GenrePunk Ninja

“Give me a lever long enough and I will move the earth.”

This quote from Archimedes bounces around the internet from time to time, highlighting the power of leverage. It’s been stuck in my head for over two decades now, ever since Commander Sheridan quoted it while escaping from an alien prison in a Season 5 episode of Babylon 5 with the power of a lever and sheer, protagonists gumption.

But here’s the thing: it’s wrong.

The full quote is, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

Thing is, the full quote isn’t as poetic as the first version. It lacks clear imagery and rhythm, and the poet in me recognises such things are a hindrance to recurring repetition.

But make no mistake: the fulcrum is important. Leverage without a firm pivot point to work against is weak. The fulcrum provides the power. 

I’ve got an interest in leverage, as long-time readers will know. Thompson’s five levers that move the publishing industry are pretty foundational to my thinking and planning as a writer and publisher, and help me figure out what moves to make as I pursue my goals.

Increasingly, though, I’ve pondered the other half of the equation. If the five levers can help you get things done, what is the fulcrum you leverage against in order to generate greater effects?

AN UNCERTAIN ERA

Personally, if 2025 has a theme, it would be uncertainty. The year started with some pretty epic storms that revealed a leak in our wall and a thick layer of mould beneath our carpet. We contacted our insurance and the body corporate, and figured we’d sort things out in short order.

Then it was still there when the cyclone hit Brisbane in March. Still there in June, when we originally planned to move out. It was still there in October, when our insurances started wondering why we hadn’t replaced our carpet yet. 

It’s still there today, as I wait for a team to come do a flood test on the wall to figure out where the leak is, in the hopes we can get this fixed before the 2026 storm season begins in earnest.

It’s a precarious way to live, and I haven’t enjoyed it.

2025 was also my third year of freelancing, and the year I decided it was time to wrap up freelancing and get a “real” job again. Cashflow was irregular throughout the year. At least twice, I put serious thought into quitting the whole publishing malarkey and just doing something less stressful (in the end, that’s what sent me back to work with a regular paycheck).

I took solace in the knowledge we were delaying our moving plans rather than cancelling — seven years in a one-bedroom apartment is just a little too long — but it took months to work out exactly when it was going to happen. At first, we thought late December. Then early January. Then late January.

It’s been an interesting year in a lot of ways, because I had a considerable number of things I could leverage to get things done. A lot of time, for example, which is an underrated resource for a writer. A lot of knowledge that I’d built up over the last few years. Some really outstanding books pitched through various contacts.

And yet, I did nothing. I had the leverage, but the sheer amount of uncertainty meant there was no fulcrum. No firm place against which I could apply the leverage and generate a greater response for my efforts.

The entire year became a tedious struggle. Everything ground to a halt as more and more uncertainty piled on top of me. 

Then…the move went from being uncertain to certain. It’s happening in about six days, on shorter notice than we thought. We’re ready, but not ready, if that makes sense. Cramming a six-week plan into two weeks is stressful.

And within the space of twenty-four hours, I was acting. Not just on the move stuff, but on publishing and writing gigs. That surprised me, given everything else going on.

Moving on short notice sucks, but having a fixed moving date provided me with a necessary fulcrum. Instead of having dozens of plans, based on how certain things happened, I had one sure thing to build around, and all the other decisions became easier. 

My spouse and I have never moved house together. We’re pretty sure it’s going to be an unpleasant experience given our respective responses to stress. 

But we’re also crazy excited about eager to get into the new place. In fact, despite all the stress, it’s the happiest I’ve been all year. 

YOU NEED A FULCRUM

In psychology, there’s a concept dubbed the locus of control — AKA your inherent belief in how much you control events versus ceding control to external factors beyond your influence like luck, fate, or the decisions of other people. It describes the feeling of agency you have over your own life, and having a sense of control is often linked with motivation, happiness, and health.

So it’s no wonder that the simple fact of having a move date has made me so happy, because we’re now able to make decisions and control what’s happening around the move. We may have stared down the barrel of moving in two weeks, rather than eight, but the energy with which we’re taking the challenge is considerable.

