Peter M. Ball

I’ve spent the bulk of 2023 mentoring a bunch of young and aspiring writers and publishers. Some of these have come via my personal mentorship offer, but the majority are run via the fine folks as Spectrum Writing, who offer peer support and capacity building mentorships to neurodivergent creatives. On any given week, I’ll run between 4 and 10 mentorship sessions and workshops, across a variety of topics (poetry, self-publishing, genre writing) and trying to meet a variety of needs (help with systems, help with craft, help with marketing, etc).

After spending the bulk of 2021 and 2022 serving writers in jobs that were more admin than hands-on learning, this year’s felt like coming back to what I’m meant to be doing, not least because it’s involved a lot of research into how and why certain things work, and just as much questioning of fundamental assumptions around what writer’s “should” do. It doesn’t quite pay all my bills, but when it’s coupled with writing and publishing, it’s edging up on my minimum viable Ramen number. 

One area where I’ve been doing a lot of research revolved around writing and attention disorders, which has been enormously valuable to me personally (not ADD, but it’s surprising how many of the strategies for helping also work really well if you’re anxious). Whole swathes of “default” writing advice are comparatively horrible if you’re not wired for habit formation and your working memory engages differently.

Working with various writers sent me on a re-read of Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal Method, re-engaging with smaller intricacies like daily logs. Carroll’s journaling approach is born, in part, of his own experiences with ADD. As he puts it:

I was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD). This was back in the 1980s, when mullets were better understood than my condition. The few resources that were available were either too complicated or proscriptive to prove helpful, or didn’t fit my needs. If anything, they salted the wound. Nothing worked the way that my mind worked, so I was left largely to my own dull devices. 

The main culprit was my inability to rein in my focus. It wasn’t that I couldn’t focus; I just had a hard time concentrating on the right thing at the right time, on being present. My attention would always dart off to the next bright thing. As I cycled through distractions, my responsibilities steadily piled up until they became overwhelming. I often found myself coming up short or trailing behind. (The Bullet Journal Method: Track Your Past, Order Your Present, Plan Your Future, p. 4).

For Carroll, the bullet journal is a tool for being intentional. By externalising his thinking and to-do list, he makes it easier to juggle what’s necessary and what can be delayed. He can sort what needs to be worked on from what should be worked on, and what he’d prefer to be working on instead. Perhaps he will ignore the necessary in favour of the preference, but he will do so by making a decision instead of falling into it from sheer overwhelm. 

I’ve long used White Boards for much the same effect, especially in the old days when I lived alone. I could lodge a massive white board with my weekly/monthly projects and committments in front of the television, and I would have to actively choose to set those aside in order to bingewatch things on Netflix or play computer games. I could track my writing by making little check boxes to mark every 500 words, and reliable predict how much I’d get done.

Sharing a house with my spouse-mouse makes blocking the TV less effective than it once was, and much of my long-term planning has now migrated to journals or project tracking software depending on who I’m working with and what needs to be logged. I make use of large swathes of Ryder Carroll’s bullet journal system, particularly daily logging and migrating to-do lists, manually rewriting all the outstanding tasks and making decisions about what gets moved, what gets deferred, and what doesn’t need to be done.

More recently, I’ve started externalising my daily to-do lists and putting them on a white board right by my desktop. Seperating out the process of figuring what to priorities from the actual process of getting things done. It helps take what could be an overwhelming amount of stuff for one day and turn it into a managable amount of work. It also makes it easier to sieze opportunity — I’m writing this entry in a half-hour gap which showed up because I dropped my spouse-mouse at work early. I could have spent this half-hour scrolling facebook or checking email, but the little reminder to post to Patreon on the “Could Do” part of my list reinded me this could be a better use of the time.

I would have struggled to make the choice that writing a post was important enough to justify using a free half-hour for it, but having made that call a few hours back when charting my priorities for the day, I made it easy to just open the file and write.

Back in 2020, in the first bloom of the pandemic lockdowns with financial panic setting in, some folks suggested I start a Patreon to support my weekly newsletter. At the time, I backed away from the notion for very personal reasons, only to loop around and start Eclectic Projects on March 2021 when things felt a little calmer.

I’m doing a deep dive into patronage and subscription models for writers at present — partially as a way of distracting myself from the existential terror of looming thesis deadlines (I submit at the end of the month!) and partially because January to March of next year will be all about rebuilding what I’m doing here with some theory and focus behind me.

