PolyWogg.ca – Page 2 – The writing life of a tadpole

Day 1 of #Bouchercon2025 in New Orleans

September 4 2025

Today was Opening Day for Bouchercon2025 in New Orleans, and my first Bouchercon ever. The non-conference bits are covered on my other site, ThePolyBlog, at https://www.thepolyblog.ca/day-1-of-bouchercon2025-in-new-orleans/.

I registered at 9:30, picking up my conference bag, program, t-shirt, badge and lanyard, and four hot little tickets for books in the Book Bazaar.

There are over a hundred books to choose from, and you only get four. I picked up two by Heather Graham, the chair of the conference, entitled Legacy of Blood (part of a series called the Blackbird Files) and The Rising. I’ve started reading The Rising already, but I’ve only read about 35 pages so far. I would have loved to spend hours browsing the tables, but my cold is still kicking my butt, so I opted for a Scarpetta novel by Patricia Cornwell as book #3 and Calico by Lee Goldberg, which has been all over his Facebook feed for some time, as #4. The fact that I don’t have any room in my carry-on for the return flight home in no way impedes my bookgoblin tendencies.

I chatted with Devlin Chatterson from Montreal on the way to the first panel, as he’s here representing Crime Writers of Canada.… Read the rest

My HR Guide: AMA about navigating your career

August 8 2025

Over the last twenty years, I’ve given numerous presentations on preparing for competitions in the federal public service (aka my HR guide called Be The Duck!). Lately, it is less of a presentation and more of an “Ask me anything (AMA)”-type format. I did one a few years ago with Health Canada, and they invited me back again this year as a joint presentation organized between Health Canada and PHAC, plus various friendly departments around town.

My presentation was called Career Compass: Navigating your career in the public service, and I knew some of the Qs in advance. I grouped eight of them in two questions before moving on to general Qs from the inbox. I promised to follow up on any of the ones I missed in the group AMA, and I’ll cover a bit of the first two again just for comprehensiveness (I’m anal retentive, I admit it!).

As always, these answers are my personal opinions based on my experiences in the public service, presented as candidly and transparently as I can. Even for some of the tough ones where I don’t think the government track-record is great.

With fewer job opportunities today, are there other classifications besides EC where there is policy work?

… Read the rest

The speed of disruption in book piracy

April 13 2025

When people think of piracy, they often immediately think of movies or software. Rewind to the ’90s, and your thoughts would have been about music with sites like Napster. Almost all of the previous significant industries went with alternate business models that put a huge crimp in piracy. In some ways, at least. Music was the first — they created the online platforms with unlimited streaming for a fee, aka the all-you-can-eat buffet. They also created distribution models where most major stars are available on all platforms, so you CAN still pirate music, but it’s a lot of work that is easily waived with a simple tap of your payment card. With way more benefit than you have time to do with pirated music. You don’t OWN the music, but if you have access to it generally whenever you want, why care?

Software has gone all-in on subscription models. Even if you can hack the current model or version, it won’t connect to a bunch of the online validation tools, and it’s only good for a certain amount of time. Game systems have moved to online platforms where the software does little more than give you access; without the subscription, there’s no point.… Read the rest

FFF: Managing in the public service like a Sheepdog

April 5 2025

As you can see on the PolyWogg.ca site, I have a PolyWogg Guide to HR competitions in the Canadian Federal Government. I cheekily called it Be the Duck as an extended metaphor, and I wanted something similar for another book in the same vein about being a manager. So this week’s FlashForwardFriday project is my future guide on being a manager, called Be the SheepDog: Managing from the Middle.

I went with the idea of a sheepdog rounding up sheep. It’s cutesy, a bit whimsical, maybe, and the dog is cute. The challenge is to know what to cover in a general guide to managing in the public service. I could, for example, talk about all of the different parts of government, but that gets to be more like an “introduction to public administration” than a management guide.

I could do something spunky like the 7 Habits of Highly Bureaucratic People, but I hate the term, and it’s not what I’m about.

I could do it like a business case study and talk about five or six complicated examples where features are added just to complicate the scenario, and after going through it, you feel good that you unravelled the mystery (that all started with the Big Bang).… Read the rest

Four interesting interactions with AI prompts

March 26 2025

I’ve been working on various projects over the last few months, some of which I will eventually talk about on my FlashForwardFriday previews of upcoming work. Many of them are still in the research and info-gathering stages, and I thought I would use some Chat AI functions to see what it could give me. In the end, I used AI in four different ways.

