My newest book, Limit Your Greed, is now available!

and I’m excited, proud, and nervous.

I’m excited both because it’s a new book and because I can finally talk about it.  Yes, this is the project I mentioned a while back.  It’s now finally here, and it is a truly lovely hardback.  Bill Catchings and I wrote it, and our team at Principled Technologies (PT) designed it. 

Click an image to see a larger version. 

For now, you can order the hardback only via the LYG site; as of this writing, the ordering page isn't even live.  Soon, you’ll be able to buy it via Amazon as well.  Right now, Amazon shows us as having one for sale, but that's only because we haven't yet correctly set up the ordering page.  I'll post an update in this blog as we fix these problems. 

I’m proud because I think this book does a good job of conveying a lot of potentially powerful ideas in a very compact space.  Both Bill and I dislike business books that are full of padding, so we tried to keep the text crisp and tight.  I’m also proud because this is not a book full of untested theories.  The principles in it are the ones by which we’ve run our main business, Principled Technologies, for 15 years.  PT is proof that a business can be profitable while still valuing people and principles over profit. 

I’m nervous on many fronts.  Like all new books, I’ve lived with this for a long time, so having it out in the world is always in some ways anticlimactic.  That’s particularly true in this case, because we’ve been working on this book for about six years and talking about it for even longer.  In addition, to avoid further delays--it takes time to sell a book--we chose to have our LYG company publish the volume.  This approach let us create a much nicer physical object than almost any publisher would have printed, and it let us deliver exactly the length we wanted without padding; it is a short volume.  It opens us, however, to all sorts of criticisms common to self-publishing endeavors.  It also means we could easily lose money on the book--and I’m accustomed to being paid by my publisher. 

What matters most about this book, though, is not my feelings.  What really counts is what this book might, just might be able to do:  help make the world better.  Our goal was to show that we could all approach businesses differently, create better businesses, and in the process build a better world.  We genuinely believe that is possible. 

To do this, though, we need your help.  Buy the book.  Read it.  Start conversations about ways that businesses could be better and do more to help both their employees and the world at large.  Even if you disagree with our specific ideas, talk about where you think we’re wrong.  Having the conversations is what matters, because from those conversations, change could come. 

We started promoting this idea in April with the shirts you can also buy at lyg.org.  Now, with the publication of Limit Your Greed, we hope to take a big step forward.

As naive and idealistic as it may sound, we firmly believe in the power of ideas to change the world, to make it better.  We hope the ideas in this book lead to better businesses and a better world. 

As we say on LYG, buy a book (or a shirt).  Start a conversation.  Change the world.

Searching for that perfect holiday present?

Search no longer.  Head over to LYG, pick up a t-shirt, start a conversation, and help change the world.

Wait for Black Friday to do it, and you just might save a nice chunk of money.

Yes, that's insider info:  as I wrote in an entry back in late April, Bill and I started and own the LYG business.  Our goal, as you can read at more length in that blog, is to help make the world a better place by building better businesses.

Yes, LYG is a for-profit business--in our dreams.  Right now, we're far from making any money on it, but if we ever do make a profit, half of all profits will go to charity.

Check it out.

Happy Birthday, Bill!

Today (January 4), is the birthday of my long-time business partner, Bill Catchings.  Last year marked the thirtieth year we've worked together, which is a long time for any sort of partnership.

Over all those years, Bill has given me many things, but the most important of his gifts is that he has helped me become a better person.  Though he and I differ on many issues--as we both say, we've never voted for the same candidate in an election--we manage to agree on so very many topics that matter greatly to us both.  By listening to him and observing him, I've learned a lot and tried to improve myself in the process.

So, thank you, Bill, and I hope you had a great birthday.  Let's keep this rolling another thirty years.  After all, I have a lot of personal growth still to do!

Check out Bill's video blog

In a post last fall, I mentioned that Bill was writing a very good blog, Tech Everywhere, for PT.  Now, we've made a few video entries for his blog, and the first one is live.



If you're at all interested in connected tech, the Internet of Things, or just cool gadgets, check out this video and then read all the blog entries.  Bill loves this stuff, he lives with it, and then he writes cogently about his experiences with it.  You can learn a great deal of useful information from his blog.

Enjoy.

A small cut from the bleeding edge of car technology

Bill, my business partner and friend, and I are both big fans of electric cars.  He was the first of us to own a Nissan LEAF, and I followed suit.  I then moved to the Tesla Model S, and he later changed to the BMW i3.  In the course of driving his new car, which he generally quite likes, he discovered a very interesting--and unpleasant--side effect of an otherwise very useful bit of technology his car includes.

