ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Dear Writers: What’s Your Business Model?

Eleven years ago, I kicked off a small indie publishing company to put out RPG products written using the d20 system. To my surprise, I wasn’t awful at it, and between 2005 and 2007 I worked pretty continuously at producing stuff that would earn me money instead of finishing my PhD. Don’t get me wrong, I made plenty of mistakes in those two years– the worst being an utter failure to adequately back up my creative work and business files, which is one of the three things that finally killed me off – but I had a metric for success when I set out and I hit it, pretty religiously. It also taught me two important things, when it came to writing. The first was the realisation that I was running a small business, rather than just being a writer. This was obvious enough, right from the beginning, that I actually looked at some small business advice and bought a couple of books on the subject. They got me thinking about things I’d never considered before, like cash-flow and business plans. These immediately led me to the second major lesson: it’s a really stupid idea to kick off a small business without a figuring out how you plan to make a profit, let alone start bringing in a living wage. 48 HOURS OF RESEARCH When I first thought about starting an indie press in 2004, I went into it with enthusiasm, a love of RPG gaming, and a handful of

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05/09/2016 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? The daily target of 500 new words + 20 minutes of rewriting on an old work seems to have worked out pretty well over the last seven days, which means I get to claim two-thirds of a win on last week’s goal. I would have done the planning, but for the realisation that I only had two weeks to finalise a PhD application for next year, and I spent much of the week doing that with my planning time. All that makes this week really simple: maintain the 500/20 system, and get the PhD application ready.

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04/09/2016 16 Comments
Big Thoughts

Beard

I was thirty-nine years old when I saw my father’s beard for the first time. It happened quite by accident – he’d gone to the barber, asked for a close shave, and the beard he’d worn since I was a baby suddenly became this close-cropped fuzz covering the lower third of his face. Still a beard, if you wanted to get technical with the definition, but thirty-nine years is a considerable length of time to go without seeing a man’s chin. Its sudden appearance, as a visible entity behind the hair, made it a thing people commented on when they saw him. I had my own brush with facial hair when I was twenty-two. It should be noted that I didn’t inherit my father’s propensity for thick, chin-hiding facial hair. Mine grows in patches, leaves broad swathes of the cheek unaffected. When I did grow a beard, at the suggestion of a woman I was dating, it mostly grew underneath my chin rather than on it. I was not suited to facial hair, but I kept the beard until the end of that particular relationship, and I have never enjoyed the act of shaving quite as much as I did the day we finally broke up. I would tell you my father, without a beard, does not look my father, but there are so many lies in that statement that it bears only the faintest whiff of truth. He doesn’t look like my father, with his chin visible, but the man sitting

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02/09/2016 2 Comments
Journal

Word Up

I blog for a living now. Not here, obviously, but in general – I go into the office and I boot up a computer and I write blog post after blog post. When I’m not writing a blog post, I’m researching a blog post or pitching a blog post or putting together a blogging schedule. Then I’ll go get lunch, eat some sushi, then rinse and repeat the morning throughout the afternoon. It’s a weird kind of job, blogging about stuff. I dig it. The focus helps a lot – for the first time in years I have a day-job that where the scope of what I’m doing is comparatively narrow. Go in, write things, produce content. It plays to my strengths, and I don’t have to switch gears too often. I like that. I worried it was going to burn me out, doing this much writing. That the days I spent at the day-job would leave me too worn out to write anything when I got home. Turns out, that wasn’t a concern: writing begets writing. Doesn’t seem to matter what, exactly, I’m writing about, so long as I get to give it some deep focus. So I write at work, and then I come home and write there. Yesterday I sat at work and spent seven hours writing about medical tests and poop and meal plans. Then I came home and wrote about young lovers who make the mistake of visiting a fortune teller, who warns them they’re going

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01/09/2016 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Quick and Dirty Book Review: Work Clean, Dan Charnas

