I’m not a country music fan, but I respect anyone who can carve out a solid career singing about beer, pickups, tractors, and beer.

I’m kidding.

Mostly.

But I saw an interesting article about the late country music legend Toby Keith. When asked what advice he’d give rookie songwriters trying to break into the business, he once said you should write one song every day.

To him, it felt like he “wrote 200 songs” before he wrote a good one. Then it took 150 more to write his second good one.

After three decades and dozens of hits to his credit, he said it does eventually get easier.

Clearly, I subscribe to this advice for anyone who wants to write, whether it’s songs, novels, poetry, screenplays, or naughty greeting cards. In fact, I encourage people to become closet writers for a while before bursting out and sharing the work.

Sure, you hear about the unicorns who hit pay dirt with their first effort. You don’t hear about the millions of others who submitted their first attempt to a chorus of crickets. And that response discouraged them to the point where they quit altogether.

I wrote short fiction for years, putting everything I had into the stories before printing them, placing them in a folder, and sliding them into a file cabinet, never to be seen again. I don’t know if I hit the mythical one-million-word mark before publishing my first novel, but I’ll bet it was close.

We want the shortcut. We want the gold medal right out of the starting gate. We read a lot, or listen to a lot of music, so we think we’ve learned the secret by consuming.

Reading is a critical ingredient, yes. But you really learn the secret by creating. Over and over again.

Toby Keith may not have produced the kind of songs I enjoy. But he probably never read any of my books, either.

So we’re even.

Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction, and is still several hundred bad songs short of his first good one.

Find his books at DomTestaBooks.com, and more of his work here.

I bought an old paperback at a used book store a couple years ago, and finally got around to it. Hey, the queue is long.

It’s a well-loved book, and I don’t mean that in terms of reviews or legacy. I mean the physical paperback book itself has clearly passed through many hands. The pages gamely remain intact against the spine, but the cover is scuffed to the point where the title is fading.

About 20 pages in, I encountered a note written in the margin alongside a long paragraph. Someone had, in pencil, written YES!

I scanned the paragraph twice and came to the conclusion that I agreed with their emphatic agreement. The words were simple yet poignant, expressing a common emotion in such an uncommon manner. It was beautiful.

As I made my way through the book, I found at least a dozen other comments scribbled either in the margins or at the top of the page. The 60-year-old paperback had become annotated, not by a scholar, but at the hands of a gleeful reader.

At first I was irritated. Because while I’m not uptight in everyday life, I would count myself as a puckered book lover. I like them pristine.

The physical condition of a book itself doesn’t bother me—again, this one was reaching the end of its practical life—though I generally hate it when someone dog-ears a page. It makes me shudder.

But actually writing in a book? That’s downright criminal.

At least I used to be that way.

Two dozen people may have devoured this particular copy, and yet one of those readers was moved enough to document their joy. And that made me stop and rethink my position.

My book collection is massive. Hundreds and hundreds of them, stashed on both floors of my house and in the basement. And with one exception—a book I bought purely for research and marked with a yellow highlighter—I’ve never spoiled the sanctity of the pages. No writing, no underlining.

Somehow, at least to my way of thinking, to do so would be to disrespect the art.

Rethinking The Sanctity

Now, squarely facing my golden years, I’m wondering if I’ve looked at it all wrong.

Since I keep most of my books for myself, why the hell shouldn’t I annotate them? What would be the harm in highlighting passages that move me, inspire me, anger me, or simply make me set the book down and think?

Sure, once someone eventually gets their hands on my precious library, they might not be happy to find some joker has blemished the work with their (my) thoughts and opinions.

But so what? No one could possibly have more reverence for books than I do, but perhaps I’ve treated them just a bit too preciously. If a sentence, a paragraph, even a single word excites me, what’s the harm in pointing it out? The next reader might be irked.

Or perhaps they’d be grateful to discover that someone else was equally moved by the author. In a strange way, it’s almost like keeping a diary, isn’t it? Your thoughts and feelings, in written form. They just happen to share a page with someone else’s thoughts and feelings, like a book club with the members separated by decades.

So far, I’m all talk. It’s been a week since I first began thinking about this and I’ve yet to take pen to paper. I’m still a tad concerned that I’ll feel like a criminal.

But it’s also tempting to leave a bit of yourself for the next reader, too.

A note to say, “Don’t you just love this?”

Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction, and occasionally reconsiders lifelong rules.

Find most of his books at DomTestaBooks.com, and his other work here.

I used to be skeptical of online reviews. Now I’m downright cynical about them.

The best example I’ve seen of their unreliability? A war between fans of Breaking Bad and fans of Game of Thrones.

It began because an episode from Breaking Bad’s final season was the top-rated TV episode of all time on IMDB.com. Hundreds of thousands of user ratings had it sitting at a perfect 10. And maniacal fans of the show wanted to keep it that way, with no competition for the crown.

So whenever another show scored top marks, Breaking Bad fans would start bombing it with one-star reviews. They did it with Succession, Chernobyl, and even the Breaking Bad spinoff Better Call Saul. Each of these shows was blistered with thousands of one-star reviews.

When the Game of Thrones spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, came out of the gate hot, BB’s fans went to work, review-bombing like mad.

Game of Thrones fans retaliated, giving that “perfect 10” episode of Breaking Bad more than 70,000 one-star reviews. That was enough to wipe out the perfect score.

Yes, with all our remarkable advances in technology, this is what humankind has chosen to do with it.

It’s Not Just Hollywood

There are already countless stories of restaurants paying their employees a bonus if they’ll recruit friends to lavish their place with bogus five-star praise. Then, the same posse will review-bomb the competition.

It’s all coordinated manipulation, and the practice is rampant in so many industries.

Then you have a different flavor, which is basically just individual pettiness. These are angry, frustrated souls who dole out one-star reviews for anything if they’ve been even slightly inconvenienced. There are no shades between five- and one-star service—it’s all or nothing, and the power that comes from sticking someone with a one-star review is intoxicating.

Tough Shit, Dom

Then there are the one-stars who come from a different place altogether. I once received a one-star review from someone who tried downloading one of my ebooks from Amazon and had trouble with the retailer’s system. So my book got one star.

They never read it. Their tech issue was with Amazon, not with me. But I’m the one who got punished. When I wrote to Amazon, pointing out the issue, they responded that the review would remain. In other words, “tough shit, Dom.”

Which leaves me asking: why would anyone place a smidge of confidence in any online reviews? They’ve been hijacked for every nefarious purpose imaginable, and yet we’re supposed to make informed buying decisions based on them. It’s insane.

After a while, you learn to just live with the system, warts and all. The radio industry taught me to have thick skin, and my foray into the publishing world made me grateful for those radio battle scars.

The One Honest Number

Has all this made me ignore reviews entirely? Not quite. Years ago, I found the most reliable reviews are the three-stars. Those are people who are clearly not cheerleaders, hired guns selected to offer up five stars. Nor are they one-star arsonists, the mildly inconvenienced citizens who demand perfection from anyone and anything.

Three-star folks generally give you the good and the bad. I find them much more trustworthy.

So on the rare occasions I do wade in, I go straight to the threes. But honestly? Unless it’s word-of-mouth from a trusted friend, I’ll keep ignoring most online reviews. They’ve become a joke.

Now, quickly, give this post a thumbs-up. 🤣

Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction, and he’s received plenty of reviews in his career. He holds a grudge against exactly one of them.

Find his five-star books at DomTestaBooks.com.

Let’s face it: we do some things in life because we have to and some things because we want to.

When it comes to your career, the perfect world is where those come together like a beautiful Venn diagram.

