​​Brackish Notebook, Spring 2021
​​NOTES / Brackish Notebook / Spring 2021
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​​🌔​ Monday, May 24th • The bug that never ended

​​I’ve spent the last month working on a really gnarly bug on 750words.com that has consumed every extra minute. It started with a report that some emails weren’t going out. 
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​​This led to a realization that the way I was integrating with Amazon’s “simple email service” had been deprecated. Ah, simply upgrade the way I’m integrating with Amazon’s “simple email service” then, you say? 
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​​This led me to try to upgrade the plugin I was using to work with Amazon’s API, but the plugin required a newer version of Ruby on Rails (the app framework that 750 Words is written in, and that I hadn’t upgraded for 10 years — oops). 
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​​Of course, this would be a huge task (and a big reason why I hadn’t done it in 10 years). After looking for any other way around it, I bit the bullet.
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​​Of course, newer versions of Rails require newer versions of Ruby (the programming language that Rails is built on top of), so I’d have to upgrade that on both my laptop and on the servers. Ugh.
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​​I ended up also having to replace the webserver and a billion Ruby gems that had very complicated web of interlocking dependencies with one another. 
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​​But a couple weeks in (I am also parenting children and planning birthdays and other things required of living humans in society) I got to the bottom of the stack of problems, replaced that bottom-most brick, and then began re-stacking everything back on top. And then realized that I had over-upgraded Ruby for the version of Ruby on Rails that I was willing to commit to (a version still over 5 years old). And so I went back down to the bottom-most brick, swapped it out again, and then re-stacked everything again. 
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​​And I was able to get some emails to send again. 
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​​Now I have this upgraded version of the site that can do things in the background like send emails and process metadata and make analytics and such, but in order for it to replace the website that is being used I’ll need to upgrade pretty much every file with new syntax and methods for doing things in the newer way. And lots of tests to write. 
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​​Software may be digital but it ages like any other physical thing.  
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​​🌔​ Thursday, April 22nd • First take on an emotion cube

​​I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about various systems for categorizing emotions, and have of course found a plethora of different attempts.
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​​One way that I like to try to understand something better is to come up with a framework for it, and then comparing and refining that framework based on existing frameworks. Seeing where things line up and where things don’t, and using that as a way to identify edges that might need more work or a different approach entirely. 
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​​Most frameworks seem to have a dimension for pleasant vs unpleasant emotions, which I think makes sense… it’s generally pretty easy to intuit that feeling peaceful is pleasant and feeling restless is unpleasant. 
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​​Most frameworks also have a dimension for high energy and low energy emotions, which also make sense. Feeling enraged is a high energy feeling, and feeling indifferent is a low energy feeling. 
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​​Then there are a handful of dimensions that seem to pop up in a few frameworks, but not in very many. Like the dimension of high control vs low control. Being angry is an emotion we use to exert control, while being sad or afraid seem to be emotions that we feel when we have less control. 
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​​The wheel itself seems to be universal in most of these frameworks. A few have a table instead of a wheel, but both of these are for the most part two-dimensional. But they also imply some kind of continuity between neighbors, and that’s where I feel like most of them fall apart. In Plutchik’s wheel, for instance, anticipation is right next to anger which is right next to disgust which is right next to sadness. While it’s probably possible to confabulate a reason why these emotions are side-by-side, it doesn’t seem to be part of the model so much as the fact that they also have opposites. And in the Geneva model, are we supposed to infer that contempt is more pleasant than disgust, and that joy is more pleasant than elation? And is elation an emotion of higher control than joy? These implications of the diagrams don’t really jump out to me as true. 
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​​I think emotions have more nuance than these 2-dimensional frameworks can really account for. So I added a 3rd dimension and turned it from a wheel to a cube to see if that helped at all.  
​​The three dimensions are pleasant vs unpleasant, high energy vs low energy, and a third dimension that I’m calling discontent vs acceptance, which I’ll explain in a bit. The first 2 are pretty much taken from Plutchik’s wheel, which I think seems to be my favorite of the wheels because these two dimensions are pretty easy to understand and intuit from an emotion word. Anger is high energy and unpleasant. Feeling peaceful is low energy and pleasant. The third dimension isn’t one we intuit, but one that represents our internal response to the emotion. When we feel unpleasant, and have a lot of energy, we can respond to that by becoming angry and deciding to fix the problem that’s causing this. On the other hand, think about being halfway through a race and how unpleasant and high energy that feels… and yet, we accept this as the state of things and are determined to push through it… that’s excitement and eagerness and an emotion that helps us strive for a goal. I think that’s a really important distinction to make and also something that is in our control when we think about our emotions. If we’re feeling low energy, but pleasant, and we fight that emotion we feel sorta stubborn and immovable, and maybe skeptical of whatever’s causing this. On the other hand, if we accept this low energy, pleasant, feeling, maybe we can shift it into a state of relaxation and peacefulness. The words here aren’t perfect. It’s just a first take. But I enjoyed getting this far with it and will continue to iterate on it. 
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​​🌒​ Saturday, April 17th • Personal calendars