I keep finding myself going to reference and link to this write-up, but newsletters aren’t the best way of archiving information for later consumption, so I’m doing a repost here for linking purposes.

Full write-up is posted below, but the link above will take you to the 2020 newsletter if you’d like to see the response in context. Both my newsletter and this Patreon drifted a bit from the initial format I used three years ago, courtesy of life events, but I find myself oddly nostalgic about it looking back. 

PATRONAGE

Last week, a friend of mine mailed back a response to the newsletter that ran something like this:

This is THE SINGLE BEST NEWSLETTER I GET IN MY INBOX every weeks, like clockwork, and I would happily pay for it. Why don’t you have a Patreon page!?!?

And it’s something I’ve considered in the past. The core reason I keep deciding against it is rather the same reason it took me four straight hours and seventeen drafts to draft a two-line reply to their email, which boiled down to: I got that social anxiety, bro, and it’ll sucker punch my writing process if given the smallest opening.

This is the somewhat longer version of that response, because I think it’s occasionally useful to talk about anxiety, and writing, and the way I move past things or manage it. Mental health is so heavily stigmatised that it’s easy to avoid talking about, and I like to do my part to break down that reluctance. Especially since social anxiety doesn’t feel like it should be a big deal for writers, given we spend the bulk of their work hours alone with a laptop or a notepad, ignoring the outside world.

But here’s the thing: Social anxiety loves a deadline and the weight of expectations the way a swarm of piranha’s love a fresh cow dropped into their tank. The deadline means you have a limited amount of time to get things right, and the expectations mean you have a chance to show your ass if you get things wrong. Transforming the newsletter into something I’m obliged to write because people have pledged money, rather than something I choose to write because I enjoy reaching out to people, is a fast ride to procrastination city and endless guilt about not doing enough.

Social anxiety also fired up when I tried to respond to their question. Most days, I do not spend four hours writing a single email. I point it out because that’s an aberration, and it highlights the way I can get derailed when anxiety catches me off guard, especially on the writing front. Part of the struggle came down to the fact that the person who suggested the Patreon is someone I’ve got a huge amount of respect for, and their esteem matters to me. Admitting to anxiety is hard in those circumstances, because I want to project confidence and competence.

Plus, in the back of my head there’s a little voice that thinks a Patreon would be grand—I’d love to be paid to write a newsletter every week, and spend my days researching interesting things to talk about. My primary goal in writing the newsletters is to produce a regular email that’s worth your time investment and deliver more than just a series of “buy my book” messages, and patronage would be a substantial source of external proof that I’m succeeding.

And that’s the thing about social anxiety: it’s simultaneously an alert that your brushing up against something you really value, and feeling the dread that pursuing that thing will reveal just how unworthy of it you really are. I’m borrowing this phrasing from Ellen Hendrickson’s How To Be Yourself, a book that framed the core issue in a way that helped me understand all the ways I felt social anxiety when nobody else was around.

Hendrickson argues that the source of social anxiety lies in the fear that something embarrassing, flawed, or deficient about us will become obvious through our actions—it’s not a dread of judgement by others, but the fear that the folks who judge us are right. And it’s a fear that escalates past the raw nerves everyone gets from time to time and turns into full-fledged behavioural avoidance—it’s better to hide or avoid such reveals of the truth, rather than taking the constant hits to our sense of self-worth and identity.

Obviously, there’s a lot of places where I don’t feel that anxiety regarding writing… or, perhaps, don’t feel that anxiety anymore. In Brian R. Little’s Who Are You, Really?, he talks about the aspects of our personality that are built on personal constructions:, we’re all constructing a series of hypotheses about ourselves and the world around them, then testing them against our experience. Building on the theories of psychologists like George Kelly, Little argues that our baseline assumptions about who we are changes in radical and counterintuitive ways when we pursue projects that are personally meaningful to us.

Which is how someone who feels huge amounts of social anxiety, like me, carves out a twenty-year career as a writer, teacher, and public speaker. I still get anxious—the night before I teach the first day of a class or launch a book is typically nightmarish and sleepless—but I’m typically confident once I get things rolling. I’ve been testing the hypothesis of can I teach/write for money for the better part of twenty years, and the results have been positive. I wanted those things, fought my way through the anxiety, and kept doing them long enough that experience and external feedback built up and shouted down the anxiety goblins whispering all the ways I shouldn’t do this.

