Category: Writing Advice – Business & the Writing Life
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

You Do Not Back Up Your Work Enough

I live my working life – both day-job and writing wise – off a USB stick. It’s a necessity, ’cause I’m routinely shuffling between three or four different computers depending on where I am, and I like the option of being able to pick up and work on a particular project with an absolute minimum of planning ahead. So you can imagine what a pain-in-the-arse it was when I dropped Shifty Silas the laptop last night and did this:   USB sticks are not meant to sit at that angle, you know? This one was completely dead. Fortunately for me, this wasn’t a huge deal. Silas is still working fine and I lost about an hour of work, which sucks, but isn’t as bad as it could have been. But it’s a useful reminder: back-up your work. I used to do a semi-regular post on my blog reminding everyone of this, usually timed to coincide with  the anniversary of the

PeterMBall 19/04/2013
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

KPIs and Writing Data

So I have KPIs at the day-job this year, a neat little grid of goals that serve as the line between “doing my job well” and “not quite meeting expectations.” This is something of a first for me – for most of my life I’ve done contract work or found my way into jobs that were…well, lets say insufficiently defined for the purposes of generating things like key performance indicators. I’ve spent most of my life listening to friends talk about their office jobs and KPIs were part of that arcane language that floated around, reminding me of how little my work-life resembled theirs. I used to envy that KPI talk. Lots of my friends weren’t fond of the meetings, or found them a waste of time, but for someone who is, at their core, a moderately competitive person, they mean something important. They mean the day-job can be won. There is a line to reach and once I have

PeterMBall 27/02/2013
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Things I would do if I were planning on becoming an indie publisher…

The title of this post is actually a little disingenuous: I already self-published back in 2005, when I first started self-publishing ebooks for roleplaying games, and I kept at it until 2007 or so when, for various reasons related to edition wars and the level of misogyny among gamers, writing fiction started to look more appealing. The interesting thing about the RPG field is that it went through it’s teething problems with ebooks a little earlier than the rest of the world, which means I frequently find myself frustrated when I get involved in conversations about indie publishing ’cause there’s a certain level of been-there-done-that-made-all-the-stupid-mistakes-already. I’d been around epublishing for a while before that, though, so I’m naturally interested in the ebook/indie publisher explosion that’s happened over the last couple of years. It’s only gotten worse since I started working for a forward-thinking writers centre with an electronic publishing think-tank attached to it. It also means that common phrases like I’m going to experiment with ebooks drive me

PeterMBall 10/10/2012
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Blogging

So I’m going to be polishing off the rest of the Dancing Monkey topics over the next week or so, ’cause I have partially completed costs about most of them and ’cause people asked for interesting topics that I actually enjoy blogging. With that in mind, I’m hitting up the next topic on the list, which came from the inimitable Steve D. What about a locum or an apprentice? On that topic, you could blog about what being a professional blogger is like, as a job, and where it leads, and who should consider it. Let’s set aside the first part of the question, since I’m assuming it was largely a suggestion based on the impetus of the Dancing Monkey posts – wanting to keep the blog active while I was travelling. In hindsight I can look at this and say, well, yes, that would have been a smart idea, but on the whole I rather like the idea of

PeterMBall 19/09/2012
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Writer-brain

My boss, Kate Eltham, is leaving the writer’s centre in a couple of months. She’s heading off to be the next chairperson of the Brisbane Writers Festival, and I’ve got to admit, that’s something that excites me. She spent six years turning QWC into one of the best resources for writers in the country, and I’m pretty sure she’s going to turn BWF into one of the finest damn literary festivals in the world. That’s the kind of person Kate is – smart, ambitious, transformative. As a Brisbane writer and reader, I’m really looking forward to seeing the kind of festival program she runs in 2013. On the other hand, as a guy who works in the writers centre, my first thought upon hearing the news was fuck, time to be a writer again. And I gotta tell you, that thought hurt. I haven’t been a writer in a while now. A year, at least. Maybe longer. I’ve written, certainly, but

PeterMBall 22/06/2012
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Great Writing Advice Learned from Pro-Wrestling, Part One

Unless you’re a wrestling fan, you’ve probably never heard of Al Snow. He was a wrestler, and a damn good one, and he’s spent years behind the scenes training new wrestlers and talking about wrestling and generally holding forth on the state of the industry. Basically, Al Snow is a smart wrestler whose fond of a good rant, and as a fan of wrestling in general I’m okay with paying twenty bucks for an entire DVD full of his rantings. Some of his rants about wrestling contain remarkably good advice about writing. For starters, Al Snow never lets you loose sight of the fact that wrestling is a business. It may be fake – it’s always been fake – but the wrestlers job is to get in there and put on a match that allows fans to suspend their disbelief and buy into the illusion that it’s real. This is no different to fiction, at all, and it’s one of

PeterMBall 08/06/2012
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Hanging with the Spokesbear: Undead Press

