GenrePunk Ninja

What Moving House Reminded Me About Getting My Writing Done

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja 0 Comment

I’ve been banging on about writing and infrastructure for a while on this journal, but I’ve recently found a fantastic metaphor for the importance of your set-up. 

As I’ve mentioned a few times, we recently moved house, trading our tiny one-bedroom flat for a two-bedroom, two-story townhouse. It’s been a considerable amount of work to move in—and the job’s still not done—but we’re already seeing the impact of our new home on our step counts.

My spouse and I both wear health trackers to log our daily steps and sleep, although we’ve never been diligent about hitting the 10,000 steps a day goal (which is, itself, less a health thing than a marketing gimmick from one of the earliest wearable step trackers). We mostly want to know how well we’ve slept and how much we’ve done, not least because my wife has some chronic health issues that mean overdoing it will lead to a pretty major crash-out.

Since we moved, both of us have noticed that things have changed. 

THE POWER OF INCIDENTAL STEPS

In the old place, it was rare that I would do over 6,000 steps a day. Often, on a heavy writing or meeting day, my steps would sit under 3,000 until I forced myself to leave the house and go for a walk. I didn’t think much of it after living in my flat for a decade. Getting steps meant setting aside time to physically leave the house and go for a walk. 

I didn’t consider the implications of where we lived on this mindset, but it makes sense. When it’s only twenty-six steps from your bathroom to your office, racking up a step count is hard.

In the new place, on a “non-moving” day when we’re simply pottering around the house or going to work, it’s rare that I’m doing less than 8000 steps a day. More often, I’m hitting 10k just before dinner. This is partially a function of leaving the house for work — the new job definitely dragged my step count up when I started — but also just the fact that it takes more steps to get around our new home. Going up and down stairs also adds up.

Through the simple act of getting up and making coffee in the morning, I’ve moved more than I would have in half a day at the old place. Going to the bathroom requires twice as many steps. It’s small, but when you do a few extra steps every time you move around the house, they add up fast.

Even better than the space inside the house is our proximity to other locations. The closest shops are an eight-minute walk away. Lots of our friends and family live within a twenty minutes walk. There’s great takeaway just around the corner. My wife’s new favourite microbrewery is five minutes down the street. Multiple bus and train routes are accessible within a ten-minute stroll. 

So we don’t just walk around our house more—we walk everywhere a lot more. Without setting out to increase our step count, the size and location of our house set us up to do more without realising it. 

Which brings us to writing. 

STOP LOOKING FOR EXTRA HOURS TO WRITE

Most writers, when faced with a desire to write more, go in search of more hours in which they can devote to writing. They lament giving their time to a day job that steals them away from their projects, or wish for an extra day crammed into the week that they can devote to writing. Me, I long for the cash to pay someone to clean my house, which will free up all the time I devote to doing (or avoiding) chores.

Problem is, we rarely have extra hours in our day. Finding an extra hour—let alone several hours—often means giving up other things. Sometimes those trade-offs seem easy—I’ll happily give up an hour of social media or TV a day in order to write—but it’s harder than it seems. That TV time is where you hang out with your family. Social media connects you to friends you don’t see as often as you’d like. Giving them up means you need other ways of feeding your need to connect with your spouse, your kids, and your peers.

Finding extra hours is hard, which is why I often talk to new writers about the power of just a few extra minutes. Squeezing fifteen minutes of writing into your morning routine doesn’t feel like it will have the impact of an extra hour of writing a day, but a) a spare fifteen minutes is easier to find, and b) you’re more likely to do those fifteen minutes consistently while you’re finding your groove.

And fifteen minutes you don consistently do over the course of a week is worth more to you than an extra hour you’ll only do oncea week.

SHORT BURST WRITING

Mystery author James Scott Bell often talks about the “Nifty 350” in his writing guides—a habit where he encourages people to write 350 words first thing in the morning, before they start their day in earnest. I scoffed the first time I encountered the suggestion — I wanted to get up and write 3000 words, not 350 — but the impact when I finally tried it was significant. A small burst of writing—little more than a paragraph—set my mindset and made it easier to get back to the keyboard throughout the day.

