Peter M. Ball's Blog

I’ve been banging on about writing and infrastructure for a while on this journal, but I’ve recently found a fantastic metaphor for the importance of your set-up. 

As I’ve mentioned a few times, we recently moved house, trading our tiny one-bedroom flat for a two-bedroom, two-story townhouse. It’s been a considerable amount of work to move in—and the job’s still not done—but we’re already seeing the impact of our new home on our step counts.

My spouse and I both wear health trackers to log our daily steps and sleep, although we’ve never been diligent about hitting the 10,000 steps a day goal (which is, itself, less a health thing than a marketing gimmick from one of the earliest wearable step trackers). We mostly want to know how well we’ve slept and how much we’ve done, not least because my wife has some chronic health issues that mean overdoing it will lead to a pretty major crash-out.

Since we moved, both of us have noticed that things have changed. 

THE POWER OF INCIDENTAL STEPS

In the old place, it was rare that I would do over 6,000 steps a day. Often, on a heavy writing or meeting day, my steps would sit under 3,000 until I forced myself to leave the house and go for a walk. I didn’t think much of it after living in my flat for a decade. Getting steps meant setting aside time to physically leave the house and go for a walk. 

I didn’t consider the implications of where we lived on this mindset, but it makes sense. When it’s only twenty-six steps from your bathroom to your office, racking up a step count is hard.

In the new place, on a “non-moving” day when we’re simply pottering around the house or going to work, it’s rare that I’m doing less than 8000 steps a day. More often, I’m hitting 10k just before dinner. This is partially a function of leaving the house for work — the new job definitely dragged my step count up when I started — but also just the fact that it takes more steps to get around our new home. Going up and down stairs also adds up.

Through the simple act of getting up and making coffee in the morning, I’ve moved more than I would have in half a day at the old place. Going to the bathroom requires twice as many steps. It’s small, but when you do a few extra steps every time you move around the house, they add up fast.

Even better than the space inside the house is our proximity to other locations. The closest shops are an eight-minute walk away. Lots of our friends and family live within a twenty minutes walk. There’s great takeaway just around the corner. My wife’s new favourite microbrewery is five minutes down the street. Multiple bus and train routes are accessible within a ten-minute stroll. 

So we don’t just walk around our house more—we walk everywhere a lot more. Without setting out to increase our step count, the size and location of our house set us up to do more without realising it. 

Which brings us to writing. 

STOP LOOKING FOR EXTRA HOURS TO WRITE

Most writers, when faced with a desire to write more, go in search of more hours in which they can devote to writing. They lament giving their time to a day job that steals them away from their projects, or wish for an extra day crammed into the week that they can devote to writing. Me, I long for the cash to pay someone to clean my house, which will free up all the time I devote to doing (or avoiding) chores.

Problem is, we rarely have extra hours in our day. Finding an extra hour—let alone several hours—often means giving up other things. Sometimes those trade-offs seem easy—I’ll happily give up an hour of social media or TV a day in order to write—but it’s harder than it seems. That TV time is where you hang out with your family. Social media connects you to friends you don’t see as often as you’d like. Giving them up means you need other ways of feeding your need to connect with your spouse, your kids, and your peers.

Finding extra hours is hard, which is why I often talk to new writers about the power of just a few extra minutes. Squeezing fifteen minutes of writing into your morning routine doesn’t feel like it will have the impact of an extra hour of writing a day, but a) a spare fifteen minutes is easier to find, and b) you’re more likely to do those fifteen minutes consistently while you’re finding your groove.

And fifteen minutes you don consistently do over the course of a week is worth more to you than an extra hour you’ll only do oncea week.

SHORT BURST WRITING

Mystery author James Scott Bell often talks about the “Nifty 350” in his writing guides—a habit where he encourages people to write 350 words first thing in the morning, before they start their day in earnest. I scoffed the first time I encountered the suggestion — I wanted to get up and write 3000 words, not 350 — but the impact when I finally tried it was significant. A small burst of writing—little more than a paragraph—set my mindset and made it easier to get back to the keyboard throughout the day.

When I found myself in situations where that was possible, I went smaller: write a single beat of a scene on an index card while catching the train to work in the morning. Rarely over 150 words, yet it soon added up into a flash fiction every week, then full-length stories as one eight-minute writing burst made it easier to find another with minutes, then twelve, then twenty.

We like to think we’ll set a goal, then take action, but action guides our goals and mindset far more than we’d think. When you use short bursts of time—eight minutes here, fifteen minutes there—it doesn’t take long before other brief windows open up. Eight minutes on a morning commute soon led to sixteen minutes a day as I started writing on the ride home. Then thirty-two minutes, as I used the gap at the end of my lunch break.

SETTING YOURSELF UP FOR SHORT SPRINTS

These days, the bulk of my writing happens on my commute. Eighteen minutes on a train. Twenty-six minutes on a bus. Eight-to-fifteen minutes here and there as I sit on a platform. Another short stint during my lunch break. Doesn’t feel like a lot, but it often nets me a thousand words in a space I would otherwise spend staring at my phone. The days I write least are the two days a week when I drive to work after giving my wife a lift to their office. 

Life is full of incidental gaps where writing could happen. We’ve just trained ourselves, as a culture, to see those little gaps of time as not terribly valuable because they don’t fit the idealised version of how a writer “should” work.

Sometimes seizing these moments means setting yourself up to do so. In the past, that’s meant working on index cards rather than notebooks or computers. They were small enough to be portable, and easily braced against a moleskin or wall if I couldn’t get a seat on the train. These days, I use a laptop because buses aren’t as conducive to neat handwriting as trains are, but I’ve still done the hard yards of figuring out how to make writing in those gaps as easy as possible.

I’ve bought new laptop bags that’s easy to fill open, so I don’t need to rummage through a backpack. I’ve also worked out how to keep the bag light, so I don’t feel weighed down and tired when carting it about. More importantly, I figured out where I’d keep my phone that wasn’t my pocket. Training myself out of checking social media when there’s a gap in the schedule is a big part of filling the gap with writing. 

I’m not alone in this. Other writers invest in tools like steering wheel desks, which allow them to write in the car while waiting for kids to emerge from sports practice or music lessons. Or they carry notebooks. Or they narrate stories into a voice-to-text program while driving to work. 

The trick here isn’t to look for big chunks of time, but to look for the small gaps in your schedule that your life and routine already provide you, then asking yourself if you can make use of those incidental moments to fit some writing in.

A QUICK EXERCISE

These days, folks aren’t really surprised to learn that their phone takes up more time than they think. Smartphones have been around for twenty years now, and we’re increasingly pondering our relationship with them (to say nothing of the periodic craze for going offline).

I’m not anti-phone — mine is incredibly useful — but there’s often an exercise I recommend to people who are trying to find incidental writing time. Secure a small notebook or stack of index cards to the front of your phone with a rubber band, so you physically have to remove an analogue writing tool from the phone in order to use it. When you reach for the phone to kill time, try to write a few sentences in your notebook or card before you thumb in your passcode and start the doom scroll.

Putting analogue writing tools in front of your screen adds a point of resistance to break the habit. Even if you don’t write anything, this exercise makes you conscious of just how many short bursts of time there are where you brain goes looking for distraction.

But if you do write — even if it’s only a handful of times — it’s getting you words you wouldn’t otherwise do. If you do it consistently and reach for you phone as often as most people do, you might be surprised to find yourself writing a couple of hundred extra words or more. 

Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:

Patronage: Want to ask me questions directly and be part of a great writing community? Join the GenrePunk Ninja Patreon!

Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.

Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.

The post What Moving House Reminded Me About Getting My Writing Done appeared first on Peter M. Ball.

The marketing plan for many new writers — including me, way back when — seems to be a weird extension of the Field of Dreams philosophy: if we publish it, readers will come. Good books find their audience. 

