever, in history? When “psych” passed from this world, did anyone mourn?) It’s so easy (and self-congratulatory) to praise creativity,

in which I make a public call for the formation of a secret society

At last, I’m fully operational after dowsing my brand-new laptop last week [http://mavengame.com/2018/03/waterlogged/]. According to the Apple Genius, AppleCare only started covering water damage with this very model. If I’d soaked the previous year’s MacBook Pro, it would have been a complete