Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Building Pyramids and Focus

I knew Father’s Day would be rough for me this year, so i didn’t push myself to do too much writing last week while the advertising was in full swing. Instead, I gave the week over to all sorts of catch-up projects and a bunch of forward planning in an effort to make good use of the anxiety-driven energy that set in. One of those projects involved sitting down and implementing the Pyramid Technique for figuring out where my writing-and-publishing priorities are currently sitting. This technique is borrowed from Dan Blank’s Be The Gateway, where he uses it to help clarify life priorities. This feels like a good time to do this, as I’m heading into the second half of the year with the distinct feeling that I’ve got a lot of planes in the air and nothing is really landing. PHASE ONE: THE INITIAL PYRAMID The process I’m using ran something like this: Grab a bunch of index cards

PeterMBall 04/09/2019
Stuff

Black Swan Thinking

Many years ago, I worked a shift at dayjob where shit well-and-truly hit the fan. We were preparing for one of our busiest periods of the year–lots of incoming calls from lots of panicked writers looking to double-check a big opportunity™ deadline, while simultaneously trying to prep for other big projects that were coming up. Big opportunity™ deadline days weren’t fun days at the best of time, but within the first hour of this one kicking off shit started going wrong. One staff member’s flight home had been delayed by twenty-four hours. Another staff member called in sick (from memory, they were heading to hospital). Our then-CEO was incomunicado for the day (for reasons I don’t recall), and the two other staff members on deck were both relatively new to the organisation. On top of that, i was relatively new to the role I was working and the projects I was working on. It was a time of transition, new

PeterMBall 03/09/2019
News & Upcoming Events

OUT NOW: One Last First Date Before The End Of The World

What do you do when your date tells you Ragnarök starts next Tuesday? Logan expected his date with Stina Lorne to be a disaster, quickly ending after dinner when they acknowledged she was out of his league. Instead they went for a long drive, then a walk along a familiar beach. In fact, everything seems to be going better than Logan could have imagined when he asked her out last week. Sure, his date is convinced she’s the descendant of Fenrir, demon wolf of Asgard. And yeah, she’s talking about the apocalypse kicking off in the near future. Logan’s not sure that matters, yeah? After all, nobody’s perfect, and even the best relationships take work. One Last First Date Before The End Of The World is the fourth release in the Short Fiction Lab series from Brain Jar Press. This experiment has been filed under: mythic fantasy, first dates, the day before the apocalypse, and slipstream romance stories.   Available now

PeterMBall 02/09/2019
Sunday Circle

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

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 blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them). After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all. Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here). MY CHECK-IN What am I working on this week? Writing is top of the

PeterMBall 01/09/2019
Works in Progress

Status Post: 31st August, 2019

BIG NEWS THIS WEEK: One Last First Date Before the End Of the World was released today. What do you do when your date tells you Ragnarök starts next Tuesday? Logan expected his date with Stina Lorne to be a disaster, quickly ending after dinner when they acknowledged she was out of his league. Instead they went for a long drive, then a walk along a familiar beach. In fact, everything seems to be going better than Logan could have imagined when he asked her out last week. Sure, his date is convinced she’s the descendant of Fenrir, demon wolf of Asgard. And yeah, she’s talking about the apocalypse kicking off in the near future. Logan’s not sure that matters, yeah? After all, nobody’s perfect, and even the best relationships take work. One Last First Date Before The End Of The World is the fourth release in the Short Fiction Lab series from Brain Jar Press—home to stand-alone short story experiments

PeterMBall 31/08/2019
Smart Advice from Smart People

Vintage Links 005: Literary Fame, Publishing Crashes, Breathing, & Research

It’s Friday, September 30, and so I launch into the fifth instalment of my Vintage Links series. It’s been an interesting week clearing the To-Read folder, as i’ve had my first run of posts/articles that were either a) no longer online, or b) now taken over by godawful spam sites that have camped on the former name. The Bizarre, Complicated Formula for Literary Fame (Joshua Rothman for the New Yorker, 2015) Read it at the New Yorker’s Website When you work in a writers centre, you tend to accumulate articles about how various writers get famous or made a giant splash. They’re almost always talking about outliers, because the kinds of folks who get the big coverage are exceptions to the rule, but they’re also the source of information for how publishing works for many new writers. They assume every successful writer’s career trajectory mirrors Stephen Kings, or Dan Browns, or JK Rowlings, or…well, you get the idea. This…isn’t one

