Category: Writing

How to write funny

Neera

Comic writer John Vorhaus says in the book The Comic Toolbox that you don’t need funny bones for comic writing, you need tools.

The one tool he recommends is – break rules, write in a passive tense.

Here is an example:

The room was walked into by a man by whom strong, handsome features were had. A woman was met by him. The bed was lain upon by her. Then the bed was lain upon by him. Clothing was removed from them both. Sex was had. The climax was achieved. Afterward, cigarettes were smoked by them. Suddenly, the door opened by the husband of the woman by whom the bed was lain upon. A gun was held by him. Some screams were screamed and angry words were exchanged. Jealousy was felt by the man by whom the gun was held. The firing of the gun was done by him. The floor was hit by the bodies. Remorse was then felt by the man by whom the gun was held. The gun was turned upon himself. And the rest, as they say, is forensics!

I had a go at it with some random paragraphs I picked from an old diary, exaggerating it and writing it in the past tense.

  1. Late waking up was done this morning. Mucking around was not held. The efficiency was experienced by achieving more in less time. The problems of the world were not contemplated upon while sitting on the throne.
  2. A meeting was held between me and the acting boss. This week’s action items were discussed. The disagreement was reached over tiny matters. The tempers were lost. The voices were raised. Desperate attempts were made by both sides to hold their grounds. The moods were spoiled. The swords were drawn. The throats would have been slain had the meeting not gone over time. Lives were saved due to time constraints.
  3. The gym bag was forgotten at home. A detour was made. The gym bag was picked up. The car was driven to the gym. The gym clothes were put on. The exercise was done half-heartedly. Machines were used to lift weights.
  4. The neighbor’s doorbell was rung. The door was opened by the neighbor with work clothes still on. A piece of paper was given to her with our phone number. A verbal invitation was extended for dinner at the house owned by us. A dinner promise, made to each other fifteen years ago, was fulfilled.

Why I am not intimidated by a blank page and why you shouldn’t either?

Neera

A few years ago I lost two jobs in a day.

I resigned from a job with a very reputed IT Company to take up a six-month contracting role only to realize at the Exit Interview what a mistake I was making.

I went back to the contracting agency saying I was not joining. The same day I told the reputed IT company that I was not leaving. The problem was the IT company said that they can’t guarantee whether they can give me my job back. The contracting agency said their client might have offered the job to someone else after I refused to join.

You must be thinking what this has got to do with me not being intimidated by a blank page.

I am coming to that soon.

This was all my doing. I couldn’t believe how stupid I had been. I had to sit at my desk and pretend to work for the rest of the day and wait. The whole time I felt helpless, angry and lost.

When nothing could calm my nerves I took a pen and a pad and started writing everything that came to my mind. My hands were shaking and my heart was pounding. But I kept writing. I scribbled every feeling I was experiencing. I wrote what a fool I was, how could I make so many mistakes, how unjustified and out of character my behavior was and how I should be punished. I filled three pages before I lifted my head.

All of a sudden I started feeling good.

The problem didn’t seem that big. I became hopeful that some solution will surface.

That day I discovered two things. One, stream-of-consciousness-writing (also known as free-writing) is an excellent way to calm your mind.

Second, freewriting is a great way to overcome the fear of a blank page.

I had filled three pages without stopping.

I was not worried about how good my writing was, or whether it was making any sense, or how rich my vocabulary was. I was just writing my worries away.

Many a time our most fluent and uninterrupted writing comes in the moment of despair when our inner-critic is pushed aside. Whenever I have gone back to read my diaries, I have found that it is the most logical, intimate, and touching writing I have ever done.

I don’t think “writer’s block” actually exists. It’s basically insecurity — it’s your own internal critic turned up to a higher level than it’s supposed to be at that moment, because when you’re starting a work — when the page is blank, when the canvas is open — your critic has to be turned down to zero… The point is actually to get stuff on paper, just to allow yourself to kind of flow.

– Philipp Meyer

Why do we have fear of a blank page?

That blank page became a phobia because you begin to think that whatever you wrote on it was not good enough. I didn’t wake up at four in the morning to write crap, you start saying to yourself, I want it to be good, at least my best, if nothing else.

