Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Sometimes the good ideas are lurking in the wrong places. Looking for good ideas? Look at bad sources. Read a crummy book. In it I will find, “Now that sentence there is a good idea for a book or something. Why didn’t this person write the book about that instead of the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips An age-old method of writing long pieces comes from writing short pieces without a plan or outline. The “outline” comes later. I recently stumbled across a description of writers as Story Quilters. This is not a method of planning or outlining a large piece before writing anything. This is not a method […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There are many endeavors in which it is important to do something before talking about doing it. Have an idea for a book? Great. Don’t pitch the idea to publishers. They will expect you to come back with 90% of the book in hand. Then they will talk to you about you […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Perhaps this is the complaint of an old man, but all the Zoomer Teams meetings just aren’t getting it done. The title of this post is an old expression from an old time. We used to talk with people on the telephone. That worked to a point, but we couldn’t “picture” the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips That job is a “meat grinder.” It has chewed up several people. Stay away. Or do we simply need to reframe the situation? While writing this, I have spent much of the past week(s) looking at the help wanted ads and talking to several companies about their job openings. Several of the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Almost anyone can gather the material. Organizing it or creating a story from it, however, appears to be a rare yet valuable skill. We have lots of information. Go to Wikipedia. Download PDFs of the pages. Concatenate the pages. There it is. Go to a search engine. Find a dozen hits. Copy […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A simple method for writing a short story (I mean really simple). I like to write short stories. Perhaps that is because I think I have so much to tell, but not enough persons to sit and listen. Anyways, here is one method to writing a short story: Remember an event in […]

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by Dwayne Phillips All organizations have management processes. Do they matter? All organizations have management processes. Some organizations codify them, teach them, spread them, proclaim them, and even sometimes use them. Do things management processes, i.e., “the way we do things around here,” matter? Of course they do. And sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the personnel, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Fiction, when repeated enough, becomes fact in the minds of many. So why aren’t we trying to stomp out fiction that is far from reality? I have seen many movies on Hallmark Movies and Mysteries. 99% of murders in real life are not like that, nothing like that. 99% of murders in […]

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by Dwayne Phillips When something does not hold up to rational analysis, any excuse or any reason is as good as another. And when no excuse or reason comes to mind now, we will think of something later. A recent xkcd cartoon had a wonderful punchline, “No, for another reason I’ll think of later.” The […]

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