What’s amazing is the speed with which having the date also affected non-moving things. I started sending emails again after being quiet for the past few months. Newsletters got written. GenrePunk ninja is picking up speed again. So are various writing and publishing projects. 

Living with a sense of uncertainty, and feeling like there was very little I could do to influence things, actually seeped into every aspect of my life. Having certainty, in turn, has given me a lot of energy that bleeds into other areas.

Which brings our core theme of writing and publishing, and what this move reminds me of. 

Leverage is good, but in a lot of ways your locus of control is the fulcrum against which you apply the levers you’ve got access to. 

All of this has got me thinking about what my current fulcrum is, and whether it’s really serving me.

THE POWER OF KNOWING THE NEXT STEP

I’d been a working writer for about ten years before I started producing science fiction and fantasy stories. Not out of a lack of interest—I’d always loved the genre—but simply because I couldn’t figure out what to do with the stories afterwards. 

I got my start in the self-addressed stamped envelope era, submitting printed stories via post. I ended up working in areas other than fiction because, frankly, they embraced digital submissions earlier than fiction magazines did. As an Australian, there were only two local publications I could track down, and one of them focused on comedic SF and fantasy. I’d write the occasional story, but the lack of opportunity kind of thwarted my ambition.

Then, in 2007, Angela Slatter introduced me to the late, lamented Ralan.com right as the era of digital submissions arrived in the spec fic space. Within a few years, I’d clocked up a pretty decent run of publications, simply because writing stories now meant there was a statistically greater chance that other people would read them.

It shifted my locus of control. Prior to Ralan, I believed that writing short stories wasn’t entirely worth it, because I would submit to a small pool of publications (one of which was really not interested in my brand of spec fic). Now, there were huge lists of places to submit, and the limits of location gave way to a sense of excitement as I realised I controlled how much I wrote and submitted.

So, I started writing stories. A lot of them. And I submitted a lot (at one point, I tried for 100 submissions mailed out a year, even if all 100 resulted in a rejection). I moved from a place where I felt like I had control over my career, and every publication rewarded those efforts.

I always loved stories, but I couldn’t get into writing them and submitting them until I knew the next steps. Doing all the work of figuring out how to write a good story, only to then find myself in yet more unfamiliar terrain, didn’t excite me.

Brains are fundamentally lazy, you know? They don’t like uncertainty.

PICKING YOUR “CERTAINTY POINT” WHEN STUCK

I’m not the only writer who has experienced this feeling. When mentoring, when people are truly stuck on a project, I often ask about what they’re planning to do after it’s done.. If they don’t know—and most don’t—I recommend picking a target. Sometimes it’s a magazine they’ll keep submitting to, one story after another. Sometimes it’s a single anthology with an upcoming deadline. If they’re a novel writer, I get them to sit down and create the shortlist of agents/publishers to submit to. If they’re an indie, I’ll get them to pick a publishing rhythm (one or two books a year, new releases every quarter, one book a month).

What they choose doesn’t matter. What we’re doing is clarifying that finishing doesn’t become synonymous with figuring out what to do next. We’re giving them a certain next step. Knowing that you’ll be submitting somewhere gives you a destination to head towards. It helps you make both creative and practical decisions about your work, because there’s a finite amount of time to work towards.

Of course, you have no real control over the publication of your work (unless you’re going indie), but aiming for it means the work gets finished, and even if the original destination says no, you can keep on submitting afterwards (sometimes it takes a lot of submission to get a yes).

Meanwhile, you’re freed up to work on the next thing. And if the place you wrote for says no, you’ve at least got finished work that can be submitted elsewhere and open up new opportunities.

MY FAVOURITE FULCRUM: THE SHIPPING RHYTHM

My preferred Fulcrum sits at the intersection of two ideas.

The first comes from Thomas Woll’s Publishing For Profit: Successful Bottom-Line Management for Book Publishers. It’s a dry-but-useful book on setting up a traditional velocity publisher that offers a really interesting insight:

“Whatever your market, you must make sure your (publishing) program runs on a consistent schedule so everyone knows what’s going and when it’s coming. There must be consistency to the commitment…” (4). He alludes to an often-overlooked aspect of writing and publishing, where predictability is an asset. If you have books coming out at the same time every year — even if you’re only releasing 2 a year — then people (booksellers, readers, reviewers, etc) learn to look for your titles.

