Category: Works in Progress

At time of writing there are about 50 49 registrations remaining for GenreCon 2017 before we hit the venue capacity. Basically, the conference is three-quarters full and there are still four months (and one ticket price discount) to go. Obviously, this is incredibly good news, but it’s also incredibly weird. In years gone by GenreCon’s have followed a very specific sales pattern. It may accelerate a little in years like 2013, when a perfect storm of guests and events sent sales into overdrive, but the basic pattern remained the same: sell out 50 Early Bird tickets fast; sales slow to a halt; sales pick up towards the end of the second discount period; then again as we approach the conference. We’ve changed the business model a little this year. Rather than limiting the early bird tickets to 50 sales, we ran them for a limited time instead. That limited time was about half the usual period it took to sell out the

The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them). After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all. Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here). MY CHECK-IN What am I working on this week? Two weeks until I have

This morning I woke up, went over to the Low Road Cafe,and ate a tasty breakfast of avocado on toast. Then I drank an industrial-sized mug of coffee while critiquing a friends story, made some notes about what I’m going to write today, and generally felt good about my life. I’m pondering this at the moment, because one of the questions that routinely appears on any test for depression is Have you lost interest in things you used to enjoy? and my default response, when contemplating that, was how would I know? How do I tell the difference between things I enjoy and habits I’ve established to keep me vaguely functional? It’s only in the last week or three that I’ve started being able to make that distinction between habit and happy again. But going to the cafe? Critiquing good stories? Definitely on the happy side of the list. Also on there: eating pork belly; going to the movies (who knew?); catching up

Went to write club today and wrote things, on Float, for the first time since posting last Friday. Not a huge amount – 600 words – but today it felt like a victory just opening a document and peering at the ignored bits of story. Everything after that was a bonus. This is, by and large, what Write Club is for. It’s the break in my routines that allows for a reset, when the usual triggers for sitting down and writing get washed away by circumstances or stress or rising tides of sorrow. Also handy about today: realising that any time I do any kind time-based word-tracking project on the blog, it’s usually a sign that I’m really struggling with what’s going on in other parts of my life. The last month has been ridiculous on a whole bunch of levels. Thankfully, it is time to start taking my foot of the accelerator. PROGRESS ON FLOAT

I have read fantastic books over the last week. The first was Neil Gaiman’s The View from the Cheap Seats, which brings together about 500 pages of Gaiman’s non-fiction and journalism over the last few decades. I was not expecting much of it, but it blew me away. I mark the books I really love by the level of jealousy they engender within me. I don’t get jealous of books that I like; spend enough time around writers, picking over the internal processes of plot and structure and language, and you’ll start to figure out certain tricks. The internal logic of good books becomes comprehensible, something you could probably wander off and achieve given sufficient time to study, write, and revise. Great books slip past my defences. They get read with a kind of childlike joy, reminding me of why I fell so hard for books when I was a kid. Great books are still magic, in a way I’m not

One week down. Things progress at the pace I need them too. After spending most of 2015 trying to write insane numbers of words a day, maintaining the 1,000 words a day I need to hit target on Float is easier than I expected. The interesting part about this particular project is that it’s the first that I’ve done 100% on a computer since installing RescueTime, which means I can start collecting some data on what my writing process actually looks like rather than what I assume it’s going to be like. For instance, I have spent 8 hours and 20 minutes working on Float thus far this month. I’ve spent far more time sitting at the computer, ostensibly “writing,” but RescueTime only counts the minutes where the file is active and I am paying attention to it. If I spend an hour at the computer, but spend thirty-four minutes checking Facebook, then there’s only twenty-six minutes getting attributed to Float.

There were parts of Float that start becoming scenes this morning. The early stage of a draft is always sketching out possibilities, laying in little bits of narrative that are obviously wrong, so that I can later come back and start figuring out the bits that bug me. This character is too passive, getting dominated by another. This scene lacks the kind of narrative spark that will make it interesting to read. All this is goddamn bloody awful, and you should probably do something better with it. And I ignore all those things, for as long as possible, ’cause they are a pain in the arse to fix. It involves deleting things, and I do not want to delete things this early in the piece. I do not want to reduce the word-count, when that’s the metric that allows me to measure progress. And, eventually, I break. I delete something and fix it. Give a character a snarkier line, so they’ve got

The storm hit and it rained a lot. I stayed in bed, reading, an awful lot. When that got dull, I got up and wrote, and did exactly as much as I needed to, this weekend. Then I ducked over here to write the laziest update on the 40 Day Rush possible. So how was your weekend?  PROGRESS ON FLOAT A photo posted by Peter M Ball (@petermball) on Jun 4, 2016 at 9:57pm PDT

I was at the grocery store today when my phone started pinging with me with notifications, many of which consisted of friends going hey, nice story. I was confused. I did not think I had any stories coming up this early in the year, but it turns out On Discovering a Ghost in the Five Star just went live over on Daily Science Fiction website, bringing together some of my favourite things: gyoza, laundromats, ghosts, and anger. Daily SF is free to read, so you just have to follow the link. Which I encourage you to do, because as a writer, I live and die by the application of your eyeballs and attention things I have written. So much so that, if left to my own devices, I will wander the moors whispering read me…reeeeead me. No-one wants that. Of course, there are only so many things I can do at once when multitasking, and that number of things is generally one, so figuring

I don’t sleep well at the moment. The plague that wiped me out last week was of the cold-and-cough variety, which is one of those that goes from minor inconvenience to major inconvenience when you strap a pressurised breathing mask to your face every evening. The moment the breathing mask pressurised, I would start a coughing fit and pull it off. The cold part of the equation is largely gone, but the cough lingers. And so I sleep in two hours bursts, packing in as much shut-eye as I can before the coughing starts and I wake up. I get, maybe, six hours of interrupted sleep a night that way. Enough to function, but not enough to be particularly happy. Thursdays I go to work. For the next two weeks, they are days when eight hours of work is followed by a two hour workshop. I still have to wedge writing in there, find the time to get the manuscript

So my exceptionally ordered routine spiralled into chaos about two months back. And, being me, I did what I always do when chaos ends up visiting – I stepped back, re-evaluated my priorities, and started adjusting my schedule to meet the demands being placed on me. Eventually, I figured, things will return to normal. I will find the new equilibrium and learn to plan around that. My writing suffered, as that happened, ’cause other work impinged on writing time. Lots of other things suffered too, ’cause the last two months have been crazy in good ways and in bad ways, but when I sit down and try to figure out why I’m stressing out, the lack of writing is always a big part of it. Writing workshops and applications are not an adequate replacement for creative work, in terms of keeping me sane and focused on what matters. And, since it been two months and the chaos shows no sign of leaving,