​​I had a weird thought that came to me half in sleep and half throughout the day about a way to relate to calendars and maps in a more mythic way. Because calendars and maps are… as some are wont to say… not the territory. Time and space are constructs, in that there’s nothing about them that isn’t a fictional (but useful) artifact that has been created to help us achieve certain goals. Like coordinating. And agreeing on boundaries. They are tools for making contracts within groups and between groups of people. Anyway. 
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​​The idea is to make the contract aspect of calendars more explicit, and to allow more wiggle room and specifics into that contract making. And to give myself, and others, ways of talking about how we’d might improve the contracts we make about space and time. 
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​​One example is daylight savings time. That silly convention that was started during WWII to save electricity during the war efforts. Lots of people think it’s too confusing to switch clocks twice a year. But we also have no way of editing this contract on our own… we just go with whatever the law is. What if there was a way of saying that I prefer a clock that is in daylight savings time year round, or that is sans daylight savings time year round? We already have ways of adjusting for time zones, but they’re all determined geographically. 
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​​I think it would be cool if I could declare, somehow, whether I wanted to observe daylight savings, or if I wanted to conduct myself entirely via Swatch Internet Time, or some other system. Once we open up the ability to declare our own preferences about spacetime, we might find that there are in fact many more useful ways to orient ourselves to space and time than the systems we’ve inherited through our nations and religious organizations. 
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​​🌒​ Friday, April 16th • The Sumerian calendar

​​I’m currently in a deep rabbit hole about Sumeria, the Sumerian/Babylonian calendar, cuneiform, and the Epic of Gilgamesh. I love when a rabbit hole keeps going and getting more interesting, and this one is really one of the best I’ve dug in a while. 
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​​It started as I was perusing this list of calendars on Wikipedia (side note: do all of my weird interests begin on a Wikipedia list page? Last time it was the list of cognitive biases). This led me to the history of calendars page, where I read: 
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​​So many links to follow. But I clicked on Sumerian calendar where I learned that this is essentially the first complete calendar created by the Sumerians (4500–1900 BC) who many believe is one of a few contenders for being the earliest known civilization. 
​​Anyway. All this to say that clicking these links and reading up on Sumerian culture, mythology, and history has been really exciting this week. The Sumerian calendar is the first, I think, that identified the 19-year lunisolar cycle. Every 19 years, the solar calendar (essentially what we currently use) and the lunar calendar (that tracks months as moon cycles) repeat. So, for example, December 22nd, 2014 (which is the December Solstice that marks the shortest day in the northern hemisphere and the longest day in the southern hemisphere) is also a new moon. The occurrence of the December solstice and the new moon happens exactly once every 19 years, and it doesn’t occur any other time. It’s not perfectly aligned, actually, and will get out of sync in 553 years or so. Because planets, satellites, and stars are all shifting slightly in their orbits all of the time. 
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​​It’s all wobbly. Which is what makes it so fascinating to me. We like things to get locked in. And when they don’t we add corrections (like the leap year, leap second, etc) to fix the wobbliness and then to lock in those fixes. But the assumption underneath is that there is a reliable order to things that can be fixed in place… when in reality all of these objects and forces are pulling and interacting with one another in a chaotic way that never stays fixed. Calendars are things that constantly need to be re-fixed as reality moves beneath them. And since it only needs to happen every couple hundred years, we’ve decided that that’s okay and we’ll just deal with it when we need to deal with it, and pretend it’s all perfectly fixed in between those times.
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​​What if a calendar was designed to embrace the wobble instead of ignore it? How would a calendar work if it not only acknowledged but celebrated the fact that all of these planets, satellites, and stars are constantly shifting, very slowly? How would one create a calendar that was as wobbly as the objects it’s trying to map? 
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​​🌑​ Monday, April 12th • Sleeping vs Waking

​​I’m keeping a running list of brackish things (things that have a 2-way quality to them: that shape other things and are shaped by the things they are shaping, and exist in this always shifting push-pull state) at the bottom of this increasingly long document. The more I think about brackishness, the more I see it everywhere, which is exactly what I was hoping would happen when I started this weird notebook. 
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​​Sleep is my current brackish struggle. I’ve always been a night owl type of person, that is until having children. The last 10 years have been a constant fight between staying up late and waking up early. And I’ve not really allowed my night owl identity take a hit. But recently I’ve been tracking my sleep with the suspicion that it’s related to the quality of my wakeful hours… and what’s the point of extending wakeful hours and staying up late if I am grumpy and my brain is not running at its normal capacity? Also how am I 44 years old and still learning this lesson? So… sorry night owl identity, your wings are being clipped.
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​​Anyway, the brackish nature of this is that if I try to protect wakefulness, then wakefulness suffers. But if I try to protect the quality of wakefulness, then it means having less wakefulness (ie sleeping more). I’ve been tracking my sleep with an Apple Watch since October of last year and over that time have been averaging about 5 hours of sleep a night. In the last few weeks I’ve been making a more concerted effort to go to sleep earlier, and not eating/drinking/exercising a few hours before bed, and my average sleep from the last week just peaked over 6 hours this morning. And I feel pretty great. 
​​I’ve always liked tracking things in order to learn about them, and I feel like this experiment in tracking is leading me to an actual insight that I didn’t really believe before, even though it’s common knowledge and obvious to almost everyone else in the world. Part of being an amateur is admitting when you’re the last person in the world to learn something, right? That’s me, right now. 
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​​🌘​ Friday, April 6th • A loopy calendar