When I found myself in situations where that was possible, I went smaller: write a single beat of a scene on an index card while catching the train to work in the morning. Rarely over 150 words, yet it soon added up into a flash fiction every week, then full-length stories as one eight-minute writing burst made it easier to find another with minutes, then twelve, then twenty.

We like to think we’ll set a goal, then take action, but action guides our goals and mindset far more than we’d think. When you use short bursts of time—eight minutes here, fifteen minutes there—it doesn’t take long before other brief windows open up. Eight minutes on a morning commute soon led to sixteen minutes a day as I started writing on the ride home. Then thirty-two minutes, as I used the gap at the end of my lunch break.

SETTING YOURSELF UP FOR SHORT SPRINTS

These days, the bulk of my writing happens on my commute. Eighteen minutes on a train. Twenty-six minutes on a bus. Eight-to-fifteen minutes here and there as I sit on a platform. Another short stint during my lunch break. Doesn’t feel like a lot, but it often nets me a thousand words in a space I would otherwise spend staring at my phone. The days I write least are the two days a week when I drive to work after giving my wife a lift to their office. 

Life is full of incidental gaps where writing could happen. We’ve just trained ourselves, as a culture, to see those little gaps of time as not terribly valuable because they don’t fit the idealised version of how a writer “should” work.

Sometimes seizing these moments means setting yourself up to do so. In the past, that’s meant working on index cards rather than notebooks or computers. They were small enough to be portable, and easily braced against a moleskin or wall if I couldn’t get a seat on the train. These days, I use a laptop because buses aren’t as conducive to neat handwriting as trains are, but I’ve still done the hard yards of figuring out how to make writing in those gaps as easy as possible.

I’ve bought new laptop bags that’s easy to fill open, so I don’t need to rummage through a backpack. I’ve also worked out how to keep the bag light, so I don’t feel weighed down and tired when carting it about. More importantly, I figured out where I’d keep my phone that wasn’t my pocket. Training myself out of checking social media when there’s a gap in the schedule is a big part of filling the gap with writing. 

I’m not alone in this. Other writers invest in tools like steering wheel desks, which allow them to write in the car while waiting for kids to emerge from sports practice or music lessons. Or they carry notebooks. Or they narrate stories into a voice-to-text program while driving to work. 

The trick here isn’t to look for big chunks of time, but to look for the small gaps in your schedule that your life and routine already provide you, then asking yourself if you can make use of those incidental moments to fit some writing in.

A QUICK EXERCISE

These days, folks aren’t really surprised to learn that their phone takes up more time than they think. Smartphones have been around for twenty years now, and we’re increasingly pondering our relationship with them (to say nothing of the periodic craze for going offline).

I’m not anti-phone — mine is incredibly useful — but there’s often an exercise I recommend to people who are trying to find incidental writing time. Secure a small notebook or stack of index cards to the front of your phone with a rubber band, so you physically have to remove an analogue writing tool from the phone in order to use it. When you reach for the phone to kill time, try to write a few sentences in your notebook or card before you thumb in your passcode and start the doom scroll.

Putting analogue writing tools in front of your screen adds a point of resistance to break the habit. Even if you don’t write anything, this exercise makes you conscious of just how many short bursts of time there are where you brain goes looking for distraction.

But if you do write — even if it’s only a handful of times — it’s getting you words you wouldn’t otherwise do. If you do it consistently and reach for you phone as often as most people do, you might be surprised to find yourself writing a couple of hundred extra words or more. 

Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:

Patronage: Want to ask me questions directly and be part of a great writing community? Join the GenrePunk Ninja Patreon!

Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.

Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.

You Don’t Need Social Media To Sell Books

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja 0 Comment

The marketing plan for many new writers — including me, way back when — seems to be a weird extension of the Field of Dreams philosophy: if we publish it, readers will come. Good books find their audience. 

Readers believe this too, although they rarely articulate it that way. And it’s not entirely wrong, because reading is a social activity, even if it’s a rather solitary one. Books that get talked about get read, and if they’re talked about enough they become a cultural phenomenon. 

It’s one reason that bookstores and publishers are so enamoured of BookTok at the present moment, where conversations about books can take off fast. 