The differences fascinate me. Hosting a morning radio show for decades, I would frequently ask callers to the show, “What do you do?” And my follow-up was often, “Do you enjoy it?”

It broke my heart when the majority of callers would groan at that second question. Driving home from the radio station, I would quietly express gratitude to the universe that my profession intersected with my vocation.

For years, I didn’t understand the difference between those two—in fact, I thought of ‘vocation’ as just a synonym for ‘profession.’ It’s not.

The word sprang from the Latin vocare, or “to call.” Today, we think of it as your “calling.” Teaching may be your profession, but your desire to educate young people is your vocation.

Hosting radio shows was my profession; my vocation was to entertain people and give them something to think about during their drive to work.

Where This Gets Personal

Writers may have one basic profession—write to make a living—but one writer’s vocation could be drastically different from another. Personally, I feel like a storyteller. Other writers seek to educate. Some write to invoke laughter. Some simply like to piss off anyone who doesn’t agree with them politically.

Hey, I consider that a vocation.

It’s important for you to separate the two in your own head, no matter what your profession. When you clearly understand what brings you joy, you may be better able to apply yourself to a particular profession.

And if you’re in the arts, especially writing, having a clear vision can pave an otherwise bumpy road for you.

When I first set out to produce a spy series, I took my love of thriller novels and aimed for an audience that also enjoyed science and humor. My vocation was to provide escapist adventure for people who didn’t take thrillers too seriously.

When I wrote the Galahad series for young adults, I simply channeled 12-year-old me, recalling the rollicking sci-fi stories I enjoyed at that time. Those books weren’t written for some vast audience “out there.” They were written to entertain juvenile Dom.

But that’s the real secret. Writing the things that would entertain you will often be the books that find their people. People like you—as frightening as that may seem. Because while strangers can admire what you make, only your people will feel it.

You have a profession. That’s the paycheck. Your vocation is the part where somebody, somewhere, realizes they’re not alone.

Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction, and still hasn't figured out which one is the day job.

Find most of his books at DomTestaBooks.com.

The social media message was unexpected, which added to the delight it brought me. Danielle said she’d read the first book I ever wrote, a young adult science fiction story called Comet’s Curse, when she was 14.

Now, at 35, she’d just finished reading that tattered copy again—with her 12-year-old daughter.

Two thoughts crossed my mind as this sank in.

First, just pure gratitude that someone would not only keep one of my books for decades, but then share their love of it with their children. That totally touched my heart.

But the second thought was more philosophical: All these years later, am I even that same writer she enjoyed in middle school?

Clearly, I’m not, and it’s not a matter of better or worse—some might think I’ve improved, others might say I’ve gone down the toilet. But I’m not the same person, let alone the same writer.

I’m like the Ship of Theseus. So are you. If you’re not familiar with it, that’s the classic thought experiment based on the ship used by the Greek hero, Theseus.

In a nutshell, it explores the idea that if pieces of the ship are gradually replaced through the years, plank by plank, eventually the entire ship will be made up entirely of replacement parts.

At that point, is it still the same ship that launched all those years ago?

Researchers claim some cells in your body could last an entire lifetime, primarily in the heart, the eye, and your cerebral cortex. But the vast majority of you is replaced over time.

Skin cells renew every two to four weeks, red blood cells get recycled every four months or so, and your bone cells will turn over every ten years. As time passes, you’re basically a new model of yourself.

My writing today is nothing like it was when Danielle enjoyed Comet’s Curse as a teen. The book itself has even changed author names since—the entire Galahad series sails under a new flag now, a pen name, Tyber North—though the story itself did not change. Same ship, different colors on the mast.

But we experience more than just physical changes. My thoughts have evolved, my tastes have changed, and big chunks of my personality have morphed, too.

You Can’t Argue With the Ocean

I’m a walking, talking Ship of Theseus. I may look more or less the way I did when I first left port, but years and years on the high seas of life have swapped out one plank after another.

Some people are terrified of that, and I understand the urge to resist. But you can’t hold back the rebuilding any more than a captain can order the ocean to leave his hull alone. The sea gets its say. Every voyage remakes you a little, whether you signed off on it or not.

Here’s the part I find exciting, though: you don’t get a vote on whether you change, but you get an enormous one on what goes back in the empty spot—the quality of the timber, the shape of the vessel, the heading you choose. It’s happening, my friend.

So the question becomes: how much effort will you put into shaping that change in the best possible way?

Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction, and is thrilled that his planks keep getting replaced.
Find most of his books, including Comet’s Curse, at DomTestaBooks.com, and some of his other musings here.

I recently read the novel “Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John Mandel. And she had a line that stopped me cold. I re-read it a couple of times.

Let’s start by saying it’s simply a great line. Mandel certainly knows her craft.

But besides the structure of the line itself, it resonated with me—and maybe you—because it’s such a casual and yet spot-on observation.

It’s human nature to feel a low hum of irritation with the people we encounter each day. I’m writing this in a coffee shop and the person at the table beside me actually took a phone call on speaker.

Our days, in fact, are often a pileup of tiny annoyances. What Mandel has done, however, is place a mirror in front of us. While my oblivious table neighbor came across as obnoxious in that moment, how often am I doing things that vex others?

Your loved ones not only see you every day, but must endure your peccadilloes as part of their daily routine. No matter how much they love you, your little quirks—over time—torture them like the chirp-chirp of a smoke alarm’s dying battery.

It truly does require, as Mandel said, a generosity of spirit to not murder us in our sleep.

Remember that the next time you’re ready to lose it over someone chewing too loudly.

Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction, and knows a thing or two about being tolerated.

Find his published books here, and more of his work here.

We go through two distinct phases in our adult life:

The first two-thirds is spent acquiring stuff.

The rest is spent trying to unload most of it.

I am squarely in purge mode. I can’t walk into a room without inwardly sighing, taking in all the crap I once thought I had to have. Now, I just want most of it gone.

Downsizing means extremely painful decisions loom ahead. That includes my large collection of books. All three floors of my home, including the basement, contain bookshelves, each filled with my treasures.

Anyone who has moved multiple boxes of books—and, like me, moved multiple times—will agree it’s beyond a pain in the ass. We love the things, and I’m glad they’ve always moved with me.

But they’re heavy and bulky. I certainly don’t look forward to doing it again. So I’m weighing my options, such as donations to libraries and non-profits, and even eBay for some of the choice first editions.

Why we keep them

It got me thinking—not about the heartbreak of giving away my prized possessions, which is bad enough—but about why many of us love our little libraries.

It’s because we love seeing our passion on display. I also read ebooks and listen to audiobooks, and those are fine. But a digital collection stashed on your phone, tablet, or Kindle is cold and invisible. Those gorgeous covers are reduced to thumbnails. You’d never know the books were there if you didn’t click.

Those hardbacks and paperbacks, however, sit proudly on your shelves and visually represent your taste to visitors. And, although non-readers would never understand it, they provide emotional comfort.

I guess the same thing could be said about the album collections many of us used to have on display. Or for some people, their wall of VHS tapes or DVDs. The books, movies, and music weren’t reduced to a line or thumbnail on a device; they were art, for crying out loud.

Yes, yes, I know

Like many, I appreciate the convenience factor of ebooks and audiobooks. I recognize that, in many ways, it’s progress, allowing us access to a vast assortment of books we might never experience. I get it.

But the cost of that convenience is real. The warmth produced by a wall of books disappears, replaced by digital code. Another slice of our humanity served up as an offering to the digital gods.

I’ll soon be parting with a sizable portion of my library in order to downsize. Choosing which books stay and which ones go will be agonizing. Some folks might laugh, but I expect it will be one of the most depressing days of my life.

