Katherine May's Blog, page 6

Want to work for Creative Partnerships? Some inside info.

You know my blog about life/work efficiency? Well, this is a little gesture towards it on my part.

When I'm not being an author, my other work (i.e. the bit the makes sure the mortgage gets paid) is being a Creative Agent for Creative Partnerships. I've worked with them for over four years now, but recently I've noticed that people are really - I mean, really - interested in this. Could it have anything to do with the dire financial crisis, I wonder?

Anyway, I'm a little fatigued with being pi...

Lightbulb Moment

Right. I am thoroughly sick of the lightbulb thing.

I walked past a shop (which will remain nameless) in Whitstable today, only to see a sign in their window saying, "Stock up on 100-watt lightbulbs here, before they disappear."

What is it that people don't get about global warming exactly? It astonishes me how mindlessly selfish people can be.

For those tempted to follow the sign, and indulge in a 100-watt spending spree: It is a LIGHTBULB you MORON. There is ABSOLUTELY NO NEED to be sentimen...

Being more efficient part 2

Following on from '10 Things I do to be more efficient'part 1, here's, erm, part 2.

The story so far: last year, I adopted the way of efficiency guru Tim Ferriss (or an edited version thereof) to make more time for writing. Here's what I learned.

6. Outsourcing: this sound ridiculous, doesn't it? How on earth could little me afford to outsource? Well, dear reader, I have. First of all, I see outsourcing in general terms - for example, I outsource my ironing to the fabulous Creased Lightning, ...

10 things I do to be more efficient

About a year ago, I realised that I was at my wits' end. I had too many projects on the go, and was constantly feeling overwhelmed. Just opening my inbox of a morning was enough to give me a nervous twitch in the stomach. My working life (as a Creative Agent for Creative Partnerships and a freelance producer/project manager) was bleeding over into my evenings, and I wasn't getting any writing done.

I'm gradually getting better, mostly with the help of my evil overlord, Tim Ferriss (no offence...

Alphaville

Personally, I love a bit of French pretension, although I accept that I am largely alone in this.

I saw Jean Luc Godard's 1965 film, Alphaville, at the splendid Gulbenkian cinema yesterday. It made me think about how wonderful cinema could be before the rules became so rigidly set. Yes, there were some odd, clunky moments that didn't work (fighting-as-vogueing, anyone?), but the joy is that Godard experimented at all. If you take risks, some of them will hit and some of them will miss, but thi...

Cogntive Enhancement, anyone?

In my new issue of Prospect Magazine (which I read cover to cover, like some eager student), David Edmonds argues that the tide of neuroenhancers will be hard to stem.

Neuroenhancers are drugs which manipulate the brain's chemistry to get rid of some of the nastier side effects of human life: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, for example, or depression. It is suggested in the article that they could even be used to encourage monogamy, or to aid accelerated learning.

Edmonds challenges the idea ...

Giving it away

Thought I might weigh in on the old debate about giving your work away for free.

Many writers I've met are suspicious about posting their work online, and I suppose that this is because writing is so ripoffable (new word! aren't I clever!). Cutting & pasting text is the easiest thing in the world (tell that to iPhone), and writers are often nervous that other people will 'steal' their work, maybe even without attribution.

However, I still support giving as much away as possible, particularly...

Life & How to Live It

I am, I think, a little bit vulnerable to people like Tim Ferriss.

For those of you not familiar with his work, he's an entrepreneur and author of 'The Four Hour Work Week', a self-help guide that's supposed to help you to get rich without putting in the hideous hours.

So far, so good - not the getting rich bit, which is no concern of mine, but the doing it with the smallest possible impact on the rest of your life. I'm an enormous advocate of his advice to batch, rationalise, outsource and q...

Solitaire

I continue to be quite beguiled by playing Solitaire on my laptop. I don't even think about it when I'm doing my 'proper', real-world work, but it's become part of my routine when I sit down to write.

Let's face it, PC Solitaire is a bit of a blast from the past. You would have thought that, in this age of astonishingly expensive, 3-D rendered games, the likes of Solitaire would be entirely obsolete. And to be fair, one of the reasons I turn to it (actually, in my mind, Solitaire is not an 'i...

A little explanation...

Okay, so I'm the new girl, which means I'm keener than I should be - or will be in a week's time, I promise.

But I thought it would be good to explain the title. It comes from Burning Out, my new novel. It's the name of a newsletter that my character, Daisy, sends out to spread her fears about the world gone wrong. As she says,

"Who wants to know about it anyway, the layer underneath? Come hear the bad news! I am here to spread the gospel of desolation! Listen to the lament of our final days ...