Hillary Rettig

I was disappointed in this book. I think I picked it up last summer, when I saw the author's workshop offered at Grub Street. I couldn't do the workshop, so I thought this would be a way of getting some of the same benefits, but as I skimmed through the middle sections of the book, I found myself wishing I hadn't even paid the $4 for the ebook.

It turns out I'm not much of a procrastinator or a perfectionist, by Rettig's definitions, and I've never really believed in writer's block. Her suggestions to delegate lower-value tasks to others, or hire people to do them, are pretty useless unless you have a few thousand dollars to throw around (and probably more useful to people without small children). I came away with no really useable ways to increase my work time or productivity, though I did highlight a few passages here and there, and will go back over those in case there's something important.

As someone who has self-published two ebooks, I felt like her $12,000 budget for self-publishing this book (detailed in one of the closing sections) was ridiculously high.

I think that this book is probably most useful to people in graduate school, and it made me so, so glad that I never went for a Ph. D. or an MFA., and may also be useful to some beginning fiction writers.

The upshot of the book is basically this: Cut yourself some slack.… (más)

I love this book. It changed my life. The book is divided into 5 parts along the theme of "managing" an aspect of your life: your mission; your time; your fears; your relationship with self; your relationship with others. Each part is significant and instructive. Rettig includes many examples and tables to help you organize your own life and activism.

One of the main points of this book is this: you will not do good activism if you are burned out. For many, this may mean doing only part-time activism. But some is better than none. This book will teach you how to find that balance and increase your productivity in activism.… (más)