Peter M. Ball

I’ve been tracking my workflow via calendars and stickers for two months now, logging word counts in multiples of 750 words, an hour spent focusing on a major Brain Jar/Freelancing Task, and non-fiction posts/content developed for Patreon and Newsletter distribution. I’m doing quick reports here because I’m still wrapping my head around what’s possible and probable when work around the full-time job, which is proving trickier than expected for a variety of reasons.

November and December felt like wildly different months, so I was surprised to discover that the space available for work is consistent across both months. I’ll generally get 20 ‘productive’ days in the month, with the non-productive days most likely to follow evening commitments and major anxiety spikes that disrupt my sleep patterns and wipe out the morning routine. December proved to be slightly better than November, heavily buoyed by the extremely productive last week, but setting my expectations around working anything more than 2/3 of a month is probably inviting disaster. 

Similarly interesting is the way my focus ping-pongs — I’ve often written consistently for a stretch, then panicked about the fact that I’m behind on Brain Jar work or a freelance deadline and switched focus to that instead. 

That switching is a failure of my default assumptions around work. My original plan was doing writing in the morning and Brain Jar design, layout, and marketing work in the evening, but it’s pretty clear that’s not happening at all. I’ve got two good hours before I head to the day job in the morning, and that’s pretty much it for the day. As a result I’ve been working reactively, focusing on whichever deadline is on fire and out of control, and doing just enough to get it back to a controlled burn instead of putting it out.

This gives me something to work on in January, likely via a rethink of habits. The current plan is to split the week into zones — probably four days of writing focus, two days of Briain Jar, one day of Patreon and Platform work (probably a Sunday, where I’m most disinclined to do writing work judging by these work patterns, although I may just progress through that cycle during productive days and leave the non-productive to their own devices). My partner’s recent adoption of the Fly Lady zone method of house maintenance inspired this approach, as I think there’s something to the cycling areas of focus week by week and making incremental progress towards your goals. 

The big wins get their own monster sticker or (in December) a gold star, marking the fact I pulled off something. In November that was clearing the time intensive work of my second-last freelance commitment. In December, that was delivering the RWA workshop in the first half of the month, and uploading Brain Jar’s first release of 2022 to the printer on the 29th. I took on a lot of freelance gigs just prior to starting work, a bulwark against the impending unemployment, and clearing those decks is going to do a lot to ease my stress levels (although the day job and omicron spread through Australia seem poised to grab that anxiety space instead).

Which brings us to January, which is a goddamned tricky month. The festival finalises its program over the next couple of weeks, which I’m expecting to be a shitfight of unbelievable proportions that results in stress and overtime under the best of circumstances (which 2022 seems unlikely to deliver). There’s two major family birthdays this month, so my calendar will have extra family commitments, and extra time management as disrupted routines and commitments fire up after the disruption of the holidays.

Despite all that, I’m going to try and push for 21 productive days across the month, with a fairly aggressive schedule of books to get out and things to write across the month. Mostly in a “let’s see if I can push for this” way, rather than an “everything will fall apart if this doesn’t get done.” A lot of this will involve saying no to things as much as possible, and hoping like hell I sidestep any kind of illness amid Queensland’s first real spike of Covid cases. My writing workload is increasingly pitched towards the 10 good days of writing word count, and likely to be split between Digest work, doing some extra work for some older releases, and my PhD projects (which will get the lion’s share of the effort once the BWF program gets delivered).

There’s three things that need to lock into place before I’m willing to commit to a monthly chapbook release all through 2022, and yesterday I ticked off the first of them. 

I’ve spent the last four days writing the twelve vignette/flash fiction pieces that will go into the first three issues, batching the drafting together in a single burst of productive work. The Scrivner-stat above represent 9 stand-alone vignettes, 3 that are part of an ongoing serial from issue to issue, and one additional scene that ended up being less ‘vignette’ and more ‘first scene of the story I’ll use in issue three’.

And I’ll note that all of these were new, rather than simply typing up some of the notecard stories I’ve been writing on my way to work, so I’m actually fifteen or sixteen story drafts ahead of where I need to be. 

STORIES I TELL MYSELF

Way back when I first interrogated the idea of doing a monthly release, I was looking at doing two fully fledged short stories rather than a short story feature and a bundle of vignettes. Problem is, my short story writing has been getting longer in recent years, with every project drifting towards novelette or novella length. I held no confidence in reliably delivering two stories a month, let alone two stories that were good. 

I’d done occasional test-flights of the idea, such as the Short Fiction Lab series, but they never hit the kind of schedule that I’d been hoping for. Life got in the way, and then Brian Jar evolved, and things I planned on doing regularly fell by the wayside.

Here’s a thing we don’t often talk about in writing and publishing: there are narratives that build up around your work. Narratives that other people construct, and narratives you tell yourself.

My narrative around fiction has been…well, let’s call it rocky…for the last few years. I’ve written a lot of work, but not with any degree of confidence. Partially that’s a function of moving into longer work, and partially it’s a function of simply writing and submitting less.

And partially it’s a function of life being a pretty horrendous gauntlet of disruptions stretching back to 2016 (and probably a few years before that, although 2016 was the point where everything bubbled over).