And worst of all is the nagging feeling that I’ll look back later and regret my decision. I’ll actually miss having to haul around those heavy boxes, and I’ll never again be able to glance up at my favorite art.

Progress sucks.

Dom Testa has written 29 books and is now trying to get rid of several hundred. The irony is not lost on him.

Find his books at DomTestaBooks.com and some of his other projects here.

On a recent podcast, the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, made an interesting point.

He said he was never great at anything—but he had a lot of range.

It was one of those moments where I paused the interview and sank into thought. Because Adam described me as much as himself.

In one of my books, I mentioned that I much preferred knowing a little bit about a lot of things, rather than knowing a lot about a few things. Like this social media big shot, I like to think my range is wide, even if I’m not much of an expert on too many things.

The thing is, it’s not like one way is better than the other. In fact, I’m convinced the world needs both kinds of people. The truly brilliant ones who devote the bulk of their brain power to one singular pursuit are the ones who can take credit for some of our greatest technological advances. They hurl themselves headlong into their single-minded purpose and we benefit from it.

The others—like me, and maybe you—perhaps could be seen as the lubricant that keeps the motor running. We know enough about enough so that things don’t break down.

I’ve seen a full-on genius in one area stumble when they had to do something outside their scope. It’s just the way our brains are wired; some are laser-focused to achieve one outcome, and the rest of us are more of the Jack-of-All-Trades-Master-of-None variety.

I suspect many creative people in the arts fall into the former category: authors, musicians, and painters. And we’re glad they focus their little gray cells on their passion.

Which puts me in a strange space, since authors are supposed to be the focused type. But I’ve written 29 books and they wander across so many different genres that bookstores don’t know where to shelve me.

Even my one specialty refused to specialize.

Mosseri says he was never great at anything, and he runs Instagram.

I was never great at anything either, and I’ve built a whole newsletter out of knowing a little about a lot. Somehow, the system works.

Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction, having never settled on either. It's a range thing.
Find much of his work at DomTestaBooks.com.

Ever get the feeling a lot of CEOs are either ex-jocks, or maybe the guys who peaked during intramural softball and never quite recovered?

They treat business like a football game. Some of them cling to their favorite sports metaphors like lucky socks. We’re told we must:

- Step up to the plate

- Keep our eye on the ball

- Remember this is a marathon, not a sprint

And when they want to get everyone working longer hours for no additional pay, it’s suddenly “all hands on deck.” All that unpaid overtime builds character, ya know.

We’ve all been in that room. We know exactly how all of this is presented.

Hovering over all of it, though, and often uttered with a raised eyebrow, is the most loaded sports phrase in the corporate playbook:

I worked for large companies for decades, and I watched that term morph through the years. Initially it was defined pretty much the same way it is on the sports field: someone who does what’s best for the team, sometimes at their own expense.

Along the way, the term was quietly and thoroughly ruined. As useful phrases often are.

Today, employees are asked to do many things that were never in their job description. They’re expected to cover for coworkers who are total slackers. They’re asked to give up personal time and work for free over a weekend.

Push back even slightly, and there it is:

You’re clearly not a team player.

What’s funny is how the term is never used today in a positive manner at all. You only hear it when someone questions a bad plan, refuses to kiss the boss’s ass, or stops carrying the workload of the office laggard who shows up for a paycheck and little else.

It’s the Scarlett Letter for the business world, except the shame is invented, the rules are flexible, and the branding iron is always ready and hot. The term has been usurped for one simple purpose: control.

The Label

In the business world, the first person to slap a label on someone usually wins. Accuracy is not important—this is about speed. Whoever fires first gets to frame the story. After that, accuracy becomes negotiable.

And once a label sticks, you’re immediately on the defensive. Which is unfortunate, because a person on the defensive always looks guilty. Even when they’re not. Hell, especially when they’re not.

That’s why “not a team player” is such a useful phrase for management. It’s vague, it’s clearly subjective, and it sounds damning without actually accusing anyone of anything specific. It’s the corporate equivalent of “I’m not saying there’s a problem. I’m just saying there might be.”

Once that label is hung on you, it’s like a branding iron being held just inches from your backside. You may not feel it yet, but you’re certainly aware it’s there. And that awareness alone tends to make people behave.

I’ll tell you what this kind of language doesn’t do: it doesn’t improve morale or inspire better work.

Instead, it creates fear and resentment, while management retains plausible deniability. No one said you were in trouble. They just implied it.

And this is key: Often it’s not even management doing this.

Coworkers learn the game quickly. Accuse someone on your team of not being a team player, and suddenly you look committed, loyal, and all-in. The other person, meanwhile, is stuck explaining themselves.

Manipulative? Yes.

Treacherous? Oh yeah.

Lazy? Of course.

And far too often, it works. The weasel wins.

The Invisible Work

From what I’m seen over many years of slaving away for various companies, the things that should earn you the label “team player” almost never do.

- Rarely take sick days while coworkers mysteriously vanish every Monday?

- Cover for people who forget, screw up, or simply don’t care?

- Build relationships with clients who quite literally keep the company solvent?

- Spend your own money to make customers happier?

Sorry, none of that earns you the label of team player. None of it protects you. And none of it matters once somebody decides you’re not a team player.

In modern corporate usage, the phrase usually translates to something else entirely:

- Don’t ask questions

- Don’t draw boundaries

- Don’t point out obvious imbalances or bad plans

- And above all, don’t make anyone uncomfortable—especially upward

Notice how none of those have anything to do with effort, competence, or results?

One-Way Loyalty

So let me turn it around. How often would you describe your company as a team player?

Stop laughing. I’m serious.

A buddy of mine who works in the hospitality field said, “I find it frustrating that companies always talk about loyalty, but there is never loyalty from the other side.”

Of course, corporate has an answer for that: Hey, we’re paying you, aren’t we?

Well, yeah, that’s technically how employment works. But why does it often feel like you’re doing it through clenched teeth?

I remember a senior vice-president once griping that I’d earned another bonus during a strong quarter. He complained to my face about having to write the check, as if I were somehow ripping off the company.

You know how you earn a bonus, though, right?

By making the company a shitload of money.

That was an eye-opening moment for me. And judging by the nodding heads I’ve seen over the years, I not alone.

What companies really seem to hate is when you walk out the door for a better opportunity. They make a big show of how betrayed they feel. How disloyal you’ve been. How disappointed they are.

And yet they have no problem firing people with no warning at all. Somehow that doesn’t count as betrayal.

The thing is, we all know this is true. We know it’s true. You just can’t talk about one-way loyalty because . . . well, because the moment you do, you’re not a team player.

Office Politicians

Let’s be fair. Almost every company has at least one person on the payroll who is a complete pain in the ass. I’ve worked with them. You’ve worked with them. We always will.

Even when they’re “team players” in the corporate sense, they can make your work life miserable.

The worst ones are the people who have management completely snowed. You know they’re awful, and everyone around you knows they’re awful. But the boss somehow thinks they’re shining beacons of employee perfection.

They’re the Eddie Haskells of the workplace, and if you don’t know that reference, I completely wasted a perfect description I was very proud of.

These are the people who never miss a chance to look helpful, loyal, and deeply concerned about the team—usually while quietly leaning on the experience and connections of more senior employees, or just quietly letting others do the work.

They smile. They nod. They cc everyone.

They may not be great at their jobs, but they are exceptional at office politics.

And they understand something important: optics beat output.

Once you realize that, a lot of things start to make uncomfortable sense.

Rethink the label

Perhaps it’s time we collectively take back the phrase and make sure it’s well-defined in every workplace:

A real team player isn’t the person who never says no.

