All The Small Things

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Gifting

The best Christmas gifts contain a little bit of your soul.

Which is why I give my close family and friends horcruxes. Nothing says Yuletide fun like a thrumming talisman of pure evil.

It has the side benefit of making me less vulnerable to teenage wizards who vie with dry turkey as the major hazard of the holiday period.

As I am flat out of Terry’s Chocolate Oranges this year, that’s a lot of horcruxes so many will have to die to ensure that I can be putting presents under the tree.

Readership

The constant question asked on Substack is: How should writers grow their readership?

Well, one thing that you can do to get everyone suddenly *very* interested in anything you wrote is to shoot someone famous. Or shoot a lot of people. Quantity can make up for quality in this game.

Typically mass shooters have not penned light romantic novels with a relatable heroine and some comic misunderstandings. They have manifestos with large chunks copied and pasted from the online verbal diarrhea of other terrible people. And yet still they are read more than your Substack. Even if all they’ve got are a few shopping lists (“yogurt, sourdough bread, apples, hollow point ammunition”) then they’ll get millions of views.

Frankly I think this sends the wrong message to would-be authors: Don’t hone your sentence skills on the page, hone your gun skills on the range. Bad grammar, poor spelling, repetition, and even excess adjectives are forgiven if you’ve offed some unfortunates.

“I felt a great disturbance in the MFA Force, as if millions of Iowa Writers' Workshop attendees suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.”

Culture

Someone on LinkedIn mentioned “Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast”. Which is odd because according their daily schedule they get up at 4am and eat the gym, which I remain unconvinced is a food group. Maybe the gym is strategy. I get lost in the broetry.

We here at Lost Tempo have a Head of Strategy and a Head of Culture. The former’s key role is to make PowerPoints no one reads and the latter brings in the cupcakes every other Thursday (ensuring that 20% are gluten-free). There is no chance of one Head eating the other as they never talk to each other. And it seems the cupcakes are equally unconsumed. I have just found 50 in the secure document shredding box. Who is responsible for this??? The interrogations will not stop until we have a psychologically safe workplace.

Podcasts

As a deeply mediocre person, I find Steven Bartlett’s level of achievement relative to his actual abilities inspiring.

It’s like the Paralympics. But for dipsh-ts.

Email

I am besieged by companies telling me that it is not too late to send a last minute Christmas gift. They are right. If anything, it is still too early.