This video tells the story of his discovery.



Clearly, North Carolina car regulations and the range-extender technology have some synchronization issues!

If you're at all interested in gadgets

or more generally want a sneak preview of the coming Internet of Things, you need to be reading Tech Everywhere, a blog by Bill Catchings on the PT site. I look forward to and read every installment. 

Before I explain why I recommend Tech Everywhere so strongly, let me get the disclaimers out of the way. Bill is my friend and business partner. PT is the company we own and work at.

I'm not, though, urging you to read this blog for any of those reasons.  I'm pushing it because Bill does something there that very few reviewers offer: he lives with the gadgets before he reports on them. When he writes about a smart watch, he's lived with it for days, often weeks.  If he tells you about the security weaknesses of some Wi-Fi-enabled light bulbs (a great entry), he's talking from experience.

As much as I love gadgets, I now won't buy one if I know that Bill is getting it and will be living with it for a while and writing about it.  It's great to have him as the canary in the gadget mine. 

Check out Tech Everywhere, and follow it regularly.  You'll be glad you did.

Interested in high-tech gadgets?

I certainly am, and so is my business partner, Bill Catchings.  He tests a lot of them, but unlike most people who review gadgets, he doesn't just test them for the short amount of time their deadlines permit.  Instead, he lives with them, really puts them through their paces, and when he's confident he truly understands them, he writes about them.  He's been doing this for a while on his personal blog, but now he's doing it for us at Principled Technologies as the kick-off writer in our new Insights series.  (More folks will be adding different sorts of insights over time.)

In the first installment, he gives this thoughts on the Basis smart watch.  See what he has to say here.

What excites me most about this addition to PT's offerings are getting to read Bill's insights regularly and also providing an outlet for exploring the incursion of tech into all sorts of devices and areas of our lives.

Enjoy!

On the road again: CES, Las Vegas, day 3

I know I've been shortchanging you with these mini blog entries, but, wow, have I had bandwidth troubles.  My excuse for today is simple fatigue:  I went to bed a little after 12:30 a.m. and got up at 3:30 a.m. to begin the process of traveling home.

Where I am now, thank goodness.  I'll be traveling more of this month than I'll be home, so it's good to get to be home.  Even though I'm exhausted, I'm happy because I'm no longer in a plane or an airport.

Now that I have real bandwidth, I can share a few happy snaps from the show.

The Sony booth was huge, a giant circus of electronics surrounded by a wall on which the firm was projecting a huge number of images.

Click on an image to see a larger version.

In a convention center full of viswalls, the LG booth sported what I believe was the largest, one that was, from some angles, sporting 3D images.

Ever wondered what that hot BMW i8 hybrid looks like in person?  I certainly did, which made seeing it a lot of fun. 

It is a beauty, though not quite as quick as my Tesla (sorry, but I couldn't resist the comparison). 

I mentioned in an earlier post that I got to ride in the BMW i3 electric car while Bill did a test drive.  Here's Bill behind the wheel of a demo version of what may well be his next ride.

The car is in the so-homely-it's-cute category.

Now, back to work. 

I'm out.

More on PT's sabbatical program

PT recently released a video in which Bill and I explain some of the background of the company's sabbatical program.  Though I can barely stand to watch myself in this one (or in any video), enough folks have asked about the program that I decided to embed the video here. 

Enjoy.

Bill's sabbatical

As I've mentioned in previous posts, Principled Technologies, the company Bill and I co-founded and work at, offers a sabbatical program to all of its employees.  (I gave more detail about the program in this earlier post.)  A key part of the program is that PT encourages employees to do a week of charity work and provides funds either for travel expenses to go to the charity or as a donation to the charity.  As I've also shown in some earlier entries, we're making a series of short videos about what employees have done for charity work during their sabbaticals.  We post those videos on our site and YouTube channel, and we also give them for free to the charities for their use. 

The video for Bill's sabbatical work is now available.  Check it out.



You can get Bill's take on his charity time via this entry on his blog. 

Bill's been working with this group since long before we created our sabbatical program.  He truly loves spending time with and helping the children there.  He's a good man, and I'm proud to have been his business partner for 28 years.

27 years

That's how long Bill Catchings and I have worked together.  Through multiple companies, several years of full-time freelancing, and, for the last decade, Principled Technologies, our partnership has held strong.  Tonight, we celebrated the end of PT's tenth year at our annual Seasonal Celebration, the holiday party for the entire company.

