Similar Posts
Last Word & Park City Peaks
My youngest’s birthday fell on Thanksgiving this year. We asked her what she wanted to do. She said she wanted to go to a hotel to swim and then play a game as a family, so Nellie and I went to work. Nellie got the game. I got the hotel. Both were great.The game was Last Word by Buffalo Games Inc. It’s fairly simple. There are subject cards with categories on them like “vegetables,” “breeds of dogs,” or “places you find water.” Then there are letter cards. Each player gets a subject card.
The round starts when someone flips over a letter card. If you can think of a word that starts with that letter in your category, you shout it out, slam your subject card down, and then everyone else tries to come up with words that start with that letter and fit the category. Or you try to think of words in someone else’s category if they beat you to it. There’s no order to it–you just shout out the words as they come to your head. The last one to come up with a word before the timer buzzes wins that round. The twist that makes it so fun, however, is that the timer is random.
You can play individually, in teams, or some mix (our youngest and I teamed up). Because of the random timer, anyone who can think up a word can play, which means our daughter who is eight could compete with the one that was seventeen.
We had a great time. One of the funniest things about it is that everyone is desperately trying to come up with words. Some fit, some don’t. Some don’t even exist. For example, when we did the category “male names,” number 3 shouted out “Mancake.” We couldn’t stop laughing. I think that one is going to enter the family vocabulary.
We also had a great time at the Park City Peaks hotel. As far as rooms go, they were good rooms. The bed was a bit too soft for me, but perfect for my wife. We got them for $65 a night, which isn’t bad at all. But it was the pool that made the experience. The pool is an actual pool, not the big bathtubs some newer hotels offer. For example, the deep end is six feet deep. But the cool thing is that half of it is indoors and half of it is out. And the outdoor portion is heated. There’s also a large heated hot tub outside as well. In the picture it’s the thing producing the long row of steam in the back.
It helped that we didn’t have much snow so the place wasn’t crawling with skiers. In fact, we had the pool mostly to ourselves. So imagine: there we were on a November night in this alpine setting, the steam rising off the water, swimming and horsing around underneath the winter stars. It was marvelous. You can be sure we’re going back.
BTW, we had Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant. Let me recommend this to you. It makes the day a breeze. You can still have your homemade turkey dinner, but picking up the turkey a few days after the holiday allows you to get them for cheap, cheap, cheap.
Since when did young adult fiction become the cure for cancer?
Meghan Cox Gurdon wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Stree Journal called “Darkness Too Visible” in which she complained that it was hard to find young adult fiction these days that isn’t filled with coarse, dark material–profanity, pederasty, mutilation, etc. She claims that “contemporary fiction for teens is rife with explicit abuse, violence and depravity” and wonders “why is this considered a good idea?” She concludes by saying:
So it may be that the book industry’s ever-more-appalling offerings for adolescent readers spring from a desperate desire to keep books relevant for the young. Still, everyone does not share the same objectives. The book business exists to sell books; parents exist to rear children, and oughtn’t be daunted by cries of censorship. No family is obliged to acquiesce when publishers use the vehicle of fundamental free-expression principles to try to bulldoze coarseness or misery into their children’s lives.
This, of course, sent hordes of folks into a frenzy of posts sneering at Gurdon’s so-called prissy sensibilities, decrying censorship, and extolling the virtues of young adult literature and dark material in particular. For example, Mary Elizabeth Williams in a Salon piece called “Has young adult fiction become too dark?” rolls her eyes, then deigns to wade into what’s she thinks is an obviously juvenile argument to apparently show Gourdon how “stupid” she really is. Williams concludes:
One of the terrific side effects of an obviously click-baiting piece of editorial twaddle like Gurdon’s is that it reminds people how many fellow passionate readers there are in the world. That incendiary WSJ piece promptly sparked a tear-jerkingly beautiful twitter #YA saves trend full of heartfelt reactions and links to outstandingly reasoned, article responses from well-read adults and teens on the value within so much of YA literature and its downright lifesaving effects.
Williams suggests fiction doesn’t have the power to lead people into bad behaviors. After all, she assures us, “an entire generation of women managed to devour the ‘Flowers in the Attic’ series without having sex with their brothers.” No, according to Williams (and all the #YAsaves folks), YA fiction only saves lives. And she provides a link to prove it.
But Williams misses the mark. Completely. This isn’t about whether fiction has power to influence us in good and bad ways. There’s a huge body of research on media effects which clearly proves fiction’s power for both. Nor is it about the theraputic uses of dark material.
