The great thing about being a writer: everything is the basis for a story, one way or another. It’s also the worst thing about being a writer. In fact, it kinda sucks. The tendency to extrapolate a narrative out of isolated incidents means that your head will be filled with chaos, especially once you move away from the page and try to live your life. Things happen and your subconscious starts playing what if, and because all writers are sadists at heart, those what if‘s are not pleasant. I’ve got a month away from the day-job coming up. It starts Friday. I hate taking time off, especially at this end of the year, because it does stupid shit to my brain. What starts with yay, holidays! becomes but what if something goes wrong while I’m away, which becomes but what if it was something I could prevent, and it wasn’t there, which becomes what if the job isn’t there when I get back, which becomes what happens if I’m unemployed and stuck with my mortgage, which becomes oh, shit, my life is over accompanied by a side-order of I fuckin’ suck. A great process to go through, while plotting, but its a terrible way to live your life (especially this year, working in the arts sector,

Back when I taught short story writing, people would often ask the trick for getting past the inevitable flow or rejections. My answer was always simple: it comes down to volume. When you have a single short story that you’re sending out, every rejection feels like you’ve been thwarted. When you’re sending out a dozen stories, with more projects in the hopper, a rejection usually means oh, thank the gods, that’s where X goes next. The sting of rejection really boils down to fear—and often the social fear of something secret and hidden about yourself being revealed and found wanting—and that fear magnifies in relation to the perceived importance. If you’ve spent your life hungry to be a writer, immersed in a cultural narrative that says successful writers are either geniuses or hacks, then that first work holds a lot of weight and expectations. It’s the point where you prove you’ve got what it takes to be the kind of writer you want to be, and those first rejections sting harder because you’ve mustered up your courage to defy society’s messaging that creating art is not for you in order to get the submission out there, and now you’re forced

THE SHIT YOU WRITE AFTER TAKING A SERIES OF JABS TO THE FACE Some days, I get punchy. I sit down at this blog and I start writing, only to discover that there’s nothing new in my head. I’ve been fighting the fight too long, taken too many hits to the face, and I’ve got nothing left in the tank but a kind of dogged resolve to keep swinging and hope I get lucky. I’ll start drawing together ridiculous concepts, seeing what I can connect. I’ll throw words at the page and squint at them, wondering if there’s something there. Some days it works. Some days it doesn’t. But if you take most writing advice on the internet to its core principles, digging beneath the layers and seriously looking at the what is being said, it will generally come down to one of two things. One: the best thing you can do for your career is keep on fucking swinging. Two: please, motherfuckers, someone buy my books. There’s a reason for this – both the advice for wading forward, and the quiet plea for an audience. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, over the weekend, because I am full of

I started reading time and project management books a few years back, when it became apparent that my ability to manage my studies was fairly limited. I ramped up my reading in 2011 when I found myself working in an organisation with multiple people for the first time, since I was pretty much used to working on my own or in small groups. Over the years I’ve tried a bunch of systems and kept stuff from each of them, but this list collects together three of the quick-and-dirty time management hacks that have been particularly useful to me as a writer. All are part of larger, more complex systems that have their own strengths and weaknesses, but I am pretty ruthless about keeping the things that work for me and searching for new options when something doesn’t. HACK ONE: PRIORITISE THE TASKS THAT UNLOCK OTHER PEOPLE’S CAPACITY TO WORK ON YOUR BEHALF I picked this one up from Dan Charnas incredible book about chefs, time management, and mise-en-place, Work Clean, and it remains the advice I turn to every time I found myself paralysed by indecision about what needs to come next. One of the base-lines of Charnas’ approach is simple: