ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
News & Upcoming Events

Apocalypse Ink Sale (& Free Copies of Exile)

I shall not bury the lede here: you can pick up a copy of Exile for free on Amazon until the end of the month, delivering you a novella’s worth of Gold Coast based urban fantasy for the princely sum of FREE. They’ve also discounted the ebook of the whole Flotsam omnibus to $3.49 until the books go out of print at the end of April. The omnibus contains all three novellas in the sequence, plus a handful of bonus short stories set in the Flotsam universe. These are just two of the deals Apocalypse Ink is running on my books, and a bunch of their other authors, in the lead up to their shift in business model. As a reminder, the series will be unavailable after April 30 and I’m still not sure what I’ll be doing with it when the rights revert, so this is your last chance to get copies for a long stretch. You can find out about the deals they’re offering over on the Apocalypse Ink site.

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29/01/2019 No Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Stuck on a Project? Try Stealing This Tip from Psychology

In the final weeks of 2018 I sat down and read Ellen Hendrickson’s How To Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety. As someone who deals with anxiety on the reg, this was a pretty good book for exploring how and why anxiety occurs, and using that to frame why already familiar techniques from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy are used. This was, by and large, an expected and hoped-for effect when I picked up the book. What I wasn’t expecting when I read it was the sheer number of times I would sit down and start making notes that were associated to writing and building a writing career. …. I spent a good chunk of last Thursday trying to write this blog post and failing. I was just back from an academic conference–an event that is really high on the list of things that trigger my own social anxiety–and my brain kept trying to put together a frame that would make that clear. A subtext that would make a request of the reader: Understand that I’m not at my best, and take pity on my failings. Which is, weirdly, why Hendrickson’s book proved useful in a writing context, because one of the core ideas she talks about is the fear of The Reveal that lies at the heart of social anxiety: It’s the sense that something embarrassing, deficient, or flawed about us will become obvious to everyone…Social Anxiety isn’t just the fear of judgement, it’s the fear that the judgers are right. We think

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28/01/2019 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? Heading down to the GANZA conference on Tuesday, which means the first half of the week will be spent putting the final touches on my conference paper and working out transport logistics (I’m not looking forward to the 5:30 start on Tuesday). Planning on a day to recover, which leaves me with a very short working week on Friday to get writing projects kickstarted. What’s inspiring me this week? My head’s been in a lot of reference books that I’ve read a hundred times before this week, but writing the final stages of the conference

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20/01/2019 2 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? There’s ten days until I deliver my conference paper and all Fiction work has largely been shuttered until that’s cleared. This week will see me finalise the order of the lit review (finally!) and write up the actual critical section, with the goal of giving it to my supervisor for a quick look around Friday. Then, I have a short window in which to write something else before the conference actually hits next week. What’s inspiring me this week? I’ve been reading a lot of Marie Kondo this week–a re-read with regards to her first

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13/01/2019 1 Comment
Works in Progress

Friday Status Post: 11 January 2019

BIG THINGS ACHIEVED THIS WEEK: The first week and a half of January has been a bit of a mess for me–lots of disruptions to work habits, lots of anxiety about upcoming thesis milestones and presentations. Which, in turn, has leant itself to a god deal of practastiprojects between hammering away at my draft (although, thankfully, having just read Rest, I’m at least able to understand how the downtime has been helping). I’m on the third draft of a conference paper at the moment–and this one, at least, seems to have the content in the right order. I’ve also done a massive notebook cull, which saw approximately 70 notebooks leave the apartment and the rest nicely arranged in blank and ongoing-project boxes. I’ve finally eliminated spiral binding from my life–something that brings an incredible amount of relief and frees up a lot of mental space I didn’t know those old notebooks were occupying. I’ve also divested myself of cheap, 8mm rule notebooks that I’ve been holding onto just in case I need them. Given the number of notebooks in the blank’s box (aka, that one on the left), I don’t think I’m going to hit that kind of emergency any tie soon. STATE OF THE WRITING PROJECTS: I’m off to the Gothic Association of New Zealand and Australia conference on the Gold Coast on the 22nd, which means 90% of my focus is being spent working on the paper I’m scheduled to deliver there. I think I’m through the literature review

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11/01/2019 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? I’ve got a rough draft of the conference paper down at the moment, which means this week is all refinement and building up. The core focus is just clocking up hours and making sure that I’ve got a next step–I lost track a little on the Thursday gone after hitting the end of the draft because I’m only thinking to the end of the current task. What’s inspiring me this week? I reviewed Alan Baxter’s Write the Fight Right as preparation for some coming manuscripts that are heavily fight focused, and it’s a really useful

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06/01/2019 5 Comments
Sunday Circle

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

And lo, we have made it to the end of 2018, navigating the wasteland between Christmas and New Years where time seems to lose all meaning due to the disruption in our routines. We aren’t sure which days are public holidays. We aren’t even sure what day it is today. Rest assured, today is a Sunday, which means it’s time for…. 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? This week is going to be be nearly 100% thesis time, locking down the conference paper I’m going to be delivering on the 22nd of January. It’s a major source of stress in my

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30/12/2018 7 Comments
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

When Is a Wasted Half-Hour Not Really A Wasted Half-Hour?

