Wordcount Escalation Woes
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Elizabeth Bear wrote a fantastic newsletter about creativity and bad habits last week. You can read it online, if you’re not a subscriber, but subscriptions are a magical thing. The really useful take-away, meditating on the internet and productivity and the psychology of creativity: Measuring one’s self against the internet rarely turns out well. Unless […]
Short Stories That Are No Longer Short Stories & Load Bearing Ambitions
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Yesterday was a weird writing day. I’m working on a short story at the moment, scribbling a couple of pages in a notebook every day, locking down the details as I go. Yesterday the rough draft hit forty-odd pages, rolling through the first major gear change in the plot, and my momentum ground to a […]
The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?
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The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own […]
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My website seems to have spontaneously created this particular post, throwing up the headline with no particular content to share, and broadcasting it to the usual channels. I originally came in to delete the post and take it down, then figured, what the hell? It’s actually a pretty good metaphor for today: I’ve just finished […]
The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?
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The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own […]
A Confluence of Time/Money/Success Posts
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There are days when the internet feeds you an interesting series of posts, comments, and articles that all seem to weave together in interesting ways. For example, this quartet of things have all showed up on my radar within a twenty-four hour period: Charlotte Nash’a comments about the limits of time on Tuesday’s post about […]
The Archive Impulse
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The first blog I truly followed belonged to Neil Gaiman, when he added the American Gods dairy to his website back in 2001. It was quickly followed by Caitlin Kiernan’s Low Red Moon journal, which quickly metamorphosed into her Livejournal (and has stayed there, even now, after Livejournal has become an archaic thing occupied by […]
Bad Systems & The Republic of Newsletters
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Criag Mod recently did a six-week walk across Japan during which he purposefully removed himself from the phone as a tool of social media. Of course, such things aren’t new these days. 2019 seems to be the year everyone stopped and looked at social networks with a critical eye, evaluating the space they occupy in […]
The Brain Jar’s Heartbeat
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I’ve been reading ReWork and It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work over the weekend, processing the business advice of the 37 Signals/Basecamp founders who have rejected the notion of building a growth-at-all-costs business. The former is very philosophy focused, while the latter is a ore process-oriented approach which implements that philosophy. One of […]
The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?
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The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own […]
The Dailies
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A few weeks back, I started picking up an old habit I’d left behind. It goes like this: every morning, I tend to wake up and work my way through a three-page planning document designed to help me frame my to-do list. It started out as a bunch of notes from Todd Henry’s Die Empty, […]
Hope and Fear and Writing
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I’ve been tutoring creative writing at UQ for the last few months, going back to some early principles and trying to explain them in different ways. Sometimes it takes a particular example or way of phrasing a technique for it to click with a particular student, but you can always see the epiphany and the […]