There are weeks when my writing process feels like a great and terrible steampunk juggernaut, powered by a creaky engine and beholden to its own momentum. When everything is running correctly, I get an extraordinary amount of work done and quickly stack up pages. When things go wrong, momentum will carry me for a while even though the engine is blowing pistons and and leaking fluids. Then the momentum will falter and the fires of the engine will go dark, and the act of getting the whole thing moving once more feels impossible. Sometimes, the thing that goes wrong is needing to turn and head in a new direction. Or stop for a while, to focus on something else, then restart after a short break. Sometimes the thing that goes wrong is a problem in the engine itself–a loose screw nobody noticed that gradually rattles free. Either way, once the momentum is gone, it feels like getting the engine started again is a near-impossible task. It’s not. What I need to do to get started again is generate words: one word, then the next. Easiest thing in the world to do. They don’t even have to be good words, just

I watched The Lego Movie last week. This puts me considerably behind the curve, given my circle of friends. The vast majority of the people I know seem to have watched this film ages ago, pitched themselves head-first into its charms, and come out the other end with Everything is Awesome stuck in their head as a kind of perpetual ear-worm. This is what happens when your friends are geeky types. Still, I’m caught up now. And, curiously, I liked the film a lot less than I expected. I got about five minutes in before I realised I wasn’t the target audience. I found myself mildly irritated, rather than enraptured, because I couldn’t let go of the idea that these were toys. Except…no. It wasn’t that. I liked Toy Story. I liked other Lego-themed animation. It wasn’t a toy thing. No, I kept getting distracted by my inability to figure out if was in a secondary world where Lego was, for lack of a better word, the dominant life-form, or I’d wandered into a film where toys had come to life. And that was weird. Weird enough that I’ve been picking at the film for a week now, trying to articulate why it

My goal for 2019 is to spend 1,460 hours working on first draft material, spread across my fiction, my PhD, and some projected non-fiction features I’m looking at for the blog. This largely equates to twenty-eight hours of drafting every week, or approximately 4 hours a day. If I’m right in my estimates, this should be good for about 700,000 to 800,000 words over the course of the year, but I’m utterly unconcerned with the word count produced. My sole determinant of success in 2019 is pure hours spent with my but in the chair and my internet blocker turned on so I’m focused on drafting new words. This is a pretty big departure for me–like most writers, I’ve tended to forward plan based around word count. My goals around this time of year would be focused on the number of words produced, or the number of things finished. I want to write 2,000 words a day, or I’d like to finish 20 short stories. Switching over to an hour-based goal is an attempt to try and overcome the fundamental flaws of this approach: I cannot schedule 2,000 words a day or writing a story effectively, because I’ll only ever