Journal

Writing is a funny business.

Case in point: I signed a reprint contract for a short-story this morning. It’s not the first time this story has been reprinted (and, Gods willing, it won’t be the last), but this reprint means that a single story of around 7,000 words has earned me more money in the space of four years than all five novellas I’ve written put together.

There’s nothing surprising about this – it’s how writing works. You write things and you keep writing things and eventually some of the things you wrote a while back come around and start earning you money again.

But it’s timely, this coming through this week, ’cause I recently made the decision to cut back my hours at the Writers Centre a little in order to free up a second day each week that can be devoted to writing. Part of me – the part that frets about the mortgage – keeps looking at that decision and wondering if was going to come back and bite me.

In the short term? Almost certainly, yes. I’ve more-or-less forgotten all the financial habits I’d built up through years of contracting and freelance work, which means I need to re-learn them.

In the long term, well. I got a lot of things I wanna get written, and I have a fair idea how much that extra day a week is worth.

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Nine days left in the month of July. Three writing things that need to be done before the end of the month, which brings me to the end of my current writing commitments.

Time to figure out what comes next.

It’s cold in Brisbane this week and I’m not sleeping as well as I should be. Large chunks of today were spent fighting to stay focused, which is much less fun than it used to be. I’ve been watching the first season of In the Thick of It between stints at the keyboard and suddenly find myself looking at Peter Capaldi’s Doctor Who in a whole different light.

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Last week, I removed the Facebook app from my phone and slid the Kindle app into the space the Facebook icon used to occupy. Not because I’m abandoning Facebook at all, but I was trying to disrupt the habit of using the House of Zuckerberg to kill time.

It’s turned out pretty well, so far. The time I used to spend scrolling through the same items in my feed is now spent reading short fiction, clearing the backlog of magazines I subscribed to via Weightless Books. The last few days have been devoted to working my way through the latest issues of Uncanny and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, which is a whole lot more short fiction than I normally get through in the space of a week.

I’m meant to off at a friend’s place tonight, enjoying the double-barrelled awfulness that is Avengers Grimm. Instead I’m here, in my apartment, trying to sort out a story for a deadline that crept up on me, being slightly grumpy ‘bout the fact I still don’t have hot water.

I’ve been thinking ‘bout blogs, lately, and how they have changed in the last ten years, ever since we started sharing things on Facebook and Twitter.

Mostly, I’ve been thinking ‘bout the those changes jibe with the blogs I tend to follow, versus the kinds of posts that I actually sit down and write. And I’ve been thinking about the fact that I sound angry, these days, whenever I sit down to write a post, especially compared to my posts from 2011 when I was, in fact, a seething ball of rage.

And after pondering this, for the last few days, I’ve come to a conclusion: I think I’d like to stop now, please.

Not blogging – I always kinda liked blogging – but certainly the concerted effort to blog in a way that preferences Twitter and Facebook. The posts, specifically, about some aspect of writing or publishing, the posts with the titles designed to hook readers, the posts – let’s be honest – designed to be shared around.

And lets be honest: that stuff works, if your goal is attracting people – folks find something smart or funny and they immediately share it around. It’s the default state of blogging in our feed-driven universe, and still the default approach I’d share with writers if they asked about platform at work. I’ve done a bit of that sort of thing, over the past few years, and the results are nothing to sneeze at.

But the blogs I miss – the blogs I still love reading, when I can find them – are the types of blogs that work like public diaries. Online spaces where the owners come to think, talk, and share, instead of showing up with a lecture and subheadings. Blogs that reward sticking with them, over time, rather than the one-off engagement.

Since there are a few folks who show up here for posts like Your Stories are Not Sacred God Poop and Things I Would Do If I Were Planning To Be an Indie Publisher, I figured it’s only fair to give you a heads up: I’m not giving them up for good, but I’m going to spend twelve months journaling, rather than blogging, which means the signal-to-noise may not be what you’d hoped.

If you’re in the need for writing advice, there’s plenty of good sources out there. If you’re looking to get in on the ground floor of something exciting, try Asking Doctor Kim. If you’re really missing my particular brand of blathering, try asking me something in the comments of a post – there’s pretty good odds I’ll answer, one way or another.

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Actually, speaking of writing advice: last week I got the chance to chair a Q&A session with Kevin Anderson and Rebecca Moesta, who are absolutely brilliant folks to talk to on questions of writing and publishing. I’d seen them present on a previous trip to Brisbane, when they did a seminar on Things I Wish Some Pro Had Told Me When I Was Starting Out, and it was so damned good that I leapt at the chance to MC when QWC offered me the gig.

They’re publishers, these days, in addition to the terrifying number of books they write, and they’ve got a pretty awesome line of writing advice that covers some pretty interesting territory. I recommend checking out Dave Farland’s Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing, The Synopsis Treasury, and Million Dollar Professionalism , if you get the chance.