Is it acceptable to still say Happy New Year when we are poking February with a short stick? I say yes, even if 2018 is well out of diapers and already on board the bus to grammar school.

So Happy New Year, and welcome to the first issue of a revamped, rejuvenated, recast Total Annarchy! I’m glad you’re here.

Many of you signed up very recently, so you don’t have a sense of what a dramatic re-do this is.

If you’ve been on this list for a bit, you might be surprised at this email’s look and feel. Read the backstory of why I am relaunching this biweekly newsletter. (BONUS: You’ll get a gander at my childhood diary. It’s as ridiculous as you’d suspect it might be.)

After I announced this new newsletter on Facebook and a whole bunch of the newer-yous subscribed... I panicked a bit. Like OMG... what did I just do? Why not stay under the radar for a while?

I spent most of middle school trying to not stand out. I refined the art of aligning my body perfectly with the outline of Howie Patch, who sat directly in front of me, so that a teacher wouldn't catch my eye and call on me. He was 6 inches shorter than me, so it required more skill than you'd think.

Since the Facebook announcement, I had moments where I'd wished that I had kept up that middle school kind of sleight of hand (sleight of body?).

Your emails to me (in response to my automated Welcome message) helped me snap out of that OMG moment and embrace the idea of being over (not under) the radar.

My friend Lorraine Thompson wrote: “I’m excited at the prospect of reading your work more regularly.” And I realized: “Hell yeah! It’s really that basic, isn’t it? I’m excited to do this, too!”

Excited. So stupid-simple, right? And a good reminder not to overthink in email. Or in life.

Here are 12 things I thought were worth sharing this "bi-week," more accurately called a fortnight:

1.
Meataphors
"Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts,” the Belgian Paul de Man wrote. Burger King used a powerful metaphor (meat-aphor?) to explain a boring problem, and I wrote about why it worked. B2B marketers selling so-called boring stuff: Read and be inspired.

2.
Just Say Nopecone
If you find yourself constantly tapped for internal projects because people say you write well and anyway it’ll only take a second and I don’t need it till this afternoon... well, Andrea Fryrear is serving up your Triple Scoop Nopecone to that BS. She says it’s about “Agile” (a word that I’m usually allergic to). But, in reality, it’s about insulating yourself from random acts of content.

3.
Rented Land, Redux
We’ve heard a lot about how Facebook has recently “killed” brands. But it’s also “killed” journalism. Because news is annoying. For Facebook, anyway. Stanford fellow Frederic Filloux resolutely believes that publishers cannot outsource technology or audience acquisition (among other things) to third parties. He’s talking about traditional media companies.

Or is he? Isn't that true of any organization? As I've been saying since Content Rules in 2010: This is what happens when you pitch your tent on rented land!

4.
Facebook It?
Frederic says it’s time to move on from Facebook. But I disagree, because Quality, Quality, Quality: High-quality content will always find an audience. Jay Baer tells you what quality Facebook content means. (Although I don’t agree with his #8.)

Allen Gannett asks me for my simplest writing tip. I gave him two.

6.
More Pages, Fewer Screens (MP,FS)
MP,FS was one of my 2017 resolutions. (It’s a 2018 one, too.) Here are 12 of the books I read last year that will help you become a better writer and storyteller.

7.
Advice for Millennials from a Peculiar Legend
Writer and legend Ursula K. Le Guin died this past week at her home in Portland, Oregon, at the age of 88. One of the things I prize in any writer is pliability, and Le Guin was more adaptive than most, moving chameleon-like between fiction, fantasy, essays, a blog, young-adult lit, poetry, and whitepapers. (Ha! Just kidding on that last one.)

She was prickly and peculiar, like most of us. My favorite Ursula Le Guin quote is this one, “There’s a point, around the age of 20, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”

8.
Ferrules Rule
A look inside one of America’s last pencil factories is amazing storytelling about the unknown art of making the first writing tool we all used. Two things struck me: (1) A shocking amount of the work is done by hand, and (2) what a joy to see ancient machines doing what machines should be doing and not, say, having their amputated legs hold up the serving station in an upscale coffee shop. There is a dignity to machines working as machines. (Just me?)

Pop-up contest: The first five people who tell me what a “ferrule” is without googling it win a signed edition of Everybody Writes. (Honor system. Email me if you think you know. U.S. only, because I’m not made of money.)

9.
My Best Career Advice
Actress Ellen Pompeo had to fight behind the scenes to get the paycheck she deserves. She plays Meredith Grey on Grey’s Anatomy—her character’s name is the show’s title, people!—yet she still had to heed the advice of show creator Shonda Rhimes: “Decide what you think you're worth and then ask for what you think you're worth. Nobody's just going to give it to you.”

That’s the exact advice I give to any young woman (or man) in “Poke your nose out. No one is going to invite you.”

10.
Calling my Boston people!
Come hang with me and my people (writers!) as Boston Content and Wayfair present a fun evening program on what it’s really like to work in copy and content. Three panelists, moderated by me, and drinks by Drizly, so you’ll find us extra hilarious. Register here.

11.
Free online program on writing: March 9
Learn how you can be a more productive writer (and hear the story of my effort to buy my literary hero’s seaside writing shed). Understand how to use comedy in B2B from the funniest person I know, Tim Washer. And hear Erik Deckers talk about storytelling—including something called the Freytag Pyramid, which sounds like a German circus tumbling act but probably isn’t.

It’s 100% free and virtual (no pants required), and you can access it on demand for 90 days. But you gotta sign up by March 9.

12.
Paradife loft
Possibly the best thing I saw this past week is this video about 10 letters that got booted from the American English alphabet. Trust me: Watch it.

Hugs for reading!

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