The second comes from Seth Goddin, in his book The Practice:

When we stop worrying about whether we’ve done it perfectly, we can focus on the process instead. Saturday Night Live doesn’t go on at 11:30 p.m. because it’s ready. It goes on because it’s 11:30. We don’t ship because we’re creative. We’re creative because we ship. 

This is why my advice for struggling writers is, essentially, giving yourself a shipping date. Getting into the habit of shipping work is powerful. It’s one reason why, when my time got very limited a few years back, I devoted my efforts to publishing a short story a week through the Patreon. Often—to borrow Godin’s phrase—the stories went live because it was 11 AM on a Saturday rather than because I thought they were ready, which meant there were a few stories I was uncertain about (spoiler alert: they were often the ones people responded to the most)

FOCUS ON WHAT’S IN YOUR CONTROL

The most useful advice I’ve ever been given, as a writer, is: focus on things you can control.

Part of the problem with writing through 2025 was the simple fact that I was angry at capitalism and its manifestations. It felt like nothing I was doing through the year was getting meaningful results, and very little was in my control. All I wanted to do was run away from home and find a nice quiet corner of the world to write in, but my publishing business was hemorrhaging money and everything I finished felt like a reason to sink deeper and deeper into debt.

A thing we don’t talk about often enough in writing: publishing is a space where it’s easy to feel helpless—to see the locus of control as fundamentally external and outside your influence. The correlation between the folks I know who work freelance and folks who experience significant bouts of anxiety is high. 

My locus of control was fundamentally external this year. I focused on the things I couldn’t influence. I told myself that there was no straightforward solution to my problems, not least because my last few stints with full-time work had not been pleasant experiences.

What I’d forgotten — what I could have done, but didn’t — is the power of establishing a shipping rhythm with my work. Keeping the flow of submissions going to one short story marketing; locking in on the posting rhythm for this pattern; setting my eyes on a specific submission opportunity for longer works and aiming to hit it. 

Maintaining a rhythm isn’t easy. Sometimes, maintaining it means letting go of work that isn’t as polished as you’d like. It means you’ll occasionally do something stupid in public. It means committing to the rhythm in suboptimal circumstances (like this week and next, when the move is in full flight)

The rhythm has perks. For instance, re-committing to the GenrePunk rhythm allowed me to recognise a fundamental mistake in my process. I used to post entries every Wednesday because it was the best fit for my freelance schedule — I had very little mentoring work on Wednesdays, and lots of time to edit entries and schedule the post.

Increasingly, with the day job, Wednesdays are my busy days where I have very few spoons. I kept missing my posting window, despite acknowledging that it was important to me in every prep week. Moving my weekly entry to the weekend made things much easier. 

So I’m trailing Sundays for my weekly post. Not forever, but as a short-term focus. A rhythm for a month. A small experiment to see how it works and where the resistance points are.

The key thing for me is getting a rhythm in place. 

Establishing a shipping rhythm doesn’t have to be your creative fulcrum. It’s what works for me because the things I mechanics and strategy of putting things out into the world. I like the act of releasing ideas and designing covers and shaping work for an audience. I enjoy contributing to my community of readers and fellow writers.

Your fulcrum — you firm anchor point against which you apply your leverage — could be something else. A commitment to a process. A daily word count. Dedication to finishing a specific project. Writing to amuse a small groups of readers.

 The important part isn’t what serves as your fulcrum, but that it’s something within your control. You don’t have to rely on other people to make it happen.

Leverage is often generated by the interplay of agents within the publishing field — you as the writer, yes, but also publishers and editors and reviewers and bookstores and fans and everything else. You can use it to great effect, but chunks of it aren’t entirely under your control.

