This is a preview of my next novel, Don’t Mess Up My Block. It’s a parody of self-help books like Who Moved My Cheese. Look for it after the holidays!

Get my book Murder in Ocean Hall for just 99 cents in this holiday offer exclusively for Kindle owners.

My novel is a murder-mystery set in Washington, DC. Inspired by my experience in the city, Murder in Ocean Hall follows a veteran detective as he investigates the death of the world’s most famous explorer.

My book takes you behind the scenes of our nation’s dysfunctional capital, revealing the real place beyond the monuments.

Amazon reviewers call it:

“a fun, quick read”

“a howdunit with some good research on the author’s part.”

Get Murder in Ocean Hall today!

Now, Discover Your Strengths is one of the very few personal improvement books worth the money. It’s been superseded by the awkwardly-titled StrengthsFinder 2.0 but the message is the same in the new book:

You should concentrate on what you’re best at. Don’t try to improve your weaknesses, instead sharpen the skills that you do better than anyone else. It’s a countervailing message in this age of self-improvement. It says to drop what you suck at (I’m never going to be a great basketball player) and work on what you do best (writing and photography).

The two books contain surveys to identify your unique strengths.  You’ll probably experience an “ah-hah” moment at the results, confirming what you already knew.

The same principle of concentrating on your strengths can be applied to social media efforts. In this new and ever-changing field, how do you determine what to spend time on? Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, FourSquare, Digg, SlideShare, Scribd, Flickr… and on and on and on. You could spend twenty-four hours a day in front of an overheated laptop updating social media sites.

I worked with Janice Hall Booth, a very interesting woman who wrote an inspiring book, Only Pack What You Can Carry. She’s an “adventurista” and an excellent role model for young women who want more out of life than Sex and the City.

Janice had a problem. She wanted to use social media to promote her book but had a full-time job. I’ve seen some of the social media plans for authors – they’re comprehensive, exhausting affairs filled with exhortations such as “get 20 new Twitter followers a day for 30 days.” How do you compel people to follow you? These plans treat all social media channels equally and require herculean efforts to complete.

Also, social media experts are extroverts; writers are not.

I took a different approach. I advised Janice to concentrate on the social media channels that she was most comfortable with. She was more likely to stick with something she was really passionate about and enjoyed. For Janice, this was blogging. Not surprising, since she’s a writer.

For my own social media efforts (for me and Murder in Ocean Hall), I’ve concentrated on blogging and Twitter. I like the constant newsfeed of Twitter, as well as the back-and-forth wittiness with friends. And for writing longer than 144 characters, I have this blog.

There’s a thousand other ways of promoting a book online. GoodReads is a really interesting online community. Facebook marketing ties yourself to the whims of a single online service. A book trailer (like a movie preview) on YouTube is a good idea for graphic novels. An email newsletter is something I’d like to do at some point. I post a lot of photos on Flickr, though they’re about my life in general, not just my book. FourSquare – why do I want people to know where I’m at?

My other piece of social media advice: evaluate after 30 days. What’s working? What’s not? Most social media, like media in general, does not reach a mass audience. You will not have thousands of followers overnight.

Instead, I’d look at your social media efforts based upon your individual strengths. Do you have blog posts that you’re really proud of? Have you made new connections that you treasure? Have you learned something new?

Passion and authenticity are rewarded in social media. Don’t try to do everything. Concentrate on what you enjoy.

We live in a magical age, where I can write a book in Washington, DC, and then readers in Paris can download my work to their e-readers.

Murder in Ocean Hall is now available in France. It’s available in la boutique Kindle, which is an adorable name for an e-book store.

The book is in English, BTW. Technology can do many amazing things but language translation requires the subtleties of the human mind.

And what did I do to publish my novel in France? Uh, nothing. I just made the e-book available on Amazon and they did all the rest.

I’m a fan of Seth Godin, particularly his book, The Dip, which is about knowing when to quit and when to keep going. His thoughts on traditional publishing are also really compelling – it’s an industry that is broken. I read just about everything he writes.

Purple Cow is one of his older works, published in 2003 and updated last year. Purple Cow is a book that will push you to create something extraordinary. Godin’s basic point is that we don’t remember ordinary experiences, like the airline that got you to your destination on-time or the meal that was merely OK. Instead, we become passionate over excellent, “above and beyond” service and products. We rave about them to our friends and neighbors, which is the best marketing there is.

And about the only marketing that works.

Which is Godin’s point – in order to break through the clutter, we must create the truly extraordinary. Do work that scares you, that’s on the edge. Don’t be like other people – be unique.

A compelling idea, but one that probably doesn’t deserve a whole book (even a slim one). After a while, it’s the same story of iconoclasm again and again. Also, some of the examples are dated now, like JetBlue as a paragon of customer service and Godin’s comment about mobile phones being commodities at this point – obviously written before the iPhone.

But if you’re a fan of Seth Godin, or are currently working on a new product and need some inspiration, then it’s worth checking out.

