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’ve got a couple of projects moving forward this week, but the one that needs the most thought is the draft for a novella called Warhol Sleeping. It’s the oldest thing on my big list of unfinished projects, and about half done, so I’m giving myself a week of tinkering to see a) whether it can be salvaged as a project (it was originally a cyberpunk-ish thing, drafted in the era before smartphones) and b) whether I can transform the suite of vignettes into a narrative arc within a reasonable amount of time. What’s inspiring me

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29/04/2018 2 Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

By The Numbers

I plan my year thirteen weeks a time, marking out the quarter and setting goals based upon pre-existing commitments and what needs to be done. It seems like an endless expanse of hours, when you sit down to start logging everything you’d like to do, but the speed with which time vanishes is startling to watch. Thirteen weeks, five work days a week. Four hundred and eighty-seven hours. Except one day a week will be lost to admin, teaching, and similar activities. That’s ninety eight hours gone. The four days a week that are left get divided between three major projects: thesis; novel draft; story drafts. One hundred and twenty-nine hours a piece, spread across thirteen weeks. To finish the first novel draft in that time assumes I’ll write 620 words, on average, across the 129 hours allocated to the task. To get a finished draft means working faster, packing in more words. To devote time to planning means working faster still – every hour spent planning needs to make another hour two or three times more productive. 30,000 words of PhD work means a much slower pace, per hour. Except that 232 words per hour pace needs research to support it. Needs time to polish and refine ideas. Needs raw hours where I do nothing but think, make connections, explore ideas. Get on with the task of doing. How much short fiction is a 129 hours worth? How many words can be written and polished? How much time can

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24/04/2018 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’m down to the final scene on the story I started last week, so I’m looking to get that written around some thesis work in the coming days. Hell Track has been a little slower to resume work on, but I’m going to break out a notebook and start tackling all the hiccups which have emerged over the last week. What’s inspiring me this week? I’ve been reading Rick Remender’s run on Uncanny Avengers over the last week, which does an incredible job of blending the history of two Marvel franchises and coming up with some

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22/04/2018 3 Comments
Smart Advice from Smart People

Friends Only

In Winifred Gallagher’s Rapt, she talks about focus as a means of overcoming our instinctual fear. We read books and plug into phones on public transport to tamp down on the fear that we’re travelling alongside strangers, a source of physical danger and possible contamination as flu season begins. We set aside places like bathrooms and kitchens where unclean tasks are attended too, allowing us to set aside the fears of and rituals to prevent contamination unless we’re in that room. Then someone using the public restroom forgets to flush their floater. The ritual of the bathroom is broken, and your attention is drawn to all those fears you’re subconsciously setting aside. You are reminded that the room is a place of pollution, for all that we try to keep it clean and wash our hands before leaving. Social spaces used to have conventions that help us set aside our fear of other people. We behaved professionally in the work space, limited what we talked about. We had a party persona, a friends persona, and one for family. Then someone broke those conventions – talked politics at a party, or made threats in a professional setting – and our attention returned to the fundamental fact that we are surrounded by strangers. Strangers who may not think as we do. Strangers who may be a threat to us. The great advantage of social media was the way it connected everyone. The great flaw was the fact that so few people recognised

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20/04/2018 No Comments
Big Thoughts

Fake Beards

“You should write a blog post about the health benefits of beards,” my boss said. He meant it as a kind of joke, but I was finishing up my contract and my replacement was already in place. I had a few hours to kill on my way out so I did the preliminary research, hitting google with the obvious search term and checking the information already out there. Dear god, there was a lot. And if you listen to the internet, beards did have health benefits that were worth paying attention too. There were blog posts. There were newspaper articles. Beards were big business on the internet at that point, the epitome of hipster cool, and everyone had a listicle or informative article out there. Beards were good for your health, motherfucker. The fix was fucking in. 8 Health Benefits of Growing a Beard. 14 Ways A Beard is Good For Your Health.  Because I’m me and I dislike taking this stuff at face value – and because the gig usually involved getting shit fact-checked by experts – I started digging into the claims. Going back through the evidence cited in each post, looking for the primary sources. Noted the proliferation of newspaper articles in 2013, just after some Queensland scientists published a paper about beards offering some small protection against UV radiation (albeit in a limited area, and far less than say…sunscreen? A good shirt with a tight cotton weave?). Noted another proliferation – Beards Protect Against Infection! –

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19/04/2018 1 Comment
Big Thoughts

The Broken Lens

  I broke the lens on my phone camera moving furniture around my flat. There’s no memory of it happening, just an afternoon lugging boxes of books into the afternoon and the realisation that the lens was shattered. My first two attempts to fix it resulted in failure, the repair places shrugging their shoulders and telling me they didn’t have the parts. After that, I placed tape over the broken lens and made do until I had the chance to get it repaired for good. The camera will still take photos, but they aren’t crisp and the colours are all washed out. The kind of photos that are no longer suitable for scanning documents with the phone, or photographing receipts that are uploaded to a rebate app. The kind of problems that are annoying enough that you notice when they come up, but aren’t quite regular enough to justify the time and the money it takes to resolve them when they’re not present. I keep using my phone, sans camera. I keep on getting by. Once a week I pull my phone out, thinking to take a photograph, and get that little reminder that I’m letting this thing slide. Then I feel that little pang of disappointment that the repairs are not yet done. I’m noticing it more and more this week, as I sit down to write something for the blog each morning. Reaching back to the old habit of adding a photographs to each post, developing the discipline