The fulcrum — the shipping rhythm – is entirely under your purview, and it often works because work that doesn’t end up where you thought finds homes elsewhere instead. The important part isn’t landing at the publication; it’s getting things ready and keeping them out in the world until they find their readership.

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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’m writing today’s entry from a cramped bus seat on my way to work, grabbing fifteen minutes of writing time out of the otherwise dreary stretch between my house and the office. It’s taken me a few weeks to get to this point. For the first week, I tried my old trick of writing on notecards during my commute. That proved ineffective because buses are a very different mode of transport to trains.

For the next week, I busted out my laptop and brought it along each day. Unfortunately, it didn’t get used. My old laptop bag was for a different phase of my life, where I had plenty of writing time and often travelled by car or train. That was fine for the last eight years, but isn’t the writing season I’m in. Using it on a train was awkward because it’s basically a backpack, and pulling out a laptop meant digging through my lunch, notebooks, and other paraphernalia.

So, I’ve been pondering the problem since I started the new job five weeks ago, and two weeks ago I bought a new laptop bag. Specifically, this bag. Smaller, lighter, easy to open. I can basically rest it on my lap and unzip it, and the laptop is ready to work on. It’s a small but essential infrastructure change that opened up opportunities to work, and it only cost me twenty bucks. 

Instantly, I have about 30 minutes of extra writing every day, so long as I can get a seat on my bus (about 85% of the time).

Between the commute and the hour lunch break at work, I’ve arrived at a satisfactory answer of when do I write rough drafts while working? An hour and a half is usually enough to get me a decent stretch wf words each weekday.

Which means I focus on the next problem: when do I edit? Rewrite? When do I get these posts live? When do I design book covers?

Important problems, to be sure, but not essential until I had the question of when do I write sorted out. 

WRITERS ARE PROBLEM SOLVERS

It would be easy to turn my current morning writing routine into a pretty cliché piece of advice about finding the time to write if you really want to be a writer. It’s not the first time I’ve had to do this kind of experiment. Back when I worked long hours for a writers festival, my available writing time was basically an eight-minute commute every morning, before the rigours of the day burned me out. It seemed an inconsequential amount of time to devote to writing, but I did it, and actually wrote a story a week for my patron for the space of twelve months.

But that’s not what I’m banging on about here. There’s plenty of times in my life where I’ve found the time to write like this, but just as many where I’ve let writing slide. Sometimes, writing isn’t that big of a priority. We’re not supposed to say that out loud as creative types, but it’s absolutely true. 

What I want to focus on is a very different lesson: solve one problem at a time. (Switching to my lunch break here, if you’re curious about what a 15-minute commute generates on the writing front)

Writers aren’t encouraged to think of themselves as “problem solvers,” but I’d argue that almost everything in writing is just solving one problem after another. What is figuring out the opening of a story but asking yourself, “how do I get people interested in what’s going to happen?”, and what is an ending but asking yourself, “how do I make people care about everything’s that just happened?” and “what do I want people to feel and think right now?”

Fixing scenes? Solving one problem after another, often by asking yourself the right questions. Same with rewriting and revision (David Madden’s excellent book on editing is just a series of questions one can ask about one’s manuscript and figuring out ways to solve the problem).

So we fix problems all the time. One after the other.

But because we don’t self-identify as “problem solvers”, we don’t think to apply that approach to the rest of our lives.

SOLVING THE RIGHT PROBLEM

When the internet and author platform boomed into existence in the last nineties and turned into the “be online and do social media” advice circa 2007 or so, I used to spend time around more experienced writers who lamented the fact that new authors kept trying to solve the wrong problem.

The really days of the internet were filled with advice about building a blog or being on social media or establishing an author platform, and lots of folks rushed to follow that advice even when they didn’t have books to sell. The Q&A section at festivals, conventions, and author events became a litany of folks asking how to be online better, but when prompted to talk about their book, newer authors would admit they focused on the social media first.

They were solving the problem of finding and nurturing a readership before they had books or stories for that readership to engage with. An absolutely fine approach if you were keen on being a blogger, but very cart-before-horse if you intended to make your living writing books.

