All I want is a room somewhere.

Isn't this a nice office? Of course it's fake, an AI-generated artwork, but nice for all that. It doesn't have a lot of those bizarre AI details, like a D&D monster crawling out of a potted plant. Although a potted plant seems to be holding the curtain open. I can't quite figure how the window works, and if it's in a city building, it probably doesn't work at all. Plus, it's time to complain to the landlord. The floorboards are coming up. 

On the whole, though, it is a lot less messy than my actual home office, the box of files in the middle of the floor notwithstanding. It doesn't have a skid of toilet paper and another of paper towels from the warehouse store. There's no exercise bike sitting idle in a corner. It has no cabinet full of dog snacks and dog-care items. While it does have two computers, it does not have two printers (one of which is only hanging on until its toner is used up). There are some stacks of paper, but nothing like my desk, where notes and pens vie for space with books, hand lotion, wires, and small tools. And there is no complete dining room set, disassembled, as in my office (for reasons too complicated to get into here).

Alas! My mother was right. For years she threatened to get a big saw and cut my bedroom off the house. She foresaw an Oscar Madison-like existence for me, buried under piles of junk. For a time after I left home that was not the case, because I didn't have that much stuff. Then I met my wife, and we got married, and we lived in an apartment, so there was little space to pile up the junk. When we got our house, I was determined to keep things orderly and not bring shame unto my family. 

That lasted a while. But things start to pile up. When I started working from home, the real disaster struck. I was too busy to neaten up as I would at a real office, because as a freelancer, any work that wasn't paying work was a waste of time. So my office became the dumping ground for things that fit nowhere else. And here I am. 

If you hear a rumor of a writer being buried by his own stuff, don't jump to the conclusion that it is me -- book people tend to be packrats as a class. But it could be me. And if I were to go under a pile of books, then I shall have died as I lived, crushed by an endless avalanche of words.  

Give it The Face.

I gave this giraffe to my wife years ago as an office mascot. She's got a different desk now, so she returned it to me for my use. Naturally I am thrilled. 

Look at that guy! Bendable, unlike me. Love the face: What a perfect mixture of shock and confusion. Maybe some disgust as well. He has no tag anymore, but I think he may have been a product of the late, lamented Alex Toys, a firm based in New Jersey. Alex was a fun company; lots of clever hands-on stuff for kids of all ages. In the early part of this century they were making baby toys that usually had powerful colors like this giraffe, colors that scientists said babies could see well with their underdeveloped vision. Lots of red and black, as if the babies were training to be Stendahl scholars. That seemed very important at the time, but now we're in the boho baby era, and things are more muted. I don't know if that's why Alex went under in 2020 -- its assets were sold, and the name survives in Canada under the name Alex Global Products. 

Or it could he was from some other outfit.

I think I'm going to like having him with me as I work. I'll just let him respond for me. For example, if someone reaches out and says they have a 500-page book that needs proofreading by Wednesday, I'll just let the giraffe handle it.

And he could come in handy for other statements. Like, "You know, COVID-19 was totally not invented by the Chinese lab that just happened to be working on weaponizing that exact virus."

Or, "When we say 'fortified the election,' we don't mean it was stolen, we just mean it was... boosted, like with a supplement."

"Peaceful but fiery protest."

"The economy is roaring! There are rich people in every city!"⭐

"Dudes who play women's sports ARE women!"

You get the idea. 

Well, I think I'm ready for Monday. But if things keep going the way they have been, I may have to get a whole menagerie of these animals. I'd wear this guy's face right out in no time. 

🦒🦒🦒🦒🦒

⭐This was basically the argument on a recent GLoP Culture podcast, that America is not in danger because we still have rich people in all the cities. I think the hosts have been spending too much time on yachts (there was an actual Mediterranean yacht story) and not enough time with families using credit cards to buy groceries, but what do you expect? An Eli, a guy who inherited a magazine from his dad, and a guy whose parents were both machers in the publishing industry who (incredibly!) became a writer.

