It may only be nine months since it came out, but I just gave the second Brain Jar Release a fresh lick of paint in the form of a cover re-design. Here it is, all shiny in its new iteration: I’ve been doing this sort of thing a lot recently, starting with the refurbishing of […]
BIG THINGS ACHIEVED THIS WEEK: Aside from the release of The Early Experiments (available now, but free for all newsletter subscribers), this week’s achievements have largely been progress on projects-where-I-would-oridinarily-drag-my-feet. The short-list looks like this: I wrote a good chunk of my conference paper and started condensing the research into a formatted argument I wrote the […]
I spent some quality time in the nearest food court this morning, drinking terrible coffee and fleshing out the draft for the next Brain Jar Press novella: Warhol Sleeping. In theory, the food court is a terrible place to work. The shopping centre it’s located in is undergoing renovation, so there’s an incredible amount of […]
This would all be easier if it was done already. This will probably be okay, but it’s not really the best I could do, is it? I should pull everything down and start over, from scratch. I swear I could do better if I just started everything over from scratch. Life would have been much […]
Whenever I go deep into notebook mode, there’s inevitably a point where someone catches a glimpse of my bag and comments on its contents. This, it should be noted, is completely understandable – I’m working relatively light at the moment, and when I emptied my backpack and pockets this morning I was still carrying around […]
I’ve fired up the laptop for the first time in three days and find myself slightly baffled over how to make my brain work in concert with a keyboard. I’m immersed in redrafts this week, kicking the tyres on a couple of novellas, and I’ve switched up my usual process by doing the rewrites by […]
Week one is done and it’s been illuminating. I don’t think of myself as a big word-counts-per-day kind of writer. I know I’ve done it in the past, when jamming towards a particularly tight deadline, but it’s always come with an opportunity cost – other projects get neglected and I usually fall into a heap […]
Day Four of the Hell Track sprint is in the bag, and it’s been another day where working on the project doesn’t necessarily mean charging ahead with word-count. Today and tomorrow, in particular, will be slowed down the shift in focus towards the second sequence (which brings a fresh series of narrative questions to explore) […]
Here is the upside of running this project diary alongside my six-week project sprint: it forces me to be conscious of my process and the things that affect it. This was particularly useful today, because I hit a perfect storm of three seperate things that had the potential to derail my momentum: Wednesdays are the […]
The last time I tried this kind of public writing diary, I was working around a couple of restrictions. These included a day-job that limited my writing time, undiagnosed sleep apnea that was having an adverse affect on my mental and physical health, and the kind of split focus that comes from carrying a lot […]
I recently mentioned my interest in applying the six-week project sprint/two-week admin and recovery model to my projects in my newsletter, figuring it would be a good way of combating the fragmentation that comes from having multiple projects splitting my attention between writing and exegetical work for my thesis. Basically, by focusing a six-week project sprint […]
So I’m working on this book at the moment, You Don’t Want To Be Published. It’ll be finished and released in February, and it’s basically a collections of essays and posts I’ve pulled from this blog and other publications that you can get for free if you sign up for my newsletter. Basically, the stuff […]
