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.

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

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,

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

Hemingway is claimed to have written the world’s saddest six-word novel [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_sale:_baby_shoes,_never_worn]. He’s got nothing on mine: > I spilled water on my MacBook. Beat that for sub-seven-word tragedy. I’m also traveling, so this comes to

Subject line courtesy of David Bowie: > If it’s wearing a pink hat and a red nose, and it plays guitar upside down, I will go and look at it. I love to see people being dangerous. From a 1999 interview with the late master in Rolling Stone. It

I often wonder: should I write these as bulleted lists? Lots of people send bulleted lists—bullet-letters?—nowadays. I read a bunch of bullet-letters myself. Some newsletter people have even started additional newsletters on top of their already popular newsletters just to offer bulleted lists. It’s like there was

Financial expert Farnoosh Torabi, host of the podcast So Money [http://farnoosh.tv/podcast/episodes/] and author of When She Makes More: 10 Rules for Breadwinning Women, among others, runs Book to Brand [http://booktobrand.co/]. It’s an intensive, two-day event designed to help experts write a book that

> The most common response to procrastination is indeed to try to “get the right emotion”: to try to motivate yourself to feel like getting on with the job. The problem is that feeling like acting and actually acting are two different things. A person mired deep in procrastination might

Judging from that thousand-yard stare, you’ve been reading the news again. Stop that! You’re not going to fix anything, unless you’re Robert Mueller, in which case, stop procrastinating and get back to those indictments. For the rest of you: While I can’t help you unsee any