Pow! Bam! Biff! Monday!

First Monday of the year, and time to return to the ol' deskeroo and get back in action. Fortunately I don't have to fight this battle alone. Thanks to Santa Claus, I have some Bat-help for the challenges of the day:

Thanks to the Unemployed Philosophers Guild (most of whose other products I would throw in the garbage) and a thoughtful wife, I have these Batman Sticky Notes to help me punch! through the trials of a Monday. 

It's a nice selection and useful as well. If I need to stick an alert on something, there's the Bat-Signal stickies; if I need to flag things in a manuscript there's a variety of flags.

And of course, for important notes to myself or others, there are the large stickies with space for writing.

One of the interesting things to me with these is they've gone for the Bronze Age look for Batman for these notes, including the logo and the little picture of the Batmobile. This is how the Caped Crusader looked c. 1970 to 1985. Afterward we got the darker, grittier, grimmer Batman of the current day.

As Alan Stewart, retired librarian and comics memoirist, puts it, the Bronze Age Batman was more human, capable of a range of emotions, as opposed to "contemporary portrayals of the Dark Knight in which that range often seems to go right from grim determination to barely-controlled rage, with very little in between (or beyond)". 

Well, that wouldn't be a good attitude to approach work, would it? Better to have the Bronze Age Bats, who can be more even-tempered and less likely to resort to violence as a first option. And was probably the Batman most of the target audience would recall from childhood. 

Anyway, the Batman Sticky Notes are in the top drawer, where they will come in handy. Having the World's Greatest Detective close by will be helpful, because I can't find a damn thing on this desk anymore. 

Fred's Book Club: Get 'Er Done!

Welcome to another Wednesday Hump Day meeting of the Humpback Writers, thus the stupid name. No one has humps, although some may have lumps. We all take our lumps in life. Anyway, you could call it Fred's Book Club, but that might be even dumber. I don't mind either way.

I was barely able to get a post together today because Tuesday was nutty, with work coming in and the router acting up and a dog needing to go to the vet (Tralfaz got a hot spot from the injury I mentioned on Monday, but he'll be all right after pills pills pills). Anyway, it was a good excuse to look at time management, which brings us to:

Alan Lakein is no slouch when it comes to time management -- which, for that matter, is not a field that really rewards slouches. How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life, first published in 1973, is a plan for the scatterbrained to do exactly as the title says. In 160 pages, Lakein gives a brisk run-down of all the principles one really needs to decide on priorities and goals and give them the one thing that cannot be bought or sold: time.

"Time is life," he writes right up front. "It is irreversible and irreplaceable. To waste your time is to waste your life, but to master your time is to master your life and make the most of it." He goes on to outline his plan in a way any writer could envy, with powerful, economic words.

I'm not a "time and motion" organizer, trying to get everything done in the shortest time with the fewest waster motions. That kind of efficiency means taking the thinking out of an activity and reducing it to a series of mechanical routines. There is no attempt to keep it fun or interesting, so you might even say that such extreme clockwatching takes the life right out of an activity, along with the thought.

Lakein is all about deciding what your priorities are and planning your time to push those first. "Control starts with planning," he writes. "Planning is bringing the future into the present so you can do something about it now." He is impressively quotable.

Of course he is aware that plans go awry, just as I didn't intend to spend an hour and a half at the vet yesterday. That's not what this is book about. This is planning over the long haul. Know your goals, resolve their conflicts. set lifetime priorities.

Take your Lifetime Goals list in hand and spend one minute selecting your top three goals. Label the most important of these A-1. The second most important is A-2. The third is A-3. Do the same for your three-years list, and your six-months list.
     At this point you have nine goals culled from the three lists. To pick out the three most important long-term goals of this nine, write on a fresh piece of paper, "My three most important long-term goals are..." Then write them in order: A-1, A-2, A-3. You have now finished a preliminary Lifetime Goals Statement. You have zeroed in on just what it is you want to do with your life as you see it at this time.