The heart of the matter revolves around a rather mundane thing–customer service and marketing.
Gurdon and those parents she describes in her article want a certain type of entertainment. For years, YA fiction has provided that type of entertainment. But things have changed, and the YA label isn’t reliable to them any more. It’s like someone who has purchased steel cut oatmeal for years is now suddenly bringing the bags home to find them filled with sardines or, horrors, Twinkies.
We can argue the merits of sardines and Twinkies. And a hundred other foods. We can argue the merits of certain types of stories for certain types of readers. And my metaphor above–maybe you think using Twinkies is unfair; maybe you would have wanted me to use something like Triscuts or Wheat Thins. But that’s all beside the point.
The real problem here is that the publishers have ignored a significant segment of the market who want to buy books but can’t find the types they’re interested in. Either the covers and blurb material don’t help them find what they’re looking for, sometimes misleading them, or the publishers have simply made the mistake of not thinking about this segment of the reading market.
The fix is easy. (1) Produce more books for these folks. (2) Label your books in a way that makes it easy for the consumer to find what they want. They’re not asking for censorship. They’re asking for a nutrition label that lets them know what they’re getting. Publishers can do what the movie and gaming industries have done with rating systems that prominently display on the cover. Or use some other method. This isn’t a moral issue, it’s simply a matter of helping the right customers find your good or service. It’s a matter of good marketing and branding.
And I would think, with the upheavals in the book industry today, that publishers and booksellers would want to do whatever they could to boost sales. Surely it doesn’t help to turn customers away because your package is confusing them.
In the meantime, the battle will rage and this simple practical core of the issue will be lost in the fires and clouds of smoke produced by the arguments extolling and excoriating the virtues and vices of fiction.
I need your insight!
Last year I posted about a service I’m working on to get ratings on books for sex, violence, and language. I posted similar thought about YA books in “Since When Did Young Adult Become The Cure For Cancer?“.I’m back.
I did lots of customer discovery last August in an effort to see if book ratings is a problem worth solving, i.e., are there lots of avid readers who would love content ratings and sign up? All my interviews were very positive, but I didn’t finish validating our ideas because I had to stop to get books out and because we discovered some things that made us change some of our assumptions. I started up again a few weeks ago, this time with a team.
To continue the project, we need to interview 20-40 avid cleaner romance readers. Folks who probably read just such a book last month.
Why?
The biggest problem startups like this have is assuming they know what the customer values, being wrong, and building something nobody wants. So before we build anything, we need to first understand exactly what readers are doing today to solve this problem and where (and if) they are struggling. If we can validate the need, I think a lot of folks will be very happy having popular clean reads delivered to their email every week.
If you know someone who fits the bill, please send this post to them. They can shoot me an email by clicking the contact link in the menu bar.
If you fit the bill, please contact me.
It would be incredibly helpful to me to hear about how you approach this and ask you a few questions. It won’t take more than 20 minutes, and there’s no need to prepare in advance.
Hope you had a great 4th!
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
Have you ever gotten into the car to go to destination A and a few turns later realized you’re going to destination B and have to turn around?If so, you’ve experienced the power of habit.
Have you ever told yourself you will NOT eat the cookies sitting out on the counter and two minutes later pick one up and eat it? Or perhaps it was the cigarette. Or the drink.
Habit.
Did you know that the genius behind the methods of Tony Dungy–the only coach in the NFL history to reach the play-offs ten years in a row and the one who turned a troubled Colts team around and three years later took them to win the Super Bowl in 2007–was to teach his players to be faster than everyone else. But they wouldn’t be faster because they would focus on increasing their physical speed. They would be faster because they would learn habits that would make their moves instinct. When his strategy worked, Dungy’s players could move with a speed that was impossible to overcome.
According to some research, more than 40% of the actions we perform each day are not actual decisions, but habits. And habits that we didn’t always consciously choose to start. We have sleeping habits, shopping habits, exercise habits, eating habits. Habits at work, at home, at school. Habits of the mind.
Companies have a huge interest in changing our shopping habits. Coaches have an interest in changing the habits we use when we play. Teachers have an interest in the habits of their classroom. Families and communities have habitual ways of interacting. We all have personal habits we’d like to adopt and others we’d like to give away. But unless you know what you’re doing, habits can be extremely intransigent and slippery things.
The good news is that a lot of research has been done in the last few decades, and we now know how habits work. When we arm ourselves with this knowledge, we’ll have a much better chance of changing. Luckily for us, we don’t have to track all that information down. In The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business, Charles Duhigg draws on hundreds of academic studies, interviews with more than three hundred scientists and executives, and research conducted at dozens of companies in his book and distills all this knowledge to its essence.