Using AI as a brainstorming partner

The first was for a project I’ll talk about later this week, a review of music of different years. I’ve written a previous take on 1943 as a year’s worth of music, what was going on, what music was everlasting, etc. But while I was planning to treat it as “A PolyWogg Guide to Music”, part of my ongoing series of serialized guides, I was having trouble with branding it. So I booted up the AI prompts and told it generally what I was trying to do … namely, look at the various lists of the “best songs of a year”, mostly from Billboard, and write my own review of a year’s music, comparing my list to the published one. With a touch of “Billboard got it wrong!”.

I had the Prompt give me a list of 10 titles to work from, and another list of 10 slogans to consider.… Read the rest

FFF: My updated guide to HR competitions

March 21 2025

Last week, I mentioned that I would start doing FlashForwardFriday (FFF) where I will talk about upcoming projects. At the time, I outlined my plans for an introduction to astronomy. This week, I’m revisiting my first, only and original guide, Be the Duck: Succeeding in Canadian Federal Government Competitions.

The current version

The short version of the long history is that, way back in 2004 or so, a friend asked me to present to a bunch of new, young civil servants on how to prepare for competitions. Two weeks later, I got an email from someone asking me about my deck. Except I didn’t know them; they hadn’t been at the presentation nor on the distribution list for it. They weren’t even in the same department! Somebody had shared my deck with 2 friends, and they told 2 friends, and the next thing I knew, I was a shampoo commercial.

My friend Vivian and I called it the Completely Unofficial and Totally Unauthorized guide so that HR people wouldn’t get nervous that I was kind of, sort of, a little bit talking about HR, but not THEIR version of HR, rather about how we get ready as applicants. I subsequently put it on my website, I’ve done dozens of presentations over the years, and my guide has been downloaded about 15,000 times now from the Polywogg.ca… Read the rest

Checking out some stock photo sites

March 12 2025

I’m working on a bunch of book covers, and to that end, I’ve been working through Fiverr with a contractor in Bosnia. They use DepositPhotos for their business model, which allows commercial use for books with their standard image license up to 500K downloads (I should be good). The contractor has given me multiple templates that I can use while swapping out the cover page and changing the text. Easy peasy lemon squeezy and the work they did saved me a ton of time for not a lot of cash. Small investment, big savings.

But now that I have the templates and can play with the covers and titles, I want to find some cover photos. I can generate them through AI tools, and I may do that for some. For example, I’m looking for a cover image that would / could represent 1940s Big Band / Swing music. I don’t particularly want a specific group, like the Glenn Miller Orchestra, so much as I’d rather have a generic “look”. Kind of like if I was writing about the 1980s and 1990s, I want someone dressed in Madonna-inspired fashion, not Madonna herself. It’s the vibe, not the person.

The test: 1940s music, Big Band or Swing style performers

I have some criteria.… Read the rest

Working on some non-fiction writing goals

March 8 2025

My biggest output to date is my HR guide, in all its forms, going back to 2004 or so. I’m happy people like it, the price doesn’t hurt ($0, downloadable PDF with no friction to access), and there is limited competition in a narrow niche. But I have plans for other guides, and to that end, I’ve been working on some cover pages for the books to serve as inspiration. My list of planned books is growing, though, and I have decided to start working on some of them before I retire instead of waiting.

HR-related books

First and foremost, I’ll update the HR Guide to competitions, aka Be the Duck. It’s relatively given that I’ll update it, and I’ll probably do three more significant updates before I call it quits when I retire.

Secondly, I am doing one called Be the Swan, which is more about managing your career.

Thirdly, I’ll do one called Be the SheepDog about being a manager with some elements about becoming an EX potentially.

And finally, one about “when things go wrong” and you have to deal with conflict, grievances, staffing complaints, etc. I’m not entirely sure what that one will look like. I’ve considered a few formats, but none particularly resonate with me yet.… Read the rest

FFF: A future guide to astronomy

March 4 2025

An author that I follow online does something called Free Fiction Mondays. I like the premise, but I’m going with FlashForwardFriday (FFF). Each Friday, I’m going to give you a preview of something I’m working on, with all the bells and whistles. For the last few weeks, I’ve been talking about an astronomy guide that I want to write. In short, I don’t like a lot of the guides out there already, not because they’re bad or anything, but because they don’t resonate with the way I approach astronomy. Nuances here and there, gaps over there, a metaphor that doesn’t land. And most of them without a “framework” to guide what they are trying to communicate.

