Tag: Process Notes
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Bullet Journals Revisited, And A Defense Of Rapid Logging

A few weeks ago, I read Ryder Carroll’s book The Bullet Journal Method. I’ve been using bullet journals for years at this point. Not the pretty art-pieces that you’ll find on the internet, full of scrolling calligraphy and Washi tape, but a series of beat-up journals that are filled with messy handwriting and scribbled notes. Notebooks with no interest in being beautiful objects, but plenty of practical use as a tool. I picked it up around 2012, after being impressed by the way my friend Kate Cuthbert organised her work at Harlequin Australia. Ten years of relatively consistent bullet journaling is a long time. Over the years, I’ve gotten large chunks of my family into the habit — there’s often a family Leuchtturm shop around the end of the year. I’ve experimented with different approaches, from one dedicated bullet journal for everything to bullet journal by project to bullet journal by context (writing/work/life). I’ve researched and experimented with layouts and

PeterMBall 04/07/2022
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Behind The Scenes On A Cover Redesign

Last year I did a new cover for Alan Baxter’s Shadow Bites: A Horror Sampler, a free bundle of stories and novel excerpts for folks who’d like to get a taste of Alan’s work. It’s a project from a longer conversation Al and I were having about title development, the stuff we’ve both been doing in the indie publishing space, and the difference between the titles where development has been nigh perfect (The Roo) and the stuff that could do with a little spruce. Here’s the original and the refresh side-by-side for context. Original is on the left, my revamp is on the right.  I won’t comment too much on the original, as it’s not my work and wasn’t specifically design with Al’s book in mind, but I will break down some of the reasons I pushed Alan to consider making a change. Mostly, these reasons have nothing to do with the cover design, and everything to do with a

PeterMBall 02/02/2022
Works in Progress

Research Links 20200413

This entry is part [part not set] of 1 in the series Research Journal

Years ago, when I first discovered Tumblr, I’d intended to use it as a public dumping ground for research links and images I might want to use later. Resurrecting the idea here, since virtually nobody comes to blogs anymore, but the folks that do probably share my obsession with seeing how ideas manifest some five to ten years after a writer first discovers them. NEW BLUETOOTH SPEAKER WITH A WAR ROBOT AESTHETIC Gravstar unleash a new bluetooth speaker design which looks like a battle-scarred war robot from an episode of Doctor Who you haven’t got around to watching yet. Watch the accompanying video for a full sense of their commitment to the motif, and ponder what these choies say about human ideas of authenticity and aesthetics. SPORTS STADIUMS ARE REPLACING CROWDS WITH ROBOT MANNEQUINS DRESSED AS FANS As sports stadiums prepare for the resumption of play amid lockdowns, some of them are replacing the crowd experience with robotic stand-ins. Some

PeterMBall 13/04/2020
Works in Progress

On Skeleton Drafts and Pantsing

This morning, around 10:00 AM, I finished the skeleton draft of a new novella about phantom punches, MMA, and a sailor who desperately wants to impress…well, pretty much everyone, including the reader. It started out as a project that drew inspiration from Robert Howard’s Sailor Steve Costigan stories, but quickly became its own thing. If nothing else, there’s less overt racism and sexism than Howard’s Costigan stories. Also, more starships and space stations. The skeleton draft is the phase of the project where the story is more-or-less done, but only in my head. In practice, there are scenes where I’ve locked down the major beats and narrative pivots, but haven’t yet locked them down. Or scenes where a secondary character appears for the first time, but doesn’t yet behave like they need to because I don’t know their role in the story until I push towards the final chapter and see their impact. Right now, the biggest unfinished scene is

PeterMBall 25/04/2019
Works in Progress

Notebooks and Process Notes: March 2019

One of the side-effects of doing my Quarterly Checkpoint this week is the realisation that I’m going to have very little time for high level strategic thinking on the writing front. With that in mind, I’ve shifted my drafting process back to handwriting in notebooks–a tactic that’s served me well in terms of keeping forward momentum during highly stressful periods. Since it’s been a while since I did an update about the state of the notebook wodge I carry with me, I figured I’d take a quick look at what I’m carrying and how I’m using it right now. Fortunately, it’s a pretty slimeline wodege of notebooks for me—there’s currently four notebooks in my kit, and I’m only usually carrying two or three of them at any given moment: The notebook on the bottom is a large, dark green JS Burrows Journal from my local office supply store–essentially, their name-brand knock-off of the moleskine design. It’s a remarkably nice piece

PeterMBall 07/03/2019
Stuff

Morning Shift

So this is pretty much how my morning went: Peter gets up fifteen minutes before his alarm goes off at 6:00 am Peter sits down to write a half-hour ahead off schedule Peter finishes the 1,300 goal he set for his morning writing shift forty-five minutes early. Peter wombles around the internet for ten minutes, then realise everyone else is asleep or on their way to work. Peter gets bored. Peter goes back to writing. And that, folks, is why I’ve missed getting up early to get writing done. It wasn’t possible for much of the last year, courtesy of the apnea and my tendency to sleep through alarms, so I gradually cut back my morning writing to a bare minimum of getting up a half-hour early and getting a couple of hundred words done (and, even then, there were mornings it didn’t happen). It’s nice to be back. # Speaking of things coming back, tomorrow night will see the