It’s also the reason reviews are so powerful, and being placed in certain review outlets (especially the ones who are seen to drive conversation) is such a big part of the marketing plan for traditionally published books.

The problem is, it’s hard to manufacture that conversation. There are steps writers can take to encourage it, but you can’t make it happen.

And so the fundamental belief that good books find their audience feels true, even if it means the converse side of the coin — that books that don’t find their audience aren’t good — is going to haunt far more writers in the long run.

Over the years, I’ve met with a lot of writers who lament the fact that “traditional” publishing doesn’t do any marketing. 

I don’t disagree with that statement, but I think it overlooks what old-school velocity publishing does well: creating a buzz about a book before it launches, and selling a good chunk of its print run in the first month.

They don’t do that by running ads or engaging in mass promotion, but by doing their best to get conversations started and whet a reader’s appetite before the release date. 

This can mean they look like they’re not doing anything, especially when viewed through the eyes of slow-build indie authors who have a very different business model (or aspiring authors who dream of getting a big push, and fear that the lack of conversation around their book means it isn’t good).

Which brings us to two of the key issues of author platform: 

1) Publishers know it can create conversation and sell books, but they didn’t always understand how. This led to a few years of authors being told to follow tactics (Blog! Run a newsletter! Be on TikTok!) because it had worked for other authors, with no one really thinking about why it worked. 

2) When new social media emerges and gets hungry for engagement, it will frequently benefit early adopters who use the platform to find new readers. As those platforms are enshittified, the later adopters are working twice as hard for half the impact, but a cargo cult forms around the tactic because everyone knows they need attention and they can’t think how else to find it.

Getting readers talking is essential to what we do as writers, but in the absence of reliable methods (and the presence of big dreams), we fall back on tools that give the illusion of control.

The Problem, As In So Many Things, Is Our Tendency to Mistake Tactics for Strategy

One of my favourite writing books—now dated, but still useful—is Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer. In it, he notes the essential problem with most writers careers.

Because writers often work organically and hate doing mechanical things like detailed novel outlines, they sometimes also shy away from creating actual lists of long-term and short-term career goals… Many writers never progress in their careers — except in a shambling, two-steps-forward-one-step-back way — because they always focus on the moment, and the moment after that. Their maps lack all kinds of details essential for finding their way toward a destination. 

I feel like this is especially true with the way writer approach platform. Ask most writers why they are on social media, and they’ll tell you they need to be there to sell books.

Ask them how their presence sells books, and they may mumble something about building a platform, but very few of them have a plan for transitioning folks from social media audience to active reader.

If you’re lucky, they can point to a tactic previously deployed (and turned into a course) by a particular writer. “Such and such used Facebook adds” or “I did this person’s course on TikTok”. 

Nevermind that the existence of a course usually means that the enshittication of the platforms nigh, and the tactic will be less effective in time.  

Writers either build around social media systems haphazardly and trust in the fates to generate the conversations and interest that eventually leads to sales, or they follow the marketing hooks of someone who is great at marketing and sells them a course.

If we step away from the immediate, tactical question of which tool to use and inst4ead focus on what we typically want from those tools, the strategy behind most author platforms is pretty easy to break down: 

  1. Generate leads that introduce new readers to our work

  2. Nurture those leads to turn interested readers into book buyers

  3. Nurture those buyers to transform them into readers.

  4. Build those readers into a community (or fandom) that generates conversations that, in turn, creates leads for more readers. 

Indie authors who have been inundated with newsletter advice might have a lightbulb go off reading that list, recognising the basic philosophy of the newsletter sales funnel. 

For everyone else, here’s how that plays out:

  • A writer sets up a newsletter and invites people to join said list. Often this involves offering an enticement, such as a free book, which serves as a lead magnet. This magnet will draw a small amount of attention from folks already interested in your work, but you can multiply its drawing power through tools like advertising, newsletter promos, and other marketing that puts your offer in front of fresh eyes.

  • Readers who join the newsletter get the free book and then hear from the writer semi-regularly (or very regularly). Often writers will establish an automatic welcome sequence, or a series of emails that go out to new subscribers, gradually introducing unfamiliar readers to the author’s works and the author themselves.