​​Here’s a weird personal calendar that I’ve been keeping this year. It’s a drawing on my iPad’s Concepts app that I add a leaf to for every day. Each loop of leaves starts on the new moon, and sometimes I make note of things that happened on certain days, either in my personal life or in the broader world. The point of it is to mark my own time in a way that feels truer to how time feels to me. 
​​On a normal calendar, days are boxes, and they are structured by rows that represent weeks. The 7 day week is a concept that it seems many different cultures invented independently. Maybe because it almost fits into a 29.5 day lunar cycle. The 10 day week almost fits too, and some cultures used that. 5 days and 8 days also show up. At some point, it became useful for people to all track days with the same concept, and 7 happened to win out. But there’s nothing in nature that mirrors a week. 
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​​The history of calendars is fascinating to me. Because it’s an attempt to systematize the cycles of the sun, moon, and stars. But unfortunately, the cycle of the moon at 29.5 days doesn’t fit neatly into the cycle of the sun 365.25 days, and the cycle of the day doesn’t fit perfectly into either of the moon or sun cycles. Even weeks don’t fit squarely into months (except for February) or years (52.14 weeks).
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​​It’s tough to internalize this because we are really trained to think that a year is 365 days (with the occasional leap year) and that the moon cycle is also regular and occurs every month or so. 
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​​The moon is, on the surface, the best object to track calendars by. Because it looks different every day, and everyone can point to it and say, “by the next full moon…” and know about what they mean. It works for things in life that happen on the order of days and weeks. But that breaks down when you start to think about things happening on the order of months and years, because there are 12.3 lunar cycles in a year, and if you track years as 12 or 13 lunar cycles, pretty soon you’re planting seeds in the winter or summer and all your crops will be messed up. So the sun has to be used. And that’s why the Gregorian calendar that we use today, with its leap years and irregular months and the very important skipping of the leap year on century years that aren’t divisible by 4, is so useful.
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​​“Kalends” is a term from Roman times, pre-Julius, when the month began when someone “called out” when the new moon was spotted and various things were due. I really like the idea of someone standing in a field somewhere as the sun sets waiting to see if they can spot the new moon or if they’ll have to wait another day, and this is how society was ordered and contracts / debts were kept. 
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​​My personal thought experiment is to rewind time to that moment when Kalends were announced every month, and to invent a calendar for myself that evolved along a different path. Instead of adopting the Julian calendar in 45 B.C. that first departed from lunar months, and then the Gregorian calendar that improved on the leap year system and corrected for calendar drift by skipping 10 days between October 4th, 1582 and October 15th, 1582, what if a society existed that never succumbed to the pressure to make the calendar simple and consistent and logical? There are, in fact, many lunisolar calendars still in use, often to declare various traditional religious holidays. There’s something pure and beautiful about prioritizing natural cycles over social convenience and allowing the sun and moon to remain the authority on time and the calendar.
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​​In my mini-quest to design a calendar for myself, I will also share details of these other calendars because they’re all amazing beautiful constructs in their own right and I feel like they’re underappreciated as cultural treasures. 
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​​The loopy calendar that I’m playing around with this year is very simple. It uses two sources of information to link the lunar cycle to the solar cycle, and so far only has these very simple principles:
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  • ​​A new year starts on the first new moon after the december solstice.
  • ​​A new month starts on every new moon.
  • ​​Months will have between 29 and 31 days depending on time zone.
  • ​​The seasons (still unnamed) occur also on the first new moon after each of the solstices and equinox (december solstice, march equinox, june solstice, august equinox).
  • ​​Most seasons will have 3 lunar cycles, but a few will have 4 lunar cycles.
  • ​​About 2 out of 3 years will have 12 lunar cycles, and about 1 in 3 will have 13 lunar cycles.
  • ​​The number of days in a year will vary depending on all of the above.
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​​One of the things I’d like to do along with this redesign is remove any words that create preference for the northern hemisphere (like conventions around summer and winter) and use directional labels instead (summer solstice = northern solstice, spring equinox = southward equinox since the southern hemisphere will now be tilting towards the sun, same for southern solstice and northward equinox). I’d also like to remove any popular associations with certain moons that are inspired by particular geographic regions (like the snow moon in February, or all the moons really). They make sense when they are used only by people in that geographic region. But I’d like mine to be more neutral about location. Right now I’m using colors to mark the moons (without names) but that could change. 
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​​Anyway, that’s the weird project for now. 
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​​🌗​ Monday, April 5th • Calendars are weird

