Category: Works in Progress
Works in Progress

FISTS OF STEEL!

The 2011 Feb-March writing gauntlet has begun, whereupon Jason Fischer and I spent two months straight bellowing word-counts and motivational taunting at one another while attempting to attain crazy levels of writing productivity. The Rules of the gauntlet are simple: three projects enter, none of them leave. Right now, Jason is ahead of the curve. My goals for March 31st, incidentally: – Finish four Flotsam stories by March 31st, so I’ve finally built up a buffer on the monthly deadlines (this includes the Feb story, due in three days) – Finish the first quarter of the great-lovecraftian-ghoul-swashbuckly-wahoo novel (approx 30,000 words) – Finally rewrite the first quarter of Black Candy to make it legible and fix the pacing issues. I’ve mostly been focused on point 1, for lo, it has a deadline (and I’ve been sick). Today is the first day of February where I’m actually rested, so I expect there will feverish keyboard pounding taking place until the wee

PeterMBall 03/02/2011
Works in Progress

I guess this is why people have day-jobs, huh?

It’s been a long time since I thought hard about the thing I’m writing as I wrote it, rather than sprinting for the finish because I needed stuff to be done and sent out and justifying itself now now now! 600 words on the great-swashbuckly-lovecraft-ghoul-wahoo! novel draft this afternoon, which brings the total up to about 5,000 for the week. It feels so very slow, working like this, but I suspect it may actually be better for me – when I’m not trying to rush things and get wordcount for the sake of wordcount, I have time to start picking at phrasing and thinking about the pace and structure of the scenes. Oddly, writing slow and considered is also a means of curing myself of my addiction to semi-colons. Also, 2011 is the year I teach myself to write in third person or die trying; place your bets on whether it works, but my money’s on the latter. I’m going to

PeterMBall 27/01/2011
Works in Progress

Toil

‘Tis actually a horrible name for the blog post, ’cause the writing thing doesn’t actually feel much like toil this week. Not even yesterday when it took me seven hours, total, to get fifteen hundred words down across two projects. There is probably toil coming though – there’s a Flotsam deadline looming in nine and a half days – but for the moment I get to skip through the word mines surrounded by bone-white moths and singing ravens and tinkling silver bells whose chimes echo strangely in the dark and shady corners. Plus I have Leonard Cohen CDs on, which is always a source of the happy. One day I will remember that the cure for not-writing is writing, rather than having to relearn that lesson every time I stop. I recently chatted to a friend of mine who enjoys the discussion of toil on the blog, watching the numbers stack up and the reports of work done come in. I

PeterMBall 27/01/2011
Works in Progress

Day Planner

Today I am: a) writing b) making plans c) washing up d) buggering off early to play DnD Last night there was write-club, whereupon I wrote about fifteen hundred words on my next Flotsam story, then sat up into the wee hours forcing myself to write 250 words on the novel project for 2011 (which is currently called Tarnished Silver Swords, but once existed under the working title of the weird lovecrafty-ghoul-swashbuckley-wahoo-novel; neither of these is workable as a final title). I thank Trent Jamieson for the reminder to do the latter, courtesy of his recent blogpost aboutgetting stuff done despite being a procrastinating slacker (which is not to say that Trent is a procrastinating slacker, just that I am and his advice came at the right point to remedy that). There has been too much not-writing in my life this January. I have another five days to rectify that.

PeterMBall 26/01/2011
Works in Progress

Process Notes

1) I’m writing in third person this year. This really isn’t my preferred narrative POV, but so it goes. I shall write slowly and suck more, neither of which are fatal conditions. 2) My writing goals are as they always were: take over the goddamn world. 3) I need to remove all forms of fiction from my work area for the foreseeable future. This would be easier if there wasn’t a bookshelf over my desk. 4) I’ve given up on planning this year. I write what needs to be written, then I write other stuff. 5) The parenthetical aside is a thing of evil. 6) There are edits that need doing. I should probably go do them.