The little sparks of anxiety are a reminder that I want to do this well, and the experience is the reminder that I can pull it off. I may have occasional bouts of imposter syndrome, but mostly I’ve got a sense of what I’m good at and what I’m not.

That confidence is highly contextual. When COVID hit, I discovered that my social anxiety fired up with the shift to online teaching because I could no longer see and interact with the students in real time. A huge part of my comfort with teaching lay in my ability to adapt to the demands of the class, and respond to particular needs and questions if I was pitching things the wrong way. I felt a similar discomfort when university marking moved online, and I spent more time to provide far less feedback because of the limitations of the online marking systems.

I’ve experienced the same issues when writing projects shift context on me. Writing stories I intend to submit blind is way easier than writing stories commissioned for an anthology, because the latter pre-supposes that I’ll write something good instead of judging the work on its own strengths. Writing my PhD has been an ongoing exercise in stress management because don’t have a decent feel for how the assessment works or what’s expected of me, particularly when dealing with the theoretical writing.

These things aren’t unmanageable—both my PhD and writing for anthologies are important enough that I factor in extra time in order to get the writing done—but it’s harder and slower and I need to be really rigorous about self-care. If I don’t, an entire month will slip by where I’ve fallen into depression and spent fourteen hours a day playing wrestling sims, Spiderman, and CIV IV on my computer. Then I’m behind on everything, and the anxiety cycle doubles down and whispers louder in my head.

Patreon wouldn’t be a big shift in context, but it would be enough to second-guess myself. There’s a freedom when you write a newsletter for free, both in terms of what you write about and in your ability to expand or contract the weekly content as circumstances shift. When my circumstances are already shifting fast—into changing employment circumstances, and from self-publisher into small press—that’s an extra layer of trouble I don’t have the spoons to navigate.

The copyedits of Eclectic Projects 005 have been on my desk, untouched, for over a month now. The original plan was getting them all squared away before launching back into my PhD deadlines, but then my spouse-mouse got COVID. They’re asthmatic, and we’d been ducking the spicy lung for three years by being extremely careful, so catching it for the first time brought a lot of fear and anxiety into our household. It also blitzed two weeks I had earmarked to put issue 5 and stories for issue 6 to bed, since a) I picked up a lot of the household chores and caring, and b) while I kept testing negative for COVID on RATs, I felt pretty bleak myself.

The curst of trying to do all the things: there’s never slack in the schedule when you need it to catch up. Probably a useful lesson to be reminded of.

One exercise I do with mentoring clients is the priority pyramid – a way of getting some clarity around all the projects on your mind, and what gets priority on the list. A secondary conversation which follows the pyramid is the harsh reality of getting things done: you’ve probably only got enough spoons for 3 or four professional projects, since there’s inevitably one or two personal projects and ongoing commitments which don’t make the radar. 

My five runs something like this.

Currently, all things bend towards getting the PhD submitted in November. There’s one novella re-written based on supervisor feedback, another that’s about 1/3 rewritten, and an exegesis that needs an unknown amount of work (the supervisor handling that says it’s largely good, but I don’t plan well around undefined amount of work).

My second row is a nebulous pool of family tasks: supporting my spouse-mouse, whose mental health is rocky post-COVID and some unexpected work shenanigans; making sure I don’t fall by the wayside on household chores just because I’m overwhelmed with deadlines.

Alongside them are my regular mentoring and workshop commitments. Admittedly, I’ve pared back some meetings with the aim of getting my thesis done, but there’s still 10 to 12 hours of contact time, prep, and admin

My third row projects are the current Brain Jar Press releases, then getting Eclectic Projects back on track, with some long-overdue admin tasks waiting in the wings for the moment I get some room on the schedule. 

One of my tricks with breaking work down this way is making sure I know what the current priority is, but also what’s most likely to step into that spot when a project’s laid to rest. 

For example, there’s a significant list of thesis tasks that need to be done: writing the abstract, finalising the research codes, finalizing the bibliography, so much university admin. Nothing steps up to distract me until I’ve finished the novella rewrites.

The current Eclectic Projects task – finalising the issue 5 proofs – gives way to rewriting the next story and setting it to go live, followed by the three stories after that. 

My Brain Jar focus tends to shift week-by-week. Right now, it should be laying out a novella we’re publishing next year, but it’s been superseded by reworking our website to account for a key plugin going away. The novella layout will come back on the list after the website work is done, and there’s another book ready to edit the moment proofs are sent off to the author.