Entry for July 15, 2008

"Sensei no e wo kaku!"

I'm going to draw a picture of my teacher!

This is what the Pumpkin Princess announced five minutes before we were going to leave for day care. I did a very rapid assessment of my options.

1) Tell her no and deal with the consequences.

2) Give her a pen and a sheet of paper and have another cup of coffee.

I decided 2) was going to get us to day care faster, with less stress for both of us. She finished her picture in about five minutes (her pictures of people actually have eyes and noses and mouths these days) and we headed for day care. When we got to day care and she got out of the car, she was holding the picture she drew very tightly.

I noticed I didn't have phrases for the last two entries. Oops!

In my endeavors to "Increase my Productivity Tenfold," I read a work related magazine during the "between times" (gaps of time between times I actually did work). When you think of the work that goes into making magazines, including but not limited to the time the author spends researching the subject manner (this is probably the most time consuming of all), choosing the words and phrases and pictures to share the information involved, the editor going through what the author has sent him and giving feedback, the author revising according to said feedback, the editor re-checking the author's work, the senior editor looking over what the junior editors have sent her (I checked, the senior editor for this particular mag is female), everything going to the printers, everything being printed on reasonably high-quality paper with reasonably high-quality ink so that the pictures show up reasonably clearly, and the printed magazine being sent to bookstores and individual subscribers, you're getting quality information for pretty darned cheap. The authors are all experts in their respective fields, so if they were being paid hourly what they usually make hourly, there is no way the magazine would break even. I think the quality of the informative author depends at least partly on the quality of his work when he is not writing. Full time informative authors are probably less likely to give you quality information because they must get you to buy their information, and they are more prone to be tempted to embellish and sensationalize it. The part time informative author will be prone to care less about how much money he will make writing and more about writing something that won't discredit his usual work.

(When I say "part-time informative author", I am talking about economists who write about economics and engineers who write about engineering. When I say "full time informative author", I am talking about someone like Robert Kiyosaki. I think full time authors who write to be entertaining (including but not limited to novelists) are probably more likely to produce entertaining material than those who do it on the side. Journalists are probably another breed altogether.)