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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? Moving forward on the second

PeterMBall 06/11/2016
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

The Sweet, Seductive Song of October Productivity

I have spent the last few weeks agreeing to do things, comfortable in the knowledge that time when I would actually have to do said things was comfortably distant in the future. Except now the future is almost here, and this will be my last week where all my writing time is actually devoted to writing-related tasks. I tend to forget that October is a good writing month. The weather is pleasant and there is a kind of lull in the yearly commitments, a quietness between the festival chaos of September and the beginning of the end-of-year chaos that comes in November. Every year October comes around and I do a whole bunch of work and I think, well, this is nice, it would be great if this was all year round. And then I start making plans, because everything seems so achievable. Then November reminds me that those plans are foolish, and December derails them entirely. It doesn’t stop

PeterMBall 27/10/2016
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Trust in the Process

I write rough drafts in my notebooks these days. It gets me away from my perfectionist impulses, lets me embrace the idea of scribbling out a crude and ugly scene that will get fixed up when I type it into the computer. Except I don’t really look at the notebooks when it comes time to sit at the keyboard. I just sit and rewrite the entire story, based on the rough beats I remember from the notebook. Everything else is basically written anew, fleshing out as I go. It feels inefficient. I keep sitting down and wondering if it’s time to go back to the computer for everything, or if its time to try doing rougher sketches in the notebook rather than trying to write full scenes. It feels inefficient, but it’s not. Notebooks are the perfect place to write that messy, ugly zero draft. They’re the perfect place to dump this stuff out there, figure out what the story isn’t

PeterMBall 18/10/2016
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Working with Time I Actually Have, Not the Time I’d Like To Have

It’s seven fifteen in the morning and I’m in the Wintergarden food-court, writing. My phone is counting down the minutes, my pomodoro app ticking softly to mark each passing second. I’m seated amid the empty tables, notebooks splayed out in front of me. There is weirdness on the walls, interior design done with light and shadow instead of wallpaper or paint. In an hour and a half, I head off to the day job. There are one hour and fifteen minutes of usable writing time between now and then, and I’ve got a list of things that need to get done today. A) This blog post. B) The next scene in my current work in progress. In the five minutes between writing bursts, I get to tweet or check Facebook or contemplate this question: what is the best use of my writing time right now? What is the opportunity cost of focusing on A, instead of B? HOW MUCH TIME

PeterMBall 12/10/2016
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Business Planning For Writers: The Five Word Benchmark

Hardworking. Prolific. Savvy. Surprising. Great. I figure I can lay claim to maybe one of these words, if I’m on-point with my writing, on any given day. More often I aim simply aiming for one, and falling frustratingly short. But as of today they’re taped to the wall, beside my projects list. A reminder of what I’m striving for with this whole writing thing. Not necessarily in the work, but in terms of what I’d like to think when I look back over my career. They’re not set in stone yet. I’m going to live with them for a few days, stare at them the same way I stare at the active projects list. Ponder whether each word is right, and change it as needed. Savvy was originally smart, for instance, when I wrote the first draft of the list in my notebook. Smart didn’t cut it as a long-term ambition. Savvy worked better, captured that feeling of knowledge put

PeterMBall 26/09/2016
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 seriously just spent about

PeterMBall 18/09/2016
Journal

Reporting In

I’ve grown complacent about travelling in recent years. I went from doing very little of it, to doing a whole lot, and somewhere along the line I stopped fretting about the logistics of getting places and packing things. I paid for that, over the weekend. Three nights in Melbourne with antidepressants and a power chord for the CPAP machine meant I was feeling particularly blunted by the end of the trip. I yawned a lot. I got light-headed in the afternoons, just like I did before the apnea was treated. I had headaches and wasn’t quite so in-charge of my emotional state as I’ve grown used to in recent weeks. Now I am home and medicated and catching up on sleep. Still blunt, but getting sharper, and vowing not to leave things behind again. I went to see Nerve last night, and it was terrible, but exactly the right kind of terrible for my mood and mental state. If you’re okay

