Planning Quarterly, Rather Than Yearly, Writing Goals

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life March 5, 2019Accidental Creative, Creative Business, Reading for Writers, Recommended Reading, Todd Henry

Todd Henry’s Accidental Creative is full of good advice and habits for anyone making their living in a creative industry, but the part that has been most valuable for me is his recommendation to limit forward planning to a three-month quarter instead of a year.

Henry recommends this because people (and organisations) have a tendency to develop permanent solutions to long-term problems, but it’s also proven a good timeframe for identifying upcoming disruptions that will impact on your process.

There are some disruptions that are easy to predict. My own calendar has recurring disruptions between December and February due to the concentration of holiday events and family birthdays, and used to include regular disruption every September when I worked at QWC due to the surge of writing events and activities around Brisbane Writers Festival.

But other disruptions sneak up on you without any particular warning, whether they’re good disruptions like an opportunity you weren’t expecting or shitty ones like a relationship breakdown or major illness. Things that eat up time you weren’t expecting and can’t plan for.

Keeping your goals quarterly, with a general idea of where you’d like to go long-term, makes it easy to adapt your process and evaluate what needs to change as external influences show up. It helps you figure out the hard edges of your practice–what’s really possible in the next 90 days? Am I trying to do to much?

For me, it’s a way of figuring out whether there’s the space in my schedule to do projects that will require more thought, planning, and revision than normal, or whether I’m better served keeping to the core projects that form the baseline of my year.

More importantly, quarterly planning gives you the space to recognise when you’re trying to solve a problem that’s no longer there. A chance to reclaim that space in your schedule, and do something more valuable with it.

It’s a chance to check in with your goals and figure out what’s no longer working for you, a chance to try and different solution instead of repeating the same one over and over.

You can hear Todd Henry talk about Quarterly Checkpoints for free in his podcast, but I’d strongly recommend picking up a copy of Accidental Creative if you get the chance. It’s a surprisingly comprehensive book for getting a handle on your creative life, and the system it offers is subtly but extraordinarily effective at moving you towards a more strategic approach to your creative life.

When I disappear…

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption July 1, 2015Bubble Soccer, Photographs of books, Recommended Reading, Snails

I was going to start this post with something completely different, but then the latest issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet arrived on my e-reader, and the opening paragraph of Alyc Helms‘ The Blood Carousel is too good to not share it:

They say any child brave enough to ride the carousel can win her parents back from death, but every child must bring her own mount to pay the ticketman. Unicorns would please him best, but to catch one you need innocence, and innocence cannot find the carousel.

Glorious, glorious story full of foxes and magic and not-quite-childhood bullies who live next door. I could think of a good half-dozen friends, who would probably love it, and it makes me glad I finally got around to resubscribing after losing track of when my subscription lapsed a few years back. Worth seeking out if you’re a fan of folklore-influenced fantasy.

So…yes. When I disappear, mysteriously and on short notice, send people to my house and look under the avalanche of unread books. There’s pretty good odds that’s what has done me in.

When I moved in to my apartment fourteen months ago, I knew there wasn’t enough room for the books. I’ve spent the last year aggressively culling, sending books to good homes, and its still barely made a dent. There remains an awful lot of books left in teetering piles, and boxes shoved under beds and stacked in quiet corners.

Some books, quite honestly, are in danger of toppling through windows one day. Come summer, when i open windows, I’m going to find copies of The Changeling and Moorcock’s Wizardry and Wild Romance embedded in the hood of a neighbours car after they made a desperate escape attempt.

Day six. No hot water. Waiting for parts to come in, which will take twenty-four hours, which were ordered thirty-six hours ago. Properly grumpy now, since tomorrow is write-club day and I’ve been rearranging things at work, on the off-chance they actually called and I could have hot water again.

Today I learned that Bubble Soccer is a Thing – players take to the field wearing giant inflatable bubbles, kick at a tiny football, and generally bounce off each other like they’re playing an absurd computer game. It’s hard to argue with people who have figured out that soccer would be better if the players bounced when they fell.

Facebook also brought along a link to an oddly poetic article about What Snails Think About When Having Sex, via my friend Chris Lynch. It’s hard to deny the power of its opening:

It starts with a light, soft touch, one tentacle gently reaching out, hesitant, hopeful, hanging lightly in the air. There’s a pause. Skin touches skin. One softly strokes the other and slides closer, and then, carefully, they wrap themselves together, stroking, probing, entwining. They glisten as they move, and because they are snails, everything happens very slowly.

Which is kinda glorious, really.

5 Short Story Recommendations in 1,012 Words or Less

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption October 8, 2012Fiction, Howard Waldrop, Laura van den Berg, Peter Carey, Pimp, Recommended Reading, Short Fiction, Theodora Goss, William Gibson

Over the last few weeks I’ve occasionally thrown a short-story link up on twitter, in that way that you do when you remember there are *fucking awesome short stories* out there and you want to share them with other people. Twitter is a horrible medium for recommending short fiction though – it has the kind of immediacy that makes it easy for people to go follow the link, but it lacks the real space to provide any kind of context beyond saying *awesome story here*.