It’s the person who knows when yes becomes self-sabotage.

And a real team isn’t one that demands loyalty as proof of worth.

It’s one that doesn’t have to threaten you with a label to get your best work.

So the next time someone questions whether or not you’re a team player, there’s a better question hiding beneath it:

Is this actually a team? Or just a place that needs one more person to say yes?

Because real teams don’t brand people.

They don’t weaponize language.

And they don’t confuse obedience with commitment.

If they do, the problem isn’t you.

It never was.

Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction, and has been labeled a team player, a problem child, and occasionally both in the same week.

Find his books at DomTestaBooks.com and some of his other projects here.

The popularity of audiobooks has soared in the last few years. Because of that, the demand for quality narrators has surged, as well.

No surprise that many of the best are licensing their voices for use by AI systems, so one really good voice actor could “narrate” a hundred books a day, potentially. Or a million.

But here’s a question I’m directing at both the writers (creators) and the readers (listeners):

Should a really good narrator have free license to edit the work they’re performing?

As a writer, my knee-jerk reaction would be to shudder and say, “Absolutely not.” An actor should never have the liberty to rewrite my work. That’s not what they were hired to do.

As someone who listens to a fair number of audiobooks, however, let me argue the other side.

I recently listened to a novel read by a terrific voice actor. They brought the story to life like only a skilled narrator can do. Honestly, some books may be great, but the audio version makes them even better.

(The best example I’ve heard is Project Hail Mary. That’s a wonderful book by Andy Weir—but Ray Porter’s interpretation of it was stellar, if you’ll pardon the pun.)

In the book I just finished, though, the author chose to end nearly every sentence of dialogue with the attribution. So a sample exchange might go like this:

“Are you listening to me?” said Derrick.

“I am,” said Elaine.

“It doesn’t seem like it,” said Derrick.

“That’s because I’m not interested in what you’re saying,” said Elaine.

Even in print, that’s ridiculous. Authors should be better than that. Readers are smart enough in a two-person conversation to usually figure out who’s saying what, especially in a back-and-forth manner.

But in an audiobook? It’s torture. The constant “he said” and “she said” and “he said” and “she said.” Enough already!

This is what prompted my original question: Should a good narrator, especially one who is doing a helluva job distinguishing between two characters, be allowed the grace to drop a few attributions along the way, just to save our ears and our sanity?

I say yes. Again, writers should be better than that anyway, but at least trust a professional voice actor enough to get the attribution across without actually saying it so many times that it makes us stop liking the book.

Thoughts from writers? Thoughts from listeners?

Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction, and would like Ray Porter to read almost everything from now on.

Find Dom’s books at DomTestaBooks.com, and some of his other projects here.

I’ve encountered plenty of assholes in my life. You have, too. They walk among us, and chances are they’re not quiet, reserved people. You rarely seem to bump into an asshole introvert, although I’m sure they exist. Maybe they’re silent jerks.

The subject came up recently after my wife finished a challenging day of piano lessons. She’s been an instructor for 20 years, and her students are generally kids between the ages of 4 and 12. The majority of them are absolutely delightful.

On this day, however, one of her charges, a little guy who’s eight, was just hell on wheels. Like he is every single time. Mean, rude, disrespectful, and even disruptive. One time, while his sister was having her lesson, he wandered unseen into another room where he wasn’t supposed to be, found a candle lighter, and was caught trying to set some of our furniture on fire.

Now, we can talk all day about parenting and discipline and all that jazz. But sitting on the porch later that evening, I proposed to my wife that the kid will likely be a lifelong asshole and is simply showing his colors from the get-go.

And that led to the follow-up discussion, with multiple unanswered questions, including: Are people born assholes, or is it learned behavior?

Is this particular little hellion walking around with genes that have already determined his personality, pushing him toward a life of assholism—if that’s not a word, it should be—and nothing he can do will pull him back into the light?

Or was he born neutral and his environment shoved him off the nice track?

Are we all born neutral? Are we all born where it’s a 50-50 proposition that we’ll be a creep as an adult?

Or are there two cosmic buckets, established way back during the Big Bang, and lifeforms are ordained at birth to fall into one or the other? For a minute, I got a kick out of imagining asshole dogs, asshole cats, and even asshole bunnies. I mean, they must exist, right?

The Case for Nature

Personally, I’m convinced jerks are born, not made. And here’s why:

Nature makes our children different from each other. If you’re the parent of more than one child, you already know this. One of your kids is shy and gentle, the other is outgoing and a borderline nightmare. One loves to sit quietly and read, the other is climbing on the furniture and terrorizing the family dog.

It works out this way because nature is covering its ass. If everyone had the same constitutional makeup, then if something happened to the detriment of that particular design, the entire species would perish. So nature produces variations. Even with the same two parents, the outcome is skewed from child to child.

With that in mind, it stands to reason that one child will be kind, the other runs the risk of being a creep. In some cases, kindness wins the day. But—and I hate to say it, but it’s true—sometimes jerks are necessary. Makes me sick to say it, actually, but I recognize there are times when you need an asshole in your midst.

I have a friend with two daughters, both around college age, both in the dating world. One has a boyfriend who might be one of the nicest young men I’ve ever encountered. The other daughter seems to constantly attract little assholes. Her parents shake their heads, but, to me, it’s the law of the universe.

Fine, Blame the Parents

For the sake of argument, let’s assume it’s more nurture than nature. That means the jerk my friend’s daughter is currently dating must come from a shitty family who raised this young man in a house filled with boorish, rude, and disrespectful behavior.

Nope. The parents seem like the nicest people in the world. Their son, however, turned out like the spawn of Satan.

Ah, you say, but maybe the kids were more influenced by their peers than their families. And I tend to agree with that. In the grand scheme of things, I believe kids are more influenced by their friends than their parents—which, I know, parents never want to hear.

But I’ve got news for you; your peers influenced you way more than you’ve ever given them credit for. Parents do the best they can, but they eventually have to trust that their little darlings will use that background to ward off the peer pressure to act like a shithead. Often they do. Often they do not.

And when I see that eight-year-old monster that my wife is trying to instruct in the beauty of piano—a heroic effort, I must say—then I have to wonder: Just how much environmental impact outside the home could this kid have been exposed to in just a few years? I can see a teenager becoming a dick because of his friends.

But a third-grader?

Objection Overruled

You may have alternate arguments in favor of the nurture angle. That’s cool.

I think a lot of it is wishful thinking. We WANT to believe we can entirely influence our children by providing them with a good, loving home and a solid foundation. I’m not saying those things don’t help in many cases.

But you’ll be hard-pressed to convince me that a certain percentage of children don’t burst from the womb on a mission to become assholes. They’re wired that way.

And unless we come up with some Clockwork Orange method of “adjusting” them—an idea that’s abhorrent to me and hopefully to you, as well—it’s simply going to be our lot in life to navigate a world populated with a certain number of d-bags.

The shitheads can’t help it.

Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction, and is happy to report that his furniture survived.
Find most of his books here, and his other projects here.

Imagine you have a brilliant idea for a book. Not an article, not a short essay, but a book that likely will run more than 400 pages. The idea has captivated you and it must be born.

So you sit down to write.

But you have no laptop. No desktop computer. Not even a typewriter.

And before you get comfortable thinking you’ll just use a pen, forget it. You don’t have one of those, either.

On your desk—which is lit by candlelight, I should add—sits a feather, a small jar of ink, and a stack of paper. Your 400 pages are calling. Ready? Go.

This imagery came to mind because I just finished reading Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” While countless volumes have been written about the story itself and the strength of her writing, I had an entirely different thought.

