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Brent P. Newhall's Blog 21st Century Renaissance Man My Latest Novel Took 8 Years to Write By Brent Newhall on 2 March 2022 A few months ago, with some trepidation, I emailed a document to a friend of mine. The friend is a very skilled editor whom I’d hired to perform a top-to-bottom editorial analysis of this document, which just so happened to be a light novel I’d written. I started this novel in 2014, after many starts and stops as an amateur writer of fantasy fiction. I’ve written short stories and attempted novels, none of them published. I’ve sent a few to fantasy magazines–back when those were a vibrant market–but never got a bite. I don’t think I’ve ever even contacted an agent. I did finish one short YA novel, put it on Amazon’s Kindle self-publishing service, and because it didn’t find overnight success I threw up my hands and abandoned the massive series I was planning to make out of it. In short, while I’ve continued to noodle away at fantasy fiction, I haven’t exactly been making steady progress. But I kept coming back to this story. I have drafts from almost every year from 2014 to now. It’s taken me a long time to write. Unlike most everything else, I keep coming back to it. Why? Partly, what it’s about. It’s about a family of ex-pirates who take in an orphaned girl and protect her from deadly threats. It’s a story of family, of protecting children, and of exciting adventure in a fantastic world. (And I get to make a lot of hopefully subtle anime references.) These are all things that I value in entertainment. Of course, I didn’t start it 8 years ago and write THE END” a few months ago. It’s gone through many revisions; draft 1 bears only a passing family (heh) resemblance to draft 6. I’m fiercely proud of it, and I think I’m proud of it because it took me 7 years to write. Because I didn’t give up on it. Because that’s the thing: a book takes time. It takes time to pull the words out of you and onto the screen, and also to sculpt the story from an inelegant lump into a coherent narrative. Every revision seems like a clean fix, a quick surgery that’ll have the patient in and out the same day. But snipping out this creates a hole, unbalancing the body. Other organs slip in to fill the space. The body compensates, and now you have a new body. And the more you look at that body, the more you see adjustments to make. Which is why I sent it off to my friend. Six home surgeries were plenty. It was time to take it to a professional surgeon who could see what I no longer could, who could sculpt it into something not just coherent but satisfying . And in the meantime, I’ve started working on the next novel. I don’t want to slow down again. More to come. Posted in Miscellaneous | Tagged novel , writing | Leave a response The Right Productivity Tool By Brent on 20 October 2017 I am becoming increasingly convinced that the reason someone’s not as productive as they want to be is not because they haven’t found the right stuff to organize their life. It’s because they keep getting more stuff to organize their life. Because here’s the problem: any productivity tool will have flaws. So if you’re looking for the right” productivity tool, whatever tool you choose, its flaws will push you towards looking for a different tool. It never ends. If, instead, you had less stuff — and by that I mean fewer projects and fewer responsibilities, as well as fewer possessions — you wouldn’t need the perfect productivity system. You’d have the space and time to get stuff done. You could use a piece of paper or a text file or a Google Drive document to keep track of your to-do lists. Posted in Minimalism | Leave a response Project Debt By Brent on 10 October 2017 ‘Bologna, Via Marco Emilio Lepido — SS9’ by Pom Angers on Flickr Last night, I slept deeply and dreamed copiously. When my alarm went off, I slowly surfaced into the real world in one of those strange grey modes of thought where my mind was unfettered by reality but still aware of it. One belief crystalized: I have too many projects. This happens to us all; to me it happens frequently. Most of the time, I sigh, acknowledge it, and try to whack my way through the weeds of my projects. But this time I saw the way through clearly: It’s exactly like getting out of debt. The best way I’ve found to get out of debt is to first stop spending money (look at how you spend money and reign that in; no more new video games or DVDs or what-have-you until things are back in control), second build a list of all your debts, and third pay off your debts starting with the smallest one. By starting small, you feel accomplishment. Same thing here: Don’t start any new projects, and start with the easiest project on the list. For me, that’s an overdue haircut. Time to get started. Posted in Self-improvement | Leave a response Minimalism vs. Frugality By Brent on 3 October 2017 Most of us need to control our spending. Many people at some point realize that their finances are, well, not where they should be. Many of them respond with a focus on frugality, and look for cheaper cell phone plans, coupons, combined internet and cable plans, and streaming services. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with reining in your spending, and psychologically you may need to start with simple changes like this, it focuses on reducing your spending. It’s a bit like putting a bandage on a chest wound; while an important first step, it won’t solve the underlying problem. Minimalism, in contrast, undercuts the need for frugality. A minimalist doesn’t need a cheaper cable service, because he eliminates cable (which you only need for one show which you can legally stream anyway). He doesn’t have to buy the cheapest possible laptop to replace his spare travel” laptop, because he only has one laptop, which he take with him everywhere. Which means he doesn’t have to manage all the software subscriptions on that spare laptop, or figure out how to synchronize his files, by the way. Now, there’s absolutely a tension between minimalism and frugality . Every so often, a minimalist will end up buying something that she might otherwise have kept in the back of a closet. However, I believe that the cost of those moments are far outweighed by the ongoing costs of buying and maintaining a collection of possessions. Realistically, we’re not going to only buy things that we end up using later. Some of it will sit in a drawer until we die. And while we all run the probabilities in our heads, let’s face it: we’re all notoriously bad at predicting how much use we’ll get out of our stuff in the future. Otherwise, our garages and attics wouldn’t be full of stuff we don’t use. So, minimalism says: cut out that spending at its root. Don’t buy things in the first place. Posted in Minimalism , Self-improvement | Leave a response The Power of the Scanner By Brent on 26 September 2017 ‘stack’ by hobvias sudoneighm on Flickr We still receive a lot of paper. People hand us receipts and flyers. We get bills and statements in the mail. I don’t keep all of these, of course, but all my life, I dutifully kept mortgage statements, credit card statements, any unusual financial notices, etc . I’ve gone paperless with as many bills as I can, but some places are still old-school. I told myself I’d sort through them all. I honestly thought I would. And sure, enough, once in my life I went through and tossed a bunch of old credit card statements. The rest of the time, they piled up in my two filing cabinets. As I began to pursue minimalism, I realized I didn’t need physical copies of almost any of these documents. I could just scan them in. At first I thought I’d just need to spend a couple of days with a scanner and digitize everything, so I only needed to find or borrow a scanner briefly. But after a few days of planning, I thought about the future. What would I do with the next piece of paper that arrived in the mail? So I looked around and invested in a USD $75 mobile” scanner,...