Every night I take 25 mg of Valdoxan before I go to bed, nudging my brain towards a healthier normal. Every morning I start tracking data on my preferred stress, depression, and anxiety management app, marking hours of sleep and minutes of exercise and whether I’ve had contact with the outside world. Every week I’m […]
I am surprisingly tolerant of cluttering in physical space. I take comfort in stacking books around me like a defensive wall, scatter notes across my coffee table along with errant mugs, and pile my laundry by the doorway leading from the bedroom to the balcony/laundry because I’ll remember to actually do it that way. I’m […]
Yesterday was my final day at my blogging gig with Queensland Health, and I am not yet contracted for my GenreCon gig or have the details of my PhD scholarship set in place. I am, technically, unemployed and bereft of income until the two latter things get sorted in the coming week. Even after those […]
One of my goals for 2016 was gathering data about my writing process, so I could better anticipate what was actually possible in terms of planning my writing time and figure out how to patch the holes where writing hours seemed to evaporate. A lot of my grander plans associated with that goal fell apart, […]
I keep meaning to sit down and write another extended post about writing and business plans, but the topic is large and tangled and crazy, and my time for blogging is short and controlled and subservient to the task of getting things written. So I have not written a blog post about basing your business […]
Hardworking. Prolific. Savvy. Surprising. Great. I figure I can lay claim to maybe one of these words, if I’m on-point with my writing, on any given day. More often I aim simply aiming for one, and falling frustratingly short. But as of today they’re taped to the wall, beside my projects list. A reminder of […]
Last Monday, I talked about the need for writers to develop a business model. It’s not the first time I’ve said this and I doubt it will be the last, but it was the first time I’ve said this here on the blog and in such am easily sharable form. That meant people started giving […]
If you’ve been following me for any length of time longer than a week, you don’t need me to tell you who Angela Slatter is and why she’s awesome. She’s a friend, write-club buddy, and force of nature. For everyone else, here’s what you need to know: Angela Slatter is one of the smartest writers […]
I find myself re-reading and chewing over Dan Charnas Work Clean for the second time this week, despite raving about it just seven days ago. I do this semi-regularly with the books I really love – the first read through is all about the experience, but the second is where I start to process. The […]
Eleven years ago, I kicked off a small indie publishing company to put out RPG products written using the d20 system. To my surprise, I wasn’t awful at it, and between 2005 and 2007 I worked pretty continuously at producing stuff that would earn me money instead of finishing my PhD. Don’t get me wrong, […]
There are things you want to sit every new writer down and tell them, right at the start. Things you’d like them to understand, because they’re things you didn’t understand back when you were starting out and they would have been useful to know. Or things you don’t understand now, even though you’ve been at […]
One of the things I like about working a day job is its tendency to provide nice, clean habit triggers. When 7:30 rolls around and I know that I need to be on a train by 8:30, its an immediate flag that I should sit down and write things. When I get into the office […]