Right?

Wrong.

Most of the time what I write is rubbish. It is what I do with that crap later on that makes it worth publishing. From the rubbish comes the useful material.

Many people when they can’t write good enough material in the first draft or can’t extract useful from the rubbish quit writing altogether.

That’s it.

All that desire and big claims of being a writer one day gone at the first sign of failure.

You got to write rubbish in order to get better and you ought to write a lot of it.

Jennifer Egan captured it perfectly in her advice on writing:

“You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly… Accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.”

If you persist, over time, that blank page becomes an invitation.

Margaret Atwood recalls a definitive moment from English author George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘1984’, where the hero of the book purchases a notebook, which draws him in.

She feels that this is descriptive of how the blank page affects a writer:

“There’s something compelling about the blank page. It beckons you in to write something on it. It must be filled.” 

— Margaret Atwood

Tools can help

I love the sight of the blank page on 750Words, an online writing app. It is a digital way of writing ‘morning pages.’ If you don’t already know what ‘morning pages’ are, it is an exercise first suggested by Julia Cameron, in her book ‘The Artist’s Way.’

Since the very first time I used the site 750Words I liked it. It has a friendly white space that is soothing to the eye, an Arial font that is big and not intimidating and 31 boxes at the top for each day of the month that gets crossed when you write 750 words precisely.

The site has a reward system too where you get badges for reaching milestones. It gives you word count at the end of the page and an analysis of your writing speed and mood.

It is a very effective way to make you write every day.

To me the blank page on this site an invitation full of possibilities. I can write a poem, a story, a blog post or the things that are worrying me.

It accepts anything and when I finish it gives a word count for the day and a ‘cross’ in the box.

And to finish off the story at the beginning, I learned through the contracting agency that their client hadn’t offered the job to anyone yet and would take me back thinking of my rejection as ‘having a bad day.’ Which indeed I was having.

From something bad, comes something good. Isn’t it?

Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash

A letter to myself

Neera

Sometimes it helps to write a letter to yourself.

When you come to think of it, it is not such a weird idea.

The idea of writing a letter to myself came from Shaunta Grimes post How To Be Your Own Business Coach. Although her post is about sharing techniques she learned from a business coach, there was a gem right in the middle of it which intrigued me.

Shaunta’s coach asked her to fill out a form at the end of the month with standard questions regarding how she was going towards meeting her goals. She thought the form was a bit limited in describing what was going on. So, instead of filling out the form, she wrote her coach a detailed letter.

She was not clear whether her extremely thorough letter impressed her coach or frightened him, but it ended up being so profoundly helpful to her that she wrote one again the next month and the month after that.

She called them end-of-the-month letters.

That was a fascinating idea.

What if, instead of a coach, one write such letters to oneself.

These end-of-the-month letters could be a great way to assess how one is fairing against one’s goals and life in general.

Shaunta wrote:
“My end-of-the-month letter provides me with a real overview of how my business is doing — not just how I think it’s doing. I have a tendency to think everything’s okay, even when things are clearly not okay. Maybe I just don’t want to believe that things are heading downhill, or I’m so focused someplace else that I don’t even realize I’ve dropped a ball somewhere. Conversely, every once in awhile, I’ll find myself certain that the sky is falling, when really, everything’s holding pretty steady. Writing allows me to take a dispassionate top-down look at what’s really going on.”

I am the exact opposite of her. I have a tendency to think that everything is no okay and that I have achieved nothing. I concentrate on the things I have not done and tend to forget the ones which I have accomplished.

When I made a shift from competitive to a creative life earlier this year, I set myself some rules.

The prime one was that I will not waste time. As one grows older it becomes quite evident how little time one has left. Annie Dillard puts it so succinctly that, ‘How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.’  that was one thing I wanted to be aware of.

The only way to make sure that I don’t waste time was to keep a tab of it. I started keeping track of what I do each day in my daily journal. That journal is now a great tool to assess where my time goes each month and what I have achieved.

I sat down to write myself a letter at the end of September.