PeterMBall 25/05/2015
Works in Progress

Streaking: 7 Days In

I’ve written a minimum of 1,402 words every day for the last seven days. There’s nothing special about that. I’ve done it plenty of times before. But I’m noting it, in this instance, because one of my goals for 2014 is to put together a writing streak. This is predicated on the Seinfeld approach to productivity, where you get a calender and built up a chain of X’s marking the days where you’ve achieved a certain goal. After a while, the Xs accumulate, and the desire to keep from breaking the chain becomes part of your motivation to keep working. I’m actually using my calendar to track two different streaks. The first half of the cross gets put in when I clear five hundred words for the day – a kind of minimum viable productivity level that’ll keep me in touch with project du jour – while the second half is put in when I clear the 1,600 words I need

PeterMBall 08/01/2014
Smart Advice from Smart People

Charlotte Nash on Project Based Writing

So Charlotte Nash came across my radar last year, courtesy of some recommendations people made for emerging writers who’d be a good fit for panels at GenreCon. Unfortunately I missed the panels she was on – curse of being an organiser instead of a punter – but all feedback suggests that Charlotte was a) very smart, and b) knows her stuff. My own experience with her written work hasn’t been as in-depth as I’d like, but pretty much everything I’ve seen supports the smart-and-knows-her-shit theme. Her recent blog post, Project Based Writing, came about in response to my ranting about writing advice last week. Charlotte isn’t a write-every-day-and-hit-2.5k writer either, but her discussion of the issue offers up an interesting alternative. Here’s a snippet: Engineering work is often project-based – a well-defined “deliverable” by a certain date: a tunnel, a bridge, a rocket. And since, to my mind, a piece of writing (a novel, story, blog, whatever) is a fairly clearly

PeterMBall 27/05/2013
Works in Progress

Novella Diary, Claw, Day Twenty-Two

Context: Solid writing sessions this morning, charging towards the end of a specific scene. Stuck now, ’cause there’s a multiplicity of things that could come next, and they all seem to be leading me off into an expansive approach to the narrative that’ll lead me into writing a novel. I am not writing a novel. Which is why I spent 51 minutes messing around with the opening part of the next scene and wrote pretty much nothing; I’m about to engage the Kress protocol and go back into the previous scene to chance something and see how if affects the narrative. I need to be bounced off into a new direction. Session 22.1 (7:56 AM – 8:24 AM) Word Count: 610 Session 22.2 (8:36 AM – 8:50 AM) Word Count: 385 Session 22.3 (8:03 PM – 8:54 PM) Word Count: 191 Total Daily Writing Time: 1 hour, 33 minutes Daily Word Count Total: 1,186 Total Manuscript Writing Time: 22 hours, 4 minutes

PeterMBall 22/05/2013
Works in Progress

Novella Diary, Claw, Day Twenty-One

Novella Diary, Claw, Day Twenty-One So last night I stayed up late, writing a moderately detail plan for the scene I wanted to get done this morning. It was a pretty good plan. Laid out a lot of stuff. This morning I woke up and wrote a completely difference scene. Potentially invalidating all the stuff I’d planned. This is why I’m not, by inclination or any real practical process, a plotter. Session 21.1 (7:18: AM -7:28 AM) Word Count: 107 Session 21.2 (8:03 AM -8:23 AM) Word Count: 470 Session 21.3 (8:35 AM – 8:57 AM) Word Count: 542 Total Daily Writing Time: 52 minutes Daily Word Count Total: 1,119 Total Manuscript Writing Time: 20 hours, 31 minutes Total Manuscript Word Count: 16,283

PeterMBall 21/05/2013
Works in Progress

Novella Diary, Claw, Day Twenty

Write club. Which, if you’ve been following this diary for a stretch, should give you some context for what’s about to happen. I spent the first hour catching up with Angela and hearing all the latest from the Aurealis Awards in Sydney, and the second stretch finishing up my WQ article in preparation for submitting it later tonight. With that done, it’s time to dig into some words. Session 20.1 (12:50 PM – 1:12 PM ) Word Count: 275 Session 20.2 (1:28 PM – 1:37 PM) Word Count: 296 Session 20.3 (8:48 PM – 9:33 PM) Word Count: 599 So, none of that went terribly well. This represents tree attempts at the same scene. Finally seem to have hit it, albeit not in a form that I’m happy with. Taking a short break before returning and trying to clock up another four hundred words, just so I can get back into the 1k a day habit. Session 20.4 (9:49 PM

PeterMBall 21/05/2013
Works in Progress

Novella Diary: Looking for some Feedback

I started May with this bright idea that I’d get Claw all neatly wrapped up inside of a month, which is one of the reasons it seemed like a prime candidate for tracking the process in front of a crowd. In terms of the words-on-the-page level, my assessment of the time it’d take was pretty accurate; even with a handful of dead days, working on other projects, I’ve still clocked up about twenty thousand words in as many days. Sure, a whole lot of these have been cut out of the manuscript, but that’s always been part of my process. I’m a pantser, and one of the realities of that is writing far more than you ever release out into the wild. My big problem is me: I’m rusty. My ability to gauge how long things take is at least three years out of date, predicated on having scads of free time, and I’ve written far less than usual. The novella

PeterMBall 20/05/2013

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