​​I’m fascinated and horrified and confused by the technology we call calendars. To me, the most interesting thing about calendars, and a lot of cultural technology around time, space, science, etc, is that they are super OLD technologies. We even track the arrival of civilization by identifying super old things that we think functioned in some calendar-y way. 
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​​This is Gobekli Tepe, in what is currently Turkey, which was built at about 5,500 years before evidence of Mesopotamian cities, and about 7,000 years before Stonehenge, and over 12,000 years prior to today. 
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​​It’s so old that the stars it was tracking have moved significantly since. And knowing that Earth’s axis rotates slowly (over 26,000-ish years, known as Earth’s precession) and causes stars to drift over thousands of years is part of how they dated this ancient site.  
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​​On the most basic level I think part of my fascination with calendars is because they function as tools/rulers for time and their ability to become “more true” than the thing they are measuring. I have a whole lotta thoughts to share on this topic so will just leave this here as is for now. 
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​​Calendars are weird. 
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​​🌖​ Friday, April 2nd • Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotion

​​I’ve been thinking about brackish things for at least a year or so, but it wasn’t until I started this brackish notebook that I really started to see examples everywhere of brackish things, two-way things, things that sharpen each other and wear each other down. That’s a point in favor of “blogging” because private journaling alone didn’t have that effect. Not that this really counts as blogging in the traditional sense… what is this even? A public shared document that I just keep adding to the top of. 
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​​Today’s brackish thing is emotions. Here’s a fun graphic that attempts to capture the range of emotions in a color wheel: 
​​Tag yourself in the image above. Hover over it and hit the “little circle with a plus icon”, then click on the emotion that you feel is currently most present for you right now.
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​​I’m a sucker for frameworks like this that try to take the amorphous and give it some handles and language to help make sense of it, or to at least refer to it with more precision than we usually are able. I think of emotions as brackish because we not only have them, but we react to them as well. And these patterns of reaction create a sort of hall of emotional mirrors that we bounce endlessly through, and we chalk it all up to a general “mood” that we have. Or that has us. 
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​​For example if I try to find the deepest emotion in my emotional stack right now, I might say that I feel a bit pensive/sad about being sick, and not getting enough sleep last night, and not getting enough quality sleep in general these last few months. It makes me feel heavy. But because I felt that way, I drank some coffee and spent some time in the crisp morning air, and had a few conversations with friends, and I’ve in a sense layered some emotions on top of that pensiveness and that creates a brackish emotional environment within myself that feels both pensive and serene. And that somehow comes out feeling like acceptance and contentment. And then that contentment motivates me to get some work done, and I add a feeling of interest/anticipation to the stack, even as the coffee begins to peak and then round the bend, and I start feeling hungry for lunch. No emotion wheel is going to really capture this always moving, always reacting-to-itself back-and-forth dialogue between emotions and actions and reactions and resistances and circumstances. But it’s still fun to play around with. 
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​​Update 4/12: Added the ​+Emotion Rhizome​ doc to track emotions for a while and see if that is interesting at all. 
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​​🌖​ Thursday, April 1st • Happy fool’s day

​​A lot of people are (perhaps with valid reasons) confused with my recent “obsession” with tarot. The part that’s valid is that on the surface it might seem to be a bit of a departure from my past interests around very rational things like cognitive biases, systems thinking, product management… checks my LinkedIn endorsements… e-commerce, entrepreneurship, user experience. Have I been captured by pseudoscience and magical thinking? Have I joined a mystical order of charlatans? If those things were happening, I would wholly expect my friends to stage an intervention. And if you are worried about this, please do reach out to me!
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​​That said, I don’t think this is what’s happening. 
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​​The way I like to think of tarot is as a language. It’s an extension pack for the language that we use to talk about our emotions, and the dramas within our life, and our goals, dreams, fears, etc. I can say that I’m having a tough time adjusting to the multi-crises of the world, or I can say that I’m experiencing the world through the Tower card. I can say that I’m feeling a bit anxious and unprepared for the leap into a post-pandemic world, or I can say that I’m seeing the world through the lens of the Fool card. 
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​​It’s not so much that the act of drawing cards is going to tell us something about our future so much that these cards are able to make certain connections salient to us when we put them on. And I don’t think there’s a “right” card to describe any moment. If I look at my day through the Tower card, I see all the places where big foundational things have toppled, and I feel the panic and unrest of jumping from a window to escape something and not knowing where I will land. If I look at that same day through the lens of the Fool card, I see how a chance for a new beginning is emerging in front of me, and while unprepared for it, I see some small ways to really enjoy the moment for what it is. 
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​​Each tarot card is “perfectly ambiguous”, a lens that has been polished for hundreds of years to pick out certain details within any picture. And in that way they help us see details that we might have otherwise missed. Those details aren’t predicted, or forecasted, or promised, or fated in any way. But by bringing attention to them they suddenly gain a sort of symbolic agency in our experience, and become part of the dialogue with reality that unfurls. 
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​​“Perfectly ambiguous” means that meaning flows both ways. It makes certain meanings more relevant, while also receiving meaning from the things it is pointing to. It tells us a little bit about ourselves and we add a layer of meaning to it as well. In Mary K. Greer’s book, 21 Ways to Read a Tarot Card, that I’m still only partially through, she describes reading tarot like this: 
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  • ​​As a reader I call myself a “midwife of the soul” (a term first coined by Sigmund Freud), because I use my skills and knowledge of the cards to ask questions so that the querents’ responses “give birth” to their own wisdom. 
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​​To read the Fool card today, put on a silly cap and try method acting the Fool as if you were walking along the edge of a mountain. Look around yourself. What mood is prevalent? Can you look at the cliffs with wonder and exuberance in addition to your natural reaction? What dissonance does it create? Does it jostle any rocks loose in your mind? Follow that train of thought for a while, until you get bored… the Fool doesn’t have to commit to new paths right now, it’s enough just to walk down them a few steps before doubling back or hopping over to another path. 
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​​Or you can use April Fool’s Day to prank someone. 
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​​🌖​ Wednesday, March 31st • Questions about publishing