How the hell did she physically manage to create a draft of this length—more than 120,000 words—with the incredibly archaic tools at her disposal?

The writing instrument itself boggles the mind. We’ve all seen old-fashioned quills that one dipped into the jar of ink. But are you aware of how much labor went into that practice? You didn’t just run down to the store and buy a box of quills. You often made one yourself, and then had to maintain it, which was no easy task.

So you grab a feather and your penknife. Yeah, that’s where the term for that device comes from; it was a knife used to actually produce a pen out of a feather. And after using it for a few pages, it was not in the best shape. That meant busting out the knife again and doing a little trimming and shaping to get it back into writing condition.

It’s not as if the ink cooperated. It ran or it blotted, and it was necessary to employ powder to keep it from ruining an entire page. The pressure you used had a lot to do with that, also, so you were mindful of the exact force you exerted on the quill. You certainly didn’t want to scratch through a page.

And you were mindful of this for hundreds of pages.

Mistakes

Think of your own writing today. What do you do when you screw up?

Jane had no backspace key, no Command-Z. Her option was to make little character changes in the space above or below a line. In more extreme cases, she might have to cross out a line or—God forbid—an entire paragraph or page.

Complicating this matter was the price. Paper was not plentiful, nor was it cheap. Mistakes in the early 19^th century were expensive.

Jane Austen had to forge a different relationship with her prose than you and I might. There had to be an intentionality behind every phrase, every paragraph. It’s easy for us to go back and rewrite a section of our work. We can do it in mere moments. For Jane, a psychological weight accompanied each word, something we could never understand.

Although she lived more than 200 years ago, we’re fortunate that her actual manuscripts have survived. We can see her revisions, how sometimes she’d rewrite entire pages, spilling more ink across more pages. We can study her actual handwriting, which was small and dense, an efficiency choice, no doubt, to accommodate the cost.

Write it. Then write it again.

Add to this the fact that her 400-page novel wasn’t written once. It was written at least twice.

In those days, authors completed a first draft that was downright messy, like a battlefield of words. In their day, they had a charming name for this. They called it the foul copy.

That meant sharpening your quill and writing it all again in what was known as the fair copy. If you were fortunate enough to be able to afford it, you might pay a copyist to produce this legible version. Often, though, it fell upon the writer.

So Jane labored through 120,000 words, constantly maintaining the delicate quill needed to scratch words onto a page, careful to not damage the paper.

And then she did all 120,000 words over again.

I think about her picking up that quill, after months of what had to be torture to produce a novel the length of “Pride and Prejudice.” The cramping she must’ve felt in her hands!

What if she’d had another option?

Well, pencils actually did exist at the time, but they weren’t anything like the trusty yellow number-two we grew up with. These were scratch tools, used almost exclusively for notes and sketches, but certainly not for writing novels. For serious written work, whether it was correspondence or manuscript pages, ink was the expected and respectable medium. To use a pencil for important work would’ve been like submitting a manuscript today in Comic Sans.

And perhaps most heartbreaking of all was how close Jane was to the age of the steel-nibbed pen. In mass-produced form, these didn’t exist until the 1820s; Jane died in 1817. She missed this revolution—no more trimming and maintaining quills—by about ten years. It boggles my mind to think what this remarkable writer could’ve created with that boost.

Instead, she produced all her masterpieces the hard way.

What about you?

As writers, we’re prone to crabbing about the process. We give a heavy sigh when we sit down at our shiny laptop to knock out 500 words. The term “writer’s block” didn’t exist until the mid-20^th century, perhaps the first of many excuses we dream up to explain our sometimes-lazy minds.

I think of the hardships Jane Austen endured to deliver some of the greatest writing of all time. I reflect on the friction she faced compared to our cushy experience.

Did the hard labor it took to produce “Pride and Prejudice” or “Mansfield Park” or “Emma” force a different relationship with the work? Did the constraints she felt result in better writing? Or just an anxious writer?

None of this was lost on me as I finished reading the book and then sat down at my laptop. The contrast of it all—her reality versus mine—struck in one single concrete moment:

In my very first sentence, I used the delete key.

Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction, and he would not have survived 1813.

Find most of his work at DomTestaBooks.com, and his other work here.

Jane Austen image from a watercolor by James Andrews of Maidenhead based on an unfinished work by Cassandra Austen. Engraving by Lizars.derivative work: Archibald Tuttle, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Book title page image: Jane Austen (1775-1817), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

1800s pen image: GlucinumMaster, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Quill and ink image by Robin Trim on Unsplash

On a crystal clear night, if you stare at the sky long enough, you’ll notice the stars are not still.

They dance. They promenade from one horizon to the other, all the while dazzling us with their tiny flashes. They twinkle, as the children’s song reminds us.

But here’s something you may not know. When you travel to space, you leave the twinkle behind on Earth. It disappears. Outside our planet’s atmosphere, the stars look like steady, sharp points of light. No twinkle.

It’s not complicated science. The twinkle is basically the result of the star’s light fighting its way through our atmosphere’s turbulence. The technical term is scintillation.

As the fragile light from a star passes through the various layers of the atmosphere, with different temperatures and different densities, it bends. This refraction creates a sort of optical illusion. To us, the star is twinkling.

When You Shine

As it turns out, the atmosphere is not the only thing with complex layers. You’ve had turbulence in your life. We all have. Life is never smooth. It fluctuates, and it has its own layers of density in the form of personal and professional challenges. One day, everything is quiet and orderly. The next, it’s chaos.

Don’t you find it interesting that the turbulence in our lives is often the catalyst for our finest moments? When faced with the greatest difficulties, that’s the moment we reach down for a little extra.

We fight through the turbulence and we shine.

That’s not to say the experience isn’t painful. Often it is. But as the old sayings go, anyone can pilot a ship through calm seas. The savviest captains are the ones who shine when the waves get choppy.

Some might long for a life with no turbulence. It certainly doesn’t feel like a gift while you’re in it.

But then, the star has no idea it’s twinkling.

Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction, and he stares at the night sky a lot. His neighbors have questions.

Find more of his work here.

It’s astonishing how artificial intelligence has woven through almost every aspect of our lives—it might even be all aspects by the time this post sees the digital light of day.

But it’s amusing to note the ways our robot friends are similar to us, too. For example, they are situationally smart.

There’s no denying their brilliant abilities in a growing number of areas. I had Claude put together a business plan for one small component of my growing portfolio of digital activities, and in less than a minute I had a seven-page document in my hands that looked like someone with an MBA had assembled it.

Because Claude essentially has an MBA.

And yet, minutes later, it could not recall something we’d covered earlier that morning, and even contradicted itself. No big deal. One line of correction and it was off and running again. In some respects, it’s brilliant. In others, it needs a little hand-holding.

Just Like Us

If that sounds familiar, it’s because WE are situationally smart, too.

There are some things you do, either professionally or just as a hobby/side hustle, where you might be in the top 1%. You could practically do it half-asleep or while juggling three tennis balls.

Then you turn around and bungle another task, one that could be your neighbor’s superpower.

We’re brilliant about some things and complete morons about others. I wouldn’t label myself a polymath, but I do have decent skills spread across several disciplines.

Yet I can’t figure out an Excel spreadsheet to save my ass. I’ve tried. It’s in my blind spot. I’ve watched my wife crochet and knit some of the most incredible items of clothing I’ve ever seen, and I’m totally lost just watching her do it. I’m like a dog staring at a fan.

AI is this way. It has remarkable skills that often stagger us with their complexities. And yet my buddy Claude never seems to know what day it is. Seriously. Earlier generations might’ve called it an idiot savant.

