Like most of my friends as well as the entire planet,  the easiest way for not  volunteering or committing  to do something is to say, “really sorry, but my time is not my own.”  This usually calms feelings of disappointment,  and for me it’s always the truth.  

     As a society, we generally find it hard to say “no.” Yet we’re already  stretched thin by work,  personal responsibilities, putting out fires, and taking care of mind and body. Common sense about survival fails to come to our rescue.    

    There have always been 24 hours in a day, yet it doesn’t feel that way anymore. Can we outsmart  time in some clever way to  better prioritize our needs? What stands in our way?  Which came first, the slow, steady erosion of our attention span, or the  burden we increasingly put on ourselves to do more, see more, read more, and be in the moment more?  Invariably, the “how” is eclipsed by “now what?”

    My own goal is not just to quit adding to the pile of activities I call “life,” but to whittle the pile down to its most important elements. For me, that includes some reading and writing time every day.
    
   For my reading friends, many prefer embracing specific genres and novelists that they have always found “satisfying.”  They escape into the familiar, into a world and characters whose predictability they’ve  almost been guaranteed by the author’s previous works. They like  predictability. They fall in love with a character.  A good story is like a jingle or something your mother told you that you can’t keep out of your head.  

    Most important, the escapism  and “down time” provided by reading are needed by many of us as much as sleeping and eating.    
                   
    Audio books have been a boon to time-starved muti-taskers whose minds  seemingly occupy several universes at the same moment. For anyone whose attention span is more fragile,  here’s another time-saver to try.

      Forgetting the name of the author for a moment, try reading a short novel (around 55,000 words) that might have all the entertainment value, emotion and depth of a traditional 85,000 word book.  As a rough comparison, that’s the difference between reading 200 pages or 300…. between taking 8 hours to finish a book or 12.

    May not sound like  much,  but those  extra four hours could be spent catching up on sleep, texting, or picking up another book.  Seriously.  We economize everything else—why not reading, too?

     From someone who has been writing and publishing  for a while,  short novels, like short stories or poetry, are challenging to write.  Whether it’s your  prose, plot, characters or theme you’re constantly struggling with, there’s little margin for error. Put simply, you have only so many words to work with, and none can be wasted. 

 
Michael R. French’s just-published adult novel, Ghost With Two Hearts, is available online and in select bookstores. Its length is about 54,000 words.

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AUTHOR BLOG:


On the rare occasion someone asks me how I get my ideas for a novel, I politely say, “It’s hard to explain. Everyone’s different.  It’s complicated.”

When I was a teenager I wrote about my emotions. 

In college I pretended I was William Faulkner.

Drafted In the army in the Vietnam era, I read books like Catch-22 and The Naked and the Dead.  I didn’t write anything of my own, but I met people I never imagined existed. I never forgot them. Eventually them became characters in my stories. 

In my late twenties, returning with my wife and children from a Club Med trip, I published my first novel.  It was called Club Caribe.

In my thirties, living in Manhattan, shopping at Bloomingdales a lot, I renamed the store Abingdon’s and it became my second novel and a best seller. It was pure genre.

In my forties, working an intense day-job, I had years of writer’s block but managed to publish some page-turners, echoing my interests in sports, politics, horse racing, and my time in the army.  I also wrote five or six novels that never found a publisher.

In my fifties, more young adult fiction, adaptations, biographies, and self-help books got published. My writer’s voice, unfortunately, was  inconsistent.

In my sixties, leaving my day-job, I stumbled on  a new voice.  It was complicated, messy, and sometimes unbearable. My story telling became more confident, and dug deeper into character and theme. My writing style focused on brevity to make complex shifts in plot and character, which were increasingly three-dimensional. I no longer wrote genre fiction because my life—everyone's life—is not formulaic.

Today, I don’t care so much about sales. I do like when intelligent readers comment on my work. Being compared to other writers is, well, ridiculous. I respect everyone’s journey, because each one is its own novel.