​​I got some interesting responses about the post from a couple days ago about royalty statements. Like, “Nice, now I'm confused in a more profound way.” And, “The more we know, the more we know what we don't know!” I know these book details are a lot of numbers, and nothing super relevant to most people, but at the same time there’s something pleasing about opening a black box up, and not just to brag. So I’m here today to make things even more brackish and confusing!
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​​The truth is that my book was only moderately successful. Not a wild blockbuster. It was a best-seller in a couple niche categories like Conversation Etiquette and Funny Self-Help. And it continues to sell enough books for the UK publisher to want to release a paperback, but not quite enough to get the US publisher to want to do that. Everyone is nice enough to answer my dumb questions, too, of which I have many, about how they make these decisions. They mentioned that most of the time releasing the paperback version of a book doesn’t lead to more sales or increased earnings for the author, unless there’s been a noted interest in the book amongst the price-sensitive book buyers. So I’m assuming there’s not enough of that with my book, and it turns out that most people in the US tend to buy the Kindle or Audiobook versions of the book, which sort of function as paperback replacements in a way. 
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​​Here are some questions I got over the last post. If you have more you can leave them here as a comment or send them to me in some other way (there are about a million ways to contact me these days… but Twitter DM is as good as any).
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​Did they (the publisher) have concrete predictions for what to expect, and were they right? 
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​​I asked variants of this question a million times, starting from before I even started working on the book proposal, all the way up through publication and beyond. They’ve been remarkably consistent in giving pretty wide open expectations, considering that I’m a first-time author, and the book publishing industry is one that lives off of hits… and hits are tough to predict. At the same time they also made very clear that they don’t only care about the hits. They want to help authors write good books that appeal to book buyers, and they encourage authors to have a wide definition of success. The clearest answer I ever got from them was that I should aim to sell at least 10,000 copies in the first year, and that 20,000 would be a solid hit. I came in between those numbers, so I feel like I squeezed by. They also emphasized the importance of shelf-life for a book and do have hopes that it’ll continue to sell and remain relevant for years, which is very much aligned with my own interests. 
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​What’s the process like for getting an advance? Is it negotiable? 
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​​My experience here doesn’t seem very representative of most of the stories I’ve heard about how this process works, but I can tell you how it worked for me. This timeline shows the general pace of the process. And yes, the book advance is very negotiable. I met my literary agent in November of 2016 (and actually had my first call with her on election day), and we worked on a book proposal for over two years before actually pitching it to a publisher in January of 2018. The proposal is a 20-40 page document that basically makes a case for the book and includes information about me, my “platform” to promote the book, sample chapters, a rough outline of the whole book, a marketing plan, comparative titles, etc. This was then shopped around by my agent and a call was arranged with a publisher to discuss. In my case I was lucky to know the editor at the publisher that I was pitching to, in fact she’s the person that first suggested that I write a book, and so the meeting included a lot of context already, and they came back with an offer in a few days. My agent and I discussed it, and she made a counter-offer that eventually led to a deal that was significantly higher than the first offer. Then there was a verbal agreement and then about 8 weeks for lawyers at the publisher and the literary agency to settle on specific details about royalty rates, foreign rights, etc, with very minimal input (mostly questions) about it from me. When I signed that, I got ~25% of the advance and was officially on the hook to deliver a book in about a year’s time. The rest of the advance came in chunks (when I turned in the manuscript, on publication day, and one year after publication). 
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​Am I on the hook to return the money if the book doesn’t sell through the advance?
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​​I asked this question a lot before I signed the book deal too. Because it was a lot of money, especially for a first-time author. What I learned is that it is possible for a publisher to take the advance back if you don’t deliver a book or if the book you deliver doesn’t meet the expectations of the publisher… but in reality this almost never happens unless there is some actual breach of trust happening. The contract did have a timeline around when it should be turned in, but as we all know some authors will blow past these deadlines by years. I think it’s all a matter of how much they believe that you can deliver it. That said, once the book is accepted, I don’t think they can take the money back if it simply doesn’t sell well. There are lots of different reasons for that to happen, and as mentioned earlier they don’t expect most books to make back their advance. I think I heard that it was less than half of books that get close to earning their advance… it might have even been less than 20% of books. 
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​Is there any pressure overtly or just that you feel internally about reaching the break even (in x time)?
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​​Internally, absolutely. Though in my case I was more interested in reaching the magical invisible line where the publisher considers the book break even more than the one where I would break even. Making money was never my goal with the book — I’m lucky enough to be idealistic about it and to focus entirely on writing a book I’m proud of and doing my best to get it out into the world, and I did that. But I hate disappointing people, especially those who believe in me and are generous with their time, energy, and resources to help me succeed. So for me I really wanted to have a solid grasp of where that line would be for my agent and editor specifically. And I think the 10,000 copies in the first year with some longevity met that bar, but only barely. They reassure me that they’re happy with the whole process so I don’t feel terrible about it. Of course, I would’ve liked to hit the upper end of those expectations… and I did 100+ podcasts and radio shows and interviews for various places and also a handful of workshops and talks etc… and I feel like I did put my heart and soul into all of it, so I don’t beat myself up about not being a mega hit too much. 
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​How did it all come to be for you to write a book?
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​​It all started with the cognitive bias cheat sheet, and an editor reaching out to me and asking me if I wanted to write a book about that. My first answer was no. I really wanted to write a children’s book about systems thinking. But a confluence of events convinced me to give this a go and it was a really great (and challenging) experience that I am really grateful to have been able to do. Now, I’m thinking about the children’s book about systems thinking again. 
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​How do you feel about people buying and reading your book? Is it any different than people reading things you post on the internet? Are they mostly the same audience? Do you hear from people who've read your book?
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​​This is a tough one to answer. Honestly, I love when people read my book. It means a lot to me that anyone would take time out of their lives to read something that I wrote. It’s more meaningful than reading random scrawlings I put on the internet like this, because A) I care more about the content of the book than most things I write — it is a crystallized object that has 3 years of anguish and insight squeezed into a few pages, and B) it costs money and takes time that feels like more to ask from someone, and more of a gift to me when they do. 
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​​I know that a lot of people I know on the internet and in real life did read the book, but selling books is difficult and this had to reach much farther than my personal audience could in order to sell books. I did put my email address in the book so I get a lot of emails from readers and I love all of these notes because it really does reach people I never would’ve otherwise reached, and they are people that I am excited to talk with. 
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​​I’ve been typing a while now and am gonna take a break for the day. But if you have any other questions, hit me up! 
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​​🌖​ Tuesday, March 30th