I wrote about what I was working on, what I was succeeding at and what was proving difficult. I realised that I hadn’t met the goal I had set myself for September. I hadn’t met it not for the lack of effort but because I had set it too early. Its time hadn’t come yet. I listed the new things I started in September and a number of things I accomplished. They were all there in my daily journal and I had forgotten about them. It was an eye-opening exercise, allowing me to see how far I had come in just thirty days. Because there were so many things that still needed to be done, I was feeling overwhelmed and underachieved. It was not a reason to beat myself.

The end-of-the-month letter made me realized I need to be kind to myself.

It made me recognise that I need to give myself more credit for the things I had achieved.

I noticed I was doing too many things which are diluting my efforts and adding unnecessary stress.

I have decided to concentrate my efforts on one to two projects at a time.

The end-of-the-month-letter helped me understand the importance of celebrating.

Life is short and art is long.

It might take me my whole life to get where I want to be. But that is not a reason to not celebrate little victories along the way. Each milestone well celebrated inspires us to achieve the next one.

Afterall it the journey which brings more joy than the destination.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

Mixing words with images

Neera 4 Comments

For some time I have been trying to figure out a way to blend my two passions – writing and drawing. I found the above picture in my papers today and was taken over by its beauty.

I don’t remember where I got it from so can’t give credit to the original creator. But they say imitation is the best compliment you can give to an artist, so I tried to recreate it. Twice, in fact, changing the words each time.

The image is nowhere near as good as the original but I am happy with the first attempt.

I thought the writing around would be hard but it was super easy. I just needed to keep rotating the notebook.

I enjoyed the process so much that I went for the third one, this time finding another figure and word to match her pose.

I can say today has been super productive.

Five rules to overcome self-doubt

Neera 2 Comments

I have often bemoaned over the writer’s self-doubt.

Why, of all the other vocations in the world, writers suffer from self-doubt the most?

It is not because we toil at our craft any less than other artists. Why is it then we feel so inadequate, frivolous, phony, and unaccomplished? Why do we feel our ideas are insignificant, our vocabulary limited, our expression plain?

No writer, it doesn’t matter how many books he has written, has ever reported fully getting rid of it.

Stephen King wrote in On Writing:

I have spent a good many years—too many, I think—being ashamed about what I write. I kept hearing Miss Hisler asking why I wanted to waste my talent, why I wanted to waste my time, why I wanted to write junk. I think I was forty before I realised that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent.

Neil Gaiman talked about it in Commencement Speech at the University of the Arts Class of 2012

The problems of success can be harder because nobody warns you about them.

The first problem of any kind of even limited success is the unshakable conviction that you are getting away with something, and that any moment now, they will discover you. It’s Impostor Syndrome—something my wife Amanda christened the Fraud Police.

In my case, I was convinced that there would be a knock on the door, and a man with a clipboard (I don’t know why he carried a clipboard, in my head, but he did) would be there to tell me it was all over, and they had caught up with me, and now I would have to go and get a real job, one that didn’t consist of making things up and writing them down, and reading books I wanted to read. And then I would go away quietly and get the kind of job where you don’t get to make things up anymore.

Steven Pressfield wrote about it in his excellent book The War of Art:

The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.

Virginia Woolf captured the anguishing self-doubt with which all writers tussle with in her novel, Orlando: A Biography :

Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted people’s parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.

Self-doubt is the worst enemy of writers, a familiar state for all those who put pieces of their inner lives into the outside world.

Determination allows for doubt and for humility — both of which are critical.

Anna Deavere Smith in Letters to a Young Artist

We writers need to learn to live with self-doubt rather than to play hide and seek with it. We ought to embrace it and find ways to work with it.

I have developed five rules to write with confidence and joy even when self-doubt is holding me back.

1. Concentrate On The Verb Rule

The word ‘writer‘ is tricky. It is both a noun and a verb. Most of the time, we get stuck with the noun and forget the verb. The fact is that it is the verb that matters the most. If you can concentrate on the verb, the noun will materialize by itself.

