GabrielCaldwell

I think family dynamics are fascinating. We often accept behavior from family that we wouldn't accept from friends. At the same time, family often acts in ways they would never do with someone outside the family. And it goes both ways. I don't know if it's familiarity breeding contempt, or that we still sort of see the other as children/parents.

Age and distance? Been there, done that - what a nightmare! I think distance is really hard to solve long term.

13. Give more than you get Being a mentor takes time and energy. But as a mentor, you’ll get just as much from the experience as the mentees. Whether it’s learning new things or just the satisfaction of helping someone grow and advance their career. — Employee Handbook: Mentoring Sometimes my sister drives me nuts. Andrea always knew how to push my buttons, and it seemed like there would be no respite on this visit. Yet her declaration that Jonah wasn’t 24 confused me more

12. Anyone can be a mentor Everyone has a story to tell; everyone can offer a perspective. — Employee Handbook: Mentoring I watched Jonah walking toward the door and desperately tried to figure out what to do. “Stay, Jonah, please,” I said, making a decision. Jonah paused and turned back to face me. I gave him a reassuring look, but he still seemed unsure of what to do. I guess that made two of us. “Do you two work together?” Andrea asked brightly, clearly unaware

11. Lead by example It’s one thing to tell someone what they should do, but if you don’t follow your own advice, are others going to listen to you? People learn more from what they see you do and how you act than they will from what you tell them to do. — Employee Handbook: Mentoring Everyone fantasizes about an ex-boyfriend asking to be taken back. At least, I think they do. I just hadn’t imagined it happening after I’d found someone better. Or maybe I had hoped tha

Next month—November—is the annual National Novel Writing Month. People are signing up, or pledging—or just thinking about—writing a novel in one month. I’ve thought about doing it before, but never actually managed to make the target (which is to write 50,000 words in a month.) Do you want to write a book that’s only 50,000 words? Do you think you can write that much in one month? All good questions, and personally, I’m not going to take part because I want to end up with a completed novel in one month. But I’m pretty sure I can meet that goal (it’s 1,600 words a day) and I feel like it could be a fun exercise. And if it takes more than a month to finish, that’s okay too. Anyone else thinking of taking part? Even if you aren’t, you might want to check out the website for NaNoWriMo. It has some interesting resources for writers covering plot and characters. Things that are important whether you are writing a 50,000 word novel, or something more or less ambitious. https://nanowrimo.org

10. Mentoring is beneficial for the mentor A mentoring program is NOT operated solely for the benefit of the mentee. Mentors benefit from the experience—whether from seeing things from another's point of view, learning to clearly and succinctly explain processes and ideas, or just the satisfaction of helping someone advance. The mentor’s role is essential, but it's also a learning one. — Employee Handbook: Mentoring After talking to Pete briefly about Jonah, Pete made a hasty e

Glad you liked it! The lack of an ending for this story really ate at me too, so even if it wasn't what the author intended, it made me feel good to have an ending for the characters!

Let's hope it doesn't come to that....

9. Don’t Assume Anything Always double-check, and never assume. If you explain something to someone, have them retell it in their own words. Then you’ll know if they really understood what you were teaching. — Employee Handbook: Mentoring For the next couple of weeks, things settled down, and life had almost become a comfortable routine. Or at least comfortable—it was barely routine. Weekdays were filled with work—Jonah seemed as inclined to work long hours as I was—but

Thank you. No, it wasn't Covid - but oddly enough I was released from the hospital just before it started taking off, so I've been in a sort of 'house arrest' aver since!

I hope to, but some things are beyond my control, as I've discovered over the last six months:

8. Re-evaluate your initial assumptions Don’t be surprised they were wrong. Instead, adjust your plans and your actions to handle the new reality. — Employee Handbook: Mentoring Upstairs, Jonah was quieter than he’d been all day. We washed up—I found an unused toothbrush in a drawer for him—and then he stripped and climbed into bed. I turned off the overhead light, and walked over and climbed into bed next to him. Jonah sat there looking pensive, as I climbed into bed.

