The October Challenge & Black Swan Sandy

ast month I challenged myself to start and finish a screenplay. I can now announce that I have written a complete draft of that screenplay. It will take some revising, but I am, for the most part, content with where it starts and how the story does not stray from its premise. Following an old teacher's advice, I pushed on throughout never stopping to go back. Rather, I kept a list of items to address, flesh out, include and fix which I'll tackle in the second draft.

Up next? Another month, another screenplay. I'm also editing the cognitive psyche kids' stories I wrote. One, pertaining to Black Swans, is particularly apt in light of Hurricane Sandy. Some folks said they didn't evacuate because they had lived in their neighborhoods for decades and had no experience with such a terrible storm and so found it hard to believe such a thing could either exist or do so much damage. They couldn't imagine such a storm because they had no first hand experience with one. It didn't matter what others told them be they meteorologists or folks who had experienced such weather elsewhere; those who had yet to experience such a storm themselves stuck to their pre-existing bias against a storm of such size.

Needless to say, that's a strong and potentially deadly bias. If we can become aware of that bias and loosen the grip we have on it, hopefully we can save some lives and stop making mistakes we seem to repeat generation after generation.

7 Up, 7 Down

irst drafts of seven children's books in seven days are complete. The books are
based on the findings of a cognitive psychology study (previously cited) that I believe has the potential to improve financial decision making through better awareness of common biases we unconsciously employ daily.

The findings I chose to focus on pertain to biases of availability (the ease with which examples of the event come to mind), hindsight biases after Black Swans (eg, banning box-cutters on planes after 9/11), motivation to prevent Black Swans, the conjunction fallacy (people tend to think a story more probable with each bit of additional detail it has than less probable), and "anchoring, adjustment and contamination" (eg, deciding to buy one item at the store not ten of that item because there's a special or the store is about to close) - among others.

The seven books will sit on ice for a month then I'll look at them again with fresh eyes and work them over a second time. And then a third before submitting them to peer review and the harshest critics - kids.

Writing these books as 16 rhyming couplets forced me to keep them lean and to keep the action up. Originally, I thought writing in this fashion would lead to more dumbed down material with a watered-down story, but I think I've avoided that by keeping the stories in line.

On Deck: While I prefer writing about baseball during the off-season, I've challenged myself to finish a draft of The Boston Squeeze by the end of this calendar year. Batter up.