The Writers Coin

There are some great deals out there today, and if I had the money and could overcome my fobia of spending money, here is what I would buy:

Amazon Kindle: I don’t know if the Kindle will kill books or if it’s even worth the money, but I’m curious to experiment with this and see how I like it. This might be how we all read books in the future, so I’d like to at least get my hands on one and play with it.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: I haven’t even finished Fallout 3 yet, but this game looks really juicy. I played it at my friend’s place and it was a blast. This Slate review was also really intriguing.

Nikon D90: My old Powershot camera is around eight years old and now the flash isn’t working for some reason—so I need a replacement. Do I need a camera this advanced and this expensive? No, but it sure would be nice to step into the SLR arena…

What the Dog Saw and SuperFreakonomics: I’m a huge fan of Malcolm Gladwell (see my Outliers review) and Freakonomics made economics fun (and comprehensible) to millions of people. These two are can’t misses.

The Wire: The Complete Series: The greatest show on TV—ever—now in one tidy little box. Other than Seinfeld, this is the only other show I’d ever want to own.

Subscription to Wired Magazine: Gadgets and great reads: the perfect combination.

Subscription to the Wall Street Journal: I’ve been meaning to keep up on the news more than I do, and this might be overkill, but it’s probably one of the best places to get your fix of world news and how the markets are moved on a day-to-day basis.

Black Friday has come and gone, and that means that the second biggest shopping day of the year is here: Cyber Monday. Rather than waking up at 3:30am and battling the crowds, Cyber Monday means we can all just fire up the computer and shop online without any hassles.

For gadget hounds and book lovers, the two sites I care about today are Amazon and Best Buy.

Amazon Deals

Amazon has some pretty crazy deals on tons of different products at their Cyber Monday page. Among the best deals I’ve found so far are:

• iPod Touch 8GB for $158 via their gold box promotion. It’s a second generation model, but still a good deal.
• Netbooks seem to be on sale for pretty good prices too, which is no surprise since they’re so popular right now.

After reading through the Cyber Monday FAQ, it sounds like speed is what will get you the best deals. So make sure to follow their Amazon Deals twitter feed to stay on top of the best deals and act fast if something you want comes up at a great price.

Best Buy

Best Buy is the last place I went to on Black Friday (by myself) and it was probably the only place I was interested in checking out. No offense to JC Penney’s and Sears, but for gadget hounds like me, this is the place to be.

• Check out their Cyber Monday 2-day sale for deals on netbooks, cameras, DVDs, and everything else that Best Buy is known for.
• Use this coupon for $20 off a purchase of $175 or more

Be careful with their price matching guarantee. I was all excited about this after seeing a commercial about it and then noticing that in the fine print of their Black Friday ad they were going to honor price matching during that day and cyber Monday. They are—kind of. For purchases made at the store, they’ll match prices from competing local retailers, but not online retailers.

For purchases at BestBuy.com, they’ll match their own prices and the store’s prices, but not other .com stores. How deceptive is that? Check out all the fine print here and here.

The Disclaimer

It’s really simple: don’t buy anything just because of the price and don’t buy anything you can’t afford. If you’re curious about what I would buy today if I had the money, check out my Cyber Monday Wish List.

Last night I got my credit score for the first time: 807.

That basically means I kick ass, but let’s have the chart do the talking:

According to this very official-looking chart, I’m 87% better than everyone else. It reflects that I have zero debt, pay my credit card in full every month, and in general am an all around rock star.

But what else goes into a credit score?

My payment history is spotless: in my 11 years of having a credit card I have paid about $40 in finance charges—all due to mixups. I normally pay the whole balance off every month.

I don’t owe anything so I got that 30% aced.

Not sure how types of credit is scored, but I’ve had my current card for quite a while.

I haven’t taken out any new credit in a few years, so that’s A-OK.

What Does it All Mean?

It means I’ve been doing a good job of keeping my finances in order. The satisfying thing about knowing you have such a high score is that all the hard work, all the saving, the budgeting, the resisting of all the consumer temptations that are out there (most of them, anyway), and the obsessing about seemingly trivial things like joint bank accounts—it has all been worth it.

In exchange for resisting all the temptation and staying disciplined with our money (M’s came in at 795, which means she’s better than most you too), we now get a slight advantage in trying to get a mortgage.

Why? Because that one number tells lenders something VERY important: that I will most likely not default on my mortgage (knock on wood):

According to the chart, there is a 1% chance someone with my score will default. That means it’ll be easier for me to get a mortgage and I’ll get a more favorable rate, which means I get so save thousands of dollars over the life of my loan.

So when all you budgeters and savers go out into the world this Friday and see all those people shopping away—buying things they don’t need and can’t afford—try to find some solace in knowing that you’ll always be better than them.

Over the weekend, a friend and I were sitting at the bar having a beer and he asked me if I had written anything lately. He knows I’m passionate about writing fiction, but I couldn’t remember the last time he ever asked me if I’d written anything “recently.”

Sadly enough, the answer was no.

Then I felt compelled to explain myself. I mean—why haven’t I written anything lately? It probably has to do with losing focus, being lazy, and being busy at work.

But the real answer is that writing sucks.

It’s True—Writing Sucks

Writing is daydreaming for hours to come up with something decent to write about. It might sound like a great idea or a terrible idea, but you won’t know until you sit down and start writing it all out. And that sucks because you’re going to have to work really hard for a really long time to maybe realize that what you’re writing isn’t any good.

Sure, occasionally the creative gods will give you a break and you’ll have an “aha” moment—a story will materialize our of thin air without any effort at all. It’s rare, but it does happen. The only story I’ve ever written that won anything came to me in two and a half hours and required very little work after that. Those two and a half hours netted me $300—not too shabby.

Writing sucks because, typically, you’re going to put in a lot of work and get very little back in return—if anything at all. You’ll sit there and write for hours and hours, pages and pages, and it might turn out that no one will ever read it. I sometimes have to write 25 pages to get five pages that are any good. I try consoling myself that all great writers have to produce shitty first drafts to eventually come up with something good, but it doesn’t make it any easier.

So Why Write at All?

My friend was looking at me laughing the whole time and ranting about all of this. He looks at me and says: “Why are you torturing yourself like this then? No one is making you write, no one is forcing you. Just stop doing it already.”

Ah, but here comes the part where I tell you why I love to write: you get to create something new out of thin air and you get to discover things about yourself you didn’t know before. Writing may be hard, but it’s one of the most rewarding things I can think of doing when it all goes right.

There’s a reason why everyone isn’t a writer—it’s hard (and there’s no money in it). But there’s a reason those of us that do keep on doing it: when you wind up creating something really good, there’s no better feeling in the world.