Maybe the reason some people are uncomfortable with the explosion of AI is that it’s not only a true disruptor, but in some ways it reminds us of ourselves—galloping through some parts of life while stumbling through others.

And I wonder if this is why the thought of humanoid robots that look too much like us causes such distress. They would close that loop.

We all have skills and blind spots. It’s what makes us human.

And it’s what keeps AI from ascending to the top of Olympus.

For now.

Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction, and in 2004 created an AI character named Roc for a YA science fiction series. So he might be a little protective of the concept. And biased.

Find more of Dom’s work here.

Know what a mondegreen is? You do, even if you aren’t familiar with that term.

It’s when you’re listening to a song and you misunderstand what the singer was actually singing.

Classic examples include CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising” where “there’s a bad moon on the rise” becomes “there’s a bathroom on the right,” or Jimi Hendrix telling us, “‘scuse me, while I kiss this guy.”

There are also oronyms, where “ice cream” becomes “I scream.”

But another variation is known as an eggcorn. (The origin of these terms could be an article unto itself.)

With an eggcorn, you’re mishearing something, but the wrong version could reasonably make sense to someone who didn’t know better. Like looking for Chester Drawers instead of a chest of drawers. A friend of mine swore the burger chain was called Water Burger. And my ex-sister-in-law was one of many shocked to learn that Colorado’s School of Mines was not the School of Minds.

Hey, you’ve gotta be pretty brainy to get accepted, so why not?

Steering and Stirring

I bring this up because I stumbled across a perfect eggcorn for anyone trying to organize their life, either personally or professionally.

During a long walk, I tuned in to a podcast where the guest was discussing ways to optimize your time. As someone who has multiple plates spinning on any given day, I was interested.

At one point, the man spoke about how important it was to steer the ship. That’s a nice metaphor for making sure you’re on the right path.

But with his European accent, I didn’t hear “steer the ship.” I clearly heard him say you’ve got to “stir the shit.”

I had to rewind it a couple of times. Did he just say I’ve got to stir the shit?

I finally figured it out. I spent the rest of the walk laughing.

Funny, but . . .

And yet, the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was just as apt as piloting that imaginary ship. Because when you’re managing a business, isn’t a portion of your day spent stirring the shit?

Your friendly neighborhood wastewater plant is doing that. In order to infuse the good kind of bacteria with oxygen in order to break down organic waste, they stir . . . well, shit.

For us, if we let things sit and fester too long, we end up with a pile of similar material. We must constantly stir all that muck, keeping things active and moving. I’m constantly stirring.

Kudos to the podcast guest who, without knowing it, accidentally delivered better advice than he’d intended.

Steer the ship. But don’t forget to stir the shit.

Sometimes they’re the same job.

Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction, and stirs both relentlessly.

Find most of his work here.

Here’s a fantasy I’ve nurtured for the last 20 years:

No permanent home address. Just two suitcases and my laptop. Moving to a new town every three months.

Call it radical mobility.

Many people share this dream. Others are appalled at the thought.

But here’s the thing. Anyone who does share this fantasy is much less likely to pursue it today than they would’ve been just a few years ago. Americans are staying put at record numbers.

Why?

For some, it’s the mortgage-rate trap. They got into a home at just 3% and now they’re unwilling to give that up.

Some are handcuffed by a dual-income. One person in a relationship might be able to pick up and go, but not both.

And the cost of everything has ballooned so much that people find it hard enough to make their current living situation work, let alone fund a nomadic lifestyle.

The Evolving Fantasy

My fantasy has morphed in the last couple of years. I originally thought of traveling the entire U.S., my bags tossed into the back and the open road beckoning. I even imagined getting temporary part-time jobs in each town to provide a few bucks while I spent the rest of my hours writing and exploring.

Lately, though, my eyes have wandered across the pond. Now, the fantasy doesn’t take place in the States, but rather in Europe. Passport in hand, one suitcase on a train instead of two, an overseas adventure that follows the earlier prescription but adds an exotic touch.

Some of us have the “Go West” gene baked in, maybe fueled by some DNA left over from our ancestors’ hunter-gatherer days. There’s no denying a certain romanticism associated with the freedom.

At times, it even became part of our cultural mythology. In the 1950s and 60s, people were either inspired by Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road” or stayed behind and felt a tinge of jealousy. The book was all about rejecting the mainstream and instead embracing freedom while we “found ourselves.”

My fantasy has nothing to do with anything that deep. I honestly don’t think I’m searching for anything, at least nothing profound, and it’s certainly not tied to politics. It’s rooted in curiosity and a desire to ditch the often suffocating responsibilities of home ownership. Call it a release valve.

The Anchored Generation

There must be a sizable number of people simmering with the same desire for freedom. Surveys show 8% of Americans now move on a regular basis—when, not long ago, it was 20%. What does that say about us? Have we become the Anchored Generation? Are we free in spirit and yet trapped in practice?

And more importantly, have we made peace with this reality, or are we quietly restless?

I work from home. I own my house outright. By every measure, I’m freer to pick up and go than most Americans.

My bags aren’t packed. I’m one little nudge away.

Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction, and has two suitcases that are starting to give him the side-eye.

Find all his work, including his books, here.

“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” considered one of the greatest films ever made, earned about $37 million during its initial theatrical run.

“Dude, Where’s My Car?” pulled in $73 million.

Twice what the Paul Newman/Robert Redford classic brought in. Which should tell you something is off.

When you glance at the list of all-time box office champions, 38 of the top 39 have come out since 2003. Only four of the top 100 came out before 2000, and you won’t find a movie released prior to 1990 until you get to #116. That’s “E.T.”

The original “Star Wars”—a legendary film by any standard—shows up at #124.

The List That Doesn't Mean Much

The game of measuring films by their box office numbers is silly, and everyone knows it. We’re left with a rather meaningless list.

When “Star Wars” debuted in 1977, the average price of a movie ticket was $2.23. Today, the average has crept above $16. An IMAX ticket to see the upcoming third “Dune” movie sold out at $50. Fifty dollars.

We’re not comparing apples to apples. We’re not even comparing apples to oranges. This is more like apples to screwdrivers.

Yes, a few lists attempt to show box office totals for older movies in today’s dollars—but even that’s not a good measurement. It assumes movies follow some natural curve of overall prices, when in reality the price increases of different commodities fluctuate wildly.

A Big Mac that cost about 90 cents in 1977 should cost $4.81 today according to inflation calculators. Instead, the average is nearly seven dollars. Meanwhile, gasoline that ran 62 cents a gallon in 1977 should be $3.32 — but war fears have pushed that closer to $4.50, and rising.

So simply applying inflationary numbers to the box office doesn’t cut it. Is there a better way?

So How Do We Actually Measure This?

For years, I suggested we simply count butts in seats. Cost be damned—how many people actually paid to see the movie?

Then I realized that’s not entirely fair either, because the U.S. population in 1977 was around 220 million, and today it’s just shy of 350 million. That’s a lot more people eligible to plop their butts in a seat.

So here’s where I’ve landed: percentage of butts in seats compared to the population.

Now we’re getting somewhere!

Let's Run the Numbers

If “Star Wars” earned about $307 million domestically in 1977—a staggering number given that $2.23 ticket price—that works out to roughly 138 million tickets sold. Sure, some die-hard fans went multiple times. But that’s still 138 million tickets out of a population of 220 million. The math: 138 divided by 220 equals about 63%.

Now let’s try 2024’s box office champ, “Inside Out 2.” It raked in $638 million. With an average ticket price of roughly $11, that’s about 58 million tickets sold in a population of around 335 million, or about 17%.

So while comparing raw box office dollars places “Inside Out 2” as the 10th biggest movie of all time, it isn’t even in the same galaxy as “Star Wars” from nearly 50 years earlier.