So I wrote a blog post. And threw in some stories I haven’t linked to on twitter so people who follow me there still have something to go read on this fine Monday. All of the stories are free to read online at the time of writing, so links are provided.

And so, in no particular order, I give you…

5 SHORT STORY RECOMMENDATIONS IN 1,012 WORDS OR LESS

1) MARY MARGARET ROAD-GRADER by Howard Waldrop

This is a two-pack of firsts for more – it was the first Howard Waldrop I ever read and the first short-story I read over at Strange Horizons. It’s one of those stories that stuck with me for a long time. Long enough that I eventually started acquiring Waldrop short story collections, for which I can honestly say to Strange Horizons, thank you very damn much. I’m now, like, 90% convinced that Howard, Who? is one of those short-story collection everyone who claims to be a short story writer really should own.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the short-fiction I recommend tends to play with plot or structure in some way. Not this one. It’s a good, old-fashioned short story with a beginning, middle, and end, and it peeled the top of my skull and rewrote my brain by the sheer fact that it’s kick-ass.

2) THE RAPID ADVANCE OF SORROW by Theodora Goss

I’ve often said that writing is an ongoing conversation that writers are having with other works. The Rapid Advance of Sorrow is exactly that, a retelling of The Snow Queen fairytale that is utterly unlike any other retelling of said fairytale than you will ever come across. There are no fucking words for how much this story fascinates me – I keep coming back to it, again and again, and seeing some new facet in the tale that interests me.

Somewhere on my bucket-list there’s an entry that says “Write something as good as Rapid Advance o/Sorrow.” I keep trying, but I haven’t cracked it yet.

3) REPORT ON THE SHADOW INDUSTRY by Peter Carey

Somewhere along the line Peter Carey went from being a writer of weird short fiction to becoming a writer of slightly less weird novels, which is a damn fucking shame, ’cause I really liked Carey as a short story writer. Fat Man in History lives in my list of short-fiction collections everyone should own if they’re a short story writer too, right up there with Howard, Who?

There are so many seriously bad habits that I’ve picked up as a result of reading too many Carey short stories at a young age: stories broken into numbered sections; narrative ambiguity; vaguely real-world settings that aren’t really real.

I recommend this story to people all the time and half of them hate it on site. Also, the link heads over to the Adbusters website, which means I’m going to reiterate the first rule of reading short fiction on the internet – do not read the fucking comics. I know you’ll be tempted to do so now, simply ’cause I’ve specifically said so here, but no, for the love of the gods, don’t read the comments.

4) JOHNNY MNEMONIC by William Gibson

Yes, yes, I know you’ve already read Johnny Mnemonic. It’s a classic of the SF genre these days and it’s reprinted again and again, and besides, they made a movie out of it, even if it’s a terrible goddamn movie whose sole redeeming features are Dina Meyer, Ice T, and Henry-fucking-Rollins all being in the same film. Put all that out of your mind. Go re-read it. Especially if it’s been a while.

This is the short story that made me want to be a writer.

Don’t get me wrong – I’d toyed with the idea. Through most of my pre-teen years I wrote things – terrible stories, half-arsed novels that would get two thousand words in and peter to a halt, poetry that was beyond awful. If you’d asked me what I wanted to do with my life, my default answer was usually “be a writer” and “play dungeons and dragons.” (In that respect, I’m living the damn dream).

Then I read Burning Chrome at age fourteen and, man, I was done. There were no other options for me; if I couldn’t go out into the world and write cool things, there was no point to life. And so began a series of poor life choices that, all things considered, have turned out far better than they should have.

And every year I still re-read Johnny Mnemonic, just to remind myself why I do this writer thing. And every year, I sit there and remember why I do this writing-thing. (Bonus points: Fragments of a Hologram Rose)

5) UP HIGH IN THE AIR by Laura van den Berg

I discovered van den Berg relatively recently, through the simple expedient of her short-story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All The Water Leaves Us, getting reviewed in our local paper. I mean, let’s be clear here: her *short story collection* was reviewed in our local paper, which is traditionally the kind of publication that…well, let’s say it’s not the place I expect to find recommendations for good short fiction. Or, you know, news.

I immediately went out and acquired the book, ’cause it sounded kind of interesting, and ’cause there are few facets of my life that don’t get recorded here on the blog, I wrote up my initial reaction to it back in 2011:

Last night I started reading Laura van den Berg’s short story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, which became one of those books that you start reading at a reasonable hour and stop reading in the wee hours of the morning, many hours after you planned on going to sleep.

It’s not simply that it’s a good book, more that it’s fiction that’s brushed with that touch of magic that great short stories are capable – brief and delicate and surprising and altogether beautiful. Not quite fantasy stories, but certainly on that strange intersection of literary and almost-fantasy-but-mostly-weird where all sorts of interesting things happen.

It reminds me very much of reading Miranda July’s short story collection for the first time, or the peculiar rewriting of the familiar that comes from your first exposure to Kelly Link.

I stand by all of that, really. You should totally go read Laura van den Berg.