It took me two days to read Dan Charnas Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-en-Place to Organise Your Work, Life, and Mind. It would have taken less time, but I had a busy weekend, which meant I was largely carving out blocks of time to read through the book as fast as possible. I was two-thirds done when I raved about it in the Sunday Circle. I am now finished. And, upon finishing, I scrolled back to the start of the ebook and started reading it from the start. It’s that kind of book. I love me a good book about productivity. I devour them like popcorn, especially when they’ve got odd little hooks. Charnas’ approach is all hook. He looks at the way people learn to be chefs, the system and the mindset that’s instilled in them in order to keep a busy kitchen functional. He extrapolates out from that, talking about mise-en-place as a philosophy and approach to life. He’s an incredible storyteller with a pool of interesting subjects, so it makes for an entertaining read. It’s also an incredibly interesting philosophy, right up until Charnas tries to formalise it into a productivity system in the final chapters.The system, if you’re the kind of person who has read Getting Things Done, comes off as a little derivative and naff. It plays to the conceit a little too strongly for my tastes, and it’s just…weaker….than the rest of the book. But the bits before that? Wonderful. Incredibly useful. I’d gotten

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31/08/2016 No Comments
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Hacking the Writing Process, August ’16 Edition

Every couple of months I sit down and look at my writing process, trying to pick up inefficiencies. I study my habits and the things that go wrong, and I double-check systems to make sure they’re working the way they should. The last time I did it, I noticed a bunch of slightly interrelated things that went something like this: My primary work-space had become my couch, which is also the place where I eat food, read books, waste time on social media, and stream television from Netflix. This meant I needed to be really conscious about writing, when I sat down, because there were so many other habits tied to the location that it was easy to get distracted. The desktop computer, which I’d originally intended to be my primary work-space, had gradually been ignored. Primarily this was because there were always multiple steps involved in sitting down and using it, starting with “move all the laundry off my office chair, then turn on the computer.” A secondary problem with the desktop – it was tucked out of the way, in the corner of my bedroom. It never served as a trigger for behaviour in and of itself, which meant I had to rely on other habits to get me there. If that sounds minor, you’re right. It’s totally minor shit, but it’s often the minor shit that gets in the way of building an effective habit by inserting little moments of resistance, which is why I try looking at this stuff.

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30/08/2016 No Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Things You Want to Tell New Writers

There are things you want to sit every new writer down and tell them, right at the start. Things you’d like them to understand, because they’re things you didn’t understand back when you were starting out and they would have been useful to know. Or things you don’t understand now, even though you’ve been at this for a while, and it would be nice to spare them that particular slice of pain. You want to tell them its going to take work, and when they nod like they understand, you want to grab them by the arm and really make them comprehend what you’re saying. “No,” you want to hiss at them, “it’s going to take work. You think you know what you’re getting into, but your head is full of dreams and lies and myths that are fucking with you. It’s going to take so much more work than you’re thinking, and none of it is as fun as you’re thinking.” You wan to tell them that it starts hard and gets harder. You want to tell them it will take time. No, more time than you’re thinking. No, more time than that. You want to tell them they’re going to fuck up. That they’re going to fuck up a lot at the beginning, when they want to be better, and they’ll fuck up even more later on and it will hurt worse ’cause the stakes seem so much higher. You want to tell them they need to write every

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29/08/2016 3 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 a little bit hit and miss on last week’s goals, at this point. Working my way through the planning questionnaire for Float went great and I have about thirty handwritten pages of notes on the first act. Revising the crocodile story didn’t really happen at all, so I’m still struggling to find the balance between planning, actual writing, and rewriting in my practice. I’m going to try being really specific, this week, because of that: write 500 new words a day, on average; map out three scenes in the first act of Float using all

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28/08/2016 19 Comments
Journal

Staying On Top Of Things

I woke up early this morning and sent off some writing emails. Discovered another couple of emails that really need to be dealt with, so they’ve been flagged for me to deal with tomorrow morning. I begin to see the benefits of the dedicated admin day, which Kathleen Jennings has mentioned on multiple Sunday Circles, but I’m still not entirely sure where it’s going to fit into my schedule. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, this week, about the new job and writing and how to establish new routines that support what I want to do. Because my old job was familiar; I knew its contours and its frustrations and its routines. I could work around it, after five years at QWC, because I knew how to predict the effect of things going on in the office. Not with 100% accuracy, but with enough certainty to plan with relative confidence. The new job is wild and unfamiliar territory. It operates at a faster pace, uses up a different set of skills. It involves a lot more people, which is its own challenge after nearly fifteen years of being part of a small, discrete team in various jobs. It is harder, on the day to day level, to figure out how what I’m doing fits into the whole. It is three days in a block, rather than spaced out across the week, so there is very definitely a chunk of my week where I am at work, rather than bouncing back and forth

