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 settling back into a work groove this week, right in time for a two week break from uni teaching where I can swing the bulk of my focus around to my own work. There is some marking and thesis writing on the docket, but the big project du jour is either a novella or short novel about boxing, space truckers, and too many hours reading Howard’s Sailor Steve Costigan stories while also watching The Expanse. Admittedly, I had a similar draft to this underway at the start of the year, but it kept iterating

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14/04/2019 4 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? I started writing again last week, doing my best to get at least a paragraph written every day on a novella project and a short story project. This week I’m stacking a little more on: a redraft of the short story that I’ve got sitting there, waiting for me to flesh out its verbs and voices; tightening up the first quarter of the story draft I’ve just written; progressing the novella to the end of the first act in its current draft; writing an opening sequence for a thesis chapter. The bigger challenge is actually

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07/04/2019 9 Comments
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Tidying the Desk

We cleaned the apartment last weekend, trying to drive a stake through the heart of the debris that had accumulated through the rolling hell that was the month of March. I took this snapshot of my desk prior to tidying it up, capturing the accumulated mass of bags, stacked notebooks, and paperwork that hadn’t been processed. I have a process for cleaning my desk these days–drawn, unsurprisingly, from a quick YouTube bit Marie Kondo put together for a UK magazine back when her book came out. It runs through a five step process: Take a moment to refocus on what the space is used for, and how I’d like it to be used. Pull everything off and group them into Notebooks, Papers, Misc Stationary, and Sentimental Things (Anything that doesn’t fit into those four categories probably doesn’t belong on my desk) Keep the things that help me ‘spark joy,’ which in this context means ‘do my job better’ as much as ‘makes me happy.’ Although I feel free reign to be specific about pens in this context. Discard the stuff that no longer has a place. Put things in an order and store vertically where possible–all my laptops/tablets now get stored in an old magazine file, while all my notebooks sit upright in a decorated box that makes them easily accessible. I have this process written down in my bullet journal, tucked away on page 60. When this journal is done, they’ll be transferred to a notecard and tucked into

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06/04/2019 1 Comment
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Venetia & Other Recommendations

Right. Friday. Back at work this morning, teaching a two-hour tutorial on Georgette Heyer’s Venetia and writing craft. It’s interesting teaching the same books two years in a row, because I can see the impact current craft interests have on the way I read. For instance, reading John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story over the last year kept me looking for the ways Venetia’s subplots serve as echoes of the central conflict, and gave me a new appreciation for the way she’s surrounded by people who are perceived but not really seen by others. Similarly, after reading Damon Suede’s Verbalize while sitting by Dad’s hospital bed, I kept paying attention to transitive verbs and the way they build the narrative (If you’ve not heard Suede talking Pride and Prejudice on a podcast, google his name and track down one of his interviews with Joanna Penn or Kobo Writing Life about the book). And because I’ve been immersed in Kenneth Quinn’s How Literature Works for a good stretch, I’ve been thinking about the ways that my own experiences as a reader keep bringing these things into the field of significant associations that impact on the way I’m reading. How each new book affects what’s read next, how opportunities to think give me the space to approach a text with a different mindset that may change the meanings perceived. All four books are worth a read, although the Quinn is difficult to track down these days courtesy of being out of print.

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29/03/2019 No Comments
Journal

Funeral Day

Woke up this morning and put on a collared shirt and tie, good pants and shoes that were not sneakers. I drove to the far side of the city and admired the kangaroos in the gardens, avoided a gathering crowd of people for as long as I possibly could. At ten o’clock, right on schedule, we started my father’s funeral service, and the rest of the day was a blur of mourning and people offering their condolences. First, at the crematorium, and then at the small pub around the corner where we decamped for dad’s wake. Tomorrow, I go teach classes. Meet with my PhD supervisor, try to write some things, and start the process of getting our flat in order after three or four weeks of neglect. It feels–rather oddly–like coming back from holidays, that same process of gathering the loose tethers of routines that were ignored while away and trying to weave them back into a familiar life. It started, this afternoon, with a few hours on the computer: opening files, catching up on the works in progress that ground to a halt three weeks back, and checking my blog reader for interesting things. # Here are some of the things that made me happy this afternoon Nora Roberts posted a long write-up about her writing process as a Facebook note earlier this week, and it’s interesting reading for both the way it highlights the work ethic that underpins her productivity and the way she debunks some of

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28/03/2019 2 Comments
Journal

Vale, Terry Ball

Last Monday, I turned forty-two and my father went into palliative care. On Tuesday night, he passed away. I stayed offline for a bit after it happened — no blogging, no real posting to social media beyond reading all the condolence messages, no checking my email unless there was something funeral-related coming through. I felt very out-of-phase with the world, and the grief felt very raw and new. It would be wrong to say that we didn’t see this coming — my father had Parkinsons, growing dementia, and issues with his blood. He’d survived a heart attack, back in 2011, and a few trips to the hospital for illnesses that disrupted treatment for his ongoing issues. A few years back, I wrote an entire essay about my father and what he meant to me and the inevitability of this day. It still caught us by surprise, when it finally happened. He went to the emergency room with a broken hip — it happened the same week my sister was diagnosed with cancer, and it seemed like the lesser concern until his doctor started listing risk factors prior to the surgery to put a pin and plate in. He was surrounded by people in the hospital — friends and family who gathered to be there with him. And the nice thing about his final week — the one where it looked increasingly like palliative care was coming — was sharing memories with people. They gave us back parts of my father

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26/03/2019 5 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? I feel a bit absurd doing this today, since the answer is largely “being there for my family during our second awful week in a row.” With so much going on involving hospitals and serious conversations with doctors, work has well-and-truly fallen by the wayside. What’s inspiring me this week? Damon Suede’s Verbalize, a writing book I picked up at the start of the hospital visits to give myself a productive distraction. Suede’s philosophy of building character around what the character does over the course of a story, rather than digging into the psychological make-up

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17/03/2019 1 Comment
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Who Gets To Monetise Your Spare Minutes of Attention?