This party is definitely a dress-up affair, which is why the two of us are in tuxes.

(If you're a glutton for punishment, click on the picture for a larger image.)

Wow, do I find it hard to look at myself!  The flash was blinding us, which is why our eyes look as they do.  I have no excuses for the rest.

We blew it out on this special tenth-anniversary party.  We even went for a commemorative cake from Sweet Memories Bakery. 

Not only was the cake over the top and festive, it also evoked images from the signature video on our Web site. 

Cake was not the only dessert, of course; we also had our traditional dessert bar.  As one of the two owners of the business, I felt I had to try each dessert in case one of them sucked and I would need to warn the others.

Fortunately, none of them sucked.  In fact, they were all delicious.

The party was great, and everyone had a wonderful time.

I am fortunate to work with the best team in the world at the best fact-based marketing company in the world.

1987

Today's entry is the one-thousand-nine-hundred-eighty-seventh post on this blog, so as I did two days ago, I'm going to flash back to what was going on in my writing life in the year 1987.

I attended my third Sycamore Hill conference that year, but I had not sold a story since May of 1982.  I really shouldn't have been allowed in the door, but as one of the organizers, it was a perq of the job.  I was learning at the conference, and I made many friends, though almost none who will come up to me at a con today and say hi, but I was also freezing up and not writing much.  That said, "Burning Up," the story I wrote for that year's event, ultimately sold (after I rewrote it, of course) and appeared in When the Music's Over, a Greenpeace benefit anthology that Lew Shiner edited. 

On the article writing front, Bill Catchings and I had definitely ramped up our freelance business, because 43 bylines of ours appeared in computer magazines that year. 

I was also consulting, a business that led me to Toronto three times in 1987.  The last time, I moved to Toronto the Sunday after Thanksgiving and lived there for three straight weeks.  The job was tense, and the hours were horrific, but I loved the city and became close, at least while I was there, with some of my co-workers.  I still love Toronto and look forward to returning there on October 31 for World Fantasy Con. 

I also traveled to the U.K. for the first time that year for the Conspiracy '87 WorldCon in Brighton.  I quite loved England, and I still do.  I also gained a phrase there that taught me a lot, a phrase I still use frequently:  imaginative concentration.  Geoff Ryman used it in a speech about writing, and it resonated immediately with me.  When as a writer you maintain high imaginative concentration, you are in the fictional world, really seeing and feeling and tasting and smelling it, so that telling details are readily available; you just report what you experience.  When your imaginative concentration flags, you start reaching for descriptions, relying on cliches, and so on. 

Finally, by 1987 I no longer harbored any hope that I would set afire the world of fiction.  Instead, I hung onto fiction like a man tied to a boat in a storm, terrified that the only fate worse than being beaten to death by the boat was drowning as I watched it recede in the distance. 

1985

This entry is the one-thousand-nine-hundred-eighty-fifth post on this blog.  Recently, the entry numbers have looked more and more like years to me as they have marched closer to the present.  For no more reason than that, every now and then I'm going to use the occasion of one of these posts to mention a few writing-related events in my life that occurred in the corresponding year.

In 1985,

• With John Kessel and Greg Frost, held the first Sycamore Hill Writers' Conference at my house.  For good and for bad, it and the ensuing SycHills were hugely formative experiences in my writing.
• First started becoming friends with Dave and Jo Drake and thus began a friendship that has lasted to this day and that has taught me a lot about both writing and the writing business. Earlier tonight, we and others celebrated Dave's birthday at a small dinner.
• Turned 30, a development that took me out of young-gun territory and that also hit me hard with my first huge failure; I had vowed to retire by the time I was thirty.
• Watched as my first professional short story sale, "My Sister, My Self," which was published the previous year, failed to gain any award attention whatsoever.  I had thought I'd set the writing world on fire, but it didn't really notice me.  I've had to relearn that lesson every year since then. That story, by the way, was the first Jon Moore tale. 
• Went to Europe for the first time, an experience that, predictably, changed me forever and that provided writing fodder I'm still using. 
• Published my first computer-related article, "Three-Part Harmony," in the November 26 issue of PC Week.  My co-author on that article was Bill Catchings, with whom I've co-written roughly a thousand assignments with many more total headlines.  Bill remains my business partner to this day.
• First visited Australia and New Zealand, another trip that permanently altered me.

A great many other important events occurred in my life that year, of course, but just looking at this list makes me see now, for the first time, how big this one was in my writing career--and in my life.