Search Results for: write club – Page 4
Journal

Last Working Friday for the Year

I don’t want to be writing a blog post right now. I just got home from the first weekly RPG session of the year, after a big day’s word count at Write Club, and I feel like slacking off. There’s an old copy of Master of Orion II on my computer, and I feel an overwhelming urge to fire up a game and try to overtake the universe as a race of marauding space lizards. I probably shouldn’t be writing a blog post right now. If I’ve got energy to burn it would be better served spent getting a few pages done on the current project, or brainstorming the next one, or doing one of the half-dozen things that need doing around the house. Laundry, for example. I could do laundry. I need to do laundry so very badly, and I keep failing to do it, ’cause… Well. I’m writing a blog post. A compromise option. Productive in the most general

PeterMBall 29/01/2016
Sunday Circle

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

The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them). After that, 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 the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here). MY CHECK-IN What am I working on this week? I’ve just had a incredibly productive week, courtesy of

PeterMBall 17/01/2016
Journal

Gone Fishing

It’s summer. It’s hot. I’m already covered in an obscene amount of sweat and it hasn’t even crossed 9:00 AM here in Brisbane. I’m off to write club in a half-hour, so putting on the air conditioning for such a short period isn’t really cost-effective. And I just got news of a short-story acceptance, so I can think of no better time to hang out the single and say: See you all tomorrow, peeps. If you feel the need for your daily dose of writing neepery, may I suggest checking out this post at writerly scrawls about taking the stress out of freelancing.

PeterMBall 22/12/2015
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

In Which I Gush Effusively About RescueTime

Forgive me, regular readers, but I’m going to wax evangelical today. Two days ago I installed RescueTime on my writing computer and phone, planning on using it as a resource when I start some heavy-duty process tracking next year. I honestly didn’t expect to be back here blogging about it two days later, but…holy fucking shit, I love this program. The impulse for installing it was pretty simple – I was having a low word-count week and I was interested in tracking exactly how long I spent at the keyboard in order to get those words. My sense of self is pretty-well bonded to writing productivity these days, and days where I don’t write a lot hit me pretty hard. I know this is a bad idea for all sorts of reasons, my subconscious cleaves to this philosophy despite my best efforts to change it. You are not working hard enough, it whispers. You should be doing more. So, fuck it.

PeterMBall 11/12/2015
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

2016 Project: A Year of Data About My Writing Practice

2016 is looming, as new years tend to do. I’ve been sorting through the options of big, writing-adjacent goal-setting projects I’d be interested in doing to replace the mad dash of the 600k year. Doing nothing was pretty high on the list, but that’s not in my nature. I like having big meta-projects to focus on that are writing-adjacent, even if they’re basically insane and designed to fail. So I went through the list of things I really enjoyed and found useful in 2015 and came up with three words: word count data. I tracked daily word-count pretty obsessively over the last twelve months. And, when I didn’t track words, I tracked daily pages in a notebook, faithfully switching back-and-forth between different coloured pens so I’d be able to see what was written on which day. I’m still tracking my word-count now, updating my excel file after every writing session. First, because it’s become a habit. Second, because I like data. Data

PeterMBall 09/12/2015
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Transmissions from Conference Land: Let’s Talk About Facebook

Peeps, we need to talk about Facebook. Specifically, this trend that I’ve noticed with this year’s GenreCon where people have eschewed email and started sending me important queries about the conference via the Facebook PM system. Don’t do this. For the love of all the Gods in all the Heavens, don’t do this. Carve these words into your heart and cleave to them for the rest of your writing career: Facebook is not the place for any kind of one-to-one professional communication.  I’m not talking about the quick, easy stuff – it’s not like the messenger/chat system on Facebook is entirely broken. I use it for all sorts of things: asking the important questions about whether we’re good for write club and whether we need donuts; asking quick questions of friends that have an easy response; the occasional chat with old friends who moved away. It’s great for that, it really is. But it’s pants for anything important. I get the impulse to

PeterMBall 29/10/2015
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

600k Year: A Conclusion, More or Less

Warning: word-count neepery associated with the 600k challenge follows. You can skip today’s post if that’s not your thing. Right. So yesterday, at Write Club, I did this Which means I’ve now written nine of the ten chapters I had planned for the novel I’m working on and there’s just one more to go. Probably about 65,000 to 72,000 words, depending on how accurate my words-per-page assumptions are, with another eight to ten thousand words left to chase down before I hit the end. It…may not be done by GenreCon. Which hurts to admit, since I was confident I’d get able to do so until about Monday, but we’re starting to hit the point where the conference stops having things that need to be done and starts to have minor disasters that will eat hours of your time as you fix them. Since I’m the only person whose disappointed if this book doesn’t get done in time, and there’s about 180

PeterMBall 23/10/2015
Journal

Home. I sleep now.