Also, don’t mix up the word ‘writer’ with the words ‘author.’ A writer is someone who writes; an author is someone who has published something. Think of yourself as a ‘writer,’ not as an ‘author.’ It is the former that will make you the latter.

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it.

— William Goldman

2. Retire The Judge rule

The judge is the inner critic that resides in you. He comes uninvited to critique your work and always finds faults in it. Even if others are raving about how good your work is, he will negate them and pinpoint the faults. He has been working all his life, tirelessly giving judgments. It is time he retires. The way to retire him is to buy him a gold watch for his services and send him home to play with his grandchildren.

In the meantime, you double and triple your writing efforts. If you are writing once a month, write once a week; if you are writing once a week, write once a day. The more often you write, the less daunting it becomes. The prolific writing is the only way to outperform the overworking inner critic.

Bad writers tend to have the self-confidence, while the good ones tend to have self-doubt.

– Charles Bukowski

3. Get it done rule

Elizabeth Gilbert gave the famous words in her book The Big Magic, “done is better than good.”

If you keep on waiting for it to be perfect, it will never be done. If it is 80% there, it is good enough.

No book or story, or article is ever finished. You stop working on it.

So give it your best for the day and let it go to the universe. If it is good, it will survive. If not, it will meet its fate. Meanwhile, you are free to write another one.

4. The Pimple Rule

This one is borrowed from Jon Bard of Write it Done. She named it after the best advice she received as a spotty teenager — “No one cares about your pimples because they’re too busy worrying about their own.”

She writes:

It’s so true in every aspect of life.  We think that people are out there ready to pounce when, in reality, they’re more terrified of being pounced upon.

We’ve met some big-time writers who tell us that even as they prepare to publish their fiftieth book or collect another prize, they still have a voice inside that wonders when everyone will catch on to the fact that they’re frauds.  Yep, that little nagging “you don’t deserve it” voice never goes away, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

If you view the outside world as a place filled with vultures ready to swoop down and pick at your bones, it’s time to rethink things.  The truth is this – all those scary would-be haters are too busy scanning the skies for vultures of their own to bother with you.

5. Nothing is original Rule

One thing that self-doubt instills in us that our work is not original. That we are copying and imitating what we are reading from others.

Tell your self-doubt that there is nothing original. Everything that has been created so far in this universe is from some inspiration from something else that existed before it. Imitation and copying are part of the learning process.

Take the pressure off you by not trying to be original and learn from your idols. Even they learned by imitating and copying their idols. Neil Gaiman, an English author of fiction and nonfiction, said in his commencement speech at the University of the Arts, to the class of 2012.

When you are at it, making your art, doing the stuff that only you can do, the urge to copy will start to emerge. That is not a bad thing.

Most of us find our voices only after we have sounded a lot like other people.

But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you.

Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision.

So write and draw, and build and play, and dance and live like only you can.

The moment when you feel, that just possibly, you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists inside you, showing too much of yourself, that is the moment you start to get it right.

You can listen to his full talk in the video below.

In summary

Don’t let doubt ruin your passion.

Have faith in yourself and your abilities.

All writers struggle with self-doubt, even the established ones. But they all learn to mange it.

Follow the five rules overcome your self-doubt.

  1. Concentrate on the verb, not the noun of writing.
  2. Retire the inner critic.
  3. Done is better than good.
  4. No one cares about your pimples because they’re too busy worrying about their own.
  5. Nothing is original.

Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

Journal writing – a simple practice that will make you the writer you want to become.

Neera

Writing is a challenge even for the best of the writers. For beginners, the undertaking is so daunting that most of them give up after a few tries. When the first novel or a bunch of short stories or hastily written poems don’t bring them either the satisfaction or the accolade they were looking for, they give up; without realizing that they could have kept their dream alive by doing one single practice.

Journal writing.

Journal writing is one simple tool that can make you an eloquent writer, a clear thinker and a much better human being.

What is a journal, anyway?

A journal is a place where you record your observations, insights, memories, impressions, and feelings. It is a keeper of your secrets and holder of your dreams and hopes. It is a whiteboard where you analyze stuff and make plans. It is a safe haven to vent your anger and share your hurts.

