Search Results for: The Sunday Circle – Page 18
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working on This Week?

I’m off to teach a course on characters in a few hours, so I’ll refer people back to last week’s post if they need a whole bunch of context about the how and why of The Sunday Circle. Short version: I am interested in what people are working on, what people are reading, and in providing a weekly check-in on creative projects for accountability purposes. If you’d like to be involved: Post your answers to the three questions above in the comments or on your own blog (with a link back here, so the rest of us can find you). 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 week two (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog,

PeterMBall 06/12/2015
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

The Sunday Circle: What are You Working on This Week?

I’ve recommended Todd Henry’s book The Accidental Creative to dozens of people over the last few years. It’s a phenomenal book for re-thinking your approach to creative industries, and it appeals to any number of friends who have struggled with productivity systems that don’t account for the rhythms of creative life. That said, there are always gaps. For all people tend to get something out of the book, they rarely find themselves able to implement his process as a single block. There are parts that just seem counter-intuitive, such as intentionally chasing stimuli, and there is also the problem of his approach to relationships. There are a number of formal approaches he advocates that are hard to set up, particularly if you’re a shy, retiring creative type who dislikes the outside world. One of the ones that seems to have universal appeal in theory, yet never quite gets off the ground in practice, is the idea of a Creative Circle. WHAT

PeterMBall 29/11/2015
Sunday Circle

A Circle, Closed

The TLDR version of this post: I’m taking a time-out to rethink the Sunday Circle and how it functions in 2020, which may see it either migrate to a new platform or have the shutters pulled down entirely. I started the Sunday Circle a few years back, inspired by a write-up of the idea in Todd Henry’s The Accidental Creative and an idea that it might be possible to replicate the process online. Over the years we’ve had a number of writers, voice actors, and others drop by on a Sunday to check in with each other, laying out their various projects and inspirations for the coming week. At the time I kicked off the Sunday Circle, it was part of a long-term strategy for the blog. A natural fit for the kinds of topics I blogged about and talked about in the long term. These days, not so much. My focus has shifted away from the long conversations about

PeterMBall 29/12/2019
Works in Progress

Saturday Status Post: 17 August 2019

It appears I had a bunch of good ideas back in February, many of which were derailed by life rolls and complications far beyond my control. One of these was the regular STATUS POST as a lead-in to the Sunday Circle, and I’m going to try and back into the groove of such things. HAPPIEST MOMENTS OF THIS WEEK: I finished the redraft for Short Fiction Lab #4, handed it off to Brain Jar’s resident beta reader, and put it up for preorder at the usual suspects. BIG THINGS ACHIEVED THIS WEEK: After rocking the whiteboard as an organisational tool earlier this week, I’ve actually succeeded in getting a bunch of things on-track. Aside from the aforementioned development work on Brain Jar’s next release: I hit my writing quota for the thesis for the first time since June, and actually started buying down the word-debt I owe that project. I progressed a fiction project every day this week–not quite back

PeterMBall 17/08/2019
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Gathering the Threads

Over the weekend I sat down and wrote a proper whiteboard for the coming week, logging all the things on my schedule day-by-day and breaking down specific goals into component tasks. It gets to live in front of my desk-top, one of the first things I see when I step out of the bedroom in the morning, and it’s the most in-control of my time I’ve felt in over a year. I kicked off this process last week, dumping every project that had my attention or needed timelines monitored onto the board in tangled lump: It’s a useful list for looking forward, but it tends to miss a bunch of the stuff that will get me from here to somewhere over there when I’m done with all that. Mostly, I put this board together to see how I’d go having the white board on the desk, blocking my access to the desktop (aka my “just here to fuck around” computer)

PeterMBall 13/08/2019
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

The Brain Jar’s Heartbeat

I’ve been reading ReWork and It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work over the weekend, processing the business advice of the 37 Signals/Basecamp founders who have rejected the notion of building a growth-at-all-costs business. The former is very philosophy focused, while the latter is a ore process-oriented approach which implements that philosophy. One of the ideas that intrigued me in It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy At Work is the discussion of heartbeats–a way of overcoming communication challenges in a decentralised workspace without devolving into meetings and reports. There’s a more detailed discussion of it over on their blog (and another discussion here), but at it’s core its a system of automated check-ins where folks list what they’ve worked on with their day, coupled with a system for discussion and requests for updates. It’s a really intriguing idea, but not terribly useful in a company of one (which, essentially, most writers are regardless of whether they self-publish or not).

PeterMBall 10/06/2019
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Quick and Dirty Book Review: Work Clean, Dan Charnas

It took me two days to read Dan Charnas Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-en-Place to Organise Your Work, Life, and Mind. It would have taken less time, but I had a busy weekend, which meant I was largely carving out blocks of time to read through the book as fast as possible. I was two-thirds done when I raved about it in the Sunday Circle. I am now finished. And, upon finishing, I scrolled back to the start of the ebook and started reading it from the start. It’s that kind of book. I love me a good book about productivity. I devour them like popcorn, especially when they’ve got odd little hooks. Charnas’ approach is all hook. He looks at the way people learn to be chefs, the system and the mindset that’s instilled in them in order to keep a busy kitchen functional. He extrapolates out from that, talking about mise-en-place as a philosophy and approach to

PeterMBall 31/08/2016
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Three Ways to Break Through the Not-Writing Habit

I have sixty minutes to write and edit this blog post. Fifty-nine minutes and twenty-seconds now. Even less, by the time you hit this sentence. I have sixty minutes because today is unexpected clear of distractions. The farewell I was meant to be attending this evening has been rescheduled. My usual Friday write-club buddy is currently interstate. I am on my own, in my apartment, trying to get shit done with no distractions, and that is bad for me. If there’s one thing I’m generally pretty good at, it’s getting shit done around other obligations. Give me an eight hour work day followed by three hours of gaming at a friend’s place, and I will bust out my minimum daily pages in record time then squeeze in a blog post for good measure. Give me twelve uninterrupted hours, and I will binge-watch shit on Netflix and watch interviews with wrestlers on Youtube. I can hold to schedules built around social obligation, but

PeterMBall 01/04/2016
Journal

Staying On Top Of Things

I woke up early this morning and sent off some writing emails. Discovered another couple of emails that really need to be dealt with, so they’ve been flagged for me to deal with tomorrow morning. I begin to see the benefits of the dedicated admin day, which Kathleen Jennings has mentioned on multiple Sunday Circles, but I’m still not entirely sure where it’s going to fit into my schedule. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, this week, about the new job and writing and how to establish new routines that support what I want to do. Because my old job was familiar; I knew its contours and its frustrations and its routines. I could work around it, after five years at QWC, because I knew how to predict the effect of things going on in the office. Not with 100% accuracy, but with enough certainty to plan with relative confidence. The new job is wild and unfamiliar territory. It

PeterMBall 25/08/2016
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Writing Habits

There are two ways to look at my weekend. First, there is the I wrote nothing approach, where I look at the zero in both my word count and time at keyboard columns and curse myself for my lack of forward momentum. Second, there is the I wrote nothing on my current project approach, which takes into account the fact that I wrote about 2,500 words on things that are, essentially, for fun and never going to see the light of day (or have any real financial benefit to doing them). Acknowledging that writing happened, it just wasn’t directed at the place where it was useful ’cause the thing that is useful is hard. Guess which of these options I go with as a default? Fortunately, yesterday’s Sunday Circle got me to actually sit down and think about triggers as they relate to writing and the holidays, which may go a long way towards figuring out why I went down the

PeterMBall 21/12/2015

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