​​A day of errands and mostly boring worky things. I did all my grocery shopping for the week, and also worked on the new version of 750 Words that is slowly but surely starting to come together. I added the ability to search entries, export past writing, add metadata to entries (like #-hashtags, @usernames, etc). I also lost my hammer.
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​​🌕​ Monday, March 29th • Royalty statements

​​Happy belated full moon. 
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​​I got my royalty statement today for my book (Why Are We Yelling: The Art of Productive Disagreement) covering June through November of last year. Because publishing is such a black box, and because I like brackish things that flow both ways more than black boxes, I figured I’d share some of this stuff in case it’s of interest to people who are either potentially interested in being published at some point, or just interested to see how this particular business works. Of course, this is just one data point for a first-time author and an average-selling book, so take it all with a grain of brackish salt.
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​​The first section covers sales in the current period (June-November 2020) and also show cumulative sales since publication (in November of 2019). 
​​If you look at the bold line at the bottom you can see that the basic summary of the statement shows that I sold 2,224 copies in the last 6 months, a big chunk of it from eBook (which I assume is mostly Kindle), and my earnings from that are about $2/book based on the very complicated royalty structure of how book deals are structured. Then you see that 16,562 books have been sold in total, and how much my earnings total have been since the publication of the book. I didn’t actually make any money during this period because my advance was larger than the total earnings to date, but if/when that does happen then I could potentially receive money with these statements. 
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​​Another interesting detail that you might miss is that if you look at the cumulative earnings column, you’ll see that the bulk of the earnings has actually come from “Subsidiary Rights Income” which is essentially a % of advances that were made by selling the book to foreign markets. And all of that happened before the book was even published. This is the part that was the most surprising to me and the part that helped me understand a bit more about how the publishing world works. Large US publishers (like, in this case Penguin/Random House) can de-risk their own publishing bets by selling it to publishers in other countries who are willing to take on some of that risk/reward. 
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​​Another thing I’ve learned through this is that I assumed before doing this that the publisher doesn’t “break even” on a book until the author earns back the advance. But that’s not necessarily true… it’s a lot more complicated than that. The publisher invests in a lot more than just the author’s advance, obviously… all the payroll of people working at the publisher on the books are also costs, of course. And also, the publisher keeps more of the money from each book as well (royalty rates for authors are usually between 10-15% of the book’s price). That’s another black box to investigate at some point, I suppose. 
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​​The next section breaks down sales in different foreign markets and in different weird formats and discount rates and it’s very noisy and difficult to understand. I won’t screenshot that because it’s really difficult to parse.
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​​I guess that’s all I have to say about that today. Feel free to ask questions about any of this by leaving a comment. I could go into more things here if there’s interest. 
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​Links I’ve recently enjoyed:
  • ​​Practice awareness of the whole, by Kevin McGillivray. “Wholeness involves more than the thing itself. The wholeness of a building involves the building and the people who live there. The wholeness of a book involves the author and the subject and those who will read it. The wholeness of a painting involves the canvas and the subject and the place it is made—There is a living relationship between the maker, the object, the subject, and the people who live with the object.
  • ​​Yes, the experts will lie to you sometimes, by Noahpinion. “If you’re a member of the public, you should realize that yes, experts will sometimes lie to you. But (with a few exceptions) they usually don’t do this out of lack of concern for your own welfare. Instead, they do it out of lack of regard for your truth-handling abilities. You’re probably not being punked; you’re being babied. So if and when you go fact-checking the experts’ recommendations, remember that they probably do have their assessment of your own best interests in mind. Think of them as an overprotective parent, not as an enemy.
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​​🌕​ Saturday, March 27th • The relating languages

