Category: Writing Advice – Business & the Writing Life

One of the interesting points explored in Elspeth Probyn’s exploration of shame, Blush, is the connection between shame, interest, and exposure. Building upon the work of psychologist Sylvan Tomkins, Probyn looks at shame as an emotion that only arrives after an interest or joy has been activated: When we feel shame it is because our interest has been interfered with  but not cancelled out. The body wants to continue being interested, but something happens to “incompletely reduce” that interest Blush, 14 While it can be felt in private, it is often an inherently social phenomena as the reduction of interest is predicated on external influences demanding said interest be reduced. Probyn looks at shame as an eruption: the secret made physical through our skin and the sensations that accompany it. The body warning it cannot fit in, even though it wants too (72). When we attempt to shame another, it is a demand they rise up and meet with the interests, ideals,

When you first start writing you find your cohort–people figuring out their writing process at the same time as you, submitting work to the same places you are. You built your networks at the same time. You develop new work at the same time, establish reputations, see each other at events and cons. It feels like you’re building from a similar place, heading towards a similar destination.  Somewhere along the line, careers begin to advance at different paces. One of your cohort makes their first pro sale, or wins an award at a conference. Someone has their first book come out. Someone gets sick and has to slow down, or a family tragedy interferes with their writing process and they disappear for a few years. Someone looks at the daunting prospect of making a living from their writing and decides, quite reasonably, that it’s not something they want to pursue with the same fervour as others in their cohort. All

Recently, I made the decision to stop working from home. I don’t write there, I don’t produce blog posts there, and I do my best to avoid spending time on the PC answering email or doing writing-based social media. I barely even take notes in my bullet journal, or break out a notebook for planning. This decision was largely made because I share a one-bedroom apartment with my partner. A very small one-bedroom apartment, split between two people who were used to living alone. And two people who have had their fare share of mental health challenges, with their respective coping mechanisms built around time alone. This had consequences: working from home meant my partner felt bad about taking a day off work when sick or in need of a break, because it meant disrupting my work routine. Working from home also meant there was no clear delineation between me-at-work, and me-at-home, so there was never a sense that I was

I plan my year thirteen weeks a time, marking out the quarter and setting goals based upon pre-existing commitments and what needs to be done. It seems like an endless expanse of hours, when you sit down to start logging everything you’d like to do, but the speed with which time vanishes is startling to watch. Thirteen weeks, five work days a week. Four hundred and eighty-seven hours. Except one day a week will be lost to admin, teaching, and similar activities. That’s ninety eight hours gone. The four days a week that are left get divided between three major projects: thesis; novel draft; story drafts. One hundred and twenty-nine hours a piece, spread across thirteen weeks. To finish the first novel draft in that time assumes I’ll write 620 words, on average, across the 129 hours allocated to the task. To get a finished draft means working faster, packing in more words. To devote time to planning means working

I’m reading a book on social anxiety, because I believe in knowing your enemy. I wrote three different versions of this blog post and deleted them all, because sometimes trying to write about anxiety is enough to trigger my damn anxiety on its own. For all that it’s hailed as a solitary profession, the anxiety I feel about writing certain things is inherently social. It’s the fear that one’s secrets will be revealed, that the things you do will invite harsh judgement that is terrifying correct; you are actually stupid, or unlovable, or worthless, and now the con you’ve played thus far has been revealed for the sham it is. Society anxiety tells you it’s better to hide, or avoid the situation, rather than risk such exposure. Writing invites people to judge you. It hangs your ass out there for posterity, which means your mistakes and shortcomings can be rediscovered long after you left them behind. You may draft alone,

