Goodhart’s law is stated as “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. It was originally articulated in the context of British monetary policy but has become universal. For faculty at universities, metrics that measure the impact of research, then used for hiring and promotion decisions, are quickly gamed and […]
Historical Changes In Paid Fiction Writing
I’m a bit of an anomaly as someone who has written extensively about personal finance (as Mr. Cheap) and currently is focused on writing books, many of which are fiction. Many writers are self-confessed math-phobic, while others are clearly uncomfortable with business and money based decisions. I’m comfortable with all of this and am often […]
What Does It Mean To Be A ‘Published’ Author?
I’m often fascinated by the wide range of what a particular word means to different people, while amazed at the expectation people have that they all share the exact same understanding of that word. ‘Feminism’, ‘capitalism’, and ‘retirement’ have vastly different meanings to just about everyone, but somehow we all think there’s a standard, absolute […]
Amazing Blog Post Series On Modern Challenges Facing New Writers
I just finished reading an incredible series of blog posts by Dean Wesley Smith. I didn’t know his name, but he’s been a working fiction writer for decades and has some incredible insights into the tradeoffs between traditional and indie publishing and the transition that’s currently happening in the writing industry. These could be bundled […]
AI Generative Art Scandal
I’m one of the 300 entries in #spfbo9, which is quite exciting. I’m happy to be a part of it this year, but in the interest of full disclosure: being an entry is more about meeting the deadline than any particular merit. Nevertheless, I’m in and happy about it! #spfbo is one of the few, […]
Come On, Baby, Don’t Fear The AI
AI writing is a huge concern for writers. The current WGA strike has a ban on AI writing as one of their main demands. Indie authors are in a panic that in the near future AI generated novels will crowd them out of the marketplace and they’ll no longer be able to sell books. Why […]
Writers Who Stop Writing
There’s a vast horde of people who desperately want to become writers. They’ll dream about it, read advice books, and badger published authors for tips. If such people ever achieved success as an author, you’d expect that they’d spend their days writing in a bliss-filled reverie. Instead, you find that at every step, people drop […]
The ‘Game of Thrones’ method of Complex Character Creation
About a year ago an interesting post on Reddit promised a way to “make your character complex, realistic, and three dimensional, simply by writing down two things that they want.” This was posted in /r/rpg and was intended for people making characters in games like Dungeons and Dragons. The idea was interesting and struck me […]
Friendship Magician
I’ve released my next book, Friendship Magician. This is the sequel to my cozy urban fantasy book Merchant Magician. Self-exiled from her family of traders in mystical goods and services on her 23rd birthday, the Friendship Magician must make her way in the world: meeting a Scandinavian werewolf, a business-minded minotaur, an air elemental with a […]
The Importance Of “Slack Time” In A Job
There’s a “polite fiction” with employment that every employee is working as hard as they’re capable of. Perhaps the other side of this is that employers are paying employees as much as possible. A steady stream of Quora questions ask some variation of an employer considering firing their most productive employee who gets work done […]