Hooray for Growth

I don't want to let another week go by without  blog post, so I decided I'd write one this morning while I drink my tea. Writing while having my morning tea is one of my favorite things, and I don't do it enough anymore. There's so much to do, that I tend to put my tea in my travel mug even when I'm at home, and then I dive into the chores.

But not today. Last week, I realized on Monday that I should have taken a little bit of time for myself over the weekend. I did nothing but chores and watching kids all weekend, and come Monday, I was tired and stressed out, although I was happy to have Petunia's new room painted.

So this weekend, I'm taking some time on Sunday morning for me. Mr. Snarky is doing chores, but I'm not feeling guilty about that because yesterday morning he went and watched the rugby world cup final live while I took the kids to gymnastics and then started prepping the baseboards in Petunia's room for paint.

(The All Blacks won, so he came home happy, with doughnuts, and all was well with the world.)

I have some really big topics bouncing around in my head, wanting a blog post, but I am too tired to tackle them. It has been a full month- lots of work, lots of chores, but also lots of fun, since it was Petunia's birthday and we went to Disneyland AND had a small party with her closest friends. Her birthday is finally officially over: on Thursday, I quit work early and took Cheez-Its into her class for the "October biirthdays" celebration. It was annoying to quit work early, but worth it to see her in her classroom. She is happy and comfortable there, and that makes me happy.

Like I said in Friday's links post, my super busy time at work is almost done. I need to finish getting Missed Chances published (it is now live on Kobo and GumRoad!) and get it launched with some reviews. I'm still querying reviewers for Unspotted and Okay, So Look, too, but I can ease off the hectic pace a bit.

Soon to be a kanban board

I have some good things penciled in for the rest of the year, but I also plan to take some time to think a bit more about my medium term strategy. I finished painting the barn door in the new office, so soon I can make my kanban board on the white board on it. I think that will help me make sure I don't overlook the tasks I should be doing to build something sustainable. We'll see.

One thing I know I need in my medium term strategy is growing my Tungsten Hippo audience. Many of the book marketing/advertising lists out there won't take short ebooks, so I am trying to build my own short ebook marketing list. I want to do it in a way that feels authentic, though, both because I think that will be more successful in the long term and because I will feel happier about it. Therefore, I was pretty happy to come across the #NonfictionNovember hashtag. I love non-fiction in general, and think that it is a genre in which short ebooks really shine. So I'm participating. My first post is up: it is about my year in non-fiction, and features a look back at some of my favorite non-fiction short ebooks for the year.

I'm also thinking hard about my strategy for the consulting part of my business. I was struck by how much I enjoyed giving the latest session of my "intro to PM" class. However, I also hate marketing when my product is ME, so my ideal strategy allows me to give classes/seminars but does not require a lot of really active marketing. Once again, growing an audience is likely to be part of the answer- and my Management Monthly email newsletter's audience is slowly growing. I've also noticed that GumRoad has added more "discoverability" features, and I'm curious if those could help me, particularly if I did more of the short seminars that I leave available for purchase even after the live session is done.

In short, I spend a lot of time thinking about marketing, and how to do it well but authentically and in a way that doesn't feel sleazy to me. This has reminded me of a conversation I had with my first career coach, over a decade ago now. I was struggling with the transition into management, and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I still thought there was going to be a single, simple answer to that. (HA!) One of the problems I had with the job I had landed in was that it required me to do some marketing. I hated it. I was no good at it. The coach listened to me rant about why I hated it and was no good at it, and then told me a story about another client, who learned to like marketing by viewing it as a puzzle that allowed him to get to the things he really wanted to do. I laughed that off, sure that I'd never think that way. I was wrong!

And now my tea is empty, and Petunia is ready for me to help her pack up the toys in her room so that we can move her to her new room... so I'll end this post and, with my last sip of tea, make a silent cheer to growth, in all its forms.

