Search Results for: sleep – Page 4

Smart Advice from Smart People

Vintage Links 005: Literary Fame, Publishing Crashes, Breathing, & Research

It’s Friday, September 30, and so I launch into the fifth instalment of my Vintage Links series. It’s been an interesting week clearing the To-Read folder, as i’ve had my first run of posts/articles that were either a) no longer online, or b) now taken over by godawful spam sites that have camped on the former name. The Bizarre, Complicated Formula for Literary Fame (Joshua Rothman for the New Yorker, 2015) Read it at the New Yorker’s Website When you work in a writers centre, you tend to accumulate articles about how various writers get famous or made a giant splash. They’re almost always talking about outliers, because the kinds of folks who get the big coverage are exceptions to the rule, but they’re also the source of information for how publishing works for many new writers. They assume every successful writer’s career trajectory mirrors Stephen Kings, or Dan Browns, or JK Rowlings, or…well, you get the idea. This…isn’t one

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

New Writing Kit: Logitech MK850 & Field Notes

Yesterday I hit a milestone: for the first time in nearly four years, I’m a week ahead on writing blogs. Which means the temporality of these posts gets a little weird, because “Yesterday” can now mean a week-in-the-past-when-I’m-actually-writing-things, or one-day-back, when-I-was-posting-about-a-thing. Getting ahead has largely been a function of the first major change I made when setting up my new workspace: adding in a whiteboard that sits in front of the “goofing off” computer, tracking my weekly to-do list. Thus far, it’s kept me on track with writing, with reading, with blogging, with newsletter creation, and with a bunch of little things I need to do throughout the week. It’s not a bad result for something that cost me $20, in terms of the value it delivers. I get quite gushy about it, when talking to folks about getting shit done. The other pieces of new kit i’ve added to my workspace is this: a Logitech MK850 wireless Keyboard and

Works in Progress

Saturday Status Post: 17 August 2019

It appears I had a bunch of good ideas back in February, many of which were derailed by life rolls and complications far beyond my control. One of these was the regular STATUS POST as a lead-in to the Sunday Circle, and I’m going to try and back into the groove of such things. HAPPIEST MOMENTS OF THIS WEEK: I finished the redraft for Short Fiction Lab #4, handed it off to Brain Jar’s resident beta reader, and put it up for preorder at the usual suspects. BIG THINGS ACHIEVED THIS WEEK: After rocking the whiteboard as an organisational tool earlier this week, I’ve actually succeeded in getting a bunch of things on-track. Aside from the aforementioned development work on Brain Jar’s next release: I hit my writing quota for the thesis for the first time since June, and actually started buying down the word-debt I owe that project. I progressed a fiction project every day this week–not quite back

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’m in the process of

Stuff

“There is always more work to do, you know?”

I’m 90 words off hitting my fiction target for the day, and getting to tick the left-hand box on my monthly streak tracker. It’s occurring late today, but my partner is asleep and there’s an evening of work before me…and I’ll be stopping once those 90 words are written. As I mentioned in my last post, the upper limit is as important to me as the minimum I need to get done. I bang on about having hard edges on your creative practice because I’ve seen the results of not having limits on my work–to whit, I spend all my time trying to get things done and end up doing less. So it was interesting to see Austin Kleon talking about the same thing on his blog today, courtesy of a question he was asked about always feeling like you can and should be doing more creative work: “Yeah, always. If you get into that productivity trap, there’s always going

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? The current project has been

Smart Advice from Smart People

Vintage Links 002: Warren Ellis; Short Crime Fiction; Washing Pillows; Unproductive Days

One of my projects for 2019 is clearing the archive of unread links tucked away in the “To Read” folder of my bookmarks bar. At time of writing, there are about 600 of them remaining, and I’m going full Marie Kondo on those fuckers: everything is checked, thanks, and cleared away so I don’t have to deal with it again. The stuff that brings me joy gets posted here, to be shared with others.  You can see the first round of things I shared in last Monday’s post. When read alongside this week’s recommendation, it should be remembered that I have a very broad definition of joy. I’m Warren Ellis, and This Is How I Work (Lifehacker, 2015) Read the post on Lifehacker I spend the first hour or two of the day at a table in my back garden, under a sloping roof, either just with the phone or with the Dell, the Pixel or a notebook, depending on

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’m on the downward slope

Works in Progress

Friday Status Post: Feb 8 2019

THE BEST PARAGRAPH I READ THIS WEEK BIG THINGS ACHIEVED THIS WEEK: I met with my supervisors this week, talking through the way we’ll be handling things as I move into my third year as a post-grad. I’m finally at the point where there’s less research and more writing required, so I’ve been thinking about how to keep my life balanced (and, occasionally, despairing that such a thing may be possible and debating which goals get deferred. The other big achievement for the week has been thinking really hard about my relationship with my phone, and removing all sorts of apps that have resulted in bad habits. Obviously, this includes social media, but after reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism I’m trailing a bunch of other things as well. For the first time in years there’s no email app on my phone–a change that’s proving useful, as I tend to read an email while seated in front of my computer and

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’ve got page proofs and

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Stuck on a Project? Try Stealing This Tip from Psychology

In the final weeks of 2018 I sat down and read Ellen Hendrickson’s How To Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety. As someone who deals with anxiety on the reg, this was a pretty good book for exploring how and why anxiety occurs, and using that to frame why already familiar techniques from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy are used. This was, by and large, an expected and hoped-for effect when I picked up the book. What I wasn’t expecting when I read it was the sheer number of times I would sit down and start making notes that were associated to writing and building a writing career. …. I spent a good chunk of last Thursday trying to write this blog post and failing. I was just back from an academic conference–an event that is really high on the list of things that trigger my own social anxiety–and my brain kept trying to put together a frame

Sunday Circle

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

‘Twas the week around Christmas and New Years,and all through the land,self-employed artists were fretting,about their families Holiday demands… If this sounds familiar, come join me for this week’s edition of the Sunday Circle, where we’ll set some intentions for the coming week and talk about the stuff that’s a little too knotty to get finished right now. 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