Friday miscellany: Playing piano in bits of time

I know that a lot of folks reading this are fans of the Happier podcast, hosted by Gretchen Rubin and her sister, Elizabeth Craft. I certainly am! So it was really exciting to be a guest on the show this week.

You can listen to the episode here. We mostly talked about Tranquility by Tuesday (which is out this coming Tuesday!), but we also talked about my Upholder status, and I shared a “try this at home” tip. It was literally a try-this-at-home idea, in that it works best for folks who work at home. We often wind up with small bits of time before we dial into meetings, and it’s hard to use those for anything. When I’m on top of things, I go play the piano for a few minutes! It’s a nice way to score some extra practice time during time that might otherwise be wasted. If you play another instrument or sing, all those are possibilities, but many hobbies can be done as micro-hobbies in bits of time.

I’m not saying we have to cram something into every minute. On the other hand, I think even minutes are worthy of being spent well.

It’s fun to see lots of publicity stuff start to come through! KJ Dell’Antonia and the folks at the Am Writing podcast re-ran an episode this week where I was a guest. It was a little strange to hear them talk about books that were coming out in 2020 as being in the far future…well, the far future is here. But we still have 24 hours in a day, so hopefully the productivity tips still feel relevant!

I was also a guest on Lauren LoGrasso’s Unleash Your Inner Creative, which is a fun show about getting creative work done — check it out!

Tranquility by Tuesday was featured on Zibby Owens’ list of “15 October Books to Make You Think and Feel.” I am thrilled to be in the company of folks like Celeste Ng, John Irving, and Dani Shapiro…

I will be releasing the first TBT In Real Life video this weekend! People who pre-ordered the book have already gotten access to all four videos but if you haven’t pre-ordered you can get a taste this Saturday.

Speaking of which…if you haven’t purchased a copy of Tranquility by Tuesday yet, would you consider doing so? You can pre-order from the major internet retailers, and through your local bookstore via Indiebound. You can also put in a request to your library system, which is incredibly helpful for boosting long-term readership. Those copies get read many times! Plus, if libraries know the book will be requested a lot, on the margin they buy extra copies.

As I said on Best of Both Worlds earlier this week, most books don’t sell many copies. We are talking in the low thousands, not millions. If even a quarter of the folks who listen to the podcast or read this blog regularly purchased a copy in the first week, the book would be considered a major success. So if you do enjoy my work I would really appreciate the support!

The weather looks to be much better this weekend, though I decided to let myself off the hook for creating exciting kid adventures (other than my daughter’s birthday party…more on that next week). I will go out to dinner, go for a long run, sing in church, and do a lot of book-publicity work. So I’m looking forward to the weekend. And probably the kids will be happy to hang out around the house. We will aim for more significant fall adventures next week.