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25/08/2016 No Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

The Other Question Pro Wrestling Taught Me To Ask About Every Writing Preject

So yesterday I talked about where is the money? – the big question I’ve learned to ask of every writing project, courtesy of a shoot interview with former WCW booker Kevin Sullivan. It’s a simple question, and it’s remarkably useful for cutting through to the heart of what needs to happen in your story, novel, or blog post. Today I’m going to talk about the other big question I learned from paying attention to wrestling bookers, although this one comes from a bloke whose insights into wrestling have already taught me an awful lot about writing – the inimitable Al Snow. The question he taught me to ask is this: HOW DO I MAKE THIS GUY? In wrestling, “making” a wrestler means figuring out what you want the audience to believe and convincing them to buy into it. You can’t just send two guys out there and have them fight if everyone knows the ending is pre-determined – there’s no drama in it. And wrestling leans heavily on drama to make money. So what do you do when a fresh, unknown face debuts on your show? To borrow words from Al Snow: If you’re a new talent, we’ve got to make you. Make the audience believe in you, that you are competitive, that you’re a heel for these reasons, that you’re a face for these reason. Acquaint the audience with who or what you are, before we do anything else. At its core: what do we need to make the audience believe about

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24/08/2016 No Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

The Question Pro Wrestling Taught Me to Ask About Every Writing Project

I watch a fair bit of pro-wrestling. I mean, I subscribe to the WWE network and mainline NXT like a junkie. I have, in the past, collected an obscene number of shoot interviews and Guest Booker DVDs. I have watched an awful lot of indie stuff, from time to time. I get irritated, occasionally, that you can no longer buy the DVD’s of Paul Heyman’s run booking Ohio Valley Wrestling in 2004, ’cause I couldn’t afford to ship them to Australia then, but could probably afford to do so now. I like wrestling. And, because I like wrestling and it’s a form of storytelling, it is something I spend an awful lot of time trying to understand better and draw lessons from. Thinking about storytelling in wrestling is often a good way of learning something important about storytelling in prose, largely because it such a different form. A few weeks ago I watched a shoot interview with veteran pro-wrestling booker Kevin Sullivan where he related a lesson he learned from one of his mentors. Basically, he’d write a television segment for someone that would be all about referencing Othello or The Book of Revelations, and it would be a good segment, but his mentor would take one look at it and ask this: WHERE’S THE MONEY? Pro-wrestling narrative is one of those things that is weirdly simple, yet complicated to execute. It’s predicated on a protagonist being denied by an antagonist, over and over. It’s predicated on making the audience

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23/08/2016 2 Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

In Which I Go See Suicide Squad…

I went to see Suicide Squad last night. Not because I had any real hopes of it being a good movie, but because it’s a comic book film and I will end up seeing all comic book films eventually. Even the Zack Snyder one’s, which ’cause me actual pain to watch. I will watch them, when it costs me nothing, and then I will hate myself. Suicide Squad did not cause pain. Mostly because it’s an incredibly tedious couple of hours, by virtue of someone taking all the core beats of six different stories and throwing them in the air, then figuring “eh, good enough,” when the pages are re-assembled. Suicide Squad is what happens if you try to make the Magnificent Seven and do the assembling the team sequence, then throw out oh, by the way, these guys are meant to be saving a Mexican village. It’s the film that happens when you kick of Die Hard with Hans Gruber taking over Nakatomi Towers, then go oh, yeah, there’s a cop trying to reconnect with his wife or something before launching into the second act. Suicide Squad is a self-contained story, in that the conflict that drives the story is largely happening ’cause the protagonist is an idiot with insufficient reason to be one (and, despite the film’s attempts to re-frame Will Smith’s Deadshot as the protagonist, there is no way in hell that it’s anyone but Amanda Waller). Weirdly, it would be a very easy story to fix. I’m almost certain there’s a

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22/08/2016 No Comments

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