You can try this with almost any film.

“Jaws,” the iconic 1975 masterpiece, was the first movie to ever surpass the $100 million mark at the box office—reaching that number in just 38 days. It earned $260 million during its initial run and held the number one spot for a remarkable 14 straight weeks.

With tickets running around $2.03—and I’m sure my dad grumbled about that—it works out to about 128 million butts in seats.

Stir in the U.S. population of 216 million that year, and the calculation comes out to 59%.

A few others for comparison:

• “Avatar” — 34%. The number one box office champion of all time . . . but not on this list.

• “Avengers: Endgame” — 29%. Number two all-time, but far less impressive here.

• “The Godfather” — 38%

• “Titanic” — 54%

• “Barbie” — 18%

And Then There's Gone With the Wind

Perhaps the most striking example, though, is “Gone With the Wind.” When it came out in 1939, it pulled in $32 million, a stunning figure for the time. With an average ticket price of 23 cents, that means about 139 million tickets were sold. And the U.S. population then was only 131 million.

Our calculation: 106%. On average, every American saw the movie, with some going back for more.

Today’s biggest movies make more money. Yesterday’s biggest movies reached more people. They weren’t just “successful”—they were cultural events in a way modern films can’t quite match.

Is that because of audience fragmentation, thanks to an explosion of entertainment choices? Or is it a reflection of quality? You’d have to decide that for yourself.

But maybe the more interesting question isn’t how much money a movie made. Maybe it’s simpler than that. And more human.

How many people couldn’t avoid it?

Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction, and saw “Jaws” twice in the theater—and has the therapy bills to prove it.

Find his work at DomTestaBooks.com.

It happened again: I mentioned that I’d traveled to the UK for eleven days by myself, and several people gave me a bug-eyed look while exclaiming, “By yourself? Oh, I could never do that!“

Well, they could, actually, and might even enjoy it.

After making multiple solo trips around the US and overseas, I’ve compiled a few notes and observations that might help you if you’re considering such a journey.

I can save you time right up front and perhaps eliminate you from the Solo Travel Club by appraising your personality:

• Are you okay with traveling (relatively) light and fast?

• Are you capable of asking for help and information from strangers in a strange land?

• And, perhaps the most important of all: Are you able to go more than an hour or two without talking to another human being?

Don’t laugh; some people require a non-stop verbal connection, and must be talking at all times. We’ve all seen—and heard—them.

Solo travel, while not lonely per se, requires that you be all right by yourself for long stretches.

If you said ‘no’ to any of these, you might not be a candidate. In that case, find a buddy and double up.

What I’ve learned

For one thing, you see twice as much. I don’t care how much you have in common with a travel partner, it’s just not reasonable to expect everyone to have the same pace.

I walk fast, I take in a lot in a short amount of time, and I’m not waiting for my travel partner to (a) read every detail on the placard, (b) take pictures of every single step along the way, or (c) pee again.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t fly through every location. But we each have our own individual pacing and interest level for travel, and two people simply take longer.

Three or more? Forget it, you’re going to see much less than what you’d experience on your own.

Next, you meet more people, especially locals.

Sure, you can meet people when you’re traveling as a couple, but think about it: when there are two of you, you’re usually talking to each other at cafes and pubs. When you’re alone, you seek out other people. I’m often doing book research on these trips, and I relish the chance to ask locals about their town or their business. They love to talk about it. And they usually love making recommendations.

Then there’s the distraction factor. As you maneuver down small European streets, for instance, there’s an endless amount of sensory input at your disposal: shops, people, ruins, and small details you miss when you’re chatting with a friend.

But solo? You see almost everything and can easily stop or go back to explore.

But there’s more

There’s an additional benefit I hesitate to list, simply because it’s often misunderstood. But I’ll just say it:

It’s true. Whenever I plop down with my backpack in a foreign restaurant or pub, the servers invariably give me more attention than when I’m with a travel partner. I suppose they feel like I’m a lost puppy or something, when the truth is I’m having the time of my life. That’s okay with me; it also means someone else to chat with about the area.

One old pub

On my last solo trip to the UK, I spontaneously hopped off a train to explore a small medieval village called Chilham, population about 500. I wandered into a pub, The Woolpack Inn, which has been in continuous operation since 1480 (that’s before Columbus bumped into the Americas).

Look at this sign they have on the wall, listing all the pub’s owners since the 1400s, and the monarch that ruled at the time.

I sat at the bar and instantly was adopted by Nikola, the owner, and five of the townsfolk. One of them, Sid, had lived in Chilham for 83 of his 88 years. Not only was he charming, but full of remarkable stories. Here he is:

And Nikola pushed local beers and wine on me to sample. Please, stop some more.

That’s just one of countless examples. I understand solo travel isn’t for everyone; there’s likely a certain personality gene required to be comfortable in it.

As a writer, it’s perfect, allowing me quiet time on a train to get work done. (Much of this particular piece was composed between London’s Victoria Station and Bearsted, on my way to visit Leed’s Castle.)

Is it for you? Perhaps you should invest one week of your life to find out. You might surprise yourself—and your bug-eyed friends.

Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction, and thinks some itineraries suffer from too much consensus.
Find his work at DomTestaBooks.com.

If you’d prefer to listen to this article read by the author, you can do that right here: ⬇️

There are two literacy stories in America right now. One makes headlines.

The other makes readers.

Khari Arnold is one of several fathers in the Atlanta area who are bonding with their kids through reading. Not just handing a book to them, but sitting down and reading with them.

Contrast that with the stories that dominate the literacy headlines. It happened again last week when an organization announced yet another donation of thousands of books to children in the New York area.

Smiles all around. It felt like a win for literacy, and maybe even a small step toward fixing a bigger problem.

Are we applauding the wrong part of the story?

Most people think the answer to getting kids to read is a simple equation: give them more books and they’ll read.

Seems logical. More access, more titles, more pages. Problem solved.

It’s a noble thought and the intentions are wonderful. But that’s not really how it works.

Yes, a book can be a doorway.

It can also be a brick.

It all depends on whether anyone ever opens it.

Access vs Interest

I spent more than 20 years working with students in elementary and middle schools. I watched firsthand as students were given books—some of them award winners, many of them classics.

After a glance, the books were set aside, never to be touched again.

That’s where the problem really lies. Not access. Interest. Just handing them books won’t solve the problem, any more than buying a piano turns someone into Mozart.

Khari Arnold had a different idea: one-on-one reading sessions, where kids share a learning experience with a parent who is fully present.

Arnold says he spent a year doing this with his daughter, then posted an Instagram reel, inviting other fathers to join him. A few did. Then a few more. Before long, there were dozens showing up for these “Library Link-Ups.” It forged a community of fathers who care.

They care not just about their own child’s growth and education, but about the bigger picture. Library Dads has grown into a nonprofit whose pillars are:

Bonding.

Books.

Brotherhood.

The right role models

The real strength of this organization is the good it’s doing with the group most in need of its help: young boys. America has a crisis on its hands with reading skills, and boys are falling further and further behind.

Few of them have a male role model when it comes to reading, and perhaps never have. The Library Dads are doing something about it.

That goes miles beyond just handing a few books to kids and hoping something sticks.

I’m not knocking book donations; the kids definitely need access to books.

It’s just that we’ve grown to love solving problems with big gestures, the kind that generate headlines. It fools us into thinking we’re making progress.

But sit down and read with one child every day? While it may not register with the news agencies, it’s one of those small gestures that actually changes outcomes.

We don’t have a book shortage.

We have an attention shortage. And the only thing that fixes that is time.

Your time.