I’m a big fan of gathering data about my processes and productivity, particular when it doesn’t require any particular effort on my part. That’s why I pay for a yearly RescueTime subscription, giving me a week-by-week (or mont-by-month) snapshot of how much of my computer time is actually spent working versus goofing off on various projects. This year RescueTime rolled out a feature that gives me an entire year in review, breaking down my computer and phone usage across the entirety of 2017 based upon a number of categories. I know that I logged 1,496 digital hours across 2017 (that’s out of a possible 8760 hours available in a year), which means I’m spending about 4 hours on average logged onto a computer or using my phone. Of that 1,496 hours, 416 have been dubbed Productive, which is how RescueTime logs any computer or phone usage in which I’m working in Word or Scrivener. It’s not a purely accurate list, given

Patreon announced a change in its fee structure this morning, which has prompted an outpouring of tweets from a number of writers I follow who have been using the platform and want to process the implications. The change is being framed as a good thing for creators, ensuring they will take home exactly 95% of every pledge, but it does so by pushing the processing fee onto the donator and this has subtle knock-on effects for the assumptions surrounding the service. Passing the fee on to the pledger means a series of $1 pledges every month actually ends up costing a buck thirty-seven or so. Multiply that out over a year, and you’re looking at an extra $4.44 a year to kick a little change to the creators you patronise. This might not seem like a lot, but for a platform that is built itself on the concept of huge numbers of people making micro-transactions, that’s a pretty big shift.

Tonight I’m off to the Brisbane launch of The Silver Well, a short story collection by Kim Wilkins and Kate Forsyth. There will be wine, readings, finger food, book signings, and an evening spent celebrating two awesome writers who have done something new. Some time tomorrow, depending on the timezone the various sales sites are using, my short story collection The Birdcage Heart & Other Strange Tales will be available for sale.  The launch will consist of a blog post, a handful of tweets spaced out over the last few weeks, and me going back to work on my next project for Brain Jar Press. Today I’m going to talk about why. WHAT NEW WRITERS THINK BOOK LAUNCHES ARE ALL ABOUT New writers look forward to their book launch, but they don’t always understand how they fit into the publishing ecosystem. In the five years I spent answering phones at Queensland Writers Centre, the calls where people asked “how can

Every now and then I write something that gets linked to a whole bunch and a whole bunch of people hit the site for the first time. Most of them read, nod, and move on about their day. Some of them… Well, they object to the profanity. Some even go so far as to email me about it. I understand this, to a certain extent. I know a lot of people who object to profanity – my mother is definitely not a fan – but I’m a much bigger fan of using it for emphasis. More importantly, I’m a fan of using it here on the blog because all those shits, fucks, goddamns, and mother-fuckers do two very important things. SWEARING FILTERS THE AUDIENCE Less than 1% of the blog posts people respond to tend to be actually profanity, and even then it largely depends on your stance on words like goddamn and screwed. It’s not a lot by reasonable

So here’s the thing about writing no-one tells you: the money is going to fuck with you and affect your creative process. O-ho, there, you may be thinking, foolish Peter, there is no money in writing, and I totally understand why you’re thinking that. You’ve been hammered with that message from day one, ever since you began stringing words together to generate meaning. People will gleefully inform you that writers don’t make a living, and even those who skip that step will imply it by asking the kind of questions that make it clear your options are: a) become JK Rowling and have books in every store every time they walk in, or b) die in a gutter. And that’s where the fucking with your process begins, because you do not want to die in the gutter. Which means your process is shaped by the perception that making a living as a writer is either a one-in-a-million chance where your

I started reading time and project management books a few years back, when it became apparent that my ability to manage my studies was fairly limited. I ramped up my reading in 2011 when I found myself working in an organisation with multiple people for the first time, since I was pretty much used to working on my own or in small groups. Over the years I’ve tried a bunch of systems and kept stuff from each of them, but this list collects together three of the quick-and-dirty time management hacks that have been particularly useful to me as a writer. All are part of larger, more complex systems that have their own strengths and weaknesses, but I am pretty ruthless about keeping the things that work for me and searching for new options when something doesn’t. HACK ONE: PRIORITISE THE TASKS THAT UNLOCK OTHER PEOPLE’S CAPACITY TO WORK ON YOUR BEHALF I picked this one up from Dan Charnas incredible