Readers believe this too, although they rarely articulate it that way. And it’s not entirely wrong, because reading is a social activity, even if it’s a rather solitary one. Books that get talked about get read, and if they’re talked about enough they become a cultural phenomenon. 

It’s one reason that bookstores and publishers are so enamoured of BookTok at the present moment, where conversations about books can take off fast. 

It’s also the reason reviews are so powerful, and being placed in certain review outlets (especially the ones who are seen to drive conversation) is such a big part of the marketing plan for traditionally published books.

The problem is, it’s hard to manufacture that conversation. There are steps writers can take to encourage it, but you can’t make it happen.

And so the fundamental belief that good books find their audience feels true, even if it means the converse side of the coin — that books that don’t find their audience aren’t good — is going to haunt far more writers in the long run.

Over the years, I’ve met with a lot of writers who lament the fact that “traditional” publishing doesn’t do any marketing. 

I don’t disagree with that statement, but I think it overlooks what old-school velocity publishing does well: creating a buzz about a book before it launches, and selling a good chunk of its print run in the first month.

They don’t do that by running ads or engaging in mass promotion, but by doing their best to get conversations started and whet a reader’s appetite before the release date. 

This can mean they look like they’re not doing anything, especially when viewed through the eyes of slow-build indie authors who have a very different business model (or aspiring authors who dream of getting a big push, and fear that the lack of conversation around their book means it isn’t good).

Which brings us to two of the key issues of author platform: 

1) Publishers know it can create conversation and sell books, but they didn’t always understand how. This led to a few years of authors being told to follow tactics (Blog! Run a newsletter! Be on TikTok!) because it had worked for other authors, with no one really thinking about why it worked. 

2) When new social media emerges and gets hungry for engagement, it will frequently benefit early adopters who use the platform to find new readers. As those platforms are enshittified, the later adopters are working twice as hard for half the impact, but a cargo cult forms around the tactic because everyone knows they need attention and they can’t think how else to find it.

Getting readers talking is essential to what we do as writers, but in the absence of reliable methods (and the presence of big dreams), we fall back on tools that give the illusion of control.

The Problem, As In So Many Things, Is Our Tendency to Mistake Tactics for Strategy

One of my favourite writing books—now dated, but still useful—is Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer. In it, he notes the essential problem with most writers careers.

Because writers often work organically and hate doing mechanical things like detailed novel outlines, they sometimes also shy away from creating actual lists of long-term and short-term career goals… Many writers never progress in their careers — except in a shambling, two-steps-forward-one-step-back way — because they always focus on the moment, and the moment after that. Their maps lack all kinds of details essential for finding their way toward a destination. 

I feel like this is especially true with the way writer approach platform. Ask most writers why they are on social media, and they’ll tell you they need to be there to sell books.

Ask them how their presence sells books, and they may mumble something about building a platform, but very few of them have a plan for transitioning folks from social media audience to active reader.

If you’re lucky, they can point to a tactic previously deployed (and turned into a course) by a particular writer. “Such and such used Facebook adds” or “I did this person’s course on TikTok”. 

Nevermind that the existence of a course usually means that the enshittication of the platforms nigh, and the tactic will be less effective in time.  

Writers either build around social media systems haphazardly and trust in the fates to generate the conversations and interest that eventually leads to sales, or they follow the marketing hooks of someone who is great at marketing and sells them a course.

If we step away from the immediate, tactical question of which tool to use and inst4ead focus on what we typically want from those tools, the strategy behind most author platforms is pretty easy to break down: 

Generate leads that introduce new readers to our work

Nurture those leads to turn interested readers into book buyers

Nurture those buyers to transform them into readers.

Build those readers into a community (or fandom) that generates conversations that, in turn, creates leads for more readers. 

Indie authors who have been inundated with newsletter advice might have a lightbulb go off reading that list, recognising the basic philosophy of the newsletter sales funnel. 

For everyone else, here’s how that plays out:

A writer sets up a newsletter and invites people to join said list. Often this involves offering an enticement, such as a free book, which serves as a lead magnet. This magnet will draw a small amount of attention from folks already interested in your work, but you can multiply its drawing power through tools like advertising, newsletter promos, and other marketing that puts your offer in front of fresh eyes.

Readers who join the newsletter get the free book and then hear from the writer semi-regularly (or very regularly). Often writers will establish an automatic welcome sequence, or a series of emails that go out to new subscribers, gradually introducing unfamiliar readers to the author’s works and the author themselves.

Once these readers are integrated into the newsletter readership, they’re dipped into a series of offers as details about new releases, sales and other discounts, and the occasional timely reminder of backlist titles. Some readers may not stick around after the initial few emails, but that’s fine—you’re aiming to speak to the readers who do, turning them into fans.

It’s one way of implementing the core strategy I talk about above, but not the only way. 

The same strategy is in play when writers attempt to sell books on social media (create leads by posting content people repost, gradually convince people to follow you regularly, and then direct your audience to the books you release).

Ditto the way traditional velocity publishers use reviews (create leads by giving arcs to taste-makers who have an audience, who then create leads with potential readers by reviewing about the book. If enough reviews and conversation starts, you generate buzz in the core community of readers for that genre, which then spills over to readers on the fringe and the general public. 

Same core strategy, very different tactics. Which leads us to the core question that few writers really ask: 

What tactic generates the strongest leads for your business model with the least expenditure of resources?

For some people, this might be social media. I hesitate to say it, because some folks hear that and think they’re going to be the exception to the rule, but there are routinely authors who leverage social platforms and take off. 

Often they’re there early, before the enshittification kicks in, or they figure out how to make use of a newly introduced feature or approach to the platform. Social media can also work if there’s strong, existing communities on the platform who can be enticed into checking out your work.

But if you’re a writer who doesn’t particularly enjoy social media—or, worse, a writer who easily falls down the algorithm hole and doom scrolls when you’d rather e writing—then the resource cost is probably not worth the leads your generating.

Because here’s the thing about social media, when viewed as a broad swathe: most platforms are great at generating conversation, but they’re terrible for organic lead generation. There is value to them in being the place where people gather and spend time, but much less in giving away the kind of attention that lets people off the platform.

It’s the step that lots of writers miss when they bitch about the algorithm sending their stupid, random-thought-at-two-AM tweet viral then chokes down the attention when they try to post about their books.

Which means that an organic social media presence still has a part to play in your author platform, but it’s best considered as a secondary tool. A method of nurturing readers, rather than generating leads. Social media works best with the people already interested in you, especially if they’re engaged enough to magnify your reach and repost when you do reach out to newer readers.

YOU DON’T NEED TO BE ON SOCIAL MEDIA AS A WRITER, BUT YOU SHOULD HAVE A PLAN TO GENERATE LEADS

So, the good news is that you don’t need to be on social media as a writer. The bad news is that you do need some way of generating leads and connecting with new readers, especially if you’re an indie author.

Fortunately, it’s possible to generate leads without social media. When you really think about it, social media platforms and review generation and a host of other marketing methods really revolve around borrowing someones audience. 

If Facebook was used by 200,000 daily visitors, instead of two billion, then it wouldn’t be as valuable. They have an audience of users, and marketers (authors and otherwise) want access to that audience, so they pay the toll in the farm of cold hard cash (ads) or sweat equity (organic content) in order to access these readers.

But magazines have readers. Reviewers have readers. Your local community hall has an audience, as does your local book club. Conventions and events are places where hardcore readers gather, and they’re much more likely to buy books than a hundred folks you spruik your book to on social media. 

Generating leads is basically putting yourself out there in front of audiences, and they don’t need to be large. In fact, a small, passionate group of people who are close to perfect for your book can be worth as much as a large crowd where only a handful of people might be on your wavelength. 

