ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
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? I’m still searching for a regular writing rhythm at the moment–one of our guinea pigs is still sick and in need of care/vet visits on a semi-regular basis. This means I’m keeping my ambitions relatively contained: catching up on my thesis draft, which is about two thousand words behind where it should be, and getting a new Short Fiction Lab instalment uploaded for a release later this month.  What’s inspiring me this week? Elspeth Probyn’s Blush: Faces of Shame is a book I’ve recommended a few times before, but I revisited it towards the middle

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14/07/2019 1 Comment
Journal

Telling Ghost Stories About Late Capitalism

I’m putting the finishing touches on a new Short Fiction Lab release this week, going through the story draft and making last minute tweaks and squinting at the title from different directions to make sure it’s right. The cover for this one is already done, so it will be a pretty quick production process one I’m satisfied with the story text and the author’s note. The new story is actually a very old one, in some respects. It’s a ghost story, of a sort, involving lonely roads and two people who may not be in love anymore, and what happens when a road trip goes all kinds of wrong. I wrote a very early draft of it back in 2007, but it never seemed to fit together right. Over the years I’ve pulled it out and tinkered with it dozens of times, taking it in different directions. This version…well, it started by going back to the very first draft I ever wrote and rebuilding it from scratch. Teasing out metaphors I’d only hinted at, bulwarking the central parallel I was drawing between being stuck in a relationship going wrong and being caught between life and death.

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12/07/2019 No Comments
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Romance at MWF & Habit Hacking

I was catching up on twitter and noticed my friend Kate Cuthbert posting about Romance at MWF. It’s…rather good news: I HAVE HAD TO BE QUIET ABOUT THIS FOR MONTHS. IT HAS BEEN SO HARD!! I’m so so so happy that A Day of Romance is now out for the public! Come and see the devastatingly talented writers talk frankly and intelligently about writing about love at #MWF19 I CAN’T WAIT. ❤️❤️❤️ pic.twitter.com/8lTYXQEhRt — Kate Cuthbert 📚 (@katydidinoz) July 10, 2019 For those who can’t see the image in the quoted tweet, it features a shot of the Day of Romance program that looks something like this: And, oh god, that looks good. It’s the 8th of September, and you can grab the full details for each event over on the Melbourne Writers Festival website, and it’s a rather spectacular program in terms of content and talent. I’m frankly jealous of all the folks in Melbourne who get to go to this. And you really should. # When I first read Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, a book about the way our brain transfers certain tasks become encoded as routine tasks in our brain, one of the things that stood out was the hypothesis that bad habits never really go away. Once a certain sequence of tasks is encoded in the basal ganglia, it’s there for good. Sure, you can force the routine into the background and override it with new sequences. And you can kick your conscious brain

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11/07/2019 No Comments
Journal

The Day After Two Weeks of Sick Days

Two weeks ago, the last Heartbeat log I put up on Instagram included the line “Realised the sore throat, aching muscles, and disrupted equilibrium may mean I’m getting sick (do not want).” The next morning, I woke up discovered that I was right on both fronts: I was sick with the flu, and I truly did not want it. Work ground to a halt, the illness getting an assist from a very sick guinea pig that needed more trips to the vet and help eating every couple of hours. I’m only just getting back to doing work-related things today, forcing my reluctant brain to look at things I’ve been ignoring for a fortnight without shying away because getting on top of things will be hard. It will still be a disrupted work day, because we’ve still got a very sick guinea pig who needs to be hand-fed every few hours, but there’s the possibility of getting stuff done around that. Sick days are hard when you have a freelancer mindset (and you live without sick leave). While I’ve been physically better for a few days, my brain is still lagging behind in the foothills of anxiety. My subconscious keeps running around in panicked loops: “We’re so far behind. We’ll never catch up. This is why writing is a terrible idea–let’s just pack it all in and go look for a different job.” My conscious brain is acknowledging that all those things are possible, but unlikely, and that doing nothing will

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10/07/2019 No Comments
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? Most of my plans for last week were predicated on “when I recover from this damn flu,” but that didn’t end up being a thing until Friday and there’s been so much chaos at home since then that I still haven’t picked up the treads. Which means the plans for this week are virtually identical to last week: spend a few days re-familiarizing myself with all the projects in progress, start the typing-up process of the handwritten drafts so far, and get all the little admin stuff done so I can hit the ground running

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07/07/2019 1 Comment
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 Keeping this short today, because I have the flu. What am I working on this week? Forward progress on drafta stalled on Thursday when flu symptoms hit, but I’m taking that as an opportunity to spend this week typing up second drafts of the first acts of the Exile redraft and Project Rad. What’s inspiring me this week? Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares, which is a phenomenal program for writers as cooking is another industry where people dream big and deny the realities of standard business practices. Its also a show where Ramsey looks to the development of young chefs working in poor

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30/06/2019 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

In Which Kitchen Nightmare’s Brings Me Comfort

Last night, my partner introduced me to Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares, starting with the infamous Amy’s Baking Company episode where shit hits the fan, then working our way back to the UK editions of the show which involve marginally less schadenfreude. There’s a joke when I make in writing classes about writers being reluctant to embrace the business side of their craft, basing their expectations off a handful of outliers, which is kind of like trying to invest a million dollars into a restaurant because you’re a big fan of Jamie Oliver. It wasn’t until the second or third episode of Kitchen Nightmares that I realised how many people actually do that, and how reluctant they are to take on board the suggestion that they, maybe, should try learning a little about how things actually work in established, successful restaurants. It makes me oddly comforted to think writers are not alone in this particular behaviour.

