My responses were posted today (along with fellow lifehackista Leon Ho’s), putting me in some pretty good company: Liz Strauss, Darren Rowse, John Chow, Leo Babauta, and Steve Pavlina, among others, have all participated. (You can read the full list of participants so far at the Happiness Project main page.)

Alex is also running a contest, offering among other things a $200 donation to the charity of their choice for the interviewee whose interview has the most original comments at the end of the project. There are also prizes for other participants, like the top commenters, so go check it out and start commenting! (The first week’s bloggers have a 2-week headstart on me, so it’s unlikely I’ll win without a lot of help! Unlikely as it is, I’ll pledge the prize, if I win, to Doctors Without Borders. As Alex says, he didn’t tell us there was any sort of contest involved when we participated, so it’s just icing on the cake.)

If you don’t already know Alex Shalman’s work, take some time to check out the rest of his blog, too. Alex is pretty driven, and his drive is contagious. I talked with him a few weeks ago (before he sent me the interview), and he has a way of taking for granted as “done” things that the rest of us see as challenges. Which is to say, he spotlights the excuses we use to put things off and just assumes we’ll get past them. I don’t think he does it consciously, it’s just part of the conversation for him. At his site, where he really is trying to push his readers past their own excuses, he can be very powerful, indeed.

Check it out, and give a little thought to your own answers. What makes you happy? What have you done lately to make yourself happier?

I decided to go ahead with that project, and am well into getting the site up and running. The site is called The Writer’s Technology Companion and will be launching sometime in March at www.writerstechnology.com. There’s a launch page there now, where you can sign up for email notifications or subscribe to the RSS feed so you’ll be informed when the site officially goes live.

The Writer’s Technology Companion is going to cover the tools of the writing trade, including computer hardware and software, blogging tools, ways to promote and sell material on the Web, self-publishing tools, and more. The focus is on writing in general — everyone from romance novelists to screenwriters to freelance technical writers should find something useful.

I look forward to seeing you there!

The question is, am I better off starting a new blog devoted solely to that niche or to start integrating that content into this site?

The advantage to posting it here is that I already have a decent amount of traffic, I have a good position in Google, and I wouldn’t be splitting my attention and time off to yet another project.

The advantage of doing it as its own site is that all the material on the site would be focused on the same topic, so readers interested in the latest writing software wouldn’t have to read about my research interests or political positions or random musings on what goes on in Amazon boardroom when they name e-readers. Also, the tone of the new content is much more straight-forward and serious than here (which isn’t to say it’s not personal — it’s the same voice, but different tone and focus) so their wouldn’t be any dissonance as I jump from practical advice to joking around. Also, any ads or sponsorships could be much more tightly focused.

Any advice?

A coule years ago, I found a flyer in my campus mailbox, from one academic publisher or another telling me how to respond to students’ complaints about textbook prices. The thing is, publishers want you to buy textbooks new, at full price; if they could, they’d outlaw the trade in used textbooks altogether. Even the Text and Academic Authors Association, of which I am a member, takes a strong stance against the sale of used textbooks which, after all, mean less royalties for authors.

But that’s not fair. Our audience as academic authors — and the clientele of academic publishers — are college students, many of them struggling to keep their heads above water. I teach some of my classes at a community college, where tuition is low — it is the cost of textbooks that causes many of my students to drop or to fail (because they try to go without books). If you’re writing for or publishing for college students, you have to respond at least a little to their needs — not act the role of the self-righteous victim because students naturally try to find the best deal they can, and not push unnecessary books into circulation when the ones published last year, or even 10 years ago, are still perfectly fine. How much does Introductory Physics change in the 2 years between editions anyway?!

I make sure my textbooks are available in the bookstore, but I also try to find links to discounted or used copies online, and encourage students to find the cheapest textbook prices they possibly can. And I feel fine about that — my job is to teach social science, not to market the bookstore. At the end of the day, fairness counts.

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One Man’s Opinion is the work of One Man a/k/a Dustin M. Wax o.k. whoever he (or she) REALLY is. What he (or she) writes is some diabolically clever good-guy agitprop (wait a minute…can the good guys produce agitprop?) A solid lefty blogroll, most of whom are already dog run denizens (and the rest will be soon), and in one talking dog’s opinion, over the plate commentary from a left-handed fireballer.

That’s “he”, for the foreseeable future, by the way.

My Talking Dog (TD) Designation is “Dunker”. A TD Designation is like those internet quizzes that tell you which Star Wars character you are, what flavour Doritos you would be, or which transcendental philosopher you should date, except where those are based on solid and objective methodological principles, TD Designations are the subjective opinion of Mr. Dog.

As a Dunker, there are a few things you should know about me. I am a Group 6 “scent hound” from Norway. Ideally, I should be medium-sized and powerfully built, but should not appear heavy, and should convey the impression of endurance. My head is not to be carried highly. It should be clean and noble with good length and parallel planes, not wedge shaped. Finally, I should have two apparently normal testicles fully descended into the scrotum. And that’s good to know. (This information gleaned from ZooClub.)

Anyway, thanks Talking Dog.

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