The first lines of text of Kathy Acker’s New York City in 1979 are short and succinct: SOME people say New York City is evil and they wouldn’t live there for all the money in the world. These are the same people who elected Johnson, Nixon, Carter President and Koch Mayor of New York. But […]
There’s been very few stretches of my adult life where I haven’t woken up and reached for a cup of coffee first thing in the morning. It’s a core part of my daily routine, as non-negotiable as urination and feeding the cat, and I’m hardly alone in the habit. One of the easiest ways to […]
Two years ago, when I first two my business plan for Brain Jar 2.0, one of my long-term goals was taking the philosophy we used to create books and use it to find other places for written work to exist. Webcomics and artists had been monetizing their art with merchandise for years at that point, […]
This morning I’m pondering the right first move to bed into my daily routine. Right now, I have about four first moves that will kick of my day, depending on which groove I’m in: Getting up and journaling to park ideas; Getting up and writing directly into the computer; Getting up and doing the day’s […]
My desk is a disaster zone at the moment. A jagged landscape of poorly stacked notebooks, contracts, and opened mail, with the detritus of my BWF office placed over the top. I love working at my desktop, but I can’t fathom the notion of sitting down and writing there. Our kitchen is a disaster zone […]
When my life goes astray, my first port of call is always walking through my morning routines and figuring out where to make changes. Inevitably, I can track a minor thing that’s throwing my whole day off, which usually sees a flurry of experimentation as I find a work-around. Back in January, mornings were a […]
I recently waxed nostalgic about the heady days of 2008 to 2009, when it felt like my fiction writing career tracked along with far more promise than it does today. I was focused on my writing career to the exclusion of everything else, a host of stories were published and opportunities offered, and things felt […]
A few months back, I wrote a little vignette while experimenting with tools from Mary Robinette Kowal’s flash fiction workshop on Patreon. The end result wasn’t quite a stand-alone flash piece, and wasn’t quite a short story, but something in between—the opening scene of a longer story. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a story I was going […]
There’s nothing like teaching a workshop on something to both clarify your thinking and beliefs, then inspire new insights on a topic. Here’s a little something I puzzled through while writing my workshop for RWA last year. In indie publishing circles (and a lot of other marketing), you’ll often find people talking about sales funnels. The […]
Elizabeth George writes a journal for every novel, logging thoughts, ideas, and problems before she starts her writing day. Every day, she runs through the same pattern: read an entry from an old journal from previous novels, then write a new entry about the book she’s currently working on. This habit gives her the scope […]
For a few years now, I’ve lamented the death of blogging as a form with a widespread readership. While there’s still a few formats that have similar broadcast capabilities — a lot of my blogging impulses moved over to my newsletter around 2017 — none of them have the same capacity to provoke conversations and […]
Some weeks, everything works smoothly. You stick to your routine, your projects progress smoothly, your business runs like clockwork and delivers, just as it should. Some weeks, everything is chaos. Work demands sudden and necessary stretches of overtime that throw your routine into chaos, just as deadlines come due on other projects, and your support […]