PeterMBall 30/08/2019
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

RECENT READING: Do Anything by Warren Ellis

Warren Ellis takes a look at the history of comics using the metaphor of Jack Kirby’s Robot Head as the central metaphor and anchor for his free-associating path through the topic. That doesn’t do the book justice, though. I don’t think any description ever will. Because one of the things that unifies Ellis’ disparate project tends to be his interesting in breaking down a form to its components and rebuilding it into something new. Ten years, when this book was just a column on Bleeding Cool, he took that approach to a weekly essay on comics books. The days, you can see him deploy the same approach over on his website, courtesy of the way he’s thinking out loud about comic book publishing and developing his vision for a weekly newsletter in an ongoing web series. I discovered this book by a circuitous route. I’d been a fan of Ellis for years, courtesy of his work on Transmetropolitan and his

PeterMBall 29/08/2019
Journal

Movable Objects

Over the last few weeks my laptop has taken on an increasingly stationary role. I’ve pulled it away from the current set-up exactly twice–once for Write Club and an afternoon at the university, and once when it was necessary to write away from the desk due to other things going on in the flat. the rest of the time it’s sat in the same spot, with the same peripherals plugged in or attached to the bluetooth. Surrounded by the same tools, the same books, the same project notes. After two or three years of migrating around the flat two or three times every work day, the steady routine of being able to just sit and write is surprising. Of course, give that it’s Wednesday as this post goes live, I’m probably engaging in my once-weekly ritual of carting the computer across town to get work done. On the downside, I’ve been in a stretch of letting my phones get smarter

PeterMBall 28/08/2019
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Movies That Surprised Me: Office Christmas Party

I remember when Office Christmas Party hit cinemas, and I’d planned to go see it. The film looked awful, a little slice of seasonal narrative that was going to be equal parts debauchery and twee, but every time the trailer’s played I kept noticing actors whose work I dug in the supporting cast: Kate McKinnon, Olivia Munn, Courtney B. Vance, Randall Park, Jennifer Aniston. “It will be terrible,” I told myself, “but it could have some great moments.” Then life got busy, ’cause it was the holidays, and it’s time in cinemas was incredibly short. There was always a movie slightly more appeal playing at the same time, and I went to see that instead. Fast forward to last week, when my partner and I settled in for a trashy movie night and scrolled through the new releases on Netflix. Office Christmas Party flashed up, and the graphics were basically Kate McKinnon in a terrible holiday sweater, and my partner

PeterMBall 27/08/2019
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

RECENT READING: Clementine, Cherie Priest

I started describing this book to my partner as I was approaching the midpoint, running through the key details: steampunk western; Escaped slaves turned dirigible pirates; a female spy forced to become a Pinkerton because she’s too famous for the South to want her anymore; MAD SCIENCE SUPER-WEAPONS! My partner basically asked me to stop and put it on her to-read pile before I’d finished the list. Clementine is part of Priest’s Clockwork Century series, which started with 2009’s Steampunk Zombie Western Boneshaker and rolled through another 5 novels and two novellas. This is one of the latter, originally released as a special edition by Subterranean press and now out in paperback for everyone who wants to catch up. As a novella, it’s not going to be for everyone. It’s definitely a long novella–I’d estimate that it runs close to 40,000 words–but it packs a lot of story, action beats, and two POV characters into that count. The result is

PeterMBall 26/08/2019
Sunday Circle

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

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 blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them). After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all. Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here). MY CHECK-IN What am I working on this week? Right now I’m in the

PeterMBall 25/08/2019
Works in Progress

Status Post: 24 August, 2019

Another week draws to a close and the next week is being planned, which means it’s time to break out another Status Post as I survey the state of things here in Brain Jar Headquarters. BIG THINGS ACHIEVED THIS WEEK: Some weeks the achievements are the big list of things you did above-and-beyond the list of things you set out to do. Some weeks the achievements are the things you kept on track despite the drawbacks. This week is one of the latter, with my fiction writer suffering but my PhD word count and a lot of goals on the non-writing side of writing were all met. And I did sneak in shiny new website redesign during the week, when it was clear creative work wasn’t going to stay on track. That lets me tick a task of the “one day’ list, and opens up a bunch of opportunities that weren’t there under the old layout. Also, there was this:

PeterMBall 24/08/2019