One of my focuses for 2026 is writing and submitting short faction to magazine markets, because a) those folks have audiences who are predisposed to like what I do, and b) has secondary effects beyond finding new readers (I get paid, I’ve created stories that can now be collected into books).

Is it guaranteed to work? Not at all. I could invest a whole lot of time into writing some stories, and its possible none of them will be picked up by an editor. That’s always a risk, but it’s mitigated by the fact I can always use stories in other ways (lead magnets for newsletter promos, collections, free giveaways to nurture my existing readers).

That, for me, is the key of those options. It’s considerably harder to re-use a less-than-successful social media post in the same way (although not impossible — having a second life for popular social media posts is pretty much the modus operandi of my mech store).

Stories aren’t the only outreach I’m doing. Blogging is a method of lead generation too—slower, I’ll grant, but occasionally more useful as years of people linking to various blog posts have shown. I’ll be making use of newsletter swaps. As we get towards the second half of the year, and the expenditures of 2025 are paid off, I’ll even start getting back to paid lead generation in the form of advertising.

All of them take less effort than “being on social media,” and typically offer more bang for my back in terms of the time I invest in doing these things versus the number of readers they actually attract.

There’s nothing wrong with making your lead generation an online feed, so long as you’re conscious of what you want your online presence to do and you’ve got the time and resources to invest in it.

It’s not what I’d recommend, outside of riding the new user wave of the occasional platform, but every writer finds their own path.

What’s important is remembering that social media is a tactic, not the entirety of the strategy. If you’re not enjoying being on Facebook, Threads, TikTok, or whatever the lastest site is—or, worse, you’re discovering that it eats into your writing time—there are other methods of generating leads that can be just as effective.

You just need to think strategically, and find the tactic that works best for you.

Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:

Patronage: Want to ask me questions directly and be part of a great writing community? Join the GenrePunk Ninja Patreon!

Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.

Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.

The post You Don’t Need Social Media To Sell Books appeared first on Peter M. Ball.

To the shock of absolutely no-one, I was considerably less productive on the writing front than expected over the holidays.

I last wrote on my last full day at work two weeks ago, and I’m picking this draft up on the 5th of January (coincidentally, my first day on a bus since moving house in late December).

The version you are reading now didn’t actually get finished until the end of January, three weeks after I thought I’d figure out the final draft. Things, my friends, did not go to plan.

Which shouldn’t surprise any writer who has gone through a holiday season more than once.

I’ve touched base with many writer friends over the last few weeks, and “less than expected” is a pretty common refrain when talking about their holidays.

Very few folks actually planned to do nothing over December and January — writers are exceptionally bad at taking weekends off, let alone extended breaks — but no-one seemed to have the knock-it-out-of-the-park kind of holiday season they’d hoped for.

If you’ve thought something similar, let us talk about why the holidays are hard on writers and the December/January period is not as effective as we’d hoped. 

1) OUR PRIORITIES ARE NOT WHAT WE THINK THEY ARE

When I sit down with new writers I mentor, one of the first things I get them to do is build a priority pyramid with some index cards. I want them to physically move around their commitments and ambitious and create a hierarchy because sometimes we all need to see that writing is not our immediate priority. 

Sometimes, it’s not even our third or fourth most important thing on our list.

This is important because the social narrative around writing and creativity makes it seem like it must be an all-consuming thing. The first and most important priority in your life. To do otherwise is to risk being seen as gasp an amateur, or even someone who doesn’t take their creative practice seriously.

When that narrative gets its hooks into you, it’s easy to feel guilty about taking a day off or putting Christmas shopping ahead of getting your word count done. It’s easy to feel like your failure to be writing all the time is responsible for any lack of success you’re feeling, and things would be better if you just dropped every other commitment in your life and wrote to the point of burn-out twenty-four seven.

This narrative sucks on its own, but when you combine it with the social narratives around Christmas, which tells us family and togetherness should also be your top priority and you’re a bad person if you don’t get into the holiday spirit….

Well, the conflicting messages can be a source of anxiety if you don’t examine them. I know from experience that writing is often in the top five things that I care about, but I also know what it’s not more important than. My wife trumps writing. So do my family and my cats, and—often—my friends. 

I can maintain a writing routine steady against things like day jobs, but I will down tools in a heartbeat to manage a crisis related to any of the above.

Even beyond that, priorities are flexible and contextual. Moving came with a deadline, made life better for some of my top priorities (my wife and cats), and required a shit ton of effort and attention. It outranked almost everything else while we were transporting furniture (even then; we ditched moving for a few hours to take a cat to the emergency vet when she got a bloody nose and we couldn’t determine the source).

Moving trumps writing, and even a lot of Christmas commitments, over the last two weeks. It will trumped a lot more through to the end of January, when we got the last of our stuff out of the old place. Preparing the old flat for someone else to inhabit will probably kick my writing routine in the teeth a few times through February as well.

And that’s okay. 

I’m knowingly setting writing aside in order to get the moving done, knowing that it will improve a whole lot of other things and, ultimately, open up more opportunities to write than I’ve had in the past.

It’s surprisingly easy for us to lose track of what’s really got our attention, which is why I use tools like priority pyramids and regularly journaling to see what’s on my mind and what I’m really focused on. It’s ever-changing and far more malleable than many folks think, and the end-of-year holiday season hits harder than most. 

2) WE LOSE OUR KEYSTONE HABITS

Like many folks, habit and routine sustain my writing process. I write when I get on a bus these days, and it feels weird when I can’t. Getting to that point has been a process, but I focused on it because I’d identified my commute as the window with time for writing. 

I used to write first thing after getting up, or when I got home from work. Other times, I set alarms that let me know it was time to begin. Comics writer Kelly Sue Demonic used to talk about lighting a candle in her office when she started work, then blowing it out when she finished. A simple ritual that trained her brain to be “on” at the start of a writing day, and turn “off” the narrative instincts when it was time to shut down.

There’s a lot of books about habit formation out there these days, and much of it talks about the way we string unconscious, habitual actions together.

If we drive to work on the same roads every morning, eventually the route becomes muscle memory. If we write every day after getting home from work, eventually we don’t have to think about writing—it will just become a thing we do after walking through the door.

But habits acrette over time: they all have a trigger, and if you remove that trigger, the habitual behaviour needs to be replaced by conscious effort. Encounter road work on your usual route to work, forcing you to find an alternate way in, becomes an annoyance because you have to think about something that used to be routine. 

Sitting down to write without the trigger of coming home (or stepping onto a bus, or lighting a candle, or setting a pomodoro timer) takes more cognitive energy. We have to think about writing rather than simply doing it because that’s when the writing gets done. Instead of sitting down to write because we encontered the trigger that said hey, it’s writing time, we have to physically coax ourselves to the keyboard and remind ourselves that writing needs to be done.

That’s harder.

It takes more energy.

And holidays often break our routines in messy ways. 

Not only are the rituals and habits around getting to work gone, but we’re packing new things into our time. Exceptions to the norm become the norm. Habits don’t stand a chance.

The trick here isn’t lamenting what didn’t get done—it’s about looking at what habits you need to re-establish (or build from scratch) now things are returning to ‘normal’.

3) WE’RE ALMOST NEVER A FULLY OPERATIONAL DEATH STAR ANYWAY

Another truism of many writers: we think we can do more than we actually can. I often plan out my year under the assumption that I’ll write 600,000 words—a perfectly feasible amount if you looked at my “good” writing weeks and extrapolated outwards. 

In practice, I can write about 300,000 words a year because the “good” writing days are not common. I estimate based on optimal conditions, but in practice conditions are never perfect. I’ve got the occasional bout of rocky mental health or exhaustion, courtesy of my sleep condition. Or I’ll need to cover household duties when my partner’s chronic illness kicks in and takes them out of commission. 

