My Social Media Bet

Posted on by

After an extended break from being online due to family commitments, I was finding it hard to return to regular online posting. The routine was just not there, and I wasn’t finding the oomph inside myself. The answer was to look for outside motivation. I remembered reading a post and watching a vid by Niall Doherty, an adventurer who is travelling the world without flying, and Niall’s suggestion for sticking to long term small increment plans seemed particularly appropriate.

Niall suggests three steps in his Holy Trinity of Productivity blog post: setting a small daily target, making sure you are accountable to someone else, and establishing a harsh penalty for not meeting the daily target.

So, I have now bet Ju Landéesse, who is my manager and web person, that I will produce a tweet and a Facebook post every single day. If I don’t send Ju this content daily, then I have to pay Ju $1000. That’s a ridiculously large amount of money.

The rationale is that, no matter how distracted or busy I am, I am always going to prefer to write the content for my Facebook and Twitter than I am to lose the bet.

The irony of having to find a way to maneuver myself into writing a couple of hundred words of text a day, when I willingly write several thousand words of fiction in a sitting, is not lost on me!

I recommend having a look around Niall Doherty’s site, Disrupting the Rabblement. I stumbled on to Niall’s writing when looking for material on minimalist travel a couple of years ago, and have kept on reading his mix of travelogue, entrepreneurial experimentation and introspection.

Torquere Days of Christmas: Running the Nullarbor

Posted on by

Torquere Press [now closed] are giving away books as their Christmas present to their readers. My novel, Running the Nullarbor, was free on December 23rd and ended December 24th. Thanks to Torquere for making Running the Nullarbor available as a Christmas present in 2014.

I’m very fond of Running the Nullarbor, and the entire Australis Liminus series. The series of adventures are set in a near future, dystopic Australia, full or magic and mayhem. Taken in its entirety, the Australis Liminus series is pretty much what happens when I sweep the contents of my brain onto the keyboard and stir vigorously. Dinosaurs. Lots of dinosaurs and megafauna later in the series. I wrote the series out of order, with the third book, Walking to the Stars, happening first, then the first and second titles written later to explain how the world became that way, and where the megafauna came from.

 

Running the Nullarbor:

Times are tough in Western Australia. There’s a war on, though nobody will call it that yet. Dan, injured in the line of duty, now takes in orphaned children until the Red Cross can find a place for them. He’s become an old hand at looking after the kids, running his little hand crank radio, and just surviving.

That is until Sid rolls up to his house on a motorcycle, claiming to be the uncle of the baby girl Dan is currently looking after. It isn’t that Dan doesn’t believe Sid, it’s just that the man knows nothing about taking care of babies and Dan doesn’t see how Sid is going to manage taking the child across the outback on his bike.

Heavy bombing in the area prompts Dan to flee eastward with Sid and the baby, but neither Sid nor the baby are your ordinary humans and the so-called police action is becoming more and more of a war every day. Will Dan and his companions survive the army, the war, the outback, and worst of all Sid’s relatives to become something more than they are?