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27/06/2019 1 Comment
Smart Advice from Smart People

Angela Slatter on What It’s Like To Finish a Trilogy

Angela Slatter has written a post about writing the third book in a trilogy and figuring out structures for the Always Trust In Books blog. It amuses me because a friend of mine recently commented that I do not seem to like geeky things, citing the fact that I rarely seem to talk about Star Wars or Star Trek or Doctor Who. Meanwhile, I suspect that I am the person referenced who banged on about story structure and Star Wars in Angela’s presence a little too often, because it’s spent a lot of time as my go-to for structure examples (back in the days before I banged on about story structure and Die Hard instead…) For the record: I’m a fan of Star Wars, fan of Doctor Who. Usually irritated by Star Trek, outside of Discovery and Deep Space Nine, because it never fits what I want from the narrative and the abstract level in which their space battles never feels like it has much tension. I was a big fan of Babylon 5, courtesy of Sean Cunningham insisting we stop a late-night D&D game in order to watch episodes of the second series during its original run (Babylon 5 is aided by encountering it when once the continuity is in full swing–I suspect, if I’d watched Season 1 first, I would have been a lot less forgiving). So…yes, I’m a fan of many things. Often quietly, because I learned to keep my mouth shut about such things over the

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26/06/2019 3 Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Wordcount Escalation Woes

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 you’re reading dub one-star reviews of your favorite book to make yourself feel better about the dumb one-star reviews of your own book, because obviously some people failed reading comprehension and don’t know it. (This works until you start getting angry on behalf of Watership Down, because it deserves so much better than “There are no boating accidents in this novel, if I could give it zero stars I would.**) The thing is, a thousand good words a day is a pretty good rate. But it’s hard to remember that when everybody around you is engaged in wordcount escalation, or the deadlines and the sewer bill are looming. And the worse we feel about our work, the more likely we are to avoid it. Or to throw ourselves into it in long, compulsive bursts that don’t actually increase your productivity: they just exhaust us and don’t leave room for recovery. I’ve been watching the trend towards word-count escalation among writers for a few years now. I put it on the program of one of the early GenreCons, because I thought it was important: Rachael Aaron’s post about going from 2k a day to 10k had just gone

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26/06/2019 No Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Short Stories That Are No Longer Short Stories & Load Bearing Ambitions

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 halt in the space of a page. For the first time since I started, I’d written less than a page. Now, yesterday was a not-terribly-good day, but other writing still got done on other projects. I did the usual self-recrimination and doubt that comes when you stall out on a project–the inner monologue of lo, it has finally been revealed, I am rubbish and the ideas are gone and I will never do good work again–and then put my writing away at 6:00 PM and went out to eat tea and watch Netflix. This morning I’m pondering the issue with a clearer head. Less angst, more analysis. Thinking through what it is that’s got me stuck, looking back at what’s come before to see what I’ve set up that I’m now ignoring, or what tangent have I started that’s a departure that does not fit and now need to include set-up if I want to keep it? The problem with the third act is invariably in the first, as movie writers are fond of saying, and some days you just need to apply the Kress protocol and get on with it. I’ve done that a

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25/06/2019 1 Comment
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? I finished my marking on Wednesday night last week, and immediately settled into a few days of rebuilding routines and re-establishing my areas of focus. Right now, I seem to have settled on four seperate projects that I’m trying to advance every day, with the bulk of the work taking place in notebook rather than on the computer (a tactic that kept me writing when the bulk of my marking needed the PC). This week, the to list looks like this: Progressing past the first act of Project Rad after doing a brain-dump of the project

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23/06/2019 2 Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

?

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 ten days straight of grading assignments, making comments on first chapters for forty-two different novels, and my brain is feeling rather scraped out and devoid of things worth saying. The thing about marking creative work, as opposed to essays, is that it gets horribly repetitive. You don’t have time to explain everything that’s going wrong across three or four thousand words, which means you focus in on the stuff that will help the manuscript get to the next level. Inevitably, when dealing with new writers, this comes down to the same conversations about scene structure and developing beats and figuring out what your characters want, talking about the mechanics of good description and thinking about patterns of action and reaction when you start generating dialogue. And the really hard part is trying to ensure your not treating every problem in a manuscript like it’s a nail and you’ve got a hammer, having to pause and ask yourself if it’s really a structural issue thats the biggest problem right now, or just some clunk dialogue that isn’t quite working as it should. So you second-guess, and you fret, and you suck it up and go with

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20/06/2019 1 Comment

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