There’s a trick I’ve been using for years, originally pulled from Maggie Stiefvater’s late, lamented Tumblr. I start my day by assigning myself a “percentage of optimal” score, with 100% being in a state that feels like I’m firing on all cylinders and 10% being “barely functional”. I then set my expectations against that percentage – for example, if I think an optimal day is 2000 words, a 40% day would be 800.

After a few years of tracking how I feel in the morning, I usually wake up feeling somewhere between 40 and 60 percent. It’s a damn good week if I find myself in the seventy to eighty percent band more than once. 

I’m almost never 100%. I will never be a fully operational Death Star. 

When I sit down to plan out projects with mentee, I always ask them what they think a “reasonable” amount of time is to finish their project. Then I tell them to double it when we lay out our plans, because things will never move as fast as you think. 

We’re almost never a fully operational Death Star, which is perfectly fine. Even a half-built Death Star is dangerous as fuck (and, hopefully, you’re using your Death Star plans for something more productive than blowing up planets and terrorising the galaxy).

Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:

Patronage: Want to ask me questions directly and be part of a great writing community? Join the GenrePunk Ninja Patreon!

Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.

Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.

The post I Am Not A Fully Operational Death Star appeared first on Peter M. Ball.

“Give me a lever long enough and I will move the earth.”

This quote from Archimedes bounces around the internet from time to time, highlighting the power of leverage. It’s been stuck in my head for over two decades now, ever since Commander Sheridan quoted it while escaping from an alien prison in a Season 5 episode of Babylon 5 with the power of a lever and sheer, protagonists gumption.

But here’s the thing: it’s wrong.

The full quote is, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

Thing is, the full quote isn’t as poetic as the first version. It lacks clear imagery and rhythm, and the poet in me recognises such things are a hindrance to recurring repetition.

But make no mistake: the fulcrum is important. Leverage without a firm pivot point to work against is weak. The fulcrum provides the power. 

I’ve got an interest in leverage, as long-time readers will know. Thompson’s five levers that move the publishing industry are pretty foundational to my thinking and planning as a writer and publisher, and help me figure out what moves to make as I pursue my goals.

Increasingly, though, I’ve pondered the other half of the equation. If the five levers can help you get things done, what is the fulcrum you leverage against in order to generate greater effects?

AN UNCERTAIN ERA

Personally, if 2025 has a theme, it would be uncertainty. The year started with some pretty epic storms that revealed a leak in our wall and a thick layer of mould beneath our carpet. We contacted our insurance and the body corporate, and figured we’d sort things out in short order.

Then it was still there when the cyclone hit Brisbane in March. Still there in June, when we originally planned to move out. It was still there in October, when our insurances started wondering why we hadn’t replaced our carpet yet. 

It’s still there today, as I wait for a team to come do a flood test on the wall to figure out where the leak is, in the hopes we can get this fixed before the 2026 storm season begins in earnest.

It’s a precarious way to live, and I haven’t enjoyed it.

2025 was also my third year of freelancing, and the year I decided it was time to wrap up freelancing and get a “real” job again. Cashflow was irregular throughout the year. At least twice, I put serious thought into quitting the whole publishing malarkey and just doing something less stressful (in the end, that’s what sent me back to work with a regular paycheck).

I took solace in the knowledge we were delaying our moving plans rather than cancelling — seven years in a one-bedroom apartment is just a little too long — but it took months to work out exactly when it was going to happen. At first, we thought late December. Then early January. Then late January.

It’s been an interesting year in a lot of ways, because I had a considerable number of things I could leverage to get things done. A lot of time, for example, which is an underrated resource for a writer. A lot of knowledge that I’d built up over the last few years. Some really outstanding books pitched through various contacts.

And yet, I did nothing. I had the leverage, but the sheer amount of uncertainty meant there was no fulcrum. No firm place against which I could apply the leverage and generate a greater response for my efforts.

The entire year became a tedious struggle. Everything ground to a halt as more and more uncertainty piled on top of me. 

Then…the move went from being uncertain to certain. It’s happening in about six days, on shorter notice than we thought. We’re ready, but not ready, if that makes sense. Cramming a six-week plan into two weeks is stressful.

And within the space of twenty-four hours, I was acting. Not just on the move stuff, but on publishing and writing gigs. That surprised me, given everything else going on.

Moving on short notice sucks, but having a fixed moving date provided me with a necessary fulcrum. Instead of having dozens of plans, based on how certain things happened, I had one sure thing to build around, and all the other decisions became easier. 

My spouse and I have never moved house together. We’re pretty sure it’s going to be an unpleasant experience given our respective responses to stress. 

But we’re also crazy excited about eager to get into the new place. In fact, despite all the stress, it’s the happiest I’ve been all year. 

YOU NEED A FULCRUM

In psychology, there’s a concept dubbed the locus of control — AKA your inherent belief in how much you control events versus ceding control to external factors beyond your influence like luck, fate, or the decisions of other people. It describes the feeling of agency you have over your own life, and having a sense of control is often linked with motivation, happiness, and health.

So it’s no wonder that the simple fact of having a move date has made me so happy, because we’re now able to make decisions and control what’s happening around the move. We may have stared down the barrel of moving in two weeks, rather than eight, but the energy with which we’re taking the challenge is considerable.

What’s amazing is the speed with which having the date also affected non-moving things. I started sending emails again after being quiet for the past few months. Newsletters got written. GenrePunk ninja is picking up speed again. So are various writing and publishing projects. 

Living with a sense of uncertainty, and feeling like there was very little I could do to influence things, actually seeped into every aspect of my life. Having certainty, in turn, has given me a lot of energy that bleeds into other areas.

Which brings our core theme of writing and publishing, and what this move reminds me of. 

Leverage is good, but in a lot of ways your locus of control is the fulcrum against which you apply the levers you’ve got access to. 

All of this has got me thinking about what my current fulcrum is, and whether it’s really serving me.

THE POWER OF KNOWING THE NEXT STEP

I’d been a working writer for about ten years before I started producing science fiction and fantasy stories. Not out of a lack of interest—I’d always loved the genre—but simply because I couldn’t figure out what to do with the stories afterwards. 

I got my start in the self-addressed stamped envelope era, submitting printed stories via post. I ended up working in areas other than fiction because, frankly, they embraced digital submissions earlier than fiction magazines did. As an Australian, there were only two local publications I could track down, and one of them focused on comedic SF and fantasy. I’d write the occasional story, but the lack of opportunity kind of thwarted my ambition.

Then, in 2007, Angela Slatter introduced me to the late, lamented Ralan.com right as the era of digital submissions arrived in the spec fic space. Within a few years, I’d clocked up a pretty decent run of publications, simply because writing stories now meant there was a statistically greater chance that other people would read them.

It shifted my locus of control. Prior to Ralan, I believed that writing short stories wasn’t entirely worth it, because I would submit to a small pool of publications (one of which was really not interested in my brand of spec fic). Now, there were huge lists of places to submit, and the limits of location gave way to a sense of excitement as I realised I controlled how much I wrote and submitted.

So, I started writing stories. A lot of them. And I submitted a lot (at one point, I tried for 100 submissions mailed out a year, even if all 100 resulted in a rejection). I moved from a place where I felt like I had control over my career, and every publication rewarded those efforts.

I always loved stories, but I couldn’t get into writing them and submitting them until I knew the next steps. Doing all the work of figuring out how to write a good story, only to then find myself in yet more unfamiliar terrain, didn’t excite me.

Brains are fundamentally lazy, you know? They don’t like uncertainty.

PICKING YOUR “CERTAINTY POINT” WHEN STUCK

I’m not the only writer who has experienced this feeling. When mentoring, when people are truly stuck on a project, I often ask about what they’re planning to do after it’s done.. If they don’t know—and most don’t—I recommend picking a target. Sometimes it’s a magazine they’ll keep submitting to, one story after another. Sometimes it’s a single anthology with an upcoming deadline. If they’re a novel writer, I get them to sit down and create the shortlist of agents/publishers to submit to. If they’re an indie, I’ll get them to pick a publishing rhythm (one or two books a year, new releases every quarter, one book a month).