PeterMBall 14/09/2016
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Some More Thoughts on Writer and Business Models: No Plan Survives Contact with the Enemy or Reality

Last Monday, I talked about the need for writers to develop a business model. It’s not the first time I’ve said this and I doubt it will be the last, but it was the first time I’ve said this here on the blog and in such am easily sharable form. That meant people started giving me feedback, which largely came in two camps: How, exactly, do I do this business model thing? GIVE US DETAILS; or Dude, I’ve got a business model, but it’s not working the way I want. I’ll address both of those eventually, but given that I’m Melbourne today (and I’ve gone three days without medication and CPAP, thanks to poor packing on my part) I’m going to hold off on answering the first. Mostly because I started and it got very, very long. As for the second: well, I’ve worked for a bunch of small businesses where exactly this has happened. This is the nature of running

PeterMBall 12/09/2016
Big Thoughts

Flight

It’s not that I’m afraid of flying. I am okay with being in the air. I like airports, and I like planes, and I like being in transit. There is a freedom to being between places, with little to do but wait. I read a lot, on planes, with a speed that I will never manage on the ground. Nor, as the old joke suggests, am I afraid of the landing if things go wrong, although I do think about it as we taxi down the runway. I close my eyes and picture the moment of impact. Or, rather, a moment of impact, as I expect the image in my head bears no relationship to the reality of connecting with the ground. In my imagination the human body is like a squishy china vase, tipped from the edge of a table and allowed to hit the floor. In my imagination we do not squish, but shatter. We disintegrate on impact, reduced to wet,

PeterMBall 09/09/2016
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Hacking the Writing Process, August ’16 Edition

Every couple of months I sit down and look at my writing process, trying to pick up inefficiencies. I study my habits and the things that go wrong, and I double-check systems to make sure they’re working the way they should. The last time I did it, I noticed a bunch of slightly interrelated things that went something like this: My primary work-space had become my couch, which is also the place where I eat food, read books, waste time on social media, and stream television from Netflix. This meant I needed to be really conscious about writing, when I sat down, because there were so many other habits tied to the location that it was easy to get distracted. The desktop computer, which I’d originally intended to be my primary work-space, had gradually been ignored. Primarily this was because there were always multiple steps involved in sitting down and using it, starting with “move all the laundry off my office chair,

PeterMBall 30/08/2016
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Habit Hacking: Phones and Notebooks

Day two of habit hacking this week, and it’s made somewhat easier by the fact that I’m heading to work in forty-five minutes. Work creates clean edges to work against. I like that. It’s been a good morning thus far. Mostly, because I instituted the first rule of getting shit done: get your motherfucking cell phone out of the bedroom. Also: your laptop, your tablet, and everything else connected to the internet. I used to be good at this, but the events of this year saw me migrate my phone back to the bedside table because I was having a lot of online conversations that were ongoing. Now? Not so much. And so it’s time for the phone to start living on my coffee table, where it will not tempt me to check email, facebook, twitter, messenger, text messages, and youtube as soon as I wake up in the morning. It seems a simple thing, but removing that temptation seriously gets

PeterMBall 09/08/2016
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Not Hung-Over, But…

I don’t get hangovers anymore, on account of avoiding alcohol in the name of not making the sleep apnea worse than it needs to be. But there are days when I miss alcohol, and there are days when I definitely miss that mild morning-after feeling where you’re slightly seedy and aware of it and things can be made better by the application of good music and prodigious amounts of bacon. Today I feel hung-over. Not because I drank, but because my brain just unloaded a whole bunch of crazy on me last night and it resulted in an evening of adrenaline and sleeplessness. And a morning where I slept through my alarms – all fucking five of them – and had started to get that shaky feeling that comes from taking the anti-depressants late. So I have cooked a pile of bacon. And applied good music. And maybe, quietly, dispaired at the idea that I will never actually create something as

PeterMBall 05/07/2016

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