Spokesbear: Undead Press. Peter: Really? Spokesbear: For reals, yo. Peter: Okay, really?  Spokesbear: Are you objecting to the topic or the patter? Peter: Both, but mostly the latter. Spokesbear: Stop trying to hold me down, dog. Peter: Seriously, what the fuck’s with that? Spokesbear: Just trying it out for size. Peter: Stop it. Really. Spokesbear: Like you never fantasize about walking into a room and saying ‘what up, bitches?’ Peter: I do not. Spokesbear: … Peter: Okay, I do to, but that’s not the point. I never actually break it out in conversation ’cause I know it’s a bad idea. Spokesbear: Hater. Peter: … Spokesbear: Okay, I’ll stop, but you have to talk about the Undead Press thing. Peter: Fine. Spokesbear: Fine. Peter: FINE. Spokesbear: FINE. Peter: … Spokesbear: … Peter: … Spokesbear: … Peter: So, the Undead Press thing? Spokesbear: Yeah? Peter: Really hard for me to talk about without engaging in victim-blaming. Spokesbear: Sure, ’cause you’re an asshole.

PeterMBall 23/05/2012
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Bonus Post: Tuesday Therapy and Some Additional Thoughts on Rights

You may have noticed that there’s a routine building around these parts. Or not, ’cause really, it’s mostly a routine that exists in my head and it’s only been going for, like, a week. In any case, this is a bonus post. As in, something I didn’t intend to write, but I’m going to anyway. I’ve offered some advice about Writing and Tracking Your Rights over on LL Hannetts blog as part of her Tuesday Therapy series. I am, for someone who once made a career of dispensing writing advice in the tertiary sector, remarkably squeamish about the process. I either want to impart everything or nothing, since the wrong piece of advice delivered at the wrong time can be fatal to a developing creative process. I still suffer crippling moments of doubt induced by something I read in Samuel Delany’s About Writing four years ago. It’s not bad advice – it’s remarkably good – but I heard it at the wrong time and

PeterMBall 15/05/2012
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Hanging With the Spokesbear: Social Media

Peter: So I’ve been reading a lot about blogging and soc— Spokesbear: No. Peter:  But I — Spokesbear: No. Peter: Listen— Spokesbear: No, we’re not doing this. Peter: Not doing what? Spokesbear: This thing we’re you’re all excited to be blogging and working again, so you show up writing a post about social media and blogging in which you ramble on about nothing. Peter: I wasn’t going to ramble about nothing. Spokesbear: Sure you were. “So I’ve been thinking about…” is your own private code for “I have something to say that I don’t want to say and so I’m going to circle the point for two thousand words.” I’m INSIDE YOUR HEAD man, I know these things. Peter:  (small voice) But I’ve already written the blog posts. Spokesbear: No-one cares. Peter: They might. Spokesbear: Alright, they might. I don’t fucking care though, how’s that? Peter: YOUR NOT THE BOSS OF ME, BEAR Spokesbear: … Peter: Right, sorry. You’re totally the

PeterMBall 09/05/2012
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Writing, Budgeting, and Shame

My primary activity at the moment is not doing things, which is not conducive to exciting bloggery. For example, I’m not succumbing to the temptation to renew my Locus subscription; I’m not rushing out to buy the passel of books I really want to buy; I’m not going on online shopping sprees to celebrating the moment of parity between the Australian dollar and the US*. In fact, I’m not really leaving the house much for anything, really. All of this takes considerable mental energy on my part, because the impulse is there to do all of them and in some cases (say, Locus) I can even partially justify why I should do them. Such are the realities of paying off credit card debt in my current circumstances – I’ve trimmed my budget to focus as much as possible on paying off the accumulated debt of the last year, and even then the realities of credit interest meant I’m only dropping the

PeterMBall 19/10/2010
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Here Comes the Fear Again

Okay, point the first: Twelfth Planet Press has offered up free e-copies of their 2009 projectsin the name of getting folks to read them prior to the Hugo nominations at this years Worldcon in Melbourne. That means there are free copies of Horn up for grabs. Make of this what you will. (I should also mention that the inimitable Robert Hoge has started a campaign to get Australian’s nominated to the Hugo ballot, and he’s compiling a small list of recommendations for people who might be interested; the real action is over in the facebook group where everyone’s pitching in names). And so, point the second: February is the month where I combat The Fear again. It’s a stupid thing, The Fear, all the more stupid because it commonly manifests itself when things seem to be going right. People start accepting stories and asking for submissions and nominating me for awards and suddenly this little voice in the back of my

PeterMBall 01/02/2010
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Awesome Things About 2009 (6/15): Write Club

I keep saying it, I know, but write club is awesome (For those wondering what the hell I’m talking about, I recommend this post and this post on Angela Slatter’s blog*). Turns out it’s a remarkably popular idea too – I’ve had a couple of conversations where people wondered how Write Club worked, and it seems Angela gets asked about it as well, so I figured I’d share my** thoughts on why write club works for those who may be curious. Reason 1) Angela Slatter is Fricken’  Awesome Granted, I say this quite a bit on this blog as well, but it doesn’t diminish the fact that it’s true. Even if you ignore the fact that she’s a superb writer whose keen critical eye has stopped me from looking like a goose a couple of times this year, and the fact that she’s generous with both her time and connections, she’s one of the people I enjoy catching up with once a week.  If you’re

PeterMBall 11/12/2009

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