Weekend Reading: The Where Did That Week Go Edition

It has finally happened- a week has gone by with no posts. I think I only have one more week of my hectic work schedule, so hopefully I'll be writing more posts, soon.

Here is part of what I've been busy with: Missed Chances, the first Annorlunda Books Taster Flight, is now available on Amazon. Since the stories in this book are public domain, Amazon wouldn't let me do a pre-order period, and the only way to find out whether they'd accept the book for publication was to just publish it. So the ebook version is live. The print version will come out next Wednesday, and the other ebook versions (BN.com, Kobo, and iBooks) are in process now. I had originally planned to test out KDP Select with this book, which would have made it an Amazon exclusive, but they won't take public domain stories into KDP Select, so I'll list the book everywhere I can.

You can still get a free copy of this book, though- if you sign up for the Tungsten Hippo Weekly Digest by Sunday at 8 a.m., you'll get a copy. If you want to read this book but don't want to be on the Tungsten Hippo mailing list, I am also recruiting some advance readers here. Advance readers will get their copies over the weekend or early next week.

So... since links are all I'm posting these days, lets get on to the links!

The Bikini Islanders are looking for help resettling in the US, since the island we resettled them too after using their atoll for nuclear testing is now threatened by rising sea levels.

I am absolutely horrified by this story. Student records should never be made public like this.

The story of the little village that stopped the spread of the plague in the 1600s is a little gruesome, but I'd love to visit the village.

Have you seen Wordnik? I could see losing a lot of time on this site.

Sophia Benoit's suggestions for things women's magazines should write about is pretty amusing.

I bookmarked two Stochastic Planet photos this week: the beautiful and the funny.

And that's all I have for the week. I haven't been out and about on the internet as much as usual because I was so busy. I also haven't been commenting on people's blogs as much as usual. I am still reading! I'm just more likely to be reading on my phone while waiting for someone to go to sleep, and I am too old to write comments on the touch keypads on phones.

Weekend Reading: The I Wish I'd Read More Things Edition

I want to start this week's post by saying that I am thinking of the folks facing Hurricane Patricia, and hoping that they'll all make it through OK. The same El Niño conditions that have made the water at our beaches unusually warm and that promise to bring us some much needed rain this winter are making this a terrible storm. I hope we don't wake up to read about a disaster tomorrow.

Now, to the links.

One of the reviews of Unspotted that I was waiting for came in, and I couldn't be happier with the result. The wildlife biologists at Dispatches from the Field loved Unspotted.

In other publishing related news, we're running a GoodReads giveaway for Okay, So Look- go enter if you are so inclined.

Still talking about books and reading... over at The Atlantic, James Fallow wrote about reading on a screen vs. in print, and he got a couple of really smart notes back from his readers. Whenever I see the handwringing about on screen reading, I always wonder if there were similar debates when the written word moved to books from scrolls. I also think about the fact that it is fairly well understood that the switch to writing stories from the oral tradition had an impact on our language and our brains, and wonder why no one is advocating we go back to memorizing all of our stories and transmitting them orally.

You can thank Bad Mom, Good Mom for that last link, and also the next two, about the return of the novella and the problem of what to call a non-fiction "novella." I really wish I had a good answer for that last one. It would make my emails to potential reviewers much easier to write.

Bad Mom, Good Mom writes a lot of good, thought-provoking posts, and posts cool pictures of her sewing projects. Go check out her recent post on why the future of diesel engines matters for a taste.

I'm glad the compounding pharmacies will be able to offer competition for the medicine that Martin Shkreli jacked up the price on... but I'd still rather we solve the underlying problem instead of using this work around. As a consumer, I'd rather take a medicine produced under a validated manufacturing process with a validated quality control system than have to rely on a compounding pharmacy. That's not to impune the work of pharmacists at compounding pharmacies. It is just to say that when you can have a repeatable process and quality control, it is nice to have those things and it seems silly to have to give them up just because some finance guys want to be a**holes.