Even I can’t believe it, but here it is mid-2020, and I’ve been incommunicado for over six months. I’m not going to bore you with all the details, but four months of that was taken up with an illness (mine), a family death, a move, and then for the last couple of months, I’ve just been recovering from all that. And after all that, whenever I went looking for things, they often proved illusive; “Three moves are as bad as a fire’—Benjamin Franklin. In many respects, I should be surprised that I ever got back at all. But here I am, and I’m hoping to get into the rhythm of writing in the next few months. Not Your Mentor has been on hold, but the next chapter is complete, and I’m doing the final edit. I’m planning on posting that chapter in a couple of weeks. (Sooner actually, but I’ve been wrong before!) My apologies to the readers for the long delay. I hope you understand. I would promise that it won’t happen again, but I now realize that there are many things in life that you really can’t control. You might think that you are in control, but unexpected events will overturn your apple cart. I don’t think I’m alone in that experience over the last few months. Gabriel

Hi everyone, Sorry for the long delay in posting the next chapter. I won't bother you with the details for the delay, but I do hope to get the next chapter up in the next couple of weeks. Thanks for reading! Gabriel

They are pretty much made up, though based on things I've come across of found here and there.....

7. Small changes can have the most significant impact Changes in attitude and behavior have the greatest impact on success. They can also be the hardest to implement. Focus on small, doable actions that build to change. — Employee Handbook: Mentoring I didn’t hear from Jonah again that week, and I wondered if he would turn up on Saturday. It seemed very likely that he wouldn’t. In truth, I was thinking things would be a lot simpler for me if he didn’t. But on Saturday morni

6. Celebrate Their Achievements When a problem is solved, or a project successfully completed, don’t immediately move on to the next one. Take a moment to acknowledge the success. It will provide the energy and enthusiasm to keep working on the next problem and give the confidence to tackle even bigger problems. — Employee Handbook: Mentoring I awoke around 9 am the next morning. The night before, I had thought that this one moment of weakness would be enough. I would have

Glad you liked it. I guess I'm more interested in the dynamics of a relationship than the sex...and I've written a bunch of sex scenes, so I'm always looking for something new to say about how to do it, which can be surprisingly difficult!

If you ignore the sex bits, males and females are very similar. Sexual attraction isn't usually just about the vagina or the penis, it's about many other aspects of appearance and behavior. I can't help wondering if we try and genetically remove things that lead towards homosexuality, we might also manage to increase the chance of people becoming asexual, with no attraction to males or females. Just a thought.

Thanks. Not giving anything away, but of course he has an agenda!! 😁 There's a lot of complications to come!

Anything can be sexy; it's all in the way you do it!! 😀

5. Look at the big picture Sometimes it’s tempting to try and solve the immediate problems, but don’t forget the big picture. It’s the foundational changes that can have the most long-term impact. — Employee Handbook: Mentoring At ten minutes before 9 am on Saturday morning, my front doorbell rang. I had been up since 7 am and had changed three times as I tried to figure out what was appropriate to wear. I’d gone for casual at first, and then thought that what I’d chosen wa

A new chapter of Not Your Mentor, Chapter 4, is up. It’s always interesting where ideas for stories come from. Even I don’t always understand—or remember—where an idea for a story came from. Often, an idea will come to me, and I start writing, and half an hour later, I can’t remember exactly what the original idea was. It’s already changed dramatically from the original concept. Some stories are based on people I see, and I try to imagine a back story for them. Other stories are based on situational ideas that come to me after reading something. Not Your Mentor was partly inspired by reading about mentoring programs that some companies offered. Not exactly exciting, but that’s where it started, and I thought it would be interesting to have two people thrown together through that. The final story isn’t exactly about that, but that’s not unusual. Sometimes a story comes to you pretty whole, and sometimes it comes in parts. You have an initial idea, you write it, but then you need more. And more. And you slog away at it. And sometimes you get really lucky, and you encounter something that fits perfectly into your story. I'm currently working on a story about a guy that falls in love with a footballer. (English football.) I’ve already written a few thousand words of the story, but at the moment it is really more of a sketch. It needs a lot more to turn it into something more than just a boy meets boy, argues, then eventually falls in love story. And then, this past week, the universe stepped in! A rookie player on the New England Patriots football team tweeted a Shakespeare quote, on Instagram. Then the (older/grizzled) Patriots quarterback replied that he should be reading his playbook (rather than reading Shakespeare!) Awesome! Suddenly I had an interesting conflict idea to add to my story! Thanks, Tom Brady! Boston Globe: Chase Winovich quoted Shakespeare on Instagram. Tom Brady told him to ‘study your playbook.’

4. Wait Before You Give Advice Don’t just jump in with a list of prescriptions and solutions. Listen to your mentee, and be sure you understand what their problems are, and what they want from you. Unwanted advice will be ignored, leading to frustration on both sides. — Employee Handbook: Mentoring The lunch hadn’t gone as well as I’d hoped, but it could have gone worse. There had been no hysterics, and no attempted blackmail, so at least my worst fears hadn’t been real