What they choose doesn’t matter. What we’re doing is clarifying that finishing doesn’t become synonymous with figuring out what to do next. We’re giving them a certain next step. Knowing that you’ll be submitting somewhere gives you a destination to head towards. It helps you make both creative and practical decisions about your work, because there’s a finite amount of time to work towards.

Of course, you have no real control over the publication of your work (unless you’re going indie), but aiming for it means the work gets finished, and even if the original destination says no, you can keep on submitting afterwards (sometimes it takes a lot of submission to get a yes).

Meanwhile, you’re freed up to work on the next thing. And if the place you wrote for says no, you’ve at least got finished work that can be submitted elsewhere and open up new opportunities.

MY FAVOURITE FULCRUM: THE SHIPPING RHYTHM

My preferred Fulcrum sits at the intersection of two ideas.

The first comes from Thomas Woll’s Publishing For Profit: Successful Bottom-Line Management for Book Publishers. It’s a dry-but-useful book on setting up a traditional velocity publisher that offers a really interesting insight:

“Whatever your market, you must make sure your (publishing) program runs on a consistent schedule so everyone knows what’s going and when it’s coming. There must be consistency to the commitment…” (4). He alludes to an often-overlooked aspect of writing and publishing, where predictability is an asset. If you have books coming out at the same time every year — even if you’re only releasing 2 a year — then people (booksellers, readers, reviewers, etc) learn to look for your titles.

The second comes from Seth Goddin, in his book The Practice:

When we stop worrying about whether we’ve done it perfectly, we can focus on the process instead. Saturday Night Live doesn’t go on at 11:30 p.m. because it’s ready. It goes on because it’s 11:30. We don’t ship because we’re creative. We’re creative because we ship. 

This is why my advice for struggling writers is, essentially, giving yourself a shipping date. Getting into the habit of shipping work is powerful. It’s one reason why, when my time got very limited a few years back, I devoted my efforts to publishing a short story a week through the Patreon. Often—to borrow Godin’s phrase—the stories went live because it was 11 AM on a Saturday rather than because I thought they were ready, which meant there were a few stories I was uncertain about (spoiler alert: they were often the ones people responded to the most)

FOCUS ON WHAT’S IN YOUR CONTROL

The most useful advice I’ve ever been given, as a writer, is: focus on things you can control.

Part of the problem with writing through 2025 was the simple fact that I was angry at capitalism and its manifestations. It felt like nothing I was doing through the year was getting meaningful results, and very little was in my control. All I wanted to do was run away from home and find a nice quiet corner of the world to write in, but my publishing business was hemorrhaging money and everything I finished felt like a reason to sink deeper and deeper into debt.

A thing we don’t talk about often enough in writing: publishing is a space where it’s easy to feel helpless—to see the locus of control as fundamentally external and outside your influence. The correlation between the folks I know who work freelance and folks who experience significant bouts of anxiety is high. 

My locus of control was fundamentally external this year. I focused on the things I couldn’t influence. I told myself that there was no straightforward solution to my problems, not least because my last few stints with full-time work had not been pleasant experiences.

What I’d forgotten — what I could have done, but didn’t — is the power of establishing a shipping rhythm with my work. Keeping the flow of submissions going to one short story marketing; locking in on the posting rhythm for this pattern; setting my eyes on a specific submission opportunity for longer works and aiming to hit it. 

Maintaining a rhythm isn’t easy. Sometimes, maintaining it means letting go of work that isn’t as polished as you’d like. It means you’ll occasionally do something stupid in public. It means committing to the rhythm in suboptimal circumstances (like this week and next, when the move is in full flight)

The rhythm has perks. For instance, re-committing to the GenrePunk rhythm allowed me to recognise a fundamental mistake in my process. I used to post entries every Wednesday because it was the best fit for my freelance schedule — I had very little mentoring work on Wednesdays, and lots of time to edit entries and schedule the post.

Increasingly, with the day job, Wednesdays are my busy days where I have very few spoons. I kept missing my posting window, despite acknowledging that it was important to me in every prep week. Moving my weekly entry to the weekend made things much easier. 

So I’m trailing Sundays for my weekly post. Not forever, but as a short-term focus. A rhythm for a month. A small experiment to see how it works and where the resistance points are.

The key thing for me is getting a rhythm in place. 

Establishing a shipping rhythm doesn’t have to be your creative fulcrum. It’s what works for me because the things I mechanics and strategy of putting things out into the world. I like the act of releasing ideas and designing covers and shaping work for an audience. I enjoy contributing to my community of readers and fellow writers.

Your fulcrum — you firm anchor point against which you apply your leverage — could be something else. A commitment to a process. A daily word count. Dedication to finishing a specific project. Writing to amuse a small groups of readers.

 The important part isn’t what serves as your fulcrum, but that it’s something within your control. You don’t have to rely on other people to make it happen.

Leverage is often generated by the interplay of agents within the publishing field — you as the writer, yes, but also publishers and editors and reviewers and bookstores and fans and everything else. You can use it to great effect, but chunks of it aren’t entirely under your control.

The fulcrum — the shipping rhythm – is entirely under your purview, and it often works because work that doesn’t end up where you thought finds homes elsewhere instead. The important part isn’t landing at the publication; it’s getting things ready and keeping them out in the world until they find their readership.

Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:

Patronage: Want to ask me questions directly and be part of a great writing community? Join the GenrePunk Ninja Patreon!

Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.

Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.

The post Leverage Needs A Fulcrum: How Do You Build Certainty Into Your Writing Practice? appeared first on Peter M. Ball.

I’m writing today’s entry from a cramped bus seat on my way to work, grabbing fifteen minutes of writing time out of the otherwise dreary stretch between my house and the office. It’s taken me a few weeks to get to this point. For the first week, I tried my old trick of writing on notecards during my commute. That proved ineffective because buses are a very different mode of transport to trains.

For the next week, I busted out my laptop and brought it along each day. Unfortunately, it didn’t get used. My old laptop bag was for a different phase of my life, where I had plenty of writing time and often travelled by car or train. That was fine for the last eight years, but isn’t the writing season I’m in. Using it on a train was awkward because it’s basically a backpack, and pulling out a laptop meant digging through my lunch, notebooks, and other paraphernalia.

So, I’ve been pondering the problem since I started the new job five weeks ago, and two weeks ago I bought a new laptop bag. Specifically, this bag. Smaller, lighter, easy to open. I can basically rest it on my lap and unzip it, and the laptop is ready to work on. It’s a small but essential infrastructure change that opened up opportunities to work, and it only cost me twenty bucks. 

Instantly, I have about 30 minutes of extra writing every day, so long as I can get a seat on my bus (about 85% of the time).

Between the commute and the hour lunch break at work, I’ve arrived at a satisfactory answer of when do I write rough drafts while working? An hour and a half is usually enough to get me a decent stretch wf words each weekday.

Which means I focus on the next problem: when do I edit? Rewrite? When do I get these posts live? When do I design book covers?

Important problems, to be sure, but not essential until I had the question of when do I write sorted out. 

WRITERS ARE PROBLEM SOLVERS

It would be easy to turn my current morning writing routine into a pretty cliché piece of advice about finding the time to write if you really want to be a writer. It’s not the first time I’ve had to do this kind of experiment. Back when I worked long hours for a writers festival, my available writing time was basically an eight-minute commute every morning, before the rigours of the day burned me out. It seemed an inconsequential amount of time to devote to writing, but I did it, and actually wrote a story a week for my patron for the space of twelve months.

But that’s not what I’m banging on about here. There’s plenty of times in my life where I’ve found the time to write like this, but just as many where I’ve let writing slide. Sometimes, writing isn’t that big of a priority. We’re not supposed to say that out loud as creative types, but it’s absolutely true. 