The title of this is too good to change: Why Angry Old Men Calling a Meeting to Yell at a Woman Is Always a Spectacular Failure.

On the falling number of working women in the US.

Apparently some big news site decided to poll its readers about whether they would go back in time to kill baby Hitler, and the internet spent a good part of the day talking about that. The best response I saw was someone who linked to this cartoon.

That's all I have. I saved a lot of other interesting looking things to read, but I didn't get to read them. So let's end with some happy stuff. This is all sorts of awesome:

This. Is. AWESOME. “@JeaneanThomas: Dear teenage boy at the skate park... pic.twitter.com/AOsuvt40Js”

— Susan Arendt (@SusanArendt) October 21, 2015

And this is really funny:

We've been had: pic.twitter.com/GiJJbtBdOI

— John Fitzpatrick (@j_c_fitz) October 21, 2015

Updates, Even Though Events Don't Warrant

I dropped my phone on Monday. This is nothing new. I drop my phone all the time. I'm a klutz. This time, though, I dropped it on the concrete sidewalk and it fell in such a way that the bumper I had on it did no good, and the screen cracked.

So, I'm sitting here waiting for my new phone to finish configuring itself, and I thought I'd write a quick update post.

Item 1: The first day of the October session of my Better Projects class was today. I thought the class went well. I am always really energized and happy after I finish giving a class. I suspect this tells me something about what I should focus on in my consulting business. I'm not yet sure what I'm going to do with that message, though.

Item 2: This has pushed me closer to deciding to offer an online version of the Navigating the Path to Industry seminar I've given a couple of times in my local area. Exact timing, pricing, and other details are still to be determined, but if you want to be sure to hear about the seminar if I decide to offer it, enter your email address on this form.

I'll be honest: the number of response on that form will influence my decision about whether to offer the class, because I'm human and I like money.

Item 3: Today, I finished assembling the text and images for the next Annorlunda Books release, which will be called Missed Chances: Short Love Stories with a Hint of What Might Have Been. I still have quite a bit of work to do before it is ready for release, which is a shame, because I'm targeting November 3 for a release date. I think I'll make it, at least for the ebook format. I'll make it for the print book format only if I don't have to order a second proof- i.e., if there are no major mistakes in the first proof I order. Right now, I have a solid potential interior file for my proof uploaded, but no cover (that's coming later this week or over the weekend). I am 75% of the way through converting my file from the Word document needed to make a print version to the HTML document needed to create the ebook. So, not bad, but a lot of fiddly bits left to do.

Last night, I finished reading through a print out of the book, and was reminded that I really like the stories I picked for this collection. They are five public domain stories- so all old. (To be in the public domain, their authors have to have been dead for at least 75 years.) But they are all really good, and I think the book is fun to read. The stories I chose are:

• Aunt Philippa and the Men, by L.M. Montgomery
• The Kiss, by Kate Chopin
• The Victory, by Rabindranath Tagore
• The Mystery of Wilhem Rütter, by Helen Hunt Jackson
• A Florentine Experiment, by Constance Fenimore Woolson

Since they are public domain stories, you could go read them individually elsewhere. But they are not collected into a single convenient volume anywhere else!

This is the book I'll be giving away to everyone who is signed up for the Tungsten Hippo weekly digest by November 1, but I'd also be happy to sign up a few advance readers, too- as usual, if you're interested in being an advance reader, there's a short form to fill out.

Item 4: My kids have their Halloween costumes. They will be Tinkerbell and Cleopatra. Petunia wants to be Tinkerbell because she got a large light up Tinkerbell wand at Disneyland and she wants to take it trick-or-treating. Pumpkin wants to be Cleopatra because she read a biography about Cleopatra and really got interested in Cleopatra. She has been saying she wants to be Cleopatra for Halloween since summer, at least.

Item 5: I have made zero progress on packing things up in the old office/guest room (a.k.a. Petunia's future bedroom). This is a problem, because we were sort of planning to paint it this weekend. I should set myself a goal of getting my shelves cleared off tonight. 