The title might sound boring, but Duhigg follows the style of Malcom Gladwell (Outliers, Blink, The Tipping Point), and the Heath brothers (Made to Stick), and has written a book that I couldn’t put down. For example, I couldn’t stop reading about coach Tony Dungy, or Target as it predicts who is pregnant and how far along they are, or the scientists who couldn’t figure out why Alcoholics Anonymous works, or how bad organizational habits led to thirty-one people being burned alive in London’s King’s Cross subway stop. I couldn’t stop reading about why Rosa Parks, not the first African American to refuse to give up her bus seat, could pivot the civil rights movement. I couldn’t stop reading the stories of individuals losing bad habits, others picking up good ones, and others who lost their minds but not their habits. Duhigg uses these and many other examples and studies to illustrate the key principles underlying how habits work. In the appendix, he gives us a guide for examining and forming our own habits.
I personally know the power of changing habits of the mind (which I’ve already written about). And teeth. A few years ago, I flossed once a week. It was such a pain. Now it’s a habit that I almost crave each night. I look back at how I made those changes and see it all laid out in Duhigg’s book. Can I actually change my habit of going to bed late? Stay tuned.
If you’re interested in forming the habits of a class, team, company, or family; if you want to change some of your own habits; if you’re interested in knowing why we do what we do and enjoy the style of Malcom Gladwell and Dan and Chip Heath, then I think you’ll love this book. Let me suggest you watch the video below. Then go to http://charlesduhigg.com/the-power-of-habit/ and click on the “Additional Resources” to watch and read more. Then just get the dang book.
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
I enjoyed Joss Whedon’s movie Serenity as well as many of the TV episodes of Firefly which featured the same characters and world. So when I saw Whedon had put up another movie called Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and made it available over the internet, I had to watch it. And then watch it again, and again.
I loved the characters. I couldn’t get some of the songs out of my mind. Some of the plot turns simply delighted. Here’s a preview.
And here’s where you can watch it right now for free. It’s only 42 minutes long. Give it 4 minutes (literally). If you’re not hooked, let me know right here. I’d give it a PG-13 for some language and thematic stuff.
Good Stuff! Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand is the finest book I’ve read in some time.
It’s tells an engrossing and true World War 2 story about Louis Zamperini, who started out in life as a steal-and-run trouble-maker. He was a kid who’d try the patience of Job. His mother tried to reform him to no avail. His father administered spankings, but physical punishment seemed to have no effect. Louis was constantly in trouble with neighbors, school mates, cops, teachers, store owners.
Louis’s older brother thought Louis would succeed if he were to just receive some positive attention. He thought track, a very popular sport at the time, was just the ticket. Louis loved his brother. In 9th grade he tried running, but the workouts chafed, and then one day he had an altercation with his parents. Louis figured the train would take him away from all his problems. So he ran away, hopped a boxcar, and very quickly learned the freedom of the rails wasn’t freedom at all. It sucked.
When he returned home, defeated, he decided to submit to his brother’s plan. This time it was just what the doctor ordered. Louis ran like mad. He broke records. He got a scholarship to USC and broke more. Louis ran in the 1936 Olympic Games. He didn’t win, but he would the next time they came around. However, the world was in turmoil back then, and Germany and Japan had their own plans which changed Louis’s life forever. He became a bombardier in the Pacific theater.
And that’s where I’m going to stop. The story that awaits you is truly amazing. And Hillenbrand brings it to life with surprising and powerful details. From start to last, I was enthralled. And towards the end, just when I thought the story was over, it took a turn that lifted it from being just another WW2 story with plenty of action to a tale that goes right to the heart of what it means to live. I wept, not for Louis’s pain, as awful as that was, but for something far more vital.
When I first saw the book, its sepia-washed cover turned me away from the tale. But with so many folks talking about it, I thought I’d give the first pages a go. I was delighted, but didn’t make it a priority. Not long after that, my 10th grade nephew told me how much he enjoyed it, and that prompted me to go back (and I’m so glad I did). It’s not that this is a kid’s book or that my nephew has the maturity of an older man. He’s definitely got some reading chops, but it’s not about an advanced writing style either. What is enthralling old and young alike is Zamperini’s story and Hillebrand’s skills in telling it.
How much do I like this book? I’m reading it again, slowly this time, so I can savor every word. Let me recommend you do yourself a favor. If you read one book this year, make it Unbroken.