My approach is simple — what would *I* need to know to do stuff? Nothing more, nothing less. An overview of the various topics, with enough information to get my feet wet and to be able to move on to the next piece, along with a framework of how it all fits together. That’s my goal. That’s what I want to share.

Let’s start with the cover

When I first started my HR guide, I framed it as a series, aka A PolyWogg Guide to Government.… Read the rest

It’s official…I’m heading to the Big Easy

February 22 2025

In previous posts, I talked about various book and writers’ conferences that interest me. I had it relatively narrowed down to ThrillerFest (in NYC every year) or BoucherCon (in New Orleans this year).

I really wanted to go to Thrillerfest because I love David Morrel and he was going to be there again this year (he goes every year). I looked at flights, had it worked out for some good options, and then went to book the hotel. Except I ran into a glitch. The main parts of Thrillerfest that interest me are Friday and Saturday. So I tried to book in Thursday and out on Sunday — four days, three nights. Except the main hotel is/was sold out. Well, dang it. Okay, it’s Manhattan, there are lots of choices. Except when I went to look for similar bookings, I was getting prices in the $1800 US range. Wait, it was only $300 a night at the conference. I started playing with options to maybe only go for one night (Friday), nd maybe fly down Friday morning, leave Saturday night. Quick down and back. I went back and was fiddling around with the main site and saw that you could see other room options even if sold out.… Read the rest

Working on images for an astronomy guide

February 22 2025

I wrote on my ThePolyblog.ca site about “needing” to write an astronomy guide, but not really being that thrilled about it. The issue is that there are a few fora that I participate in for astronomy, and I really don’t like the way people answer certain questions. It almost seems irresponsible to me to answer the questions like they do.

For example, if someone said to you, “I want to buy a vehicle”, would you say, “Oh, you should buy (this specific model)”? Probably not. You’d ask them what they want to use it for, how often they’ll be driving it, how many passengers, etc. The car they use to go shopping around town once a week is probably not the vehicle they need for hauling pigs, if they have pigs to haul. And a whole host of other variables, which is partly why there are so many cars on the market. They serve different market niches. But someone out there could probably just say “Get a Honda Civic”. The basis for their recommendation is relatively linear — a good all-around sedan, and if you don’t have any other details, maybe it’s as good a recommendation as any, probably better.

Yet, for astronomy, people frequently respond with:

Just look up with your eyes — the equivalent of telling someone just to walk instead of buying a car;
Buy binoculars — like saying to get a bus pass;
Buy a Dobsonian — the Honda Civic of cars, a good all-around suggestion;
Buy a large EQ mount with an expensive refractor and some good camera gear — the equivalent of telling someone they need off-roading capabilities so they can get all the way to the top of a nearby mountain because that is the biggest / hardest use to handle; or,
Don’t buy (brand x)—this is the same as those who will tell you never to buy a Ford or Dodge or American or Japanese, whatever, because someone they once knew had a bad experience 40 years ago with a bicycle owned by someone who drove one of those vehicles one-time as a rental.

… Read the rest

Working on images for my astronomy guide

February 22 2025

I wrote on my ThePolyblog.ca site about “needing” to write an astronomy guide, but not really being that thrilled about it. The issue is that there are a few fora that I participate in for astronomy, and I really don’t like the way people answer certain questions. It almost seems irresponsible to me to answer the questions like they do.

For example, if someone said to you, “I want to buy a vehicle”, would you say, “Oh, you should buy (this specific model)”? Probably not. You’d ask them what they want to use it for, how often they’ll be driving it, how many passengers, etc. The car they use to go shopping around town once a week is probably not the vehicle they need for hauling pigs, if they have pigs to haul. And a whole host of other variables, which is partly why there are so many cars on the market. They serve different market niches. But someone out there could probably just say “Get a Honda Civic”. The basis for their recommendation is relatively linear — a good all-around sedan, and if you don’t have any other details, maybe it’s as good a recommendation as any, probably better.

