Tag: Writing

Where to Buy Management Lessons From Game of Thrones

This is the BSFA Award shortlisted management textbook you never knew you wanted, but now you know you have to have it. The hardback has a scary academic price tag, but the paperback has a nice friendly RRP of £20/$30 or equivalent.

Amazon UK link here

Amazon US link here

Buy direct from publisher here

Bookshop.org link here

If you want to order direct from your local bookshop or other provider, the ISBN is 978 1 83910 528 9.

Not sure if you want to buy it or not? Here’s a sample chapter to whet your appetite.

Not that sort of appetite.

I’m in Foundation again!

I’m deeply honoured to have an article comparing “Doctor Who: The Mutants” and Nigel Kneale’s “The Stone Tape” in the 50th anniversary issue of Foundation, the oldest science fiction studies journal! In due course it will be available online, but if you can’t wait (and/or want to support the Science Fiction Foundation’s activities), you can get your copy by joining here.

The Lunchtime Writer, Part 6: The Portable Lunch

This instalment, I’m going to talk about another advantage to Lunchtime Writing that I’ve only recently become aware of: it’s very portable.

Recently I’ve been traveling, going to conferences and conventions and film festivals (hooray! Travel is once again a thing!), and as such I’ve found myself more than once in a situation where I’ve got the time to write, and I’m in the mood to write, and I do have a copy of my work-in-progress saved to my cloud drive, but I don’t have my laptop or keyboard with me.

Solution? Open the document on my phone, type 500 words. No problem. Target hit, and even a Gen-Xer like me is capable of writing the equivalent of two lengthy tweets on a smartphone.

The one caveat is that this is really only good for writing a draft; I have not tried editing on a phone and I have a feeling it could be awkward, particularly with a longer work. Though your mileage, and your ability to work on a small screen, will vary of course. However, if you’ve got something in the adding-words-to-a-draft stage of writing, phone writing is very, very easy for a Lunchtime Writer.

“Management Lessons from Game of Thrones” goes to Worldcon!

I can now reveal that I’ll be presenting a paper on “Pathways to Female Leadership in Game of Thrones”, based on some of the work you can find on this blog, at ChiCon8, the 80th World SF Convention, in Chicago this September! I’ll be attending in person, so will also be turning up on various panels and roaming around promoting my new book as well.

You can read my blog series on Leadership in Game of Thrones here, and you can preorder my book on the subject.

The Lunchtime Writer Part Five: On Breaks

One question which leaps to mind on the subject of Lunchtime Writing is: can I (or should I) take breaks? Maybe take a day or two off and make it up later.

Well, sometimes you have to. There will always be days when you have literally no time, not even a spare half-hour, for writing. Or other days when you really should, for other reasons. I remember one of Isaac Asimov’s editorial columns from his magazine, where he boasted that he worked literally every day of the year, and then added (also as a bit of a boast) that this had led to his wife getting angry at him for excusing himself from a holiday visit with guests to go write. Let’s just say there’s more than one reason Asimov doesn’t have a reputation for the greatest social awareness.

But I’ll also say that part of the power of Lunchtime Writing comes from the fact that it’s a daily practice. It’s like learning a language or studying for an exam or exercising or playing a musical instrument: in some ways, doing it regularly is better for your brain than the amount of time you spend doing it.

You can also, of course, shorten the amount of time you spend on it. If you want to make sure you get in some writing every day, you could set yourself a target of 100 words, or even just 1 word, on busy days.

But if even that’s impossible… well, my advice is to keep breaks to a minimum.