Getting Organised

Goal-Setting

PETERMBALL Works in Progress ,

Things I’m going to do this week:

1) Write a short story
2) Re-establish my writing routines after letting them fall by the wayside during the march towards the deadline
3) Write some blog posts that don’t involve the word “novella”
4) Work out a series of goals for December that are flexible enough to suddenly transition into “fixing Cold Cases” when needed

Things I am not going to do this week:

1) Write five thousand words a day in a desperate binge to complete NaNoWriMo with a 50k manuscript.

I thought about this one for a long time over the weekend, because in the back of my head there’s the awareness that five thousand words a day isn’t beyond the realms of possibility. Up until Sunday evening I really thought it was going to happen – what was another week of being a work-obsesses shut-in after three weeks of working on Cold Cases – but in the end common sense won out.

The salve to the wailing, angry writer-child within that stomps his foot over failing a wordcount goal is this: My regular routine will still get the 50k draft written by mid-December, but it’ll also allow me to stock up a few short stories along the way and leave me a complete burn-out at the end of the process.

A message from the Spokesbear

PETERMBALL Journal , ,

zomg_dropbear

As the duly appointed taskmaster and primary source of daily conversation you’re regular blogger has on any given day, I thought I’d drop past and deliver an important warning: expect nothing of substance from Peter in the near future. He’s boring me with his “novella novella novella” and “Ooh, a short story idea” and “check it out, I’m writing *words*” like it’s something special, so I figured I’d spare us all another hamfistedattempt to say something meaningful while his brain is all muddled up with plot. Jeez, you’ve never met a guy who is so astonished by the fact that he’s actually writing when he’s supposed to be. Makes my life a misery, I tell ya, trying to keep him focused on the things he’s meant to be doing.

If you’re looking for interesting reading try this post. I promise you Peter won’t mind. At this point he’s lucky to realise that he should stop and eat lunch rather than keep typing.

Peace out, Peeps.
Your duly appointed spokesbear,

Fudge P. Fudge, esq.

Transition Periods

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life , , ,

It’s weird – the business side of writing always creeps up on me and mugs me while I’m not looking. And it’s not because I never thought I’d need to paying attention to this stuff, just that I always thought the process would move a little slower than it does.

Over the last couple of months I’ve had to set up two new spreadsheets in my writing folder. The first, originally set up a few months, is your basic quarterly profit-and-loss data – what’s coming in, what I’m spending, etc. I’d been avoiding doing this for a long while, but the realities of my working situation (heading into a year of long-term unemployment, albeit broken up by some short-term and part-time contracts) have made it necessary if I wish to continue paying rent and avoid some unpleasant conversations with the local social security office.

The second spreadsheet, and the most recent to be created, is designed to keep track of what rights are where for stories that have already been published – something that I was first told was worthwhile about two years ago, but never really seemed necessary until a few days ago (reprints, after all, were things that happened to other people). This was one of those things I figured I could get away with not doing for much longer than this – after all, I could just go check contracts when the questions came up – but what I thought was a stray question about the rights of a particular story quickly got followed by a couple of others and after I spent a week not-replying to an e-mail because I was in the midst of reorganising the files…

Yeah, well. Yet another moment where I realise that I’m slowly drifting away from being the guy who just writes and submits stories and started becoming a guy whose running a slightly wonky, badly administrated and marginally profitable small business.