Yet, for astronomy, people frequently respond with:

Just look up with your eyes — the equivalent of telling someone just to walk instead of buying a car;
Buy binoculars — like saying to get a bus pass;
Buy a Dobsonian — the Honda Civic of cars, a good all-around suggestion;
Buy a large EQ mount with an expensive refractor and some good camera gear — the equivalent of telling someone they need off-roading capabilities so they can get all the way to the top of a nearby mountain because that is the biggest / hardest use to handle; or,
Don’t buy (brand x)—this is the same as those who will tell you never to buy a Ford or Dodge or American or Japanese, whatever, because someone they once knew had a bad experience 40 years ago with a bicycle owned by someone who drove one of those vehicles one-time as a rental.

… Read the rest

Planning some more PolyWogg guides about HR

February 22 2025

For those of you who have read my PolyWogg guide for competitions, you know that I have the general “slogan” of “Be the Duck!”. The idea being of course that if a manager wants to hire a duck, then your best chance to get hired is to tell them you’re a duck. Not someone who speaks Duck, or who knows Ducks, or who has worked with Ducks, but rather that you are indeed a duck. Preferably the best dang duck they’ve ever seen. But definitely you want to say “I’m a duck”.

I developed the cover long before I had the guide written…seeing the cover is “visually motivating”. So what if I do ones beyond the Duck?

For example, are there times when you might want to do something other than say you’re a duck? Sure. Like when you’re managing your career, not just going through a selection process. Then, you want to…dun dun dun…

As you can see, I maintained the same look and feel. Same frog, top swath in green, bottom swath for name and website address. I added an edition, but ignore the year, not sure when I’ll get it written. Volume 2 — Be the Swan — is more about how you strut your stuff to be a great employee and to develop in your career.… Read the rest

My brain won’t let a creative idea go for PolyWogg guides…

February 19 2025

I think I’ve mentioned more than once (hah!) that I think in frameworks. It’s one of the reasons why I wrote my HR guide. I have a framework that works for me, it makes sense to me. More importantly, it lets me make sense of the HR world AND to be able to communicate that approach to others in a way that often resonates with them and let’s them understand it.

I’m not the smartest guy in the room. I don’t have the deepest insights. I’m not the most experienced with the most profound understanding of a topic. But I often can find a way within a framework approach to figure out how **I** understand it, and then explain that same approach to others in a way that they tell me they find helpful.

It works well for HR, but I am confident enough to admit that I know it is an approach that works in other areas too. I might have trouble EXPLAINING the framework until I’ve actually created it or written it down, but once I have it down in some form of written or graphic form, it’s clear. And then I own it intellectually, spiritually, physically, mentally. It becomes part of me.… Read the rest

So, I want to go to a book conference

February 18 2025

I’m a book nerd, born and bred. I’m replicating that with my son, who has gone from having a book collection resembling that of a small town library to going through series after series to taking a book whenever we go anywhere. It is one of the things I am most proud of with him, even if most of it is just his personality and I get no credit for it. Having a literacy practitioner for a mom probably doesn’t hurt his support network either.

With that love of books, I’ve always wanted to go to a book conference. I minimally helped to organize a mystery one here in Ottawa the year Jacob was born, and the weekend that it happened? Yeah, that’s the weekend Andrea had a premature partial rupture of the membrane (PPROM). Fun times, I hung out with her at the hospital, scared out of our gourd. No book conference for us! I haven’t tried for another one since! 🙂 The conference or another kid!.

Which leaves me wanting to attend a conference somewhere. I don’t know if I want to attend a book festival or a writing conference, although either will do for my interests. 🙂 I’m scouring the web for some options; let’s see what I find.… Read the rest

Curation: The 26th Annual 101 Best Websites for Writers (Writer’s Digest)

February 9 2025

Every few years, I try to review the list of what WD thinks are the best websites for writers, as included each year in the Writer’s Yearbook. You don’t need to read the list every year; for 2025, 91 were included last year with only ten new “additions”. They don’t say which 10 they dropped to make room.

The first set, Creativity, has 6 sites listed, all repeats. I’ve looked at the sites before, but I confess I find nothing “inspiring” in most. Many are light on craft and heavy on reading recommendations in multiple ways, but they do interviews with writers that may reveal their creative process. It includes one software package (MasterWriter). However, I confess the site TerribleMinds.com/ramble is worth its weight in gold, assuming you’re willing to do some panning. The blog part that you want to read is primarily from Chuck Wendig, a very candid and opinionated writer when it comes to writing and the publishing business. That might sound bad, but it isn’t. He definitely has clear views, but he’ll tell you why he has those views and what experiences he has had, and he is very transparent. When he started sharing his experiences, some people thought he was nuts.… Read the rest

