In the early days of my newsletter I posted a link to Maggie Steifvater’s journaling approach, designed to manage uneven energy levels after she contracted a long-term illness that kept her from writing. The original post is gone now—along with the rest of Steifvater’s Tumblr—but the lesson from it has lived with me on-and-off in […]
I wrote a rough plan for February, because January has been one of those months where I’ve been reacting to deadlines and my brain is doing a very bad job of figuring where my focus needs to be. I love a good whiteboard that takes that decision away from me and says, “Here. Your focus […]
It’s been just over a year since my second short story collection came out, and it did pretty well for itself. It made the shortlist for Best Collection in the Aurealis Awards, and had some pretty strong sales for one of my ebooks in a year when my attention was mostly on other things. At […]
There’s a really good post about process, goals, and identity over on LitReactor at the moment. It’s worth taking a gander at the entire thing, but I’ve grabbed the key take-away here: You can never take the process away, but once you attach your identity to goals and results you can’t control, it’s a recipe […]
Where do ideas come from? It’s the question that you’re not meant to ask writers and other creative people, because the mythology of creativity is so fucking bizarre that providing a real answer is seen as a diminishment of the art produced. Or it’s disregarded because people assume the idea is the important part, rather […]
There are weeks when my writing process feels like a great and terrible steampunk juggernaut, powered by a creaky engine and beholden to its own momentum. When everything is running correctly, I get an extraordinary amount of work done and quickly stack up pages. When things go wrong, momentum will carry me for a while […]
Last week, my partner showed me the trailer for the next film from Ian Ziering and the guys who did all those Sharknado films, a little flick they’ve dubbed ZOMBIE TIDAL WAVE. For those who haven’t seen it yet, I encourage you to take a look: As fans of large chunks of the Sharknado franchise, […]
Yesterday was a weird writing day. I’m working on a short story at the moment, scribbling a couple of pages in a notebook every day, locking down the details as I go. Yesterday the rough draft hit forty-odd pages, rolling through the first major gear change in the plot, and my momentum ground to a […]
A few weeks back, I started picking up an old habit I’d left behind. It goes like this: every morning, I tend to wake up and work my way through a three-page planning document designed to help me frame my to-do list. It started out as a bunch of notes from Todd Henry’s Die Empty, […]
I’ve been tutoring creative writing at UQ for the last few months, going back to some early principles and trying to explain them in different ways. Sometimes it takes a particular example or way of phrasing a technique for it to click with a particular student, but you can always see the epiphany and the […]
My favourite function in Scrivener isn’t any of the fancy layout options, the scratch-pad that exists for eery scene, nor the ability to set up a useful list of metadata attached to any particular slice of a story. I make use of many of those things, but the thing that keeps me coming back to […]
In the final weeks of 2018 I sat down and read Ellen Hendrickson’s How To Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety. As someone who deals with anxiety on the reg, this was a pretty good book for exploring how and why anxiety occurs, and using that to frame why already […]