What I want to focus on is a very different lesson: solve one problem at a time. (Switching to my lunch break here, if you’re curious about what a 15-minute commute generates on the writing front)

Writers aren’t encouraged to think of themselves as “problem solvers,” but I’d argue that almost everything in writing is just solving one problem after another. What is figuring out the opening of a story but asking yourself, “how do I get people interested in what’s going to happen?”, and what is an ending but asking yourself, “how do I make people care about everything’s that just happened?” and “what do I want people to feel and think right now?”

Fixing scenes? Solving one problem after another, often by asking yourself the right questions. Same with rewriting and revision (David Madden’s excellent book on editing is just a series of questions one can ask about one’s manuscript and figuring out ways to solve the problem).

So we fix problems all the time. One after the other.

But because we don’t self-identify as “problem solvers”, we don’t think to apply that approach to the rest of our lives.

SOLVING THE RIGHT PROBLEM

When the internet and author platform boomed into existence in the last nineties and turned into the “be online and do social media” advice circa 2007 or so, I used to spend time around more experienced writers who lamented the fact that new authors kept trying to solve the wrong problem.

The really days of the internet were filled with advice about building a blog or being on social media or establishing an author platform, and lots of folks rushed to follow that advice even when they didn’t have books to sell. The Q&A section at festivals, conventions, and author events became a litany of folks asking how to be online better, but when prompted to talk about their book, newer authors would admit they focused on the social media first.

They were solving the problem of finding and nurturing a readership before they had books or stories for that readership to engage with. An absolutely fine approach if you were keen on being a blogger, but very cart-before-horse if you intended to make your living writing books.

These days, I notice the same tendency among the folks I mentor and tutor. They want to rush ahead to strategies and tactics, caught up in the latest online buzz about the things writers “must” do in order to succeed.

My advice begins with a simple question: is that the problem we’re solving now, or is it a distraction?

FINE TUNING 

If you’re struggling to find time to write, then adding a social media stream to promote your books probably will not help you unless you’ve already got a massive backlist of 20 or 30 books. There is nothing you can do on social media — paid or unpaid — that doesn’t pay off ten teams better if you’ve got books for people to buy, and your limited time is better spent finishing your first series (if you’re an indie) or getting new books out (if you’re traditional).

If you’re not writing and you don’t have a deep backlist, then the far more pressing problem is how do you get writing again.

Note that I’m saying nothing about quality here. How do I write better? is a problem that’s worth tackling after you’re in the habit of getting new words on the page. How do I get these books into the hands of an audience? is a problem to solve after you’ve got polished books to put in the audience’s hands.

(My lunch break ends here, cut short because I need to leave the office)

Even within these broader questions, focusing on the right problem for right now can be important. Changing my laptop bag was an important step in getting more writing done each day, but it wasn’t the first problem on the list. Before it was writing during my lunch break and maximising the time available there. Our break room at work is busy, so I trialed working in the local food court for a bit…then realised that losing ten to fifteen minutes walking there and another ten to fifteen coming back was a lot of lost words.

From there, I tried different lunch breaks to find the period where the break room is at its most usable. After that, I kept a log of days where I didn’t write for my entire lunch break, and the things that disrupted me. Some of those were unavoidable (dealing with insurance and body corporate calls after some recent damage to our flat), but some were things I could address (feeling like I needed a pick-me-up and ducking out for a coke or coffee). Those I addressed by purchasing a vacuum-sealed mug that lets me bring coffee to work and keep it warm all morning, or by bringing a can of soft drink and bonus snack into work as my afternoon treat. 

SOLVING THE RIGHT PROBLEM

I bang on about infrastructure a lot when I talk about writing, because it’s often the invisible underpinning that guides how much we write and what we can do with the finished product. Building a readership overseas was incredibly difficult in the days before the internet, which naturally limited what I could achieve as an Australian writer. Even now, my career is shaped by issues of geography and resources: I don’t go to conventions, for instance, because Australia is vast and empty and even our local sci-fi conventions locally are expensive for me to attend from Brisbane.

This doesn’t mean that my career can’t advance, but it limits the strategies I can use to connect with readers and sell books. 

(Another morning stint. 465 words written)

Whenever someone mentions they’re having trouble writing, I start by looking at their infrastructure. Where are they writing? When are they writing? What tools are they leaning into? Where we go from there will often vary, because nobody starts the writing game with a level playing field, but those small logistical issues matter. 

I started my new working routine by trying to get writing done before I left for work, but it just didn’t work. There’s too much going on in our flat, from cats demanding food to a spouse getting ready for work, and my attention keeps fragmenting. It would have been easy to despair at how little I was getting done, but I’ve been at this a long while and I know it’s better to experiment.

Ergo, I focused on the problems one by one. Figured out when and where I could get work done, and refined those windows to let me do more.

It took a few weeks to get right, but once I did, I had a pretty consistent process I could rely upon.

TOMORROW’S PROBLEMS

Are other parts of my writing business suffering while I work this out? Absolutely! I haven’t sent a promotional newsletter in weeks, and managing the Brian Jar Press store has been a little slower than I’d like. Figuring out when to do store stuff was one of the early problems I worked on (early mornings, before I head off to work, which wasn’t being used as effectively for writing as I’d like), but others are just on a list I call “Tomorrow’s problems.”

They’re things I need to solve, but they’re not the most urgent things I need to address. They’re simply further up the Writer’s Hierarchy of Needs than I’m at right now. Much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which suggests that concepts like Self Actualisation and Community are less important when you’re struggling with lower-order needs like safety and accessible food, tomorrow’s problems are more important once I’ve got the lower foundation problems sorted.

I had them down a few weeks ago, before I started the new job, but my habits were built around freelancing and spare time. The big change in available hours moved my attention away from the higher-order issues and towards the more basic ones.

Writing new words

Making them good

Getting them out into the world.

Everything else can come after that. I need to nail down the foundation first.

THE SAME PHILOSOPHY WORKS FOR CREATIVE PROBLEMS

Incidentally, I use the same philosophy when dealing with story issues as well. I often tell my mentees that there are three phases of writing: coming up with ideas, putting them on the page, and making them good. We often think the process is linear, but it’s not. What kills many writers’ momentum is some combination of trying to ideate, write, and edit at the same time, or trying to apply the solutions of one phase when the issue is another.

I’ve written about this a bunch in the past. A few years back, when drafting my story The Rise And Fall of Darnell Royce, Cartographer, I stalled out on the draft and got log jammed for over a week. I kept trying to write new sections, but they didn’t work. I tried editing sections, and that didn’t work either. Everything kept coming out awful and disappointing.

So I stepped back and asked myself what problem I was really trying to solve, and it turned out I had an ideation problem. The solution wasn’t writing more; it was sitting back and creating a pool of concepts and ideas to pull from. Once I had the ideas, I could write the end of the story pretty easily, but coming up with them while I was at the keyboard was always going to be harder than ideating on its own. 

THE POWER OF SMALL, CUMULATIVE SOLUTIONS

Over the years, I’ve learned that the solution to problems is rarely a large change. I’ve changed my lunch break and used a different bag. Bought a sealable coffee cup that will allow me to bring coffee to work. Between them, they’ve nearly doubled my daily word count over the last three weeks, even though I’ve had a few days when things went really off the rails.

That’s the power of solving problems one by one—the effects accumulate and add up over time, while simultaneously being easier to implement than big changes. 

I’m keeping this in mind as I try to solve the editorial problems, because I often feel like editing should be big chunks of time, when in reality doing one or two fixes a day will quickly add up.

It’s hard to talk about this without sounding like I’m delving into the world of mass productivity advice, since so many books aimed at business and entrepreneurial types home in on this idea. “A cumulative 1% improvement in your productivity every week adds up to something huge” is a very common promise, and often assumes that continuous improvement is always possible and there’s no end point to the exponential curve.