This means that I should stop using the ongoing phone set up as an excuse to goof around on the internet and get back to some sort of work- either finishing up the items on my work list for the day or packing those shelves.

More updates will no doubt be forthcoming in the future, even though events probably still won't warrant them.

Just Keep Making Progress

Our home renovation is almost complete. The new room is done and painted, and our desks are in there (although not in their final arrangement.) The fancy barn door into the office is up, and half painted. We like the colors we chose. The expanded living room is awesome. The removal of a built in bookcase inbetween the living room and the kitchen/dining area has opened the space up even more, and I'm still amazed by how spacious our common living area feels now.

The new patio we had to get due to some drainage issues is great, too. It will be really nice once we get some furniture for it and it will be even nicer once we come up with the money to put up a pergola or something to give it some shade. However, the new room provides some shade, so I think the patio will be really nice even as it is.

Of course, there is a lot left to do. Our garage is still a mess. The walls are painted, but the skirting boards are not- that is on Mr. Snarky's list for today, actually. He's gotten some shelves back up, but we haven't put our big floor to ceiling shelves back where they belong, so the garage is currently not functional as anything except a storage area.

Yesterday, we moved the piano and Mr. Snarky's desk out of what used to be our office/guest room and will eventually be Petunia's room. When we moved the desk out, we found some mold on the wall behind it. This is not completely surprising: we had a problem with mold growing on some outside walls back before we added insulation to our walls. I cleaned the mold off the walls, and started the process of de-molding the bottom of Mr. Snarky's desk drawers. As we surveyed the walls in that room, though, it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that the room needs to be painted. Hooray. More work.

Before we can paint, we need to finish boxing up the things in that room. Mr. Snarky has a ton of CDs, and they need to be boxed, and the shelves moved out of the closet. I had some shelves on the wall that need to come down, so I need to find a place to put the things on those shelves.

You'd think the obvious answer to that last problem would be: on the shelves in the new office. But we don't have shelves in the office yet. We're going to buy the Ivar shelves from Ikea and paint them. That is the best solution we can find that we can also afford- the overall renovation project has been quite expensive, to the point that the $3000+ cost of getting custom shelves is not feasible, and we have been unable to find any non-custom shelves we both like other than Ivar (if painted).

And the list goes on. I won't bore you with the rest of it. There's just a lot to do. I have given up on having a firm goal for when everything will be done. My new goal is that we just keep making progress- certainly every weekend, and sometimes during the week, too. I guess this is an example of matching the project management methods to the team and the project. There are just too many surprise additions to our to do list to be able to have a firm schedule for this project. But we do need to keep pushing to get it done, so we have defined an overall workflow and set firm intermediate goals for ourselves.

I have taken the "just keep making progress" mindset into my business work, too. at least a bit. There, I have more firm deadlines for myself. But those are all intermediate goals, really. My current push is to finish the book I will giveaway as part of my Tungsten Hippo birthday celebration. (I'll post it for sale, too, of course.) I will also be giving my Better Projects class starting this Wednesday, and I have a new book submission to write editorial comments on. I'm toying with the idea of taking the talk about job searching that I have given a couple of times in person and turning it into a seminar I could deliver online. I need to make a decision about whether to do that soon. I've decided I want paperback versions of my books to be available at BN.com, so I need to work on that. And this list goes on and on, too.

In this case, the long term goal is "build a sustainable business." That is a bit daunting, even more daunting than "finish the home renovations." The intermediate goals are a lot less scary, so I focus on them. I am beginning to think that is the secret to starting a company. Yes, I need to think about long term strategy and the like, but that is just words and aspirations. The real progress comes when I translate those aspirations into concrete, short term projects, and then complete those projects.

And with that in mind, my morning tea is done, and it is time to get to work on the real to do list for the day. Up first: finishing the ebook text and converting it into HTML for the ebook.