Home again, after four days of traipsing around northern Queensland. Nowhere near as wrecked as I should be, given I just spent four days delivering workshops and travelling, which may well mean the post-teaching/travel exhaustion I’ve come to expect in recent years is another one of those things that connected to the apnoea. Still, it is good to be home. I’m putting serious thought, post-trip, into abandoning the computer as a first-draft tool. A few weeks back I made the decision to abandon all digital screens after ten PM, turning off the computer, the television, and my phone a good two hours before I finally went to bed. This started putting a serious crimp in my productivity, but there was no arguing the fact that I was sleeping better and it stopped bad habit of staying up past bedtime in order to mainline a TV series or play a marathon game of Civilization. Instead of writing, I’d use those two hours to edit print-outs

PeterMBall 17/08/2015
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Total Microsleeps While Writing This Post: 5

I don’t sleep well, not anymore. I first wrote that in the opening paragraph of Horn back in 2007, when a kind of restless sleeplessness was one of the first things I knew about Miriam Aster. It was a trait we shared, to some degree, if only ‘cause I’m the kind of person who resists sleep like the plague. I enjoy being up late. I prefer being a night owl. I’m used to living with a kind of self-inflicted exhaustion when I found myself having to engage with other people’s daylight-focused schedules. These were the stories I told myself, and for the most part they were true, but they ignored stuff: the weeks where I’d wake up repeatedly throughout the night, desperately needing to urinate; the nights when I’d wake myself up ‘cause I snored so loudly; the times when I’d go to bed and get a full eight hours sleep, but still wake up feeling exhausted as hell. They

PeterMBall 08/04/2015
Journal

Thursday I’ve Got Friday On My Mind

So, on the plus side, I had a really good writing day today. Got up and did some early morning writing, then followed it up by joining Angela Slatter for our regular Write Club. Net result: about 2,000 words. A whole chapter of the novella done, plus half of the second one finished. On the downside, I lost my USB drive on the way home. I spent a couple of hours looking for it, went back to the grocery store where it most likely slipped free of my pocket, but I didn’t have any luck tracking it down. Which means it’s time to buy a new USB and restore things from back-up. This is the second time I’ve lost a USB in 2014 – the first time happened back in March, right on the deadline for the first Flotsam novella, when I dropped Shifty Silas the laptop USB first and snapped it in two. I’m pretty good about back-ups, so I only lost

PeterMBall 22/05/2014
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

10 Thoughts On Shame and Writing

ONE I rocked up to Angela Slatter’s place for Write Club earlier today, went through the usual process of getting buzzed into her apartment block and climbing upstairs. When I finally reached the front door, Angela pointed out that I didn’t really sound like me when I talked into the intercom. “Huh,” I said. “It’s probably because I was cheerful.” TWO I spend a lot of time thinking about shame these days, particularly in the last few weeks. I ran out of money back in late June, for certain definitions of running out of money that triggered all sorts of bad instincts that built up during my three years of unemployment. This means I immediately went into the same coping mechanisms that got me through that period, counter-productive as they were: I cancelled social engagements; I hid from the world; I avoided any activity that could potentially draw attention my way, including writing (If you want to trace exactly when

PeterMBall 14/06/2013
Works in Progress

Novella Diary, Claw, Day Twenty

Write club. Which, if you’ve been following this diary for a stretch, should give you some context for what’s about to happen. I spent the first hour catching up with Angela and hearing all the latest from the Aurealis Awards in Sydney, and the second stretch finishing up my WQ article in preparation for submitting it later tonight. With that done, it’s time to dig into some words. Session 20.1 (12:50 PM – 1:12 PM ) Word Count: 275 Session 20.2 (1:28 PM – 1:37 PM) Word Count: 296 Session 20.3 (8:48 PM – 9:33 PM) Word Count: 599 So, none of that went terribly well. This represents tree attempts at the same scene. Finally seem to have hit it, albeit not in a form that I’m happy with. Taking a short break before returning and trying to clock up another four hundred words, just so I can get back into the 1k a day habit. Session 20.4 (9:49 PM

PeterMBall 21/05/2013

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