The simple practice of journal writing, if pursued faithfully, can make you the writer you want to become. Whether you write fiction, nonfiction, blog or business documents, you will find that the practice of keeping a journal makes you a much better writer.

Journal writing has been around for centuries. It is a practice adopted by the old and new writers alike.

Many prolific writers were journal-writers. Rainer Maris Rilke, Virginia Wolf, Whinston Churchill, Louis XiV, Henry David Thoreau, Carl Jung, Anais Nin, and Susan Sontag became the writers they are through the practice of keeping journals.

This is how Anne Frank started, at age thirteen, with the following words in The Diary of a Young Girl.

Thirteen years old Anne went on to become the most famous journal writer in the world even though her life was tragically cut short only a few years after she wrote those words.

If you have too many obstacles in the way to follow your dream, then do just one thing, keep a journal. Here are ten ways a journal will help you become a writer.

1. Journal writing will keep your writing dream alive

Twenty years ago, when I felt an urge to write, I couldn’t even put a decent sentence together. Having not written anything other than a bunch of letters I had no expertise in writing. Out of sheer luck, I picked up an old diary and started writing.

My first entry was a letter to my husband. I wrote on-and-off for a few years, gradually increasing the frequency to weekends and whenever life threw lemons at me. Little by little the urge to write took hold of me so much that any day I don’t write doesn’t feel like the day I have lived.

Journal writing, more than anything else, kept the dream of becoming a writer alive for me. All through the years while I was busy with work, home, raising children and parenting the parents, the only writing I was doing was in the journals. But this simple act made me a much better writer than I was before. I am a full-time writer now. It wouldn’t have been possible without the practice of journal writing.

2. Journal writing helps you become a better writer

When I started writing I had a very limited vocabulary. My writing expression was plain and I didn’t know a lot about literary devices and my knowledge of fiction and non-fiction writing was next to nil. All I had was a desire to write.

My journal became my teacher. I wrote in it whichever way it came, never editing, never trying to improve anything. For the first couple of years, I wrote with a pencil rather than a pen so that I could erase whatever I didn’t like but I don’t remember using it much. It was just there for comfort.

As I wrote I got better and better at it. My vocabulary increased and my sentences improved.

Journal writing provides you with a safe environment to practice. No one is going to read your journals. They are for you and you only. You can write in it whichever way it comes. Broken sentences, random rants, off-tangent remarks, unfinished poems, mundane stories – everything is acceptable.

In journal writing, it is not the outcome but the practice that matters.

3. Journal writing will bring out what lies buried deep inside you

A journal is a place where you can write intimately, truthfully, and without any constraint. No one is going to read what you write. You are writing for yourself.

It is also a very effective tool to bring out to surface what is buried deep inside you. When you write in a journal you inevitably return to the center of your being. A journal becomes a trusted companion to whom you can tell everything without the fear of being judged.

On the surface everything was fine, but deep down I knew something was wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it and the nagging feeling wouldn’t go away. I went through the day, distracted, a part of my brain continuously trying to figure out the problem.

Finally, when the day was over, all the chores done, I sat in my bed and opened up to my journal. Layer by layer I started peeling off the ambiguity. One by one, I recounted all the reasons. Every pent up emotion came out. Raw and fierce.

At times I went off the tangent, but it didn’t matter. In about half an hour I started feeling better as if there was weight on my chest and it has been lifted. I could breathe normally now.

The problem was still there but I had dissected it. It was not a huge monster any more. It lay there in tiny pieces and I was not afraid of it any longer. I knew solution will come to me sometime in future. I closed my journal and drifted off to sleep.

An excerpt from my journal

Journal writing teaches reflection and brings focus. It gives you room to know yourself in depth.

4. Journal writing will help you know yourself

Writing in a journal helps you self-examine. It is a supreme way to record your thoughts and to understand your own thinking process.

The patterns of your thinking, emotions, and actions start becoming evident very early in the process of journal writing.

Unfolding these patterns can empower you to see what you are giving time and attention to; where your thoughts are taking you; what emotions accompany your thoughts; what insights are there and what changes are needed.