Note: The 2010 edition includes an appendix containing stories of companies and organizations that have adopted the Purple Cow philosophy successfully.

I had the privilege to work with Janice Hall Booth. She’s a very inspiring woman who wrote a great book, Only Pack What You Can Carry. It’s like Eat, Pray, Love but is about someone who actually went out into the world and did something Her message is that you can find your personal mission through solo travel.

Janice has been a whitewater rafter, a photographer, a nonprofit executive and an avid adventurer, always willing to push the limits of what’s possible.

Only Pack What You Can Carry

But perhaps her most challenging adventure was getting a book published! She’s been blogging about this and has now put the publishing story together in a handy PDF. Find out how she was discovered and what it was like working with National Geographic. It’s a warts and all look at the publishing world, told with her trademark honesty.

And I make a brief cameo at the end, as Janice’s new media coach. While I gave her checklists to follow and guides to blogging, my advice was really simple – use the tools that you’re most comfortable with to tell your fascinating story.

Everyone writes. In this digital age, we’re creating more words than ever. Whether it’s an email to a client, a persuasive blog post or the Great American E-Book, the ability to explain yourself in writing is the critical skill of the Internet era.

Despite this profusion of words, people often encounter writer’s block when attempting large or significant projects. They can fire off tweets and snarky Facebook comments all day long but their fingers stall when it comes to crafting something that really matters.

After I wrote my novel Murder in Ocean Hall, the question I got most was, “How?”

How did I muster up the patience to devote so much time to a single idea? How did I keep at it? How did I overcome the inertia of writer’s block to get started?

Writer’s block happens to everyone. But it can be overcome.

Perfect is the Enemy of the Good

I’ve met a lot of creative folks with ideas for books or blogs or screenplays. Yet, many of them fail to ever put pen to paper. Why? Because the idea is perfect in their head; the reality of the thing is never going to match their vision. They do nothing, preferring to keep their fantasies pristine rather than sullying them with reality. But isn’t it better to have something that actually exists, no matter how flawed, to an ephemeral vision? To write means to express your ideas, imperfectly.

Steven Pressfield calls this reluctance to get started, “Resistance” in his book on creativity and courage, Do the Work.

outline for this blog post

Outline

Would you go out into the wilderness without a map? Yet, many people will just dive into a project without a clue where they’re going. Once the rush of enthusiasm ends, they get stuck. It’s better to take some time and create an outline. An outline can be really simple – a list of chapter titles, points you want to make, things you want to mention. It’s something that you can turn to when you run out of steam.

No Editing

Don’t edit as you go. That can be done later. The purpose of the first draft is merely to get your ideas down on paper. It’s about collecting all the disparate thoughts you have and recording them, without judgement. You can clean them up and make them coherent when you edit. The first draft is more about collection than craft.

Reward Yourself

You can’t boss your mind around. It’s really adept at avoiding commands. In fact, telling yourself that you “must” do this or that virtually guarantees procrastination.

A better strategy is to reward yourself when accomplishing important milestones. When writing Murder in Ocean Hall, I gave myself a small present (a bottle of gin, a Wii game) for every 10,000 words I wrote. We all respond better to carrots instead of sticks.

Find a Quiet Place

One of the worst developments of the 20th century is the open office. Noisy and filled with distractions, these low-walled spaces are terrible for any type of work that requires concentration. Find some place quiet to write, like your favorite coffee shop, the neighborhood library or an empty conference room. And turn off the Internet.

Simple Tools Work Best

I like Pages by Apple. It’s a simple word processor that gets out of the way. If you must use Microsoft Word, turn off all of its autosaving, autocorrecting gimmickry – “features” that are designed to interrupt your concentration.

First Things First

I am not a morning person. Despite this, I do most of my writing first thing in the AM. Why? Zenhabits had the excellent advice to do your most important work at the beginning of the day, lest it get lost in the press of other demands.

writer’s block vs Writer’s Block

I was on a panel on with Claudia Myers, a professor who teaches screenwriting at American University. She made a distinction between writer’s block and Writer’s Block. The lower-case variety can be cured by the methods listed above; it’s largely a matter of getting started and keeping the momentum going.

However, Writer’s Block (upper-case variety) indicates a structural problem – perhaps there’s something wrong with the way that your communicating your idea. For her screenwriting students, she recommends explaining their script out loud to a friend. Sometimes by talking things out, you can identify what’s wrong with your story. If your audience seems puzzled or confused, then you’ve gone astray.

So, what do you do with an idea that’s not working out? You have three choices:

1. Press on, because it’s your idea, dammit.
2. Figure out what’s not working and fix it.
3. Quit and start something new.

Not sure which option to take? See the excellent The Dip by Seth Godin, a book about knowing when to quit.