These days, I notice the same tendency among the folks I mentor and tutor. They want to rush ahead to strategies and tactics, caught up in the latest online buzz about the things writers “must” do in order to succeed.

My advice begins with a simple question: is that the problem we’re solving now, or is it a distraction?

FINE TUNING 

If you’re struggling to find time to write, then adding a social media stream to promote your books probably will not help you unless you’ve already got a massive backlist of 20 or 30 books. There is nothing you can do on social media — paid or unpaid — that doesn’t pay off ten teams better if you’ve got books for people to buy, and your limited time is better spent finishing your first series (if you’re an indie) or getting new books out (if you’re traditional).

If you’re not writing and you don’t have a deep backlist, then the far more pressing problem is how do you get writing again.

Note that I’m saying nothing about quality here. How do I write better? is a problem that’s worth tackling after you’re in the habit of getting new words on the page. How do I get these books into the hands of an audience? is a problem to solve after you’ve got polished books to put in the audience’s hands.

(My lunch break ends here, cut short because I need to leave the office)

Even within these broader questions, focusing on the right problem for right now can be important. Changing my laptop bag was an important step in getting more writing done each day, but it wasn’t the first problem on the list. Before it was writing during my lunch break and maximising the time available there. Our break room at work is busy, so I trialed working in the local food court for a bit…then realised that losing ten to fifteen minutes walking there and another ten to fifteen coming back was a lot of lost words.

From there, I tried different lunch breaks to find the period where the break room is at its most usable. After that, I kept a log of days where I didn’t write for my entire lunch break, and the things that disrupted me. Some of those were unavoidable (dealing with insurance and body corporate calls after some recent damage to our flat), but some were things I could address (feeling like I needed a pick-me-up and ducking out for a coke or coffee). Those I addressed by purchasing a vacuum-sealed mug that lets me bring coffee to work and keep it warm all morning, or by bringing a can of soft drink and bonus snack into work as my afternoon treat. 

SOLVING THE RIGHT PROBLEM

I bang on about infrastructure a lot when I talk about writing, because it’s often the invisible underpinning that guides how much we write and what we can do with the finished product. Building a readership overseas was incredibly difficult in the days before the internet, which naturally limited what I could achieve as an Australian writer. Even now, my career is shaped by issues of geography and resources: I don’t go to conventions, for instance, because Australia is vast and empty and even our local sci-fi conventions locally are expensive for me to attend from Brisbane.

This doesn’t mean that my career can’t advance, but it limits the strategies I can use to connect with readers and sell books. 

(Another morning stint. 465 words written)

Whenever someone mentions they’re having trouble writing, I start by looking at their infrastructure. Where are they writing? When are they writing? What tools are they leaning into? Where we go from there will often vary, because nobody starts the writing game with a level playing field, but those small logistical issues matter. 

I started my new working routine by trying to get writing done before I left for work, but it just didn’t work. There’s too much going on in our flat, from cats demanding food to a spouse getting ready for work, and my attention keeps fragmenting. It would have been easy to despair at how little I was getting done, but I’ve been at this a long while and I know it’s better to experiment.

Ergo, I focused on the problems one by one. Figured out when and where I could get work done, and refined those windows to let me do more.

It took a few weeks to get right, but once I did, I had a pretty consistent process I could rely upon.

TOMORROW’S PROBLEMS

Are other parts of my writing business suffering while I work this out? Absolutely! I haven’t sent a promotional newsletter in weeks, and managing the Brian Jar Press store has been a little slower than I’d like. Figuring out when to do store stuff was one of the early problems I worked on (early mornings, before I head off to work, which wasn’t being used as effectively for writing as I’d like), but others are just on a list I call “Tomorrow’s problems.”

They’re things I need to solve, but they’re not the most urgent things I need to address. They’re simply further up the Writer’s Hierarchy of Needs than I’m at right now. Much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which suggests that concepts like Self Actualisation and Community are less important when you’re struggling with lower-order needs like safety and accessible food, tomorrow’s problems are more important once I’ve got the lower foundation problems sorted.

I had them down a few weeks ago, before I started the new job, but my habits were built around freelancing and spare time. The big change in available hours moved my attention away from the higher-order issues and towards the more basic ones.