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My wife and I recently returned from a pandemic-delayed trip to Komodo Island National Marine Park, and other distant Indonesian islands. Besides pristine serenity, we longed to find  places that were untouched by plastic debris. A couple of beaches gave us that joy; their unscarred beauty was magic. Yet many beaches were impacted by empty bags of chips, water bottles, styrofoam, baby diapers, tangled fishing lines…  These islands  were often uninhabited and rarely visited: no villages, no park rangers, no big cruise ships.


We had come here on a relatively small ship with 12 other Western snorkelers and divers. Our guide told us the trash had been washed ashore from who knows where. It didn’t matter to us where things came from—that made the environment a political issue. We just wanted to make our own gesture of doing the right thing. And to put us in a new mindset wherever we traveled next. On one beach, in only twenty minutes, we combed the soft coral sands and picked up as much trash as we could, depositing it in our boat’s trash bin. There was plenty we had to leave behind.


We had made a small dent that we guessed would soon be carpeted over with more plastic.  Though we were in plain sight, no one in our group joined us. One couple did say, “thank you.”  I grew up in a time when teenagers left a Dairy Queen and giddily tossed their wrappers out of the car, onto the street. It took years before a new consciousness emerged.


We began to speculate. What if more travelers took it upon themselves to do a quick clean up of a portion of a beach, or for that matter a street, or a vacant lot that had become a random dumping ground?  Specific to travel, what if more hotels, travel agencies, and advocacy groups, beyond calling themselves “environmentalists”  or  “eco-friendly,” encouraged clients to spend twenty minutes to make their own dent in the war on plastics? It could become the next cool thing.  Small gestures can have a cumulative effec

I didn't wig out when I learned there was someone else living in my rental house.  She was Japanese and let me know she had lived here before.  We were both shy about exchanging our stories."

"My first week in Kyoto, walking into a Shinto shrine, I realized my cellphone was missing from my back pocket.  I found it half an hour later, sitting on an empty table in a busy cafe."

"My mind traveled to Emiko's riddle, just after we were throwing stones into the canal.  What could be worse, she asked me, than a terrible cold that could never be cured.  When I finally figured it out, Emiko was nowhere to be found."

​ Sound bites in today’s world are as inevitable as they are the nemesis of clear thinking. Politics thrives on sound bites.  Why use a hundred words to explain something when you can have more impact with two or three?  Slogans and phrases are intended to arouse emotions, which they do, but in  social media they can harden into opinions and battle cries, or conspiracy theories, which somehow replace research and critical thinking. "Who has time for debate and  research when you already know what’s true.” a friend commented facetioudly to me. But at the same time, he was deadly earnest.
      President Franklin Roosevelt was an early expert on arousing urgency without scaring everyone to death.  “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”  made us think we were practically guaranteed to win the war that was about to envelop the world.  No one wanted to dwell on the tfate of  Pearl Harbor and the loss of half of our Navy.   Roosevelt showed leadership by inspiring confidence, while Churchill often added sarcasm or wit. “When you’re going through hell, keep going,” he said. This was an era of using  phrases positively, to invoke patriotism and the common cause.

 Then something changed in politics toward the end of the twentieth century. The whole idea became to scare people to death.  Images and sound bites—the ones you couldn’t get out of your head, and would influence your vote—had the power of an addiction: ”Make love, not war," “Blood and soil,” “cancel culture,” “Black Lives Matter,” “White Power,” “Willie Horton is coming for you,” “We are Q.”  The word “disinformation" is getting replaced by “freedom of speech” and “opinion.”  This is an example of what one historian called “totalist  language…where a slogan protects itself from scrutiny or analysis as it builds social and political  power."  
I wish the next George Orwell would grab the mic soon.  A novel like 1984 needs to be updated to include AI, hacking academies, and spy drones.  The only constant will be the autocrat who runs it all.