When writing, nothing is ever really wasted. At the very least, working on a failed project is good practice. And that effort may come in handy later on. For example, I tried writing a novel about gentrification in DC. I got about fifty pages into it and got hopelessly stuck. A few years later, the characters and the story I worked on were the basis for my award-winning screenplay, Mount Pleasant.

Summary

It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

Writing is making a dream come true. It’s about taking your idea and communicating it successfully. Writer’s block is an inevitable part of the process, a difficulty you encounter along the way. But it can be overcome.

It’s hard to imagine but booze was once outlawed in DC. The Prohibition era is the subject of a fascinating new book by local author Garret Peck.

He’s an excellent speaker with an encyclopedic knowledge of the city. I wrote an article for the Pink Line Project about his book talk, where he shared what life was like when Washington was “dry.”

My book Murder in Ocean Hall can now be found in the Kindle online store in Germany. For less than a euro, readers in Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg or elsewhere in the country can download this DC mystery.

What did I have to do to publish my work in Germany? Nothing. I had already published my book in the USA with Kindle Direct Publishing. Amazon did the rest, creating a new Kindle store for German users.

If a few years ago you had told me that I would write a mystery, publish it electronically, and that people would actually read books on e-readers, and that my book would be available in Europe…. That sentence involves so many improbabilities, but all of these things are now true. Makes you really hopeful about what comes next.

SXSW in 2007

SXSW Interactive is an annual conference of social media and web geeks in Austin. It’s a huge, exhausting event that takes place over a long weekend in March and is popularly known as the conference that introduced Twitter and other new forms of communication.

The criticism now is that it’s gotten too big and too corporate, dominated by giant corporations trying to be hip. And that it’s gotten to be such a chaotic moshpit that it leads to network outages.

I went to SXSW in 2007 and 2008, just the right moment before it became mainstream. The conference taught me to love the brilliant minds at 37signals, whose radically hopeful ideas about the future of work cannot arrive soon enough. I learned that project management should be as simple as possible. Gantt charts and MS Project should be avoided in favor of clear goals that everyone can understand. REWORK is their vision for the ideal work environment, where meetings and busywork are eschewed in favor of collaboration and results. Their philosophy is subversive and attractive for anyone stuck in boring meetings or lengthy conference calls.

A surprising part of SXSW for me was meeting authors and discovering self-publishing. Listening to showmen/charlatans Tucker Max and Timothy Ferris, I realized that I should write and publish a book. Rather than trying to interest a NYC publisher, they just started writing and blogging their adventures and opinions. In the trade show, I also got to examine the slick self-published titles produced by Lulu – they looked and felt exactly like “real” books and were indistinguishable from anything you’d find at Borders. These two lessons:

1. Ignore the gatekeepers and write your book
2. Self-published books are real books

within a year prompted me to write my first novel, Murder in Ocean Hall.

Dave and Margie Newman

However, so much of the best stuff at SXSW happens outside the convention center. Like when I met Dave and Margie Newman in the beer tent, who ended up moving to DC and becoming great friends.

Or when I encountered the strange figure of Reverend Billy, railing against consumerism and Starbucks. And just the experience of getting out of DC and going somewhere warm to eat BBQ and watch women in skirts and cowboy boots was rejuvenating.

Reverend Billy

I realized that I’m more interested in going to Austin than attending SXSW. Unlike when I attended in 2007 and 2008, there are panels relevant to my job as a web editor for government web sites. But the thought of yet another endless discussion by self-appointed thought leaders on “Gov 2.0″ makes me ill. Why go to SXSW to see that?

I hope that the govvies in Austin avoid such seminars and look for the different and the oddball. Roam the streets. Talk to people. Stay out late and get drunk.

Another reason for skipping SXSW is that some of the “keep Austin weird” creative spirit that I like so much has migrated to DC. Unbelievable, yet true.

Just look at my schedule for this month. Last night, I went to screening of short films by a local director – this is someone who is making movies outside of Hollywood. Then on Tuesday is the DCist Exposed Photography Show, a community-based exhibit of photos that embodies the democratic, creative ethos of SXSW. Later in the month, I have the DC Film Salon on my calendar, another communal mediamaking event. I also plan on doing some writing for the Pink Line Project, an online guide to the arts in DC.

The do-it-yourself creative spirt of Austin and SXSW inspired me to create art. Being there made me realize that I wasn’t interested in the stories of startups making millions of dollars, of the next Twitter or Gowalla. And of large organizations trying to adapt to new technology… that doesn’t seem to belong at SXSW at all.

Instead, I was intrigued by individuals making art on their own, whether they were writers, photographers, bloggers or filmmakers.

SXSW demonstrated to me that you could write and publish your own book. Or make a short film. Or create a blog to share your message. It had an enormous influence on me and one that I’m still trying to incorporate into my life.

Perhaps that’s why I don’t feel the need to attend SXSW this year. I’m still working on what I learned from previous years. These are ideas of autonomy and creative self-expression, empowered by new tools such as self-publishing and social media. You don’t need to sit in a convention center to learn that. You just have to participate.