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Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction, and believes the most important lessons aren’t taught, but shared.

Find his work at DomTestaBooks.com.

Blame the Internet. That’s what everyone else does.

I’m talking about the reason you don’t get your writing done, and, consequently, why your words don’t end up in print. Same with all of the poor little gadgets, like the cell phone or the tablet or the video game. They’re consistently accused of sabotaging the efforts of writers.

In a seemingly never-ending quest to overcome these abominable tools of convenience, we search for help, ironically from other electronic marvels. Digital task programs. Calendar overlords. Project management systems. Hell, there are apps you can download to your phone or laptop that lock out the Internet for a prescribed length of time, just so you can get your work finished.

Yes, we’re at the point where our own willpower and determination be damned. We can’t cut it. We need digital supervisors to shepherd our efforts and keep us focused.

The Convenient Villain

Distraction is easily blamed on outside influences, and these do contribute quite a bit. I readily admit to working better away from home because the lure of things—even stupid, mindless things—is too great around the house. It’s as if we need to have something evil to act as scapegoat for our own shortcomings. I can’t help it! Those email alerts keep going off.

Which is patently ridiculous, and we know it’s ridiculous, but it’s an odd compact we’ve made with the Muse or whatever label you assign to your creative side: I’ll humor you occasionally with five hundred words, but I reserve the right to screw around whenever I like and it won’t be my fault. Do you hear me? Not. My. Fault.

We’re all wired differently when it comes to outside distractions. For writers, a prime example is the cliched coffee shop. I saw a comic strip about a guy who innocently sat alone in a coffee shop with no laptop and no cell phone to stare at. Just sat there, drinking his coffee and looking around. What a weirdo, one woman thinks to herself before diving back into her little screen.

It is kinda funny that generally people on their laptops outnumber the people just sitting there or chatting with another humanoid. It’s a sign of the times when the most-frequent complaint baristas receive has nothing to do with the beverages and everything to do with the number of available outlets.

But coffee shops don’t work for everyone. I really want to write there, but the conversation at the table next to me is just too interesting or the music is bothersome. I understand that some people need that background ambiance. I mean, there’s even an app for that, too. Yes, a “sounds of the coffee shop” app in case you’re stuck at home and need that clinky/chatty/dark-roasted atmosphere in order to spew words.

There’s a fine line, however, between something that distracts versus something that provides respite.

When a Break Becomes a Trap

For instance, I heard a podcast interview with writer Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy, and the screenplay for Cheryl Strayed’s Wild). He mentioned keeping a jigsaw puzzle going at a table beside his writing workspace and how he’ll sometimes turn around and labor over it.

As someone who’s been a jigsaw freak since childhood—and has assembled a 24,000-piece behemoth—I was instantly intrigued. I wondered if this was a trick I could borrow, then just as quickly discarded the idea. Nick is able to use it to clear his mind for additional writing, but I know myself. I would get lost in the puzzle and maybe not resurface for days.

Paraphrasing a Clint Eastwood character, “We’ve all got to know our limitations.” What may be a therapeutic break for you could be a subversive distraction for me.

The Distractions You Don’t Get to Avoid

Then there are the necessary outside distractions, the kinds you can’t just ignore. Although it may be the ultimate dream, you’re likely not able to write full-time yet and so this thing called “a job” pops up. If you’re in a relationship, you better figure out a way to wedge your writing life into that commitment. We have obligations and responsibilities. We gotta pay the bills and we gotta keep our people happy.

Oh, and don’t forget parenting. It’s probably disrespectful to label that a distraction, but can we agree it’s vexing trying to pen a bestseller when some little—but loud—person is demanding a goddamned peanut butter sandwich?

So yeah, there are real life distractions, and there’s nothing you can do about most of those.

The Call Is Coming From Inside the House

What really interests me, though, are not necessarily the outside distractions, but the inner. To me, cell phones and video games and family are nothing compared to our own, self-inflicted damage. The kind you can’t blame on anything else.

We already touched on fear, which is, as we described it, internally generated. But in its purest sense, a distraction is, quoting one dictionary source, “that which divides the attention or prevents concentration.”

Based on that definition, I nominate, as the worst offender in the writer’s pantheon of distraction, the syndrome I call “the new baby in the house.”

Here’s an example. Like you, I have ideas for stories or articles spring to mind that immediately captivate me. I’ll jot down notes and even some narrative or dialogue, things I’m sure will propel the idea into a published smash hit. It’s not unusual for the first chapter or two to spill out, my fingers barely able to keep up with the word flow. It’s gonna be huge.

And then . . .

And then another idea strikes me. An idea just as tantalizing, maybe more so. And I jot down notes and even some narrative or dialogue. A first chapter may even materialize.

At this point you’re saying, “Wait, what about the first idea?”

It’s been abandoned. Maybe not officially. You still keep the manuscript on your desktop, or simply minimized in the lower task bar. But c’mon, the new baby in the house—that fresh story idea, the one that promises publishing superstardom—has kidnapped your attention.

Now that I think of it, perhaps the new-baby metaphor isn’t right. This is more like a siren song, the pernicious call leading you to paralyzing doom. Paralyzing because you’ll get two or three chapters into this new idea before yet another steals your soul. Sidetrack after sidetrack.

See, this is an all-too-real form of distraction that doesn’t get the attention normally paid to tangible, physical things like phones and email. And I believe, at its core, it’s more damaging. We can lock up our phones and shut off the Internet connection, but we can’t shut off our monkey minds. There’s no downloadable app to lock up your brain and keep it on task.

I’d pay $99 for one if it existed. Maybe more. Probably more.

If you’re looking for the cheap and easy solution to this problem, I’m afraid you won’t find one. This is where pure discipline is required, the only tonic that can help. You need to cultivate a mental toughness to catalogue new ideas, including a few quick notes, and then put the idea down for a nap. It’ll still be there when you finish the first project.

Success Is a Wonderful Waste of Time

And then we get to the internal distraction created by fantasy. No, not the dragon, wizard, troll, or gorgon forms of fantasy, but rather the dreams we concoct about the eventual success of our words.

Everyone will love this! Easily number one on Amazon. New York will come calling with a seven-figure contract for all the follow-ups. I want the new house on a lake somewhere, with a dock. Oh, and a little kitchenette in my master bedroom.

You know, the stuff we incessantly think about when we should actually be producing the words that would generate the fantasy life we’re imagining.

To be fair, a bit of fantasy is not only okay, but it’s also an important ingredient to success. After all, we’re told we need to visualize success, right? It’s why people create vision boards.

The problem comes when we slip headlong into a dream world, and we spend all our time visualizing rather than creating. Just like your diet, a healthy mix is crucial. And don’t ask, “What’s a healthy mix?” You’re bullshitting yourself if you pretend to not know where the line is drawn.

No need to feel guilty if you’ve occupied Fantasy Land for too long. Today is a good day to put your fantasy life on its own diet. It’s a distraction when it’s bloated, and our goal is to minimize distractions.

Know the Enemy

So we’ve seen the enemy, and it is distraction. Some are external, many are internal, and all of them are threats to the fragile framework of creation. Don’t beat yourself up over a few random detours along your path. Just pay attention to what is most often hijacking your time and figure out a plan that helps to protect those valuable minutes. It could be as simple as finding an isolated, quiet oasis where you can paint a picture with your words.

We’ll explore that specific strategy in the next chapter. In the meantime, stay committed and true to the color of your dreams.

Just don’t get lost in the palette.

Dom Testa writes fiction and nonfiction. “The Color of Your Dreams” takes a deep dive into the mental roadblocks that often hinder people who want to get published.

Find it at DomTestaBooks.com.