It doesn't get much more complex than that.

I don't think there has been a single book on organizing for success that really had more to say than Lakein has here, but most authors pad their books with cute names for complex tasks, endless anecdotes and testimonials, and misattributed quotations swiped from the Internet. If you just want to get your life in order, I say, stick to Lakein.

And there is the rub. I bought this book more than twenty years ago, when I had a demanding job and a scattered personal life and was trying to get things in order. The problem is, like any good program, it only works if you put it into action. I don't know what became of the notebook I was using to work out my life plan back then, but it is gone. It may be in my desk. The fact that I have no idea tells you how well I practiced the program.

In fact, one glance at my desk (which I shall spare you) is enough to prove that I have never followed any advice on organization for long. I won't say that my desk looks like you took a bunch of books and papers and pens and things, stuffed them in a huge ballpark T-shirt cannon, and blew them at it. I will say that if you did such a thing, the results would be indistinguishable from the current condition.

Perhaps I ought to give this book a second glance. If I can find the time.

Tale of the Tape.

[Something from the old defunct blog that I knocked off at my old office one boring afternoon. Shh, don't tell my old boss. Who's retired.]

"Stuck on You"

A Romance of Post-it® Notes

By Frederick Key

Jack was a handsome young pad-about-town, a bright and cheerful postman with plenty of stick-to-it-tiveness.

Jack had promised his parents he’d stay focused and unattached. “Just stick to the staples until you make your fortune!” they warned.  But he had gotten stuck on Prue, a charming paddette at the office.

Jack would make excuses to slip by her drawer. He loved just watching her chew her gum. “Hey, Prue,” he might say, “you’re going at a good clip today!”

She would smile and say something like, “Time to get off the stick!”

But Clive also loved Prue from afar, and was jealous of the way she clung to Jack.

“Go peddle your papers somewhere else,” he growled.

“Why so ruffled?” said Jack. “Just because Prue hasn’t noted your interest?”

“I know you don’t like me because of I'm colored,” snarled Clive.

"We're all colored," snapped Jack.

“Just know that I’m a-fix your wagon, boy. I’ll plaster you.”

“Try something and I’ll paste you one,” said Jack.

“I’ll ream you out!”

“Oh, boys,” said Prue, cutting in, “I’m going to lunch with my boyfriend, Emmet.”

“Hi,” said the very large Emmet, glaring.

“Uh, hi,” said Jack and Clive, their tempers flagging.

As Prue fluttered off with Emmet, Jack and Clive scowled at each other.

“She only likes him for his glutes,” grumbled Clive.

Jack sighed. “Lunch?”

“Sure.”

Moral: Chicks dig guys with big mucilage.

The S&P indesk.

Recently cleaned out the desk and found these:

Too good to throw away, too unnecessary to use, they accumulate in the desk until:

• You leave the workplace, and the desk and its contents become the next guy's problem.
• You sneak them into the office kitchen where they join 10,000 other such packets and become everybody's problem.
• You throw them away and say the hell with it.

I don't even get takeout very often, so I don't know how I got these. They seem to multiply in the desk. But the variety of fonts tells me they are not even directly related. 

If I were to just pitch these, how much salt and pepper would I actually be throwing away? I wondered. So I brought them home and emptied them out.

Hard to tell how much that is. I have about the same amount of each, so I put the pepper in a sliding measuring spoon.

About half a teaspoon. So it wouldn't be much to lose, even if I just threw the packets away. Of course, coming from a Depression-educated family, I thought of the pepper mines that are being used up, the salt trees being stripped to provide this savor, and I still couldn't bring myself to just throw out the spices. Wars are fought over spices! You remember the Dutch-Portuguese War? The Anglo-Dutch Wars? Dune? No, I couldn't waste such an important resource; I had to put the salt and pepper in the shakers. 

Of course, the plastic utensils that came with these packets are in a landfill somewhere by now, but that's the way it goes!