I don’t want to reinforce that. I simply want to acknowledge the core truth of solving writing problems: start with the little things. 

Too often, writers get caught up in the idea that writing is big, because the cultural myth around art is that it’s all big sweeps of inspiration and dedicated perseverance.

When you focus on the small—what you can do with your time and resources, instead of what you can’t—the opportunities that open up may surprise you. 

WRAPPING UP MY SECOND LUNCH BREAK

I’m finishing today’s entry from the break room at work, having just broken a thousand words for the day (and a little over two thousand words for this entry). Two morning commutes, two short writing bursts during lunch. This is pretty solid confirmation that the new system is working for me. Momentarily distracted by some work colleagues getting literary questions wrong in their lunchtime quiz, but otherwise trucking along pretty well for a Tuesday. There’s even twenty minutes left to give this a once-over and a polish, getting ahead of the next problem on the list.

And while I’m focused on solving the main problem in front of me, I do occasionally brainstorm possible answers to later problems. We’ll be moving house in January, which means my daily commute will basically double and feature a switch from train to bus halfway through. Editing will become the train portion of my commute. Buses will be the writing portion. It may not work, but that’s being tested and iterated in a few months when we actually make the change. 

Until then, everything is theoretical. Solutions for tomorrow’s problems, which aren’t the problems of today. Right now, I’m looking to move from getting things written to getting things out into the world. Building up my writing habits and career step by step.

ADDENDUM

It’s worth noting that a lot of what I’ve been experimenting with starts with a much older experiment, where I challenged the notion that I needed big blocks of time to write. Since then, I’ve gotten much better at using the time I’ve got, rather than cursing the fact I don’t have the time I think I need.

I am, by nature, a short sprint writer. Even if you give me three straight hours to write, odds are I’ll write about three hundred words and pause, pottering about for a few minutes before figuring out what happens next and starting the next chunk of story or blog post. 

 

Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:

Patronage: Want to ask me questions directly and be part of a great writing community? Join the GenrePunk Ninja Patreon!

Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.

Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.

The post Solve One Problem At A Time appeared first on Peter M. Ball.

I spend a lot of time talking to writers about their work, whether it’s as an editor, a writing mentor, or someone who exchanges critiques with friends. Over the years, I’ve noticed that one of the most commonly used solutions I’ll offer when folks are stuck on a problem is simple:

What’s the object you can attach to this objective or goal?

Learning to use objects and objectives effectively in fiction is one of those tricks that really levelled up my writing, and it’s the thing we all overlook when in the messy process of creating a first draft.

Nine times out of ten, if a scene or story is feeling problematic or vague, it’s because the big picture goal or ambition is locked down, but there’s no way of confidently stating whether a character has achieved it.

Unfortunately, we read stories to see how characters solve problems. Having a clear sign that a problem is solved is one of the most useful things we can embed in our fiction.

OBJECTS MAKE THE ABSTRACT SPECIFIC

Transforming the abstract and intangible into the concrete and specific is a key skill for writers, and it manifests in different forms. It’s the same advice that lies at the heart of Chuck Palahniuk railing against the use of thought verbs, where he argues:

Your story will always be stronger if you just show the physical actions and details of your characters and allow your reader to do the thinking and knowing. And loving and hating. (Nuts and Bolts: “Thought” Verbs, Litreactor.com)

Similarly, objects can transform an ambiguous goal into something specific and tangible. Take, for example, a character whose long-term goal is “I want to be rich.”

Rich is a nebulous social construct, and it means different things to different people. There are people out there who believe that earning $100,000 a year is a fantastic income, and others who will decry that they earn that much and live paycheck to paycheck.

Ergo, the reader left pondering what “rich” means in this context: moving from poverty to a middle-class lifestyle? Becoming a titan of industry? Building an investment portfolio to rival Warren Buffett? Becoming your world’s equivalent of Tony Stark?

Even though your story will provide some context, the nature of wealth means there’s a sliding scale.

But look at what happens when we take that goal and attach it to a concrete action or object:

“Rich” means living in the $5 million mansion on top of McKinley Hill. The big, white-walled place that looks like a castle, which I used to stare at from the bedroom of my shitty shared bedroom as a kid.

“Rich” means having $10,000 in savings in the bank and enough money to send my kids on the trip to Disneyland they always wanted.

“Rich” means walking into the boardroom of my rival company after a final takeover and firing the board, particularly my hated father-in-law.

“Rich” means driving a cherry red Lamborghini to my fifteen-year high school reunion.

“Rich” means launching my experimental rocket, and funding a trip to Venus.

By attaching the goal to a physical thing, we immediately know what kind of rich the character is chasing, why it’s so important to them, and whether they’ve achieved it.

Does the character live in their mansion? No! Then the story isn’t over yet.

EVERYONE CAN INTERACT WITH AN OBJECT

Here’s the other advantage of attaching goals and objectives to an object: everyone can interact with it. An idea is shared by everyone without changing, but an object can be moved from person to person, and the ownership of it can motivate the character and show their progress through the story.

It’s hard to argue that someone has stopped your character from getting rich, but if their arch-nemesis buys the mansion or a hacker steals the savings buffer they’ve worked so hard to build up… well, now that characters is going to be motivated.

When they have a specific vision of what rich means attached to the object, they’ll immediately want that object back.

Similarly, you can change the object to show how a character is growing and shaping over the story. Physical objects become metaphors as they change over the course of the story. Dent a character’s Lamborghini, and we know their self-esteem is damaged. Wreck it, and we know they’re on the verge of burning out (or they’re about to learn their goal was stupid, and chase after what they need instead of what they wanted).

This interactivity can also show a character’s evolution. Take Episode VI of Star Wars, for example, when the long-term goal of “Stopping the Empire” is attached to a physical object: a small, unprotected exhaust port vulnerable to torpedoes.

The rebellion throws everything they have at the exhaust port, but technology won’t get the job done. It takes Luke Skywalker rejecting technology (turning off his targeting computer – another object serving as a stand-in for the wrong path) and trusting in the Force to actually take down a Death Star.

In doing so, he actually becomes a Jedi, worthy of the object that’s attached to that goal (the lightsaber he received in the first act of the film).

(Star Wars is often a masterclass in using objects. Consider, for example, what the Millenium Falcon means to Han and Londo, or receiving his first X-Wing means to Luke. Also Princess Leia’s iconic hairdo, the chase after Death Star plans, and the way Darth Vader’s mask represents his character growth).

SHORT TERM OBJECTS

The examples above revolve around long-term objects and objectives, but often the fix to a scene that’s not working is figuring out the short-term object the character is chasing in the moment.

For example, an abstract goal like “to get married” can be made concrete by giving the character a suitor to pursue, which in turn suggests a series of short-term goals: get a date; make it through the date without embarrassing yourself; fending off the interest of the wrong guy; making big mistakes that may alienate your paramour; showing the object of your affections that your intentions are real after pissing them off.

Each of these can have an object attached. “Get a date” might mean “get the phone number” or “use these tickets to a theatre event to coax them into going out”. Success and failure are built in – do you have the phone number? Have they agreed to the date?

Similarly, great romance stories often attach the highs and lows of a relationship to objects or information that can be shared to destabilize a relationship (or stabilize it, in turn). 

But this is not just a romance tactic. I would argue most scenes should have an object the character wants or an objective they’re trying to acquire, a short-term step on the path to the longer term goal. I often find myself distilling from goal to objective to object. For example:

“Find out who murdered my sister?” is a big, abstract goal.

“Get information from Detective Maury about my sister’s murder?” is an objective that might be at the heart of a scene – a small step towards that larger goal.

“Get Maury go give me my sister’s case file?” turns the objective into a concrete object the character is pursuing.

