This was today’s newsletter, but I thought it’d make a good blog post, too, so:

1. Do something small every day and it adds up. (Every day, no matter what I try to blog and write in my diary.)

2. I have lots of Daily Rituals when I work: I keep everything in a banker’s box, I scatter index cards and markers around the house, I tack pictures of my heroes on a bulletin board above my desk, I press the sleep timer on my clock radio, and I smoke a fake cigarette pencil.

3. First drafts don’t need to be perfect, they just need to exist. (More in Anne Lamott’s wonderful book, Bird By Bird.)

4. The tools matter and the tools don’t matter.

5. Notebooks double in power if you take the time to re-read them.

6. It’s way easier to get things done when you’re working on things worth doing.

7. You can spend your time on work, family, or friends, but you can only have two at a time.

8. If you’re blocked, play with blocks.

9. I can’t think about my book if I want to fall asleep at night, so I need to wind down with a good book that’s not in the genre I’m writing in. Comics and fiction work well, but what I really love is trashy rock ‘n’ roll histories, like Please Kill Me, Van Halen Rising, The Dirt, or, the one I’m reading right now, Meet Me In The Bathroom.

10. I think I have it figured out, but every time I write a book, I learn new things.