54.29%

Today is the 121st consecutive day I've written at least 250 words of fiction. Since the beginning of the year, my minimum has been 337 words (the daily average of the first 95 days in this streak), and I've averaged 460 over that time. This puts me nearly 55% of the way toward one million words.

I like statistics. I like liking what I write more. The latter has prevailed recently, as I have finally found a voice for this character I've been writing off and on for five years. For that breakthrough, I owe both the consistency of work over the past four months and Graham Greene.

Everyone says that THE POWER AND THE GLORY is Greene's masterpiece. Perhaps it is, having read precious little other of Greene's work, I can't judge. I can say that I don't really care for THE POWER AND THE GLORY. It isn't that Greene doesn't write beautifully, or that his characters don't work, or that his effort fails in any meaningful way. I simply don't enjoy reading from the perspective that Greene employs, a sort of limited omniscience (?) that explains to the reader things that the characters on the page would not necessarily know or think.

This is not what I like to read, and it's not how I write. My good work has tended to have close perspective, and genuine voice because of that. I don't have to write to a rule or a style. I have to write to that close perspective on a character only I can know. This is exciting.

Thoughts on A LIFE IN SECRETS

Sarah Helm's A LIFE IN SECRETS reads like the backstory of an Alan Furst novel. It details the life and work of Vera Atkins, whose fame stems from her WW2 work with spies and saboteurs sent from Britain to France and her tenacious search to find information about what happened to them once they were captured. Vera's personal story makes this Furstian, and the book itself is a layered tale of puzzles across six decades.

In studying Vera, Helm's exhaustive search led her both to vindicate Vera and to reveal secrets that Vera sheltered all her life. The book delves into Vera's work during the war, her efforts to locate her agents (particularly the women), her sprawling investigation into what exactly happened to them in concentration camps. That's a whole book right there, but Helm goes further, examining Vera's family history (she was born Jewish in Romania to a German father and an Englishwoman brought up in South Africa), the secrecy in which Vera shrouded it all her life and how that affected her efforts to sanitize her own background and her work during the war.

The book is as much a celebration of the work undertaken by less than ideal agents during WW2 as it is an indictment of gross negligence and incompetence of the intelligence community, often run by less than ideal officers.

I've not given much in the way of specifics about the book, because Vera's story is told so well here that I don't want to spoil it should you decide to read it. It amazes me sometimes that the Allies won the war at all, and it is shameful that we are forgetting more and more about the war in general as time passes.

N.B. This book deals in parts with the horrors of concentration camps. It is necessary to acknowledge these horrors, but it is not easy.

There is now a Level Zero

I have struggled to do my work recently. I would much rather read. Or watch a movie. Or play cards. Or board games. Or Wii Bowling. Or fold laundry.

Yes, fold laundry. It's that bad.

Even when I know I should work, I look at the task at hand and think that it's gonna take SOOOO long or I have to upstairs to do that or something similarly pathetic. Which invokes a round of self-loathing--but ironically, that's not enough to get me to work, either.

I have chosen to tackle the misperception about time. And it works. I simply set aside a short time to do work. Depending on the task, it can range from five to twenty minutes. If I'm having trouble starting an article, I force myself to work for five minutes. Usually by the end of five minutes I'm into it and willing to keep going. For studying, I do twenty minutes. Wherever I am at the end of twenty minutes, I stop. That is my reward for doing the twenty minutes.

Doing this repeatedly over the course of a day nets an impressive amount of work. Today I studied for an hour and forty minutes: five twenty-minute shifts. I also finished an article I was working on in two five minute shifts that both turned into twenty-to-thirty minute shifts.

This tells me that the way I perceive the time necessary to complete a task and the opportunity cost of going ahead and working right now are, shall we say, inadequate. That's being kind. Really, they're destructive.

I have to stop. I only allotted five minutes for this.

The death of youth

My favorite baseball player growing up is now in the Hall of Fame. I am officially old.

Congratulations, Barry Larkin.

Thing 1 saves the game

We have a Wii. My son would spend most of everyday playing on the Wii, if possible. As such, ever since we got the Wii--and more so now that he also has an iPod touch and all of the games thereon--we have made a deliberate effort to emphasize games that we can all play together (on the Wii and otherwise) and games that we can not play on the Wii.

Like most things, we go through phases of interest. For a while we were playing Sorry all the time. Then we were on to Lego board games. By the cosmic accident of an Amazon.com recommendation, I discovered Castle Keep, which led indirectly to a recommendation from someone in a toy shop in Saratoga Springs, New York, that we should play Spot It. We played Castle Keep and Spot It to death last year, adding Sleeping Queens and Loot from Castle Keep maker Gamewright.

Now board games are best taught in the playing. Few games of any kind have so elegant a set of rules that you can explain the flow of play beforehand. (Checkers, maybe? War, but that's a card game.) In teaching new games to kids, you notice that they grasp the goals and mechanics of new games far better in the playing--so much so that one wonders why you don't start like that in the first place.