​​Woke up and read about Sara Ness’s thought-provoking article about relating languages.
​​Language is definitely a brackish thing. We learn languages as we use them, and change them as we use them. I think I’m in the questioning+spaceholder dialect most often, at least in public and social environments. In private, within my own head, and in very safe environments I’m probably more comfortable in the joking+clown dialect.
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​​🌔​ Friday, March 26th • The brackish moon

​​One of the fun side effects of blogging in a document like this is that people can witness the act of writing. It’s a good way to lower the bar of expectations even more. These aren’t thought out thoughts, they’re just thoughts that come to me in the moment. 
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​​My brackish thought of the day is about seeing the moon during the day. The moon during the day is sometimes called the children’s moon because only children have the time and the eyesight required to really notice it. I’ve started paying more attention to the moon, trying to develop an intuitive sense of where it is, sort of as a mental game. Gotta stay sharp during this pandemic, right? It’s humbling in a few ways, because I realize that even though the moon is this giant object that’s been orbiting Earth forever, it’s also rarely the source of my full attention other than during a full moon. Most other times it’s a peripheral thought, when I see it I think, “Oh the moon looks cool tonight.” and when I don’t see it I don’t think about it. 
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​​I asked the other day on Twitter about whether, when people see a ​🌔​ moon, if they know whether or not the moon is about to be full, or was just recently full. Or if it was even possible to know this based on that information alone. To know this would require not only noticing the moon in the sky but also tracking it and remembering what it looked like on previous days/nights. 
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​​In the Northern Hemisphere, the moon waxes (becomes increasing full) from right to left. It’s left to right in the Southern Hemisphere. So, if you see a moon that is bright on the right side, and you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, it means that it’s waxing and will become more full every day until it is fully full, and then it will begin to wane with the right side again becoming dark, and that darkness growing as it moves right to left over then next 14.75 days or so. Now you can look at the moon at any time and know approximately how long it will be until it is full, and approximately how long it’ll be until it’s dark again. 
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​​Or you can just download an app and it will tell you these things. 
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​​But, going back to my brackish thought, one thing these apps won’t really tell you is when the moon is visible during the day. Usually the apps will tell you something like this: 
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​​The moon will rise at 5:20pm today. But will I be able to see it when it does? In this case, I suspect that I will, if the sky is clear, because the sun is already on its path to setting in the next couple hours, and it will be in a very different part of the sky from the sun. 
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​​In fact, when I was driving home from skateboarding practice with Niko and Louie yesterday evening, around 5:15pm or so, I pointed out the moon to them, and it was already pretty high and clear in the sky. Oh yeah — yesterday the moon rose at 4:11pm, which is more than an hour earlier than it will rise today, because as it moves towards being full, it rises later and later, until it rises very closely to the time the sun sets on the day when it is most full. Which makes sense if you think about it because the moon is full when it is opposite to the sun from our perspective. 
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​​What about other times of the lunar month? The new moon happens when the moon is very close to the sun — rising and setting at the same time — and we can’t see it because the sun is bright and its light is all on the side facing away from us. And, because we know that the moon waxes from right to left, that means that in the days after the new moon, the sun rises and sets shortly before the moon. Which is why the waxing crescent moon, a day or so after the new moon, will only be visible as the sun sets. The sky darkens and a tiny sliver of the moon can be seen about 15 degrees above the horizon, as it follows the sun down. 
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​​This is taking me longer to talk about than I thought, but these are brackish notes, with no polish, and no editing, so I guess this is what it is. 
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​​On March 15th, I was on a phone call at 6pm and decided to go for a walk. I decided I would try to identify the moment that the moon became visible as the sun set, because I had not been able to find the answer on the internet. Visibility, unlike other qualities of the moon like its phase, or its moment of rising or setting, isn’t precise. It depends on the amount of moisture in the air, and the temperature, and my eyesight, and also my ability to guess where it would be and remain focused on the sky long enough to actually identify it. 
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​​My call ended at 7 o’clock, and the sun was going to set at 7:16pm, but there was still no sign of the moon. Instead of going inside, I decided to allow my curiosity play out and I stood on my sidewalk staring casually at a part of the sky, hoping my neighbors wouldn’t come out and ask me what I was doing. 
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​​Then I saw it, at 7:05pm. The tiniest lightest sliver of a crescent moon. So small that when I took a picture of the sky it didn’t even show up in the photo unless I zoomed in a ton.
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​​The sun set 11 minutes later, and the moon set a couple hours after that. When the moon is waxing, it starts out being visible in the evening for a few hours. Then, every day, it becomes visible earlier in the afternoon and sticks around later in the evening, but then begins to rise later in the day. Until we’re where we are now with the 5:20pm moonrise and 6:17am moonset. 
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​​The moon is brackish because it flows into daytime hours, then flows out, and flows into nighttime hours, and flows out. Its visibility can’t be determined scientifically because it’s a function of weather, eyesight, and awareness of its location even when it can’t yet be seen. 
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​​You can strip away all the symbolism and cultural meaning from the moon and it’s still a pretty interesting thing to think about, and look for, in my opinion. Maybe even more interesting without all of that other baggage.
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​​🌔​ Thursday, March 25th • The Mahicantuck River flows both ways