Self-awareness brings acceptance and widens our perceptions. The less aware we are about ourselves the more closed and restraint we become. The more secure we feel about ourselves, the easier it is to open up to what’s around us, including to other people’s views and experiences. Journal writing supports this.

5. Journal writing will help you become an observer

Journal writing will train and hone your eye for beauty. It will invite you into the present moment while also allowing you to roam your past. It will open you to experience awe and wonder. It will let you intensify and renew your pleasure in events and situations that have gone well. It will support your recovery and the gaining of wisdom from the times you wish had never happened.

The habit of journal writing creates the most interesting distance between you and your thoughts. Your feelings change when you write your thoughts down and you are able to change your perspective. Experiencing your own powers of observation, coupled with a greater awareness that you have choices, increases your sense of self-mastery and inner stability.

As your journal writing continues, this means that you become not only an acute observer of your own life but also an acute observer of life itself.

6. Journal writing will help you understand the world around you

Journal writing is a supremely effective way to engage more intimately with the world that is all around you.

It will help you become less judgemental and critical of other people and generally less judgemental and more supportive of yourself.

Journal writing is a self-directed source of inner development, yet it also makes the world beyond your own self more real and more vivid. It can be an interface between you and the outside world.

The change might take place at a glacial speed, but you will find out that your writing will become less and less about yourself and more and more about the outside world even if it is about the palm tree outside your window or the birds chatting to each other.

7. Journal writing makes you an original writer

Only you can write your journal. Only you know most about yourself. And only you have your own perspective. When you write in your journals you are not imitating or copying. You are just being you. In your journals, you find your voice.

The freshness that comes from writing a journal permeates your life.

It is impossible to write a journal consistently and not become more reflective, insightful, and original in your writing.

8. Journal writing helps you silence your inner critic

Journal writing is all about process – not goals or outcomes. It is freeing – not constraining. Journal is the place where you can retire the inner critic. How you write, what you write, matter only to you. You are writing to please yourself, no one else.

Sometimes when I read my old notebooks I get drawn into them like a novel. I almost forget that I have written it. Some insights are so profound that I stop and wonder where that came from. All negativity about my writing ability vanishes and a sense of acceptance of my own abilities surfaces.

Journal is a thinking place, where you are least inhibited. Many writers use journals as the place to develop ideas or reflect on their intellectual work in progress.

It can be a place of discovery, learning, emotional relief, and insight. It can also be a playground, where the everyday rules of writing, reflecting, problem-solving, goal-setting, production, and planning no longer apply.

9. Your journals are the containers for your stories

An empty page in your journal is an invitation.

It is a place to collect your stories. A perfect repository of your anecdotes. This is where you describe things that can’t be captured in pictures. Like your home, what it means for you, how it functions and what comfort it brings you.

In your journals your practice noticing and capturing details to make your writing intense. Through your journal, you learn to see the world in more vivid colors. Widen your vision. Excite your senses.

I was hanging clothes on the clothesline when I took off a pair of socks I had already hung and straightened them by pressing them between the palms of my hands. Then I put them up again my cheeks to feel their texture. I hanged them up again, this time slowly and nicely so that when they dry I can fold them the way Marie Kondo suggested. It was then the realization struck me – I now have time to thank my socks. I laughed when I read that suggestion in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying. Now I just did that.

Excerpt from my journal

These stories make perfect reading for rocking-chair days.

Journal writing is a supremely effective way to engage with your own inner world – and to engage more intimately and confidently with the world that is all around you.

10. Your journals itself will become your writing

Over time your journals will become your life’s work, something more precious, truthful, and rich than any book you can write. Many journal writers have left their journals as their legacy. Anais Nin made an art form out of her journal writing. She left behind 150 volumes (about 150,000 pages) many of which got published in her life making her a feminist icon of the sixties.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing or sing in writing then don’t write because our culture has no use for it.

Anais Nin

Start a journal you don’t have one, and for the love of writing keep going if you already have one.

Photo by Essentialiving on Unsplash

I publish two new posts every week to help unleash your creativity. If you don’t want to miss any, join my email list.