I’m writing the first half this post on campus at UQ. It’s approximately 7:03 in the morning, and the cleaner is working their way through the offices. I’m here early because I teach a class at 8:00 AM, because it’s the first week and I still don’t know exactly how to find the room, and because I like to get on campus an hour early for classes. That’s my buffer, should there be traffic problems or train delays, and on the days when there are no such problems, it leaves me with approximately 47 minutes of time to fill once I arrive. Occasionally I have a plan for this time: going to the library, for example. Catching up with friends before class. Today — and for most of the coming semester — my plan is this: Do not give this time to Facebook or Twitter without a damn good reason. Instead, I’m making a conscious decisions about the way you’ll use the little slices of time to advance the writing projects that matter to me. # I often think of the period between 2005 and 2009 as my most productive years as a writer. Part of that is invariably hindsight being golden, ignoring the set-backs and indolences of the period. Part of it is thinking of all the setbacks that hit right after that period, and my slow shift into regular work after years of sessional teaching and freelancing. Part of it is running through two periods where my process

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12/03/2019 1 Comment
Smart Advice from Smart People

Vintage Links 002: Warren Ellis; Short Crime Fiction; Washing Pillows; Unproductive Days

One of my projects for 2019 is clearing the archive of unread links tucked away in the “To Read” folder of my bookmarks bar. At time of writing, there are about 600 of them remaining, and I’m going full Marie Kondo on those fuckers: everything is checked, thanks, and cleared away so I don’t have to deal with it again. The stuff that brings me joy gets posted here, to be shared with others.  You can see the first round of things I shared in last Monday’s post. When read alongside this week’s recommendation, it should be remembered that I have a very broad definition of joy. I’m Warren Ellis, and This Is How I Work (Lifehacker, 2015) Read the post on Lifehacker I spend the first hour or two of the day at a table in my back garden, under a sloping roof, either just with the phone or with the Dell, the Pixel or a notebook, depending on what kind of day it is. (Am awaiting a Textblade, which might make some things simpler, particularly when away from home.) The rest of the day is in a small room at the back of the house that I claimed as my office twenty years ago. I’m at the same old, heavy wooden desk I bought from a junk store twenty years ago. I’m not sending a picture because it is currently a bloody mess that makes me look like a hoarder because a bunch more junk got dumped in here

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11/03/2019 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? As the tenor of my blogging may have suggested, a lot of plans went out the window over the last week–one member of my family got diagnosed with cancer, while another fell over and broke their hip, had surgery yesterday, and now have a lengthy hospital stay while they heal and rehab. Given that it’s the family member who has advanced Parkinsons and dementia, said hospital stay and rehab is going to be all kinds of tricky.  So my main task for the coming week has moved away from “getting writing done” and towards “be

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10/03/2019 1 Comment
Big Thoughts

Backups

I’m coming up on my forty-second birthday in two weeks, which means I am officially middle aged and set in my ways. I do not discover new bands with anything approaching regularity. I tend to read the authors I know I’ll like rather than reach out for the cutting edge. Experimentation for its own sake makes me weary as a reader. Provocation for its own sake just makes me wish for something undercutting the attempts to shock and provoke. I’m now old enough that I get cranky with young people for parking tractors on my lawn. Old enough I can still remember the point that phrase got lodged in my consciousness, back in the nineties: an episode of Good News Week, repeating a statement by the British PM John Major out of context for comic purposes. I still prefer blogs to social media. Email to messenger programs. I get mildly irritated at tools like Slack every time I’m forced to use them, and mildly irritated at the folks who insist on using them to manage projects. I am still the kind of person who remembers the wonder of an RSS reed. But automated back-ups and networked hard drives are little slices of fucking magic from the technological gods, and the only way you take this future away from me is from my cold, dead fingers.

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08/03/2019 No Comments
Works in Progress

Notebooks and Process Notes: March 2019

One of the side-effects of doing my Quarterly Checkpoint this week is the realisation that I’m going to have very little time for high level strategic thinking on the writing front. With that in mind, I’ve shifted my drafting process back to handwriting in notebooks–a tactic that’s served me well in terms of keeping forward momentum during highly stressful periods. Since it’s been a while since I did an update about the state of the notebook wodge I carry with me, I figured I’d take a quick look at what I’m carrying and how I’m using it right now. Fortunately, it’s a pretty slimeline wodege of notebooks for me—there’s currently four notebooks in my kit, and I’m only usually carrying two or three of them at any given moment: The notebook on the bottom is a large, dark green JS Burrows Journal from my local office supply store–essentially, their name-brand knock-off of the moleskine design. It’s a remarkably nice piece of kit for the price, and there are a bunch of little improvements to the design over the last time I’d used one of their large journals. The shift to a creme-coloured paper, for one, and the move away from the larger 8mm rule that made it feel like I was writing in a school exercise book. It’s also a little wider than most notebooks that size, which makes it a pleasurable thing to hold and work in. It’s currently holding the bulk of my actual writing and brainstorming for

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07/03/2019 No Comments

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