​​It’s 2021, COVID-19 is still in the spring air, and while trends seem somewhat positive it’s unclear where the finish line is with this long month of Pandember.  Somewhere in the last year I’ve lost my voice in terms of writing publicly on the internet. Part of it is clearly burnout from talking about productive disagreement in a world that seems to identify itself by its unproductive disagreements. Part of it is my personal life in a pandemic — when the world has the rug pulled out from under it it’s bound to also bring some personal life rugs along with it. Part of it is also that the world is changing, and that means our relationships to the world will also change, and finding out how we can best relate to the world takes time. So I’m starting small (it’s my year of the amateur after all) by using Dropbox Paper as a blog/diary-like repository of half-formed thoughts. 
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​What does “Brackish Notes” refer to? 
​​I am a bit obsessed with the idea of brackish things, because they capture a feeling that I seem to be having a lot lately, and it’s always nice to see feelings represented in the external world so that I can point to something and say “that’s how I’m feeling”. 
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​​The word brackish means “slightly salty, as is the mixture of river water and seawater in estuaries”. An estuary is a place where fresh water from rivers meets salty water from the ocean and they mix in various ways becoming neither fresh nor salty. Brackish also means “unpleasant or distasteful” because I assume it must be surprising and disturbing to accidentally drink brackish water when you thought it was going to be fresh. All of this seems appropriate for what I plan to write about.
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​​I can point to the Hudson River, which changes directions 4 times a day (high tides at lunar noon and lunar midnight, low tides at lunar 6am and lunar 6pm — we don’t have good words for these times).
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​​When the tide is rising, the salt water from the ocean flows up the Hudson River, making it saltier. And when the tide is lowering, the river flows towards the ocean again, its fresh water mixing in more. 
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​​Brackish Notes, for me, is a way to think about things that flow in two directions. These days I hear about nondual or both/and thinking more often, and I think this is a useful development in how we talk about things. I like the idea of brackishness because it doesn’t define itself by what it is not (not dual) but rather by what it is. Brackish. Not only a mix of different states, but a condition that itself ebbs and flows through different kinds of mixtures. 
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​​I also want to point out that the Hudson River was not always called the Hudson River. In fact it had a much more appropriate and respectful (in my opinion) name when it was called Mahicantuck by the Mohican and Lenape people, meaning “great waters in constant motion" and "river that flows two ways." 
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​Links I’ve recently enjoyed:
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​​🌒​ March 20th 

​​Spring equinox, beginning of spring, etc. A new clean page to capture some brackish thoughts.
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​​🐉​ Brackish Appendix

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​Examples of brackish things:

  • ​​The Hudson River
  • ​​2-way roads
  • ​​Neurons
  • ​​Conversations, debates, dialogues
  • ​​Feelings
  • ​​Plumbing
  • ​​AC electrical current
  • ​​Light in a hall of mirrors
  • ​​Cause and effect
  • ​​Brainstorming
  • ​​The moon’s visibility during the day
  • ​​Language
  • ​​Reading tarot
  • ​​Maps, calendars
  • ​​Natural selection 
  • ​​Service leadership
  • ​​Exercise
  • ​​Kinetic energy and motion
  • ​​Sleeping and waking
  • ​​Tail wagging the dog
  • ​​Local, state, and federal governments
  • ​​What else?
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