How much time do you spend opening and reading emails that you have already read? Any time you spend thinking about which items in your inbox you should attack next is a waste of time.

Same with any time you spend rereading a message that you have already read and failed to act upon. Choose among these options right away, with a strong bias toward the first two.

If you read the note and know what needs doing, do it right away. Otherwise you are dooming yourself to rereading it, which is percent wasted time.

This is a good evening activity. Zero items is the goal, but anything less than five is reasonable. Otherwise you will waste time later trying to figure out which of the long list of things to look at.

Sometimes the older stuff gets taken care of by someone else. When you get a note with useful information, consider who else would find it useful.

When you use the bcc blind copy feature, ask yourself why. The answer is almost always that you are trying to hide something, which is counterproductive and potentially knavish in a transparent culture.

The only time we recommend using the bcc feature is when you are removing someone from an email thread. Similarly, just as the exterior world requires research to establish believable, small details, the interior world of a character requires research as well.

Good historical stories promise to not only transport readers to a historical setting but to reveal the interior life the mind, heart and aspirations of a character.

For me, some of the large questions here had to do with interior perceptions: How did men and women in the s think about romance? How were their professional desires different than for artists today?

What language might they use in their thought life? The answers, in large part, came from personal writing: letters and diaries. Yes, it might be awkward to ask a living person to borrow his or her diary.

But many people — particularly those who have achieved some modicum of career fame — often leave their letters and diaries to university archives and special collections; such archives are generally open to the public.

With the help of friends and the Internet, I was able to find letter or diary collections from about 10 artists working in animation in the s and s.

More than any other source, these documents presented the thought language and inner aspirations of the men and women who worked for animation studios.

Though none of these individuals became a character in my stories, collectively, their writing helped me understand how the inner life of an artist working in the middle of the 20th century is different than that of an artist today.

Use common names, not technical ones. America is a cinematic culture. As a people, we are familiar with the conventions of film, perhaps more so than those of fiction.

For a film, an audience is largely a collective witness to events that unfold on the screen. But in fiction, readers enter the world, almost always, through the perceptions of a central character or perhaps a small group of characters.

With this, fiction is the more intimate art, the one in which the perceptions of an individual character are the means by which readers engage the narrative world.

To deepen this connection between the reader and the protagonist, it is almost always helpful for the narrative prose to present the common names — not the technical ones — for elements in the story.

For example, animators in the s would never call a studio screening room a screening room, they would call it a sweatbox, as that was where animators sweated as their work was reviewed on screen.

Immerse yourself in the culture. To write historical fiction of any kind — short stories or not — you need to be able to close your eyes and have the past blaze up around you.

The basic question aspiring historical writers need to ask is this: What documents of the era exist to demonstrate daily life in a chosen time period?

Note: I said of the era , meaning created during the era. In ways, I had a little bit of luck fall my way. He chose to blast the entire Outkast discography from his phone.

Everything went pretty smoothly and, again, he was very kind and patient. Afterwards, we went out for Chinese food.

Probably feeling very jazzed about just having DONE IT, he ordered a giant plate of meat and ate it all, even though I warned him that it looked a little sketchy.

Lo and behold, on our romantic walk home, he stopped suddenly and gripped my hand. Then remembering the correct way to put on a condom took a minute and I didn't expect the weird silence, inactivity, and pressure I felt while I fumbled with the wrapper.

After it was all over, I remember feeling that the entire experience was very underwhelming. I wasn't sure if I had finished or not but I just got so tired that I wanted to stop!

The second time I had sex was so much better when I discovered that I actually hadn't finished the first time.

I much prefer to talk about the first time I had sex with a woman. We weren't exactly sure what we were doing. We didn't really know if what we were doing was gay.

It totally was. Now I see it but at the time we were like, haha this is innocent AF! We're just BFFs who want to feel affection and aren't getting it from boys so whatever!

We would kiss everywhere but the mouth. Cheeks, neck, hands, face, head. We eventually kissed on the mouth, which spurred a whole conversation about the reality of what we were doing.

Then in the same week, she came over and we had a few glasses of red wine and she slept over. We started making out and I went down on her.

It was a really weird experience because I wasn't sure where we were at emotionally. She came pretty immediately.

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