PeterMBall 10/01/2011
Works in Progress

Is This Thing On

Today is the day I returned to work (both day job and the real job), and that means my blogging hiatus is over. Admittedly, it should have been over back on the first of January, but those of you following the twitter feed will already be aware of the somewhat crappy way I kicked off 2011. I spent New Years Day dealing with the catastrophic aftermath of an accident with a bottle of red wine, a somewhat less catastrophic car accident on my way to pick up cleaning supplies and a bunch of new work shirts, and an encounter with a rusting hot water system in the garage that caused my elbow to swell up to twice it’s normal size. If I’d blogged on the day, I probably would have spent five hundreds trying to say what can be summed up as, essentially, fuck fuck fuck. I’ve just spent the last two hours banging out some much needed worded count

PeterMBall 04/01/2011
Works in Progress

On the Appeal of Easy Targets

So I’ve set myself some modest goals this week: 500 words a day of writing; three blog posts*; at least one day where I limit myself to two coffees**; buy one Christmas present so I don’t get stuck shopping during the evil December shopping crush. Thus far, I’ve failed horribly at all three, although I can at least make progress the first of my list by clicking publish. This is the curse of modest goals – it’s too easy to let them slide, figuring there will always be a moment later where you can get things done, but for the moment they’re a necessary evil because the immodest goals were just too damn intimidating for me. Monday was a rough day for writing; Tuesday was much improved, largely courtesy of a 3k night at write club, but today I’ve been letting the side down again, focusing more on planning than writing new words. Still time to rectify that before bed,

PeterMBall 17/11/2010
Works in Progress

Process

So after a week of sturm-und-drang and putting forthblog posts and twitters that worry my parents, it’s time to get back to the talking cats. There seems to a process when I sit down to write novellas. It starts with this is easy, no problem, which is quickly replaced by aaargh! WTF? Who thought I could do this, and it eventually reaches okay, I’ll dump everything and start over, with a plan; planning for the win!  This usually coincides with a healthy slice of screw this, I just want to write short stories, which is usually followed by some OMG, I totally forgot how to write a short story type flailing. Guess which stage I hit a few days ago. Fortunately, I’m already aware I’ve been here before and things worked out. It’s handy to track these things, sometimes. From memory there’s a stage or two that follows this one, although the fact that Claw is part of the series

PeterMBall 20/10/2010
Works in Progress

Heading off for a few days

I’m preparing to decamp to the Gold Coast and hang out with my parents for a few days, which is a process that would probably go a lot better if I hadn’t just spent an hour drinking my morning coffee and checking my RSS feeds on the internets. On the other hand, the more internets I get out of my system now, the less time I spend wasting my parent’s bandwidth. I’ve also been deploying kitchen timers and to-do lists this week, which is slowly starting to make a difference when it comes to getting things done. I’m yet to actually finish a to-do list, mind, but I’m usually averaging five or six things on a list of ten goals for the day. I’m still debating whether the timer is going with me to the Gold Coast or not; in theory I’ll be spending the bulk of my time down there doing a rewrite on the sparse first-quarter of Claw

PeterMBall 08/10/2010
Works in Progress

To Do

Things I have to do today: write job applications; attend a meeting; pick up the mail at the PO Box; eat dinner with my parents. Things I wish I was doing today: fixing the current wordcount on Claw, since the bits I’ve got written thus far are so damn sparse and rough that it makes me itchy to think about them. What writing I’m going to get done today will take place in small gaps – a half-hour here, twenty minutes there. I suspect this will be enough to hit Minimally Acceptable Levels of Productivity (aka 500 words), but it may not be enough to hit the Comfort Zone (aka 2000 words) or a Good Day of Writing (aka 5,000+ words). All in all, I’m starting to remember how this writing thing goes again.

PeterMBall 05/10/2010
Works in Progress

Metrics!

For the first time in a long while, I’ve managed to write two thousand words in the space of a day. While this is certainly good news around these parts, it comes with the somewhat sickening realisation that Giving Up Coffee is Working. Interestingly, kicking the draft version of Claw into gear has involved sketching the bare bones of a scene – basically, getting the conflict and the final line down – then trusting that I’ll be able to come back and flesh things out once I’ve got the structure in place. This is a new and different territory so far as my process goes, and may well come back to bite me in a few thousand words time. ________________________________________________ Current Writing Metrics Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 2 New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 10/30 Rejections in 2010: 21/100 Claw Word Count (Finish Date: 15th November)

PeterMBall 03/10/2010
Works in Progress

Thoughtful Writer Face

I have drunk the coffee and eaten the toast (with ginger marmalade yet, and lo it was delicious) and deployed the thoughtful writer face. All is in readiness and it’s time to work, dammit. Fear me, works of unfinished fiction, for I am mighty and today you will fall before me. Or, you know, something like that. I’ve been wearing my viking PJs* to bed this week, and they make me somewhat belligerent in the mornings. That said, I could truly use a day where one of the projects I’m working on achieves some kind of measurable progression. I’m working on a pair of drafts (1 short-story, 1 novella) where the endings are far more well-defined than the beginning, all of which is relatively unusual for me, so I’m spending a lot of time circling the stories and working out which way is the best result. This will continue until I get frustrated and just belt out a beginning. I used

PeterMBall 15/09/2010