ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Thinking about Time, Goals, and Social Media

A few years back, after I first installed RescueTime, I got it into my head to reduce the amount of time I was spending on Facebook and Twitter.   Lots of people decide to do this, but it rarely exceeds. For one thing, social media companies excel at luring you in. It’s easy to use them to fill the blank times, the little moments where there’s a break in your attention and you’re looking for distraction. For another, ‘doing less’ of something is one of those vague definitions of success. How much less do you want? How do you gauge the effectiveness of your efforts, beyond trusting your gut? I recently had a conversation about this where I realised how important RescueTime actually was in cutting back. The service tracked time I spent on apps or using certain programs, telling me exactly how many hours and minutes I spent on social media every week. I could weigh those hours against the time spent doing other things, and I had a specific goal to achieve: get my social media time under an hour a day. That’s a really specific goal. The kind where you can make active choices about how you’re going to achieve it, and where there’s a really clear line where those efforts are successful. The numbers were there, laid out in black and white, contrasted against the time I spent writing or doing research or playing games every week.  I’ve not paid attention to my reports as much these

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06/11/2018 No Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Profit and Loss

I went and updated my profit-and-loss statements over the weekend, and noticed that I brought in as much from my RPG publishing books as I did the more recent Brain Jar Press releases. It’s tracking to do the same this financial year, although I’ll be doing my damnedest to keep that from being the case in the first half of 2019. All this means, in essence, the work I did over a decade ago is paying off more than than the more recent fiction work, simply because the sum total of effort I put in was checking the sales report. All the hard work was done in 2006, when those books came out, while the Brain Jar books required writing, layout, upload, etc. I’m making a note of this because I’m revisiting my business plan for Brain Jar over the next month, figuring out how I’d like to adjust things based upon the last twelve months.  There’s a bunch of challenges associated with indie publishing these days, but one of the biggest when you’re starting out is this: it’s easy to get sucked into someone’s business model without realising that it’s a business model.  You see someone’s approach to making it–rapid release, advertising, going wide, going exclusive–and it seems like that’s what you need to do in order to succeed as a indie publisher. There’s a lot of terms and ideas that get thrown around: rapid release; exclusive versus wide; read-through and the ROI from advertising on AMS or Facebook;

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05/11/2018 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? There’s five major projects on the boil this week, and it’s possible I’m sneaking in work on a sixth around the edges. The Warhol Sleeping structural sweep is underway–every scene is getting broken down in a spreadsheet so I can trace what’s happening and make sure the emotional payoffs are right. The next book in the series is about 6K in, spinning off one of the characters I cut from the early drafts and giving him his own story (in third person, past tense). The other two projects are early drafts, but the real meat

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04/11/2018 2 Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

New Project Week & Three Card Monte Drafting

With the Warhol Sleeping draft in the bag, I get to start a new project this week. It’s not a NaNoWriMo project, despite being started on November 1, because my current process is spectacularly ill-suited to doing NaNo. In fact, it’s one of those batshit crazy approaches that works for me in my current situation, but would make me shake my head if someone suggested it in a writing class. Basically, I’m trying to stay ahead of my anxiety and tendency to fret by treating drafting as a game of three card monte: three projects, three hours of writing time each day, and a timer that reminds me to swap between them at the end of every hour. The whole thing is focused on short, sustained bursts of focus on multiple projects, rather than three hours of trying to batter my head against a single book. No word count goals, just a specific amount of time staying focused on each draft, usually packed into the space between lunch and my partner arriving home. It’s unlikely that I’m going to make 50k on any particular project in the space of a month, but it’s possible I’ll clear that total. I did about 37,000 words in the last two weeks, courtesy of making short bursts of progress on multiple projects. It turns out that constant incremental advances add up really quickly, and packing the bulk of my drafting into a three-hour block leaves me a good chunk of day to devote to

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02/11/2018 No Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Year, Date, Month Archiving

Some days I think big thoughts about writing. Some days, I’m just amused that the surprisingly useful little things you pick up as you build your career. Case in point: numbering invoices. I started out using the date as the basis for my invoice number. Anything sent on a day like today, for example, would be invoice 01112018-001. Day, month, year, followed by where it fell in the number of invoices sent that day (rarely more than one).  A lot of the invoices I processed from writers tended to do something similar. Then, one year, an American author’s invoice for GenreCon broke the pattern. They structured their invoice number using year, month, date instead.  For example, an invoice sent today would be numbered: 20181101-001 This is a really simple thing, but it made the invoice files incredibly easy to manage. Sorting by name immediately left everything in the date order, and it was easy to seperate out all the invoices from a tax year. I started using it for my invoicing the moment I realised the advantages, and subsequently used at the start of any files where such ordering could be useful to me. Tracking drafts of stories, for example, particularly when a project starts to iterate across programs. Given that I tend to start drafts in Word or Google Docs, then iterate into Scrivener when I need to break down the structure, it saves an incredible amount of time when figuring out which is the most recent file. 