I’ve written an awful lot over the past few years, but very little of it is finished and submitted/published. All of my successes have been with backlist work, whether it’s the Keith Murphy novellas or short story collections, and that’s had an impact on the story I tell myself about my writing career.

All too often, in recent years, I find myself thinking “I used to be good at this.” I often start  projects trying to figure out how not to fail (again), rather than trying to make the story succeed. 

And given the challenges in building a writing career, that’s one heck of an eight ball to put yourself behind and try to manoeuvre out of.

TRANSIT STORIES

I started writing flash again after taking Mary Robinette Kowal’s Patreon workshop on the form, which laid out a structure and ideology around crafting short vignettes that held some appeal to me. If you’re not one of Kowal’s Patreons, you can find a somewhat truncated but still informative series of notes on the topic over on Kowal’s twitter feed. 

Both these resources focus on the 250 to 500 word flash format, which is not my favourite, but as Kowal is fond of noting in multiple courses she runs, writing has a tendency to be fractal and the toolkit for writing a 500 word story expands just fine when creating a neat 1000 to 1500 word vignette.

I used to write a lot of stories around that mark, back in 2007 to 2010. I often thought of them as “Phone Bill Stories,” as they were projects I could burn through fast and often paid just enough to cover my phone and internet bill if someone accepted them. Stories under 2000 words were also a weirdly useful thing, because when an editor’s got a limited budget for a magazine and really loves that submission at the top end of their word count, they look for something short and on-brand they can acquire with the rest of the budget.

This is not an attempt to disparage flash fiction (although I prefer the term “vignettes”, ) — I often wrote those stories because I originally trained and published as a poet, and the 1,000 word story often played to the skills I brought over from that form. A good flash fiction story relied on a certain level of control and ability to play with an audience, while also playing with resonances and allusions from other stories. And, because the form couldn’t support detailed world building, you had the freedom to be pretty damn weird and trust the reader to follow along. 

But as I started finding my feet as a fiction writer (and picked up a day job that covered the phone bill), I left the shorter formats behind and worked towards longer works whose ambitions lay in places where my craft was weaker: structure and plot development, third person narration rather than a close first person, fast-paced action rather than weird-ass concepts for the fun of it.

WAKING UP

I’d largely forgotten the pleasures of vignettes over the last few years, and probably wouldn’t have revisited the form at all if I hadn’t been working full time. But two strange thing happened once I started writing flash fiction on my commute: first, I started finishing things.

Second, I was having fun for the first time in years, writing in a way that was disconnected from the eventual success and failure of the piece for the first time in years. 

And the thing about finishing things that are fun? It makes it easier to do more. What started as six minutes of scribbling on an index card while driving to work soon became those six minutes plus ten spare minutes during my lunch break, which meant I was finishing twice as often and thinking about what I could do with the stories once I’d typed them up. 

More importantly, I was working my way through ideas I’d had a decade ago and never got around to finishing, which did wonders for my self-narrative around writing and feeling perpetually behind.

By the time I was four days in, and close to hitting the twelve-vignette mark I’d set as my target for the week, you can see how hungry I was to simply get this done. I wrote four vignettes in a single day, and probably the best of the one’s I drafted this week, and doubled the word count of the previous day in one fell swoop.

All because I was having fun, and I could see the path to a clear and achievable win.

And while writing here in the gap between Xmas and New Year is basically productivity on easy mode—I’m on leave and not besieged by major commitments or stressors—the notion that I just finished twelve stories and started a thirteenth at the tail end of a year where I published no original fiction for the first time in over a decade is a big thing.  

In a pinch, I could have these bundled and out as a stand-alone chapbook by New Year. I could submit a stream of stories to markets for the first few months of the year, and maybe pick up some publications. I could release an original story to my newsletter list every month, and thank folks for signing up.

At this stage, I’m doing none of these things, but I’m predicating the decision on tactical choices about the best use of the work rather than failure to produce. 

And that’s not a thing I’ve been able to say for…well, years now. 

Many, many years.

TELLING MYSELF A STORY BY TELLING STORIES

So the four-vignettes-an-issue goal I’m setting myself with the monthly Digest is as much about rewriting the stories I’m telling myself about writing as the stories I’m telling all of you. It’s a narrative of steady wins, having fun with form, and trying new ideas. Using vignettes as R&D when the occasional tale explodes into something longer (as one of these did) or a character/concept catches reader attention and earns itself a revisit.

It’s also a narrative of control within the writing itself, pushing to find ways I can bring a concept home inside of  1000 to 1500 words. Re-engaging with the discipline of conveying detail in short bursts, hinting at larger world, and finding an ending.

And I’m hoping that when I move on to my next batch of tasks — writing the short stories — that sense of precision and control stays with me as I focus on nailing a concept in four or five scenes instead of one.

If you’ve been in a writing slump — or if the story you’re telling yourself about writing bears more than a passing resemblance to the negative one I’ve been carrying, given everything that’s going on — I can recommend taking a gander at Kowal’s process and the way it breaks down story goals and intent by sentence level for a tightly written flash story.

You probably won’t follow it exactly — Lord knows I don’t — but busting out a quick win or two just might be the kick start you need to challenge the story you’re telling yourself.