  • Once these readers are integrated into the newsletter readership, they’re dipped into a series of offers as details about new releases, sales and other discounts, and the occasional timely reminder of backlist titles. Some readers may not stick around after the initial few emails, but that’s fine—you’re aiming to speak to the readers who do, turning them into fans.

It’s one way of implementing the core strategy I talk about above, but not the only way. 

The same strategy is in play when writers attempt to sell books on social media (create leads by posting content people repost, gradually convince people to follow you regularly, and then direct your audience to the books you release).

Ditto the way traditional velocity publishers use reviews (create leads by giving arcs to taste-makers who have an audience, who then create leads with potential readers by reviewing about the book. If enough reviews and conversation starts, you generate buzz in the core community of readers for that genre, which then spills over to readers on the fringe and the general public. 

Same core strategy, very different tactics. Which leads us to the core question that few writers really ask: 

What tactic generates the strongest leads for your business model with the least expenditure of resources?

For some people, this might be social media. I hesitate to say it, because some folks hear that and think they’re going to be the exception to the rule, but there are routinely authors who leverage social platforms and take off. 

Often they’re there early, before the enshittification kicks in, or they figure out how to make use of a newly introduced feature or approach to the platform. Social media can also work if there’s strong, existing communities on the platform who can be enticed into checking out your work.

But if you’re a writer who doesn’t particularly enjoy social media—or, worse, a writer who easily falls down the algorithm hole and doom scrolls when you’d rather e writing—then the resource cost is probably not worth the leads your generating.

Because here’s the thing about social media, when viewed as a broad swathe: most platforms are great at generating conversation, but they’re terrible for organic lead generation. There is value to them in being the place where people gather and spend time, but much less in giving away the kind of attention that lets people off the platform.

It’s the step that lots of writers miss when they bitch about the algorithm sending their stupid, random-thought-at-two-AM tweet viral then chokes down the attention when they try to post about their books.

Which means that an organic social media presence still has a part to play in your author platform, but it’s best considered as a secondary tool. A method of nurturing readers, rather than generating leads. Social media works best with the people already interested in you, especially if they’re engaged enough to magnify your reach and repost when you do reach out to newer readers.

YOU DON’T NEED TO BE ON SOCIAL MEDIA AS A WRITER, BUT YOU SHOULD HAVE A PLAN TO GENERATE LEADS

So, the good news is that you don’t need to be on social media as a writer. The bad news is that you do need some way of generating leads and connecting with new readers, especially if you’re an indie author.

Fortunately, it’s possible to generate leads without social media. When you really think about it, social media platforms and review generation and a host of other marketing methods really revolve around borrowing someones audience. 

If Facebook was used by 200,000 daily visitors, instead of two billion, then it wouldn’t be as valuable. They have an audience of users, and marketers (authors and otherwise) want access to that audience, so they pay the toll in the farm of cold hard cash (ads) or sweat equity (organic content) in order to access these readers.

But magazines have readers. Reviewers have readers. Your local community hall has an audience, as does your local book club. Conventions and events are places where hardcore readers gather, and they’re much more likely to buy books than a hundred folks you spruik your book to on social media. 

Generating leads is basically putting yourself out there in front of audiences, and they don’t need to be large. In fact, a small, passionate group of people who are close to perfect for your book can be worth as much as a large crowd where only a handful of people might be on your wavelength. 

One of my focuses for 2026 is writing and submitting short faction to magazine markets, because a) those folks have audiences who are predisposed to like what I do, and b) has secondary effects beyond finding new readers (I get paid, I’ve created stories that can now be collected into books).

Is it guaranteed to work? Not at all. I could invest a whole lot of time into writing some stories, and its possible none of them will be picked up by an editor. That’s always a risk, but it’s mitigated by the fact I can always use stories in other ways (lead magnets for newsletter promos, collections, free giveaways to nurture my existing readers).

That, for me, is the key of those options. It’s considerably harder to re-use a less-than-successful social media post in the same way (although not impossible — having a second life for popular social media posts is pretty much the modus operandi of my mech store).