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01/11/2018 2 Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

What d20 Publishing Taught Me About My Next Fiction Project

Earlier today, I added about 3,500 words of new content to the Warhol Sleeping draft, finishing up the scenes that needed fleshing out and adding in the interstitial content and “deleted scenes” content that will get added to the final product. The novella draft is officially done. Now the real work begins, exporting it from Scrivener and starting the process of doing real editorial work instead of patching up the weaker scenes.  Setting up the cover and the marketing copy, working out some pre-release promo, then working out whether the date I’ve earmarked for release is actually a feasible timeframe to get everything done.  It should be. I dedicated the first year of Brain Jar to short story collections, largely so I could get an idea of how the various systems and tools I’d need were going to work. Now I’ve got them down, which means I can start playing a little more. And Warhol Sleeping is very much a project where I’m playing, a project that’s being done for the hell of it.  Many years ago, when I still wrote RPG products, my record for producing a finished product from scratch was something within the region of 24 hours. There was a hot topic on a forum I visited, talking about squirrel-based magic items, and I figured, hell, someone hold my beer, and pushed myself to get something done before the conversation was over. It sold a crazy number of copies, despite being about a third of the length

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31/10/2018 No Comments
Works in Progress

Breaking Patterns

I spent some quality time in the nearest food court this morning, drinking terrible coffee and fleshing out the draft for the next Brain Jar Press novella: Warhol Sleeping.  In theory, the food court is a terrible place to work. The shopping centre it’s located in is undergoing renovation, so there’s an incredible amount of construction work going on in the vicinity. The coffee shop is hideously expensive, the local shoppers frequently intrusive, and the food options surprisingly limited. There’s also a two-hour cap on parking, which means I’m always watching the clock while I’m there.  In practice, it remains a useful place to work for two reasons: there’s no Wifi to distract me, and it breaks me away from the usual habits that have built up around the house.  The food court forces me to be intentional about what I’m doing with my time, instead of falling into routines. After a few days where my focus has been off, that’s worth any amount of construction noise, bad coffee, and nosy bystanders that might come with my choice of work space. 

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30/10/2018 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 finished the draft of Warhol Sleeping last week, but it’s still a rough bit of work. This week I’m doing a redraft sweep and fleshing stuff out: adding more personality and detail to character’s in earlier scenes, before I really had a handle on them; looking for the scenes where I’m writing plot alone and adding the emotional/sensory details that will make them work.  Basically, sanding away the rough edges and transforming it into a book I’d like to read. What’s inspiring me this week? Netflix released The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the reboot of Sabrina the

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28/10/2018 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 finished my work week halfway through the penultimate scene of a new novella, Warhol Sleeping, which I’ve flagged for the next Brian Jar Press release next. That means this week will be spent drafting the climax and the denouement,  writing some of the interstitial material that slots in around the major sections, and doing some redrafts of earlier chapters that will need to be reshaped.  What’s inspiring me this week? There’s a host of things that I could talk about this week on the reading front, but the thing that’s got me thinking the most has

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21/10/2018 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? Last week got derailed by illness by Wednesday, but I still managed to progress a bunch of projects (and resume one that has languished for a while) before that. This means that the coming week shares a similarly crowded to-do list, and has the same goal: drive towards the mid-point of my post-apocalyptic buddy-cop story (while also working on an older project, Warhol-Sleeping, which found it’s feet in the week just gone). The main goal in the coming week remains time based: ten hours devoted to the buddy cop story; ten hours devoted to Warhol-Sleeping;

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14/10/2018 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? My to-do list for the coming week is growing rapidly, but on the writing front my core project will be getting to the midpoint of my gonzo post-apocalyptic buddy-cop novelette. With everything competing for attention this week, my goal is less word-count based and more time-based–I’m aiming for a solid ten hours of work on the story over the coming week. What’s inspiring me this week? There were a handful of books and movies I contemplated putting here, but truthfully the thing that has got me most excited this week is the OmniFocus 3 update

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07/10/2018 5 Comments
Journal

Slow Work

I’m currently riding shotgun to an old laptop as I work, monitoring the transfer of 10,000 odd fils onto the shared hard-drive I set up last year. This is one of those tasks that’s been on my to-do list for a while, but always gets delayed because completing that one step (itself time-consuming and irritating) unlocks a whole bunch of new work that I don’t particularly want to do. The files on the laptop represent my entire digital life from approximately 2006 to 2017, the data dutifully copied from computer to USB drive, from USB drive to new computer, from computer to back-up drive. Usually, when I start a new PC, I create a dump-filed label DMZ and park everything from the old computer there, then start with a new file architecture based upon whatever is top of my mind at the time. This laptop was my primary work PC for the better part of three years, and it’s the last to get uploaded for that reason. Part of my hesitation has always been the sheer level of redundancy that’s going to be involved–multiple copies of files from different years, folders that serve the same purpose but have been named something different. I set up inefficient systems and allowed them to replicate, as we tend to do when we think of computers as permanent things rather than nodes in an overarching network of devices. This was perfectly natural thinking as recently as three years ago. Now, it represents a problem

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04/10/2018 No Comments

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