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 setting aside the next

PeterMBall 09/06/2019
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

The Dailies

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, then gradually evolved to include little bits and pieces from other routines I’d trialed (such as this one at the bottom of of Tobias Buckell‘s bullet journal post). It’s a useful document that walks me through four major areas of focus with dot point prompts to guide my planning: what’s important to me today? What am I trying to change or progress? Who will I talk to and what do I value about them? What are the things that need to be done, and the things I may have forgotten? It makes for a nice little ritual to work through over coffee, and generally gives

PeterMBall 06/06/2019
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Hope and Fear and Writing

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 excitement when the see how stories work. I know a few things about writing, but I read how-to books voraciously because I want other people’s phrasing and techniques in my toolkit for things like this. One of the winners, this time around, was this description of how scenes/stories work from Robin Laws Beating the Story: More importantly, the important thing to keep in mind that he drops a little later in the chapter: We don’t just want to know what happens next. We’re rooting for an outcome. I don’t often do this kind of planning up front, but it’s the first thing I turn to

PeterMBall 05/06/2019
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? I’m in the process of

PeterMBall 02/06/2019
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? The week just gone was

PeterMBall 26/05/2019
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Podcast Rec: 50 Things That Shaped the Modern Economy

For years, I worked on the theory that I was not built for podcast listening. I didn’t like the formats people used, and the signal-to-noise ratio didn’t add up when I looked at fitting them into my schedule. Then I discovered the genre of podcasts I really enjoyed: short, topic-focused essays and the interview series, as exemplified by Writing Excuses, the Allusionist, and Chris Jericho’s wrestling interviews. Recently a whole host of the podcasts I listen to regularly went dormant, so I started searching for things to replace it. The one that’s really captured my attention: BBC World’s 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy. The series is everything I want from the format: short, informative, and generally built around a seemingly innocuous topic that ultimately changes the way you see or understand the world around you. Which isn’t a bad result for something which spends 8 minutes charting the history of things like barcodes and spreadsheets. The transition from

PeterMBall 24/05/2019
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? The first draft of Project

PeterMBall 19/05/2019
Smart Advice from Smart People

“There is always more work to do, you know?”

I’m 90 words off hitting my fiction target for the day, and getting to tick the left-hand box on my monthly streak tracker. It’s occurring late today, but my partner is asleep and there’s an evening of work before me…and I’ll be stopping once those 90 words are written. As I mentioned in my last post, the upper limit is as important to me as the minimum I need to get done. I bang on about having hard edges on your creative practice because I’ve seen the results of not having limits on my work–to whit, I spend all my time trying to get things done and end up doing less. So it was interesting to see Austin Kleon talking about the same thing on his blog today, courtesy of a question he was asked about always feeling like you can and should be doing more creative work: “Yeah, always. If you get into that productivity trap, there’s always going

PeterMBall 16/05/2019
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? I’m two weeks and 20,000

PeterMBall 12/05/2019
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Searching for the Sweet Spot in Daily Word Count

My favourite function in Scrivener isn’t any of the fancy layout options, the scratch-pad that exists for eery scene, nor the ability to set up a useful list of metadata attached to any particular slice of a story. I make use of many of those things, but the thing that keeps me coming back to the program is the function that tracks the daily word count needed to reach a particular deadline (and automatically re-calculates it, when a day goes better or worse than expected). Which means, most mornings, I boot up my computer and load two trackers: one for my thesis, and one for the current creative project. Generally, speaking, whatever number is on the session target is what needs to get written in order to tick off my “have written” log on a given day. My actual target is usually slightly higher, because I crave consistency in the hard-edges to my process: generally speaking, the first time I

PeterMBall 10/05/2019
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Simply Designed, and In Great Quantity

There are books that I keep on my bookshelf because they are pleasurable artefacts to have around, even if I’m no great fan of the text that exists inside them. Occasionally, these objects are what you’d expect: leather-bound tomes and special editions, books that look like something out of a movie. More often, they’re smaller books. Paperback novellas or chapbooks whose slim page-count is wrapped in a beautiful, simple design, turning what should be a weakness in the marketplace with regards to page count and paper quality into a strength: I may care very little for Freud’s work, but I love this book. It’s a compact hundred pages long, four essays bundled together in a very pleasing package. Maybe 25,000 words in total, and part of the Great Loves series from Penguin that shares the same design aesthetic while being recognisably related to the longer Penguin Classics line. It’s not designed to take up much room on a shelf as

PeterMBall 07/05/2019
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? The current project has been

PeterMBall 05/05/2019