More importantly, attaching the objective to an object opens up tactics. If the investigator can’t convince Detective Maury to share the file or get access to it through the courts, they might break into the police station or hack the files or even smuggle the file out of the police station.

The genre and tone of the story will guide the exact actions, but the object gives us options. More importantly, it makes it clear when a scene is over, because the character has either taken possession of their object or been thwarted so badly they need to regroup and try another tactic.

OBJECTS AND STAKES

The flip side of a character’s goals are stakes – the things the character is afraid of losing, rather than the thing they’re chasing. My favourite method of figuring these comes from a workshop by Mary Robinette Kowal, who suggests thinking about the things that could happen that would really make your character feel like the worst person in the world.

The worst way to approach stakes is to treat them as the inverse of the character’s goal – if the character wants to be rich, then their stakes are not being poor. But once again, attaching these to objects can be incredibly useful.

For example, if our character chasing wealth would feel like shit if the antique watch he inherited from his grandfather was destroyed, then we immediately have an object that suggests what this character values.

The watch is a connection to family, and he feels value in protecting the one nice thing he was given as a child, and its destruction is meaningful to him.

Once again, attaching the character’s stake to an object makes it easy to motivate them and show where their character is at:

What happens if another character steals the watch?

What if the price of getting the home they always wanted is sacrificing the watch they love?

What does it mean if he shows another character the watch and tells them the story behind why it means so much?

What does it mean if he sacrifices the watch for another character’s goals?

OBJECTS MATTER

As writers, ambiguity is the enemy. We work in an in-exact art form where words suggest and shape, but never actually represent what we’re trying to describe. We manipulate and reshape the reader’s memory, and provide context to guide them towards the points and themes we’re trying to make.

There are very few problems in writing that aren’t improved by sitting down and asking how to incorporate meaningful objects into the scene, how to attach meaningful objects to the character, and how to transform goals and objectives into something tangible.

Done well, you can create metaphors and icons that last for generations. From lightsabers to Indiana Jones’ hat and whip, from the light on the end of a dock in West Egg to the myriad rings, swords, and Mithril shirts that dominate Lord of the Rings.

Objects matter to us, in stories and real life.

Deploy them at will to level up your writing.

The post Boost Your Fiction: The Power of Objects and Objectives appeared first on Peter M. Ball.

Here’s a dirty secret I rarely say out loud as a writer: I don’t want you to friend me on Facebook.

I don’t want you to follow me on Threads or Twitter or Instagram. I sure as fuck don’t give a shit if you’re following me on TikTok. 

I’m on all these places, and I’ll engage with you if they’re the only choice, but they’re not my primary focus.

As a writer, I’ve got three top tiers of engagement: I want you to subscribe to my newsletter. If that’s a no-go, the second-best choice is joining my Patreon. The third choice—just—is following my YouTube. Maybe, as a last resort, I’d taken a follow on BlueSky.

Why? Because everything listed in that first paragraph are increasingly algorithmically driven. A follow there is next to worthless to me, because the For You page or “content we think you’d like” has taken over the follower feed.

I’m interested in actual followers, who’ll hear from me regularly. Email is still an old-school follow. Patreon, for various reasons, is much the same. YouTube is algorithmic as hell these days, but at least has the Subscriptions section where you can get updates from folks directly.

And for a writer—heck, for any artist—an old-school follow is the most valuable thing there is.

I miss the old-school follow. I’d still be talking about Facebook et al. with affection if they still offered something like it.

But they don’t, even if so many writers still produce content for social media like it’s 2007.

THE MAGIC OF THE FOLLOW

The founder of Patreon, Jack Conte, spent much of 2024 giving speeches about the Death of the Follow and how it will affect creators who rely on the internet.

If you’re unfamiliar with his work, Conte is an interesting case study. Before he was the CEO of a tech platform, he was a musician who broke out on YouTube as both a solo artist and one half of Pomplamoose. If you were online in 2010, you probably encountered some of their covers (I’m still a big fan of their version of All The Single Ladies).

Conte is still a working musician on top of running Patreon, and he created Patreon to solve a problem he saw with the way YouTube was changing as the platform matured.

There’s two things writers and other creative artists typically want from social media:

We want to reach people who don’t know about us and tell them about our work.We want to build our following and keep talking to the people who like our work.

Buttons that allowed users to follow or subscribe to us on social media, Conte argues, were the revolutionary part of Web 2.0. It allowed people who liked what we did to sign up and hear from us repeatedly. It gave writers, musicians, and other artists a distribution channel that ensured future work was sent to people most likely to be receptive to it.

“The follow is not some handy feature of a social network,” Conte says. “It’s foundational architecture for human creativity and organisation… Not just reach, but a step past it. Ongoing communication, connection, a sustained relationship. Community.” (Jack Conte, Death of the Follower: SXSW 2024 Keynote)

The Follow allowed small creators to reach a dedicated group of fans and build up their profile. It allowed books to succeed that wouldn’t otherwise.

I ran pretty hot on my author platform in that era and saw its effects first-hand: small press books that sold out print runs unexpectedly; ideas that went viral because they were shared and re-shared by people who enjoyed the way I thought and wrote.

But large chunks of the internet don’t work like that anymore.

I wish it did.

Because here’s the thing: The follow is magic for creators.

It’s not so good for social media platforms.

THE ERA OF RANKING AND ALGORITHMIC FEEDS

There’s a simplicity to the old-school follow: a user says, “I’d like to see more from this user,” and then they see more. Every post is displayed on the feed as it goes live, and they can track what their favourite creators (and their friends, and their loved ones, and their favourite burger place) are doing day to day.

Here’s the problem: most people aren’t that interesting twenty-four hours of the day. Or they’re not showing up and talking about the things you love all the time.

And social media needs to be interesting. It needs to reward you with stuff you absolutely want to engage with every time you log on, because the money in social media lies in having a large user base who shows up often, giving you data and reach that can be sold to advertisers.

Facebook started messing with the feed around 2009 to 2012, moving away from a solid timeline and towards an algorithmic feed. They’d survey all the posts made by folks you followed, and feed you the ones that were getting the most engagement and interest from other people. Stuff nobody engaged with was more likely to get hidden.

Instantly, a follow became less useful. Largely because, in those nascent days of the internet, stuff that got engagement was often realising a chunk of your friends group were not who you thought (2013 was the peak era of friends engaging in comment-fights with the vague acquaintances whose racism and sexism was exposed).

Over time, Facebook got good at showing you folks you weren’t following, who were still interesting. Then it got good at showing you paid ads that held your attention and kept you on the platform. Soon you could idle away whole days engaging with vaguely interesting stuff that tapped into a part of your identity and fed it.

That shit was insidious, but effective. Great for Facebook. Less great for us. 

A few years after that, we had TikTok, which disposed of the follower feed altogether. The default there became pure algorithm—the For You page—where a constant stream of stuff you’re probably interested in rolls past in a series of six seconds videos.

And because algorithmic feeds worked, everyone adopted them. Facebook’s innovation begat similar tools on Twitter and Instagram and Threads. Suddenly, you had to pay to reach your followers, or feed a steady stream of high-engagement content into your social media.

And here’s the thing about the algorithm: it favours a small percentage of creators who reliably get traction with posts. It randomly gives attention on another subset of creators, based upon the needs of the algorithm. As Cory Doctrow notes in his essay on the Enshittification of TikTok, the platform will often artificially inflate the presence of a new users’ videos on the For You page to convince them of the platform’s value. 

Then, shit goes wrong.

Once those performers and media companies are hooked, the next phase will begin: TikTok will withdraw the “heating” that sticks their videos in front of people who never heard of them and haven’t asked to see their videos. TikTok is performing a delicate dance here: There’s only so much enshittification they can visit upon their users’ feeds, and TikTok has lots of other performers they want to give giant teddy-bears to.

