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

PeterMBall 06/01/2019
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

PeterMBall 30/12/2018
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

PeterMBall 29/12/2018
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

PeterMBall 28/12/2018
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

PeterMBall 27/12/2018
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

PeterMBall 23/12/2018
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

PeterMBall 21/12/2018
Works in Progress

The Great Repackaging

It may only be nine months since it came out, but I just gave the second Brain Jar Release a fresh lick of paint in the form of a cover re-design. Here it is, all shiny in its new iteration: I’ve been doing this sort of thing a lot recently, starting with the refurbishing of the Short Fiction Lab covers and the more recent decision to reformat the cover of The Birdcage Heart. it’s never a huge change–different fonts, same cover, small tweaks to the way things are presented–but it can have a big impact on the way the book looks. The original, off-centre design for You Don’t Want To Be Published was a function of the tools available. I’m largely pulling Brain Jar Press up by its bootstraps, which means working with the tools I can afford based upon the limited monthly budget I’ve allowed and whatever’s come in with book sales.  When I started up, twelve months back,

PeterMBall 19/12/2018
News & Upcoming Events

Second-Last Brain Jar Publication for the Year

So last week I put out Black Dog: A Biography, which is not a new story in the Brain Jar Press Short Fiction Lab, but a reprint of a somewhat experimental older story that I’m using as a free sample of the kind of short fiction I write. It contains fiction. It contains biography. It contains large, girlfriend-eating dogs that may or may not be an imaginary friend.  And your sample: The first time the Black Dog showed up I was five. We were living in Miriwinni and it lurked behind the low, chain link fence that marked out our backyard, hunkered down in the long grass filling the space between the fence line and the train tracks. No-one else could see it, not even my parents. It was good at hiding when other people looked. I don’t remember much about our house back then. My parents were teachers, so we moved a lot. I was five, and that means

PeterMBall 17/12/2018
Sunday Circle

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

It’s been a long, complicated week, as they tend to be at this time of the year. New Years is coming, people go on holiday, and managing your focus is a necessity if you want to get things done. If you’ve been feeling the drag on you projects this week, come join me for this week’s instalment of: 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

PeterMBall 16/12/2018
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Rebuilding a Creative Routine After It’s All Gone To Hell

Joanna Penn’s post about the importance of Creative Routines showed up in my RSS reader this morning. I clicked on it immediately because, right now, my creative routine is basically out the window and there are no hard edges around my process. I scramble after whatever project needs attention most urgently, engaging in long work binges where I’m doing as much as possible to keep all the plates spinning. Here’s the thing: I love my creative routine. I know the value of having hard edges to my work day, and the power of slow, incremental progress on a particular project. I also know how easily this stuff gets derailed because I start focusing on solutions instead of figuring out what problem I’m trying to solve.  In short, I’m falling back on two key fallacies of creative project management: If I’m busy enough, no-one can blame me for things not being great, and repeating the same solution even after it doesn’t work, because obviously

PeterMBall 13/12/2018
Journal

New Writing Space

For the last month or so we’ve been re-arranging our apartment, looking for more efficient ways of using the limited amount of space. Part of this has been setting up a work nook for me to write at–a place where there’s a clear signal that I’m doing focused work rather than just tooling around on the internet or tinkering with book covers.  This particular nook of the apartment used to be our linen closet, although the closet was an old TV cabinet. That’s now out in the lounge room, housing the TV (which used to sit on top of the book case to the left, while the DVD player and associated tech sat on the current laptop desk). This isn’t the work nook’s final form–long-term there will probably be a smaller desk so I don’t hunch over quite so much while typing and enough space for a mouse–but a lot of this week will be devoted to bedding in the

PeterMBall 10/12/2018