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

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,

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 bad systems and newsletters, which I read a few hours before… Kameron Hurley’s Locus essay about burnout, the expectation of productivity, and the reluctance to say “do less” in our culture at the moment. This post by Daphne Huff about writing a novel when you have zero time due to running a family, a full-time job, and a podcast (which seems like madness when read alongside everything else, but the final section about focusing on one aspect of craft/publishing at a time in the final section orients it with in this list). And this highly interesting twitter rant by @GravisLizard about the way we react

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 ideas that intrigued me in It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy At Work is the discussion of heartbeats–a way of overcoming communication challenges in a decentralised workspace without devolving into meetings and reports. There’s a more detailed discussion of it over on their blog (and another discussion here), but at it’s core its a system of automated check-ins where folks list what they’ve worked on with their day, coupled with a system for discussion and requests for updates. It’s a really intriguing idea, but not terribly useful in a company of one (which, essentially, most writers are regardless of whether they self-publish or not).