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18/04/2018 No Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Know Your Enemy

I’m reading a book on social anxiety, because I believe in knowing your enemy. I wrote three different versions of this blog post and deleted them all, because sometimes trying to write about anxiety is enough to trigger my damn anxiety on its own. For all that it’s hailed as a solitary profession, the anxiety I feel about writing certain things is inherently social. It’s the fear that one’s secrets will be revealed, that the things you do will invite harsh judgement that is terrifying correct; you are actually stupid, or unlovable, or worthless, and now the con you’ve played thus far has been revealed for the sham it is. Society anxiety tells you it’s better to hide, or avoid the situation, rather than risk such exposure. Writing invites people to judge you. It hangs your ass out there for posterity, which means your mistakes and shortcomings can be rediscovered long after you left them behind. You may draft alone, just you and the keyboard, but writing only comes alive once other people read it. Opening yourself up to other people’s judgement is part and parcel of the gig. The vast majority of the writing tasks that set of my anxiety share the same trait: I’m doing something new and unfamiliar, or using a new and unfamiliar system. Anything where I have to learn what I’m doing at the same time I’m trying to figure out how I want to do it, increasing the odds of fucking up or doing

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17/04/2018 No Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Endings and Hard Decisions

The interesting thing about writing is the sheer amount of craft that goes into a single moment. Stories tend to climax when a major character makes an important decision – Luke Skywalker turns off his targeting computer and uses the force, or Katniss Everdeen refuses to play by the rules of the Hunger Game and refuses to kill the final competitor – and everything else in the story tends to focus on making that decision as meaningful as possible. Character arcs, themes and conflict. Narrative voice and carefully developed metaphors. All just an elaborate construction to contextualise a single difficult decision and imbue it with meaning. We aren’t built to make hard decisions. Even something as simple as “I should start getting some exercise,” is met with considerable resistance as we delay and make excuses. Watching fictional characters make those hard decisions is a promise that one day, if it really mattered, we could overcome that resistance and make the hard call. It’s also a promise that hard decisions do mean something, in a world where it can feel like no decision really matters.

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17/04/2018 No Comments
Journal

Really Simple Syndication

I broke out my RSS reader last night while sitting on the couch with my partner. I’ve been using Newsblur for tracking blogs ever since Google Reader shut down, and part of me still holds a grudge against Google for deciding that RSS was an archaic bit of technology they no longer wanted to support. I value my RSS reader to the tune of a yearly subscription, even during the lean years where it felt like an extravagance. My partner had never encountered an RSS reader before. The difference in our age is a handful of years, but within those years was the advent of social blogging platforms such as Livejournal and the eventual rise of social media. Things powered by RSS without anywhere near the level of control if you value the ability to curate and sort the flows of information into meaningful categories. Occasionally I read about the death of the blog. It’s all about social media these days, or establishing an email newsletter and communicating directly. Yet when I leave my RSS reader untouched for a week, I come back to over 1,000 entries that have built up in my absence. Blogs are still out there, generating content. They may place more importance on getting shared on Facebook or Twitter these days, but you can still tap their feed directly and get everything published sent your way. It’s not as obvious as it used to be, back in the days when the RSS symbol could be found

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16/04/2018 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? Everything in my life ground to a halt while I focused on clearing marking of decks this week, so this week will be spent reconnecting with the three major projects on my plate: Hell Track, the current short story draft, and my thesis chapter. I’m keeping my new word goals relatively low – I’ll be happy if I get 500 to 1000 a day – but I’m aiming to spend about two hours a day on each re-reading what’s already been done, making notes, and generally getting back up to speed after a few weeks

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15/04/2018 8 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? This week, thesis work and writing take a back seat to clearing a bunch of marking of the decks and preparing for the next few weeks of classes. The first half of this semester’s teaching was dominated by books I knew really well, but the back half involves two books I’ve never read (Gone Girl, Eleanor and Park), and one book that I’ve not read in a lot of detail (A Game of Thrones), so I’ve got a bunch of reading and annotating ahead of me before the semester returns from break. What’s inspiring me

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08/04/2018 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? I didn’t get much writing done over the last week, but I have been rehabing workspaces and writing tools to re-evaluate how to make them work a little better. One of the things on my to-do list was consolidating all the unfinished projects from three seperate computers into a single drive, sharing the same file architecture and save structures, so I don’t find myself getting lost every time I try to figure out what to do next. I’m currently sitting at 237 unfinished projects of various lengths, which includes: – 144 short stories in various states

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01/04/2018 1 Comment

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