Mailbag #86
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I really love your routining for Hide-A-Key from Love Letters #10. It rounds out the effect in such a satisfying way.
Have you had any issue with anyone questioning the key itself? Does it look like a legitimate key to you?—LO
While I haven’t performed this trick hundreds, or even dozens, of times, in all the times I have performed it, I’ve never had anyone comment on the key looking strange or anything like that. And I perform for the sort of people who would call me out on such a thing.
In the U.S., at least, this style of key is pretty ubiquitous. Double-sided keys like this were mandated for cars over 30 years ago. So people here are familiar with the style/shape of key. (Of course, now most cars don’t have actual keys at all. But this key style is still familiar to people.)
While I wouldn’t perform this for a locksmith, I’m pretty comfortable showing it to anyone else without them questioning it.
You just need to ask yourself, does the key look strange to you? If so, then maybe you shouldn’t get it, because apparently, you’re from an area where this key type isn’t common. But it didn’t even raise an eyebrow from me when I first saw it (and I’m usually hyper-critical about the look of magic props).
Keys are so unstandardized, that it would be unusual, I think, for someone to think something was off, just based on looking at the key. If they ask (which they probably won’t) tell them it’s for your gym locker or storage locker or something other than a house key or car key.
Now, once the key vanishes, they might have some suspicion about the key itself, but they’d have that regardless of what it looked like.
With the version of Hide-A-Key I perform, the focus is more on the reappearance than solely the vanish. The structure used in that effect would be inexplicable to people even if you performed it with a mysterious ball of goo. So if you do it with something that looks even vaguely like a normal key-like, you shouldn’t have a problem.
What is your writing schedule like? How do you block out your time? I’m embarking on writing my first novel and I just don’t know how to schedule things out. —JP
I have a very complicated writing system I use to manage all the different outlets I end up writing for: the book, the newsletter, the site, and other professional writing gigs.
Getting too much into the weeds of the system I use probably won’t help anyone out. But I will tell you the general principle I follow, and this is what works for my brain. I overestimate the amount of time everything will take.
If, for example, I was planning on writing a novel of about 300 pages, I would estimate about 4 hours of work per page. I would then see how long it will take for me to find 300 4-hour blocks of time in my schedule. If I average one a day, then it will take me 10 months to write the book.
As I said, that’s an overestimate. It usually doesn’t take me 4 hours to write a page (although it has). By scheduling for the maximum amount of time I need, I end up feeling positive even if it takes me the maximum amount of time. And on days where I knock out that page in 60 or 90 minutes, there is a real sense of momentum and progress.
I know other people don’t work in this way. There is the old theory that work expands to fill the time you’ve allotted for it. But that’s not how my my brain operates. I’m more a follower of that U.S. Navy SEAL maxim: Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.
