All posts tagged: life

Splash page for the scifi crowd-funded novel FULL NEGATIVE.

Last Chance to Pledge for Full Negative Book

Friends. Readers. Fellow nerds with impeccable taste. We are officially in the home stretch. The final 24 hours. The last lap. The dramatic climax of the movie where everything explodes in slow motion and the music swells and someone says something heroic right before punching a fascist in the face. (Okay, that last bit’s just wishful thinking, but after the week we’ve all had, I think we deserve it as a treat.) My point is: we’re down to the last days to pledge for FULL NEGATIVE, my big, bonkers scifi space opera that asks the question: what are you willing to give up for freedom? And also, what happens when the trolley problem is measured on a macro sale. (Spoiler: it gets messy.) Why does it matter? Because, for me right now, and hopefully for you, later, this isn’t about publishing a book. It’s about launching a world—telepaths, shapeshifters, space empires, doomed romance, glorious betrayals—and all the weird, wild joy that comes with that. It’s also about proving that stories like this—genre-rich, character-driven, unapologetically extra—have …

The Complicated Nature of Simple Systems

Keep it simple. We grow up being told that, don’t we? Or rather, Keep It Simple, Stupid, so it has a funny and memorable acronym, KISS. And as a society, we certainly do seem to prefer that, don’t we? Keep the solutions simple. Make it easy to understand. Tiktok and sound bites and break your ideas into bullet points so you can thread them together on X. To be fair, I’m not on X anymore. What does this have to do with writing? Nothing. Everything. When I was first learning how to be a project manager, I was introduced to two individuals who would change my life. (Not personally introduced, you understand, but introduced to their work.) One was a statistician, mathematician, and engineer and the other one was a banker. I speak of W. Edwards Deming, whose management and quality control techniques helped shape the Japanese automotive boom, and Dee Hock, the founder of VISA. I don’t know if they ever met each other. I rather suspect they wouldn’t have gotten along. While both …