Books | Youseph Tanha

Brennan’s Texas Comic Book Wall

Recently I was contacted by Brennan from Texas. He sent me a picture of his new comic book wall using the directions from my IKEA comic book hack. Brennan had the following story to share with us about this comics and his new comic book wall.

After most of my comics got destroyed in a flood about 6-7 years ago, I stopped collecting. But my parents found a box of stuff I stashed away in their garage and it turned out, most of my favorite issues and cover art were inside. Growing up, I was a bigger fan of the B-list Marvel heroes, guys like Dr. Strange, Moon Knight, Iron Fist, Black Panther and Black Knight. So naturally, I wanted a relatively inexpensive way to display them. After doing a little online research, I came across Youseph’s site and liked the results I saw.

There’s an IKEA near where my folks live in Dallas and I bought 16 frames for under $40.00, picked up some black card stock at the Hobby Lobby and some Command Picture Hanging Strips, so that there wouldn’t be any damage to my walls. I chose 16 of my favorite covers from the 40 or so books I had left in my long box and my girlfriend helped me hang them up in the office.

She loves them, I love them. The result was perfect. Now we’re thinking about hanging up 16 more in another part of the house! If it wasn’t for Youseph’s site, we’d have probably spent a lot more money. Thanks for the smart and effective tip!

If you have a comic book wall using the IKEA hack found here, please contact me. I would love to see how it turned out for you.

The Memory Palace

Memories, remembering, and how thought and the recall of thought works for people is something I often find myself thinking about a lot. I think this is because at one point in my life I needed to be on antidepressants and they really messed up my short-term memory. So, I find myself thinking about how people remember things and recall things.

The first time I started thinking about how the brain and thoughts work was early on in school. I was told by my music teacher that the human mind can only handle seven independent things/thoughts at one time. If you add an eighth in the mix, one of the other seven will no longer be available to you.

The way this applies to music and my drumming, he told me, was that when you are drumming you are using all four of your limbs behind the drum kit. Your arms and legs. Each one is doing something independent of the other. That is four things your mind is tracking. You are also keeping time in your head and anticipating what is coming next. That is six things. The seventh thing I find myself doing while I am playing music is just either looking around and being observant of the other musicians. Sometimes I’m thinking about random things such as what I am going to make for dinner or what is on the agenda for work tomorrow. That’s my seven things at once. The brain can’t handle anymore than that. This point gets proven over and over again with me during band practice whenever anyone hits a note that is not correct, or plays something different. This by default makes me drop whatever extra thing I am thinking at the time to focus on the change in the music. Sometimes I won’t be as lucky and forget what I was thinking. Sometimes one of my legs or arms will quit working and the drum beat I will be playing will sound wrong. So a lot of discipline goes into being focused and prepared for something unexpected when I am playing music with my band.

In the past I have talked about how much I like, and use, the Getting Things Done (GTD) work methodology developed by David Allen. It’s great for keeping tasks and projects, both work and personal, organised in a way that allows you to get things completed quickly and efficiently. But the thing that makes GTD so great is the fact that it frees up your mind to allow you to have ideas. Unlike remembering things, having ideas is something the mind is great at doing.

“Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.” – David Allen

By being able to put your tasks down in a system that you trust allows you to focus on your next action rather than spending your time worried about the overall project. It really is a life changing way to work and get things done. If you have not looked into before, I highly recommend that you do so.

The latest thing I have been learning about almost contradicts GTD in a way. The Memory Palace is an ancient way of remembering anything. By having a house for all your thoughts that are triggered by distinct locations within the house of your minds eye you can recall any kind of information. See the videos below to better understand what I am talking about.

Self Publishing Steps

When I self published my first book ALL THAT MATTERS I learned a lot of stuff as I went along about self publishing. I wrote down a lot of these things to make my todo list for my next book MIRROR THROUGH TIME a little bit easier for me self publish. I want to share that todo list with you today to see if anyone thinks I am leaving something out.

Finish Writing Book (so close)
Have the book sent to an editor to be edited
Have a cover designed
Consult with a PR firm
Have an audio book made
Have a physical copy of the book made
Have Review copies of the book to give out.
Contact as many book review blogs as possible to review my book (currently have a list of 300 and growing)

So what do you think? Am I leaving anything out? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think I should add or do differently.

iBooks Authoring and Me

Not long ago Apple introduced a book authoring program called ‘iBooks Authoring’. Its an application that makes publishing books to the Apple iBooks store a whole lot easier. One of the reasons my book ALL THAT MATTERS was not published to the iBooks store was because of how difficult it was to do so. To solve this problem Apple has made an application that will make the whole process of publishing to their store easier.