Understanding a partially-assessed pool…

January 18 2025

If you read through my PolyWogg HR guide, Be the Duck, you know that the general approach to a federal government competition looks like this:

POSTER: Job goes up with elements for eligibility, experience, knowledge, abilities, personal suitability, language, security and conditions of employment
APPLICATION: People apply and are screened in/out for eligibility and experience;
WRITTEN TEST: Remaining candidates are tested for knowledge and some abilities;
INTERVIEW: Remaining candidates are tested for some abilities and some personal suitability;
REFERENCE CHECK: Remaining candidates are tested for some abiliteis and some personal suitability;
LANGUAGE TEST: Candidates are tested by PSC for French and/or English oral, written and reading;
POOL ESTABLISHED: All candidates who have passed steps 2-6 are put in the pool, which means they are all considered fully assessed and can be offered a job.
SECURITY CLEARANCE and CONDITIONS OF EMPLOYMENT: As part of the letter of office process, the selected candidate will be assessed for security (if necessary) and asked to agree to conditions of employment (most often travel or overtime, as required) before the letter is issued.

That is the whole process start to finish, generally speaking, for a fully-assessed pool. By contrast, a partially-assessed pool would be if they stop / pause their process any time before Step 6 (the last assessment phase before language testing).… Read the rest

Breaking a long astronomy hiatus

August 22 2024

As much as I still want to call myself an amateur astronomer, it requires you to DO something astronomy-related occasionally. Like looking through my scope, perhaps.

Just as the pandemic started, we were about to host a RASC Ottawa telescope workshop where people could come and see the different scopes, how they were set up, etc. When we cancelled, many people accused us of hysteria and that the virus wasn’t a threat. I wish I had saved those emails. 🙂

Since then? Almost nada. While lots of people around the world turned to sourdough bread, many also turned to astronomy. Purchase orders went out, production waiting lines got longer and longer, and prices went up, but many tried it out. Not me. Oh, I bought two new telescopes at the Black Friday event that year, and they were good deals. I bought a refractor and a reflector, with mostly the intent to try them out, write some “step-by-step” guides on how to use them, and perhaps either donate to the cottage or sell off. I planned some writing, looked at some stuff online.

But since March 2020, the only active thing I have done is to go to one of the first Star Parties in Carp, but even then, only to wander around to talk to people.… Read the rest

Friday Question (FQ): How do you answer a question marking more than one element?

February 5 2023

I received a really interesting question from a commenter who wanted to know how to handle a specific type of element in an interview process. Let’s say the interview is evaluating you on four elements A, B, C and D, with perhaps D being communications. In a traditional interview process, and the default of most managers, they’ll ask you three questions:

About Element A
About Element B
About Element C

And then they’ll grade D for communications on how you did across all three questions. Sometimes they’ll give you a question and evaluate your Comms only on that question, but most do a global score for Comms.

But today’s question is about what to do if the interview combines A & B together into one question for the interview.

A small digression on Elements

Let me first say that a combination of elements can happen at any stage of a process or even ahead in a poster.

For example, in a traditional poster, “Ability to work with others” is a frequent and popular “Ability element” (perhaps A above). Equally, “Interpersonal relations” might be a “Personal Suitability” element (perhaps C above). And just for fun, let’s say that B was another Personal Suitability element listed as “Initiative”.… Read the rest

Friday Question (FQ): Why would my boss not approve an assignment?

January 20 2023

I mentioned in a previous post that I was going to do some Friday Questions, and there is a really persistent question that people in non-managerial positions have trouble wrapping their heads around. In the shortest form, someone wants to go on an assignment, and their boss said no. They think it’s mean of their boss, and they want to know why the person is such a jerk. Even some inexperienced managers frequently want to say, “Well, of course, you should say yes. Holding people back is just short-sighted”.

If that is your frame, it DOES appear to be mean or short-sighted. So let’s look at why.

Understanding assignments

In short, within the public service, you occupy a “box”. It is a specific box, with a specific level and classification, let’s say PM-02. There’s an actual position number for that box, you get a letter of offer that appoints you to that box, and it comes with a job description of what you will be doing (albeit often a very generic one). That box is what you have been hired to do, and let’s make it simple and assume you’re in an indeterminate/permanent position (not casual or term, etc.).

An assignment would say that you, as the Employee who works for Manager A, are authorized to go and work for Manager B for a set duration of time.… Read the rest