Stories aren’t the only outreach I’m doing. Blogging is a method of lead generation too—slower, I’ll grant, but occasionally more useful as years of people linking to various blog posts have shown. I’ll be making use of newsletter swaps. As we get towards the second half of the year, and the expenditures of 2025 are paid off, I’ll even start getting back to paid lead generation in the form of advertising.

All of them take less effort than “being on social media,” and typically offer more bang for my back in terms of the time I invest in doing these things versus the number of readers they actually attract.

There’s nothing wrong with making your lead generation an online feed, so long as you’re conscious of what you want your online presence to do and you’ve got the time and resources to invest in it.

It’s not what I’d recommend, outside of riding the new user wave of the occasional platform, but every writer finds their own path.

What’s important is remembering that social media is a tactic, not the entirety of the strategy. If you’re not enjoying being on Facebook, Threads, TikTok, or whatever the lastest site is—or, worse, you’re discovering that it eats into your writing time—there are other methods of generating leads that can be just as effective.

You just need to think strategically, and find the tactic that works best for you.

Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:

Patronage: Want to ask me questions directly and be part of a great writing community? Join the GenrePunk Ninja Patreon!

Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.

Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.

I Am Not A Fully Operational Death Star

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja
I Am Not A Fully Operational Death Star

To the shock of absolutely no-one, I was considerably less productive on the writing front than expected over the holidays.

I last wrote on my last full day at work two weeks ago, and I’m picking this draft up on the 5th of January (coincidentally, my first day on a bus since moving house in late December).

The version you are reading now didn’t actually get finished until the end of January, three weeks after I thought I’d figure out the final draft. Things, my friends, did not go to plan.

Which shouldn’t surprise any writer who has gone through a holiday season more than once.

I’ve touched base with many writer friends over the last few weeks, and “less than expected” is a pretty common refrain when talking about their holidays.

Very few folks actually planned to do nothing over December and January — writers are exceptionally bad at taking weekends off, let alone extended breaks — but no-one seemed to have the knock-it-out-of-the-park kind of holiday season they’d hoped for.

If you’ve thought something similar, let us talk about why the holidays are hard on writers and the December/January period is not as effective as we’d hoped. 

1) OUR PRIORITIES ARE NOT WHAT WE THINK THEY ARE

When I sit down with new writers I mentor, one of the first things I get them to do is build a priority pyramid with some index cards. I want them to physically move around their commitments and ambitious and create a hierarchy because sometimes we all need to see that writing is not our immediate priority. 

Sometimes, it’s not even our third or fourth most important thing on our list.

This is important because the social narrative around writing and creativity makes it seem like it must be an all-consuming thing. The first and most important priority in your life. To do otherwise is to risk being seen as gasp an amateur, or even someone who doesn’t take their creative practice seriously.

When that narrative gets its hooks into you, it’s easy to feel guilty about taking a day off or putting Christmas shopping ahead of getting your word count done. It’s easy to feel like your failure to be writing all the time is responsible for any lack of success you’re feeling, and things would be better if you just dropped every other commitment in your life and wrote to the point of burn-out twenty-four seven.

This narrative sucks on its own, but when you combine it with the social narratives around Christmas, which tells us family and togetherness should also be your top priority and you’re a bad person if you don’t get into the holiday spirit….

Well, the conflicting messages can be a source of anxiety if you don’t examine them. I know from experience that writing is often in the top five things that I care about, but I also know what it’s not more important than. My wife trumps writing. So do my family and my cats, and—often—my friends. 

I can maintain a writing routine steady against things like day jobs, but I will down tools in a heartbeat to manage a crisis related to any of the above.

Even beyond that, priorities are flexible and contextual. Moving came with a deadline, made life better for some of my top priorities (my wife and cats), and required a shit ton of effort and attention. It outranked almost everything else while we were transporting furniture (even then; we ditched moving for a few hours to take a cat to the emergency vet when she got a bloody nose and we couldn’t determine the source).

Moving trumps writing, and even a lot of Christmas commitments, over the last two weeks. It will trumped a lot more through to the end of January, when we got the last of our stuff out of the old place. Preparing the old flat for someone else to inhabit will probably kick my writing routine in the teeth a few times through February as well.

