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

PeterMBall 31/10/2018
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,

PeterMBall 30/10/2018
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

PeterMBall 28/10/2018
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

PeterMBall 21/10/2018
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

PeterMBall 14/10/2018
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

PeterMBall 07/10/2018
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

PeterMBall 04/10/2018
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 goal this week is

PeterMBall 30/09/2018
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 hit a thorny bit

PeterMBall 23/09/2018
Smart Advice from Smart People

Daemon Voices

DAEMON VOICES: ESSAYS ON STORYTELLING is a collection of Phillip Pullman’s writing on the subjects of writing and writers. I was tempted by this collection despite never having read Pullman’s fiction–in my head, he’s catalogued as that guy who wrote the YA novel that was turned into the film with the polar bears. I haven’t even seen the film, but the visual of the polar bears has been stuck in my skull for a decade now.  I have friends who are huge fans of Pullman’s Dark Materials books, though, and the first essay in the collection was more than enough to convince me it was worth ponying up the cash. The essay, Magic Carpets, details the responsibilities Pullman feels as a storyteller. He leads off with something unexpected: your first responsibility is financial. Like every other member of a capitalist society, you need money to support your loved ones.   When we start writing books we’re all poor; we all have to

PeterMBall 21/09/2018
Gaming

SMAX #174: Breaking the Broan

The most recent session of our Superhero RPG was an interesting one in terms of seeing the gap between our style and the nature of the system we’re using. With this in mind, I’m going to quote from the player notes Adam keeps from session to session on his gaming wiki: We have a terrible plan to get inside the spaceshipThis is true pretty much regardless which of our plans we use Crow Road Campaigns, SMAX #174 notes At the same time, this was the session where I started implementing some of the more narrative-oriented rules from the Cortex Prime draft. This assumes a lot of player control over the narrative–perhaps more than we’re used too–and a default assumption borrowed from the Leverage RPG that whatever plan they come up with is the right plan.  In narrative terms, the heist is built around planning only so the viewer knows how things have gone wrong when they do. Executing a plan

PeterMBall 20/09/2018
Stuff

Handsome Boys

When I moved in with my partner, I moved in with a pair of guinea pigs. For a while this felt like a considerably bigger deal that living with another person, as I’m generally not a pet person and never really wanted to be. My partner specifically adopted boars when she decided to live with guinea pigs, since they’re harder to find homes for than females pigs. The current two don’t get along well–when spending time in the same pen they’ll get into an ongoing contest for territory–but guinea pigs are social creatures, which means they like being able to talk to one-another so long as there’s a fence between them. They’re also ravenous little buggers, prone to wheeking for snacks and demanding attention the moment you walk into the room. On the days when I work from home, I walk into that room an awful lot.  Which probably explains a good chunk of my instagram over the last twelve

PeterMBall 19/09/2018