I started tracking my days in half-hour increments after finishing Laura Vanderkam’s Off the Clock: Feeling Less Busy While Getting More Done. Unlike Vanderkam, I track things old school instead of using an excel document: Every morning I wake up, note the time in my bullet journal, and mark off a series of half-hour increments down the page. Then I fill them in as the day progresses, noting the time spent faffing about on the internet and actually doing work. Noting any major turns in my day, where somethings happen to redirect my attention. Often, noting down word counts achieved or specific things read. It’s not the first time I’e done this–all sorts of productivity advice suggests doing this sort of thing to get a firmer understanding of how you’re actually using time–but those usually suggested doing it for a week. I just hit the end of my first week, and I plan to keep on going this time. What I’m really interested in the kind of data Vanderkam gathered by doing this exercise for years, both in terms of the data collected about patterns as they shift and the increased mindfulness about how time is used. Still, there is something to be said for even a week of doing this. I’ve already realised that the activity I like to call “Digital Faffing” takes up both more time in my day than I’d like, but also casts a long shadow over my psyche. Basically, I can spend 45 minutes checking

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29/12/2018 1 Comment
News & Upcoming Events

My Last Release for 2018

When I started releasing short fiction through Brain Jar Press, I knew I was going to end the year with a flurry of new releases. It’s inevitable, when you’re a short story writer, that you end up with a bunch of previously published work that’s either hard to find or now out of print. Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor & Other Things We Called The Band is one of the latter, despite being one of my more recent stories. This was one of those those stories that surprised me when I first wrote it–it’s a story about bands and belonging and growing-up-in-places-that-are-not-good-for-being-an-artist. It’s also about nostalgia–one of the catalysts was hitting up old university friends of mine to grab memories of the Dog House Bar–and mysterious happenings that involve entire audiences dying off in a single moment. It may be a horror story, depending on your taste. I largely think of it as weird-ass fantasy, but I think that about pretty much everything I write. It first appeared in the Speculate ‘zine back in 2017, but the story went offline when Evil Girlfriend Media (who ran Speculate) went dormant to reshape what they published. Now you can pick up a copy from any good ebook store. Here’s a little taste of what’s going on in the story: I saw them play The Playroom exactly one week later. They didn’t seem like much, taking to the stage. Just another rock-and-roll four-piece: guitar, drums, bass, and a singer out the front. The bass guitarist was short and feral, with torn stockings and silver

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28/12/2018 No Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

My Writing Goal For 2019: 1,460 Hours

My goal for 2019 is to spend 1,460 hours working on first draft material, spread across my fiction, my PhD, and some projected non-fiction features I’m looking at for the blog. This largely equates to twenty-eight hours of drafting every week, or approximately 4 hours a day. If I’m right in my estimates, this should be good for about 700,000 to 800,000 words over the course of the year, but I’m utterly unconcerned with the word count produced. My sole determinant of success in 2019 is pure hours spent with my but in the chair and my internet blocker turned on so I’m focused on drafting new words. This is a pretty big departure for me–like most writers, I’ve tended to forward plan based around word count. My goals around this time of year would be focused on the number of words produced, or the number of things finished. I want to write 2,000 words a day, or I’d like to finish 20 short stories. Switching over to an hour-based goal is an attempt to try and overcome the fundamental flaws of this approach: I cannot schedule 2,000 words a day or writing a story effectively, because I’ll only ever be using an estimate of how much time it will take to get those done. It may be a pretty good estimate–I’ve been tracking my time pretty carefully over the last couple of years and know my average hourly pace while writing first drafts–but the moment I have a bad

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27/12/2018 No Comments
Sunday Circle

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

‘Twas the week around Christmas and New Years,and all through the land,self-employed artists were fretting,about their families Holiday demands… If this sounds familiar, come join me for this week’s edition of the Sunday Circle, where we’ll set some intentions for the coming week and talk about the stuff that’s a little too knotty to get finished right now. 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? My partner’s on Holidays and there’s commitments on both Xmas and Boxing Day, to say nothing of the upcoming New Years. I’m keeping my expectations low on creative projects this week–whatever progress I make on Warhol Sleeping

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23/12/2018 No Comments
Works in Progress

Friday Status Post: 21 Dec 2018

BIG THINGS ACHIEVED THIS WEEK: A whole bunch of Brain Jar busy work, including: New covers for You Don’t Want To Be Published and The Birdcage Heart. Finalising and uploading copies of Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor and Other Things We Called The Band, which will be the next Brain Jar Short Story release scheduled for Boxing Day. Resuming daily Conan posts over on Twitter, after some very intermittent posting over recent weeks. Christmas Shopping. STATE OF THE WRITING PROJECTS: Warhol Sleeping progresses scene by scene, but it’s well and truly over 40k now, which means we’re in short novel territory. I’m also working on a MMA-in-Space project that riffs on Robert E. Howard’s Sailor Steve Costigan stories, as a bit of a palate cleanser after the difficult narrator of Warhol Sleeping. CURRENT EARWORM: Bad Romance, Lady Gaga. Or possibly the Amanda Palmer version. I just have a whole bunch of oh-ra-oh-la-la running through my skull and it isn’t going away. CURRENT READING: I’ve ended up reading Genevive Valentine’s Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus at the same time, which is a whole lot of vaguely-steampunk-themed magic-circus reading that should probably not be included in a year that’s had a lot of vaguely-steampunk-themed magic circus reading. It’s possible one needs to be put aside for a time. BEST SCREEN MEDIA OF THE WEEK: We’re powering through the second seasons of 3% and Lucifer and it’s all been pretty damn glorious, to be honest. Just have to find myself a window to go see Into

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21/12/2018 No Comments

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