Howdy 👋

My takeaways:

• Stop waiting for inspiration. Amateurs wait for the muse; pros treat creative work like a job.
• Routines wear out. Coben writes somewhere (a café, a supermarket deli counter) until it stops working, then moves on. Switching pens, notebooks, or screens helps too.
• Get comfortable with boredom. If you take a walk because the blank page scares you, you’re dodging, not creating.
• The magic isn’t the process. It’s seeing words on a page that was blank this morning. Progress beats bliss.
• Character is plot. Don’t describe who someone is; show what happens to them.
• Worst advice: write for the market. By the time you finish, the trend is dead.
• Best advice: if it helps you produce pages, good. If not, bad.
• Good collaboration isn’t 50/50. Aim for equity, not scorekeeping.
• “You bring your own weather to the picnic.”
• Doubt never goes away, even for Stephen King. Let it fuel you, not freeze you.

In theory, all customer support systems may look the same. This Airbnb vs Booking vs Expedia case study illustrates differing support philosophies that materially affect system design, each with its own tradeoffs.

Cool AI-native OS features by Microsoft, especially around agent isolation/containment and embedded small language models.