I read a great post on writing by Rachel Aaron recently – how she focuses her writing time to get concentrated results with a mix of tracking her productivity (word counts), knowing what she’s writing and writing enthusiastically – read the post if you’re a writer, it makes for interesting stuff. I’m partway through the first of Rachel’s Eli novels – The Spirit Thief – and enjoying it.

Rachel also has a post about her thoughts the Taleist survey of self-published authors. Her post was interesting, and for a moment I almost considered buying the survey to get a sense of my own efforts – after all this is a business and the survey only costs $5. Except then I read Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Not a real survey” post on the Taleist document, and then the comments following that. Well – completely the opposite take. I’d had a sneaking suspicion that the survey might not be quite up to par, and her overview (and the comments) breaks it down neatly. Too many holes. Still, sometimes you’ve got to dig through a lot of dirt to find any gold.