Consulting Swordsman
I spent the first week of October on a data detox. No emails, no whatsapp, no socialz, no scrolling. It’s been a lovely mental break. My initial reason for trying this was to allow my inner visionary to be heard, as per this post. The single biggest surprise is how little I missed it. I was … Read more
Alison Balsom is retiring this week, quitting after 25 years at the very top of the classical music world. She is probably the most famous classical trumpeter of her generation, and certainly ranks with the greats: André, Marsalis, Hardenberger, Harjanne (go Finland!). She’s 46. I have several of her 17 albums, and she is an … Read more
2016 was a hell of a year in all sorts of good and less good ways. Celebrities apparently dropping like flies and some seriously crazy political developments put my own experiences of the year into some pretty sharp relief. Be that as it may, I’ll run through what I did last year in the hopes … Read more
The New Year is upon us, and with it, a new opportunity to do interesting things, and a time to perhaps take stock and think about what’s important. That would be lovely, except right now I’m totally overwhelmed with stuff to do. You might be to, so here’s how I deal with it. First, let … Read more
In “Following my own advice” I described how I try to get something important done every day before checking emails, because prioritising the important over the apparently urgent is key. In that post I rather blithely referred to concentrating on ‘creating assets’, and loosely defined assets as “anything that adds value to your life. Value … Read more
I just uninstalled the Facebook app off my phone. Shock! Horror! How could I do such a thing? Well, yesterday I gave a class to some students on a professional writing course at the University of Suffolk here in Ipswich. The topic was time management, and my advice boiled down to the following key points: … Read more
Creating a card game to teach the basic theory and terminology of a medieval combat system was really hard. Audatia is done though: four glorious character decks and two expansion packs; piled up on my desk they really look like we created something. When people hear about it, the most common reaction is “wow, that’s … Read more
This has been quite a month. Since May 1st, here are the projects I have been working on, and some of the stuff I have done, in no particular order. Finishing and publishing the first three instalments of my Swordsman’s Quick Guide series. Working on a complete rewrite of Veni Vadi Vici. Installing a new … Read more
Yes, I spent some time clearing my desktop before shooting this…
I am typing this very slowly, without looking at the keyboard (much). This may seem trivial to those of you that learned to touch-type young, but I have twenty years of bad habits to overcome: five published books and God knows how many thousand emails, all written by poke and pray. I got pretty quick … Read more