The most frequent question I often get is ‘How do you find the time to fit it all in.’ All, presumably, being a full-time job, a parent, exercising, socializing, reading and writing books. How? Do you sleep three hours a night? No, actually, I almost always sleep almost eight hours a night.

One big key is to make consistent, everyday progress. You don’t write a book in a day, or a week, or a month. You write it one word at a time. One day, one hour, at a time.

The other big secret? Divide all those to-do item into distinct categories and it’s alright to be a little selfish, too. 1) things I need to do, 2) things I want to do, and 3) things other people want me to do. You probably won’t get to number 3 very often. Don’t feel guilty. It’s called having boundaries.

Here are 3 crime fiction links, 2 quotes, and 1 question for this week:

3 LINKS

• Kirkus interviews Alex Segura about SECRET IDENTITY, comics in the 70s, Patricia Highsmith, NPR superheroes, and what he’s been reading lately.
  
• With TOKYO REDUX now out in paperback, The Guardian talks to David Peace about Japan, the still unsolved Sadanori Shimoyama case, whether he’s a crime writer or not, and writing 300,000 unusable words.
  
  
• Paste Magazine looks at the upcoming spring streaming adaptations of books including Shining Girls, Slow Horses, Bosch: Legacy, and Tokyo Vice. Hoping they do justice to Beukes’s book. Really enjoyed that one in print.

2 QUOTES

Quotes from Donald Ray Pollock’s Knockemstiff this week:

• “A lot of people get the wrong impression, think there’s something romantic or tragic about hitting bottom.”

• “Because of who we were, I already knew what we would do.”

1 QUESTION

• Did you watch the Netflix adaptation of Pollock’s THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME? What did you think?

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Until next Thursday, happy reading,

Mike

Author the Max Strong thriller series