So we have tended to play games first and ask questions later. Typically, an adult reads the game directions to get a general sense of what's going on and then we dive in, referring to the rules as necessary. In this spirit, I gave a cursory examination to the rules of Duck Duck Bruce, an interesting card game from Gamewright that was a Christmas present to my kids. We played with my parents and my kids, six of us, all playing for the first time. It was a neat game, but one that I lost miserably because I couldn't keep any cards for points. Oh, well. You win some, you lose some, right?

The next day, Lera and I went to see a movie, leaving my kids and parents to their own devices. They decided to play games, including Hedbanz, a guessing game that they also got for Christmas, and Yahtzee. They also played Duck Duck Bruce. My son, the compulsive reader, snatched up the game instructions to pass the long moments between things that entertain him, and discovered that I had taught them the game incorrectly. In my haste to get going, I had misinterpreted one of the directions, the one that saw me lose so many cards and points. The correct rule makes the game much more enjoyable and makes all of the other game features easier to execute.

This tells me many things, foremost among them pay attention to the instructions. Or, beware children who can read. It also suggests that we may be ready for more complicated games. Probably not Axis & Allies, but maybe Ticket to Ride or Scotland Yard.

Non-Fiction in 2011

I read almost as much non-fiction as fiction last year, and that doesn't include all of the study material I read for the CFA Level 2 exam. And in all honesty I read some pretty crappy books. However, these stand out.

About this time last year I wrote about OUTLIERS. Truly remarkable. It doesn't need my commendation but it earned it nonetheless. I'll not talk any more about this except to say that it was so good I'm going to read it again this year.

THE LITTLE BOOK OF BEHAVIORAL INVESTING is from the Little Book series of investment and finance books, each written by a subject-matter expert. Or at least someone who has a reasonably impressive resume and a 'method' that can be distilled into a book. Some of them are great. Christopher Browne's one on value investing is fantastic, as if Jonathan Clements' on more generally getting your financial house in order. Pat Dorsey wrote one that boils down what is basically Morningstar's equity valuation heuristic into a third of the book he wrote on the same subject for Morningstar. Three years ago, I shot some holes in Peter Schiff's Little Book on how not to get smacked around by a bear market, which is now in another edition but probably isn't much better. (Hey, Peter. You were right about decoupling. Too bad it looks like the U.S. isn't the caboose.)

James Montier's take on behavioral investing is concise and to the point. If there is a book folks ought to read before they invest, it shouldn't be something by Ben Graham or Philip Fisher or the Motley Fool. It ought to be THE LITTLE BOOK OF BEHAVIORAL INVESTING. Know thyself, and beware. This book can help you in that direction.

(A more in depth dissection of this subject is YOUR MONEY AND YOUR BRAIN, by Jason Zweig. It too is a fine book, but about four times as long as Montier's Little Book.)

RICHARD THE LIONHEART appealed to me for several reasons. One, the subject. Two, the effort that author Antony Bridge makes to place Richard's actions and perceptions of them in the context of Richard's own time. Too much of what we read and think nowadays is influenced by our modern takes on the Crusades and eight centuries of creative speculation, a la Robin Hood and THE LION IN WINTER. Three, Antony Bridge is a polymath, the author of a brilliant biography here, an accomplished artist in his youth, an officer in military intelligence during WWII and later a priest--and a dynamic preacher. I like that.

The most interesting thing about Richard that Bridge reveals in his efforts to strip away centuries of myth and malice built up around him is that he really was the archetypical knight-king of the Age of Chivalry. Tireless and just like his father, artistic and emotional like his mother, unbeaten in battle, brave to a fault, negligently forgiving, ruthlessly cunning, the only thing Richard lacked was a son.

Thoughts on THE AX

I first read THE AX just after it came out in 1997. I heard an interview with Donald Westlake on NPR, and the premise intrigued me: a man who loses his job to industry-wide offshoring sets out to serially eliminate the remaining competition for the handful of jobs that remain. That's right. The hero of THE AX is a serial killer.

I re-read THE AX in 2011 and was absolutely floored. It was one of the very best books I read last year.

The plotting is intricate, and Westlake girds the book with strong technique. For example, he shifts verb tense in the book so he doesn't have to lay out the story in a straight line. That allows him to start just before the first killing and fill in backstory along the way, letting you know where you are by what tense he's writing in. A nice touch.

The characterization is what sells the unusual story. Burke Devore, serial killer, is troubled, somewhat psychotic, but mostly angry. This could be just a tale of misplaced revenge, but Westlake does two interesting things. He makes Devore see his victims and individuals, with their habits and histories, makes him hate some and regret killing others. He struggles with volition and execution of his plans. It's not easy, but he presses on, alternating between desperation and determination. Then, Devore hones his anger into a force that actually saves his family an unforeseen nightmare. I'll not reveal it, but it is striking how genuine Devore seems and how easily the reader is drawn in, despite his monstrosity.

The story has new immediacy after several years of weak employment prospects in this country. The pent up rage Devore feels for the faceless corporate manipulators who cost him his job is akin to what many feel for similar corporate manipulators who wrecked banks, loans and jobs in 2008 and 2009. And many real-life situations beg the same question Devore faces: how far will you go to hold on to what you have?