Writing new words

Making them good

Getting them out into the world.

Everything else can come after that. I need to nail down the foundation first.

THE SAME PHILOSOPHY WORKS FOR CREATIVE PROBLEMS

Incidentally, I use the same philosophy when dealing with story issues as well. I often tell my mentees that there are three phases of writing: coming up with ideas, putting them on the page, and making them good. We often think the process is linear, but it’s not. What kills many writers’ momentum is some combination of trying to ideate, write, and edit at the same time, or trying to apply the solutions of one phase when the issue is another.

I’ve written about this a bunch in the past. A few years back, when drafting my story The Rise And Fall of Darnell Royce, Cartographer, I stalled out on the draft and got log jammed for over a week. I kept trying to write new sections, but they didn’t work. I tried editing sections, and that didn’t work either. Everything kept coming out awful and disappointing.

So I stepped back and asked myself what problem I was really trying to solve, and it turned out I had an ideation problem. The solution wasn’t writing more; it was sitting back and creating a pool of concepts and ideas to pull from. Once I had the ideas, I could write the end of the story pretty easily, but coming up with them while I was at the keyboard was always going to be harder than ideating on its own. 

THE POWER OF SMALL, CUMULATIVE SOLUTIONS

Over the years, I’ve learned that the solution to problems is rarely a large change. I’ve changed my lunch break and used a different bag. Bought a sealable coffee cup that will allow me to bring coffee to work. Between them, they’ve nearly doubled my daily word count over the last three weeks, even though I’ve had a few days when things went really off the rails.

That’s the power of solving problems one by one—the effects accumulate and add up over time, while simultaneously being easier to implement than big changes. 

I’m keeping this in mind as I try to solve the editorial problems, because I often feel like editing should be big chunks of time, when in reality doing one or two fixes a day will quickly add up.

It’s hard to talk about this without sounding like I’m delving into the world of mass productivity advice, since so many books aimed at business and entrepreneurial types home in on this idea. “A cumulative 1% improvement in your productivity every week adds up to something huge” is a very common promise, and often assumes that continuous improvement is always possible and there’s no end point to the exponential curve.

I don’t want to reinforce that. I simply want to acknowledge the core truth of solving writing problems: start with the little things. 

Too often, writers get caught up in the idea that writing is big, because the cultural myth around art is that it’s all big sweeps of inspiration and dedicated perseverance.

When you focus on the small—what you can do with your time and resources, instead of what you can’t—the opportunities that open up may surprise you. 

WRAPPING UP MY SECOND LUNCH BREAK

I’m finishing today’s entry from the break room at work, having just broken a thousand words for the day (and a little over two thousand words for this entry). Two morning commutes, two short writing bursts during lunch. This is pretty solid confirmation that the new system is working for me. Momentarily distracted by some work colleagues getting literary questions wrong in their lunchtime quiz, but otherwise trucking along pretty well for a Tuesday. There’s even twenty minutes left to give this a once-over and a polish, getting ahead of the next problem on the list.

And while I’m focused on solving the main problem in front of me, I do occasionally brainstorm possible answers to later problems. We’ll be moving house in January, which means my daily commute will basically double and feature a switch from train to bus halfway through. Editing will become the train portion of my commute. Buses will be the writing portion. It may not work, but that’s being tested and iterated in a few months when we actually make the change. 

Until then, everything is theoretical. Solutions for tomorrow’s problems, which aren’t the problems of today. Right now, I’m looking to move from getting things written to getting things out into the world. Building up my writing habits and career step by step.

ADDENDUM

It’s worth noting that a lot of what I’ve been experimenting with starts with a much older experiment, where I challenged the notion that I needed big blocks of time to write. Since then, I’ve gotten much better at using the time I’ve got, rather than cursing the fact I don’t have the time I think I need.

I am, by nature, a short sprint writer. Even if you give me three straight hours to write, odds are I’ll write about three hundred words and pause, pottering about for a few minutes before figuring out what happens next and starting the next chunk of story or blog post.