And that’s okay. 

I’m knowingly setting writing aside in order to get the moving done, knowing that it will improve a whole lot of other things and, ultimately, open up more opportunities to write than I’ve had in the past.

It’s surprisingly easy for us to lose track of what’s really got our attention, which is why I use tools like priority pyramids and regularly journaling to see what’s on my mind and what I’m really focused on. It’s ever-changing and far more malleable than many folks think, and the end-of-year holiday season hits harder than most. 

2) WE LOSE OUR KEYSTONE HABITS

Like many folks, habit and routine sustain my writing process. I write when I get on a bus these days, and it feels weird when I can’t. Getting to that point has been a process, but I focused on it because I’d identified my commute as the window with time for writing. 

I used to write first thing after getting up, or when I got home from work. Other times, I set alarms that let me know it was time to begin. Comics writer Kelly Sue Demonic used to talk about lighting a candle in her office when she started work, then blowing it out when she finished. A simple ritual that trained her brain to be “on” at the start of a writing day, and turn “off” the narrative instincts when it was time to shut down.

There’s a lot of books about habit formation out there these days, and much of it talks about the way we string unconscious, habitual actions together.

If we drive to work on the same roads every morning, eventually the route becomes muscle memory. If we write every day after getting home from work, eventually we don’t have to think about writing—it will just become a thing we do after walking through the door.

But habits acrette over time: they all have a trigger, and if you remove that trigger, the habitual behaviour needs to be replaced by conscious effort. Encounter road work on your usual route to work, forcing you to find an alternate way in, becomes an annoyance because you have to think about something that used to be routine. 

Sitting down to write without the trigger of coming home (or stepping onto a bus, or lighting a candle, or setting a pomodoro timer) takes more cognitive energy. We have to think about writing rather than simply doing it because that’s when the writing gets done. Instead of sitting down to write because we encontered the trigger that said hey, it’s writing time, we have to physically coax ourselves to the keyboard and remind ourselves that writing needs to be done.

That’s harder.

It takes more energy.

And holidays often break our routines in messy ways. 

Not only are the rituals and habits around getting to work gone, but we’re packing new things into our time. Exceptions to the norm become the norm. Habits don’t stand a chance.

The trick here isn’t lamenting what didn’t get done—it’s about looking at what habits you need to re-establish (or build from scratch) now things are returning to ‘normal’.

3) WE’RE ALMOST NEVER A FULLY OPERATIONAL DEATH STAR ANYWAY

Another truism of many writers: we think we can do more than we actually can. I often plan out my year under the assumption that I’ll write 600,000 words—a perfectly feasible amount if you looked at my “good” writing weeks and extrapolated outwards. 

In practice, I can write about 300,000 words a year because the “good” writing days are not common. I estimate based on optimal conditions, but in practice conditions are never perfect. I’ve got the occasional bout of rocky mental health or exhaustion, courtesy of my sleep condition. Or I’ll need to cover household duties when my partner’s chronic illness kicks in and takes them out of commission. 

There’s a trick I’ve been using for years, originally pulled from Maggie Stiefvater’s late, lamented Tumblr. I start my day by assigning myself a “percentage of optimal” score, with 100% being in a state that feels like I’m firing on all cylinders and 10% being “barely functional”. I then set my expectations against that percentage – for example, if I think an optimal day is 2000 words, a 40% day would be 800.

After a few years of tracking how I feel in the morning, I usually wake up feeling somewhere between 40 and 60 percent. It’s a damn good week if I find myself in the seventy to eighty percent band more than once. 

I’m almost never 100%. I will never be a fully operational Death Star. 

When I sit down to plan out projects with mentee, I always ask them what they think a “reasonable” amount of time is to finish their project. Then I tell them to double it when we lay out our plans, because things will never move as fast as you think. 

We’re almost never a fully operational Death Star, which is perfectly fine. Even a half-built Death Star is dangerous as fuck (and, hopefully, you’re using your Death Star plans for something more productive than blowing up planets and terrorising the galaxy).

Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:

Patronage: Want to ask me questions directly and be part of a great writing community? Join the GenrePunk Ninja Patreon!

Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.

Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.