When I checked out the application on the Mac App store the other day I saw loads of comments from people who have already used it publish their own books and that it was very easy.

But will I use it?

The answer is yes and no.

I will use ‘iBooks Authoring’ to post ALL THAT MATTERS so it will finally be available on the Apple iBooks store. I plan to do that as soon as I am done writing MIRROR IN TIME. While I have been writing my second book, I have been planing in the back of my head to hire a third party to code out the book for the Kindle, Nook, iBooks, and other e-book readers. Coding out the first book took up a lot of my time and I just assume put that in someone else’s hands who has more experience than me at doing it.

CISSP and Writing

CISSP logo

Since just before the start of the new year I have been studding to get my Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification. My goal is to be well versed in all the CISSP information and get certified within five months (hopefully sooner). I have been delving deep into giant study tomes on CISSP and taking several legal pads worth of notes in the process. I have learned a lot from reading this study information and I have also had a lot of ideas and principles I already knew reenforced. But in the end I still have to pass the test and I am just as nervous about that as anyone else in my shoes would be.

I have also been making time to keep working on my second book that I have recently titled ‘Mirror Through Time’. Several days a week after work I have been visiting the local library to get in a couple of hours of writing in. Because I am studying for my CISSP work has slowed down on my book, but not stopped. Not in the least. In fact, I have recently started the second draft of ‘Mirror Through Time’ and I am so excited to finish it and get some other eyes on it for feed back.

Happy New Years

I had a pretty amazing 2011 and I hope you did too. I would like to spend this blog post reviewing some of the amazing things that I have gotten to do and experienced over the last three hundred and sixty five days.

I Lost 30 Pounds!

2011 started off with a book, ‘The 4 Hour Body‘. This book had a huge impact on me. Because of this book I have lost thirty pounds and I have kept it off! This is amazing to me because my weight is something I have struggled with my whole life. Now, I don’t feel like I am struggling anymore. I feel like I have it all under control.

I Got Married!

As far as importance goes, my marriage should be the first thing on my list. But I have decided to do my 2011 list in chronological order rather than importance.

In April, I got married to my beautiful wife Hannah, and I can’t think of another person I would rather spend the rest of my life with. After being together for seven years we had an amazing wedding with our family and friends. We can’t thank everyone enough for showing up and supporting us on our special day. But please know we are thankful and grateful for each and every single one of you.

I Wrote My First Book

In 2011, I wrote ‘All That Matters’, my first book. I wrote it and self-published it all in the same year. Its now available on Amazon.com and Barns & Noble. From start to finish creating this book was an amazing process that I have learned so much from. I am eagerly working on my second book which I hope to have out soon.

My Most popular Blog Post

In 2011 I wrote a blog post entitled ‘Ikea Comic Book Photo Frame Hack‘ which has become the most popular post on my blog. Its pretty impressive that something I wrote on how to display comic books cheaply has become the most popular post on my whole blog in less than a year.

2012

2011 was an amazing year with memories I will carry with me forever. I have nothing but great hopes and dreams for 2012 and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Thank you all for taking the time out of your busy days to follow my little blog. I hope you have found it entertaining, if not useful. I wish you all lots of luck and happiness for the new year.

Writing A First Draft

When I sit down to write the first draft of a book, I like to create a document for each chapter. So in whatever wordprocessor you choose, start by creating a new document and save it as ‘Chapter 1’. Then using the the outline you created earlier, copy the outline for chapter 1 and paste it into your new ‘Chapter 1’ document.

Lots of people have their own ideas and techniques on writing. I just like to write using the outline as my guide. The key word there being ‘guide’. While you are writing chapter 1 your thoughts and writing may go in a whole other direction. Some aspect of the story may grow out of your typing organically. That is perfectly fine and I encourage you to follow that flow. I find that a lot of my writing is till very organic and spawns lots of ideas. But by the end of it, I have touched on all of my outlined points. If something I have written was not a specified in my outlined point and it turns out to be really good I will add it to my outline should I ever need to reference the chapter I put it in.

Remember that your first draft should just be used to get your ideas out. To write the story. The first draft for me is more of a brain dump. Ernest Hemingway said “The first draft of anything is shit”, and that is how I treat it. Not until the second draft do I scrutinize over everything letter, word, and comma.

As far as words are concerned and how they should be used, I will not waste your time. The truth is that far greater writers than I have written wonderful books on how words should be used. I encourage you to seek out at least one of these books and read it before you start writing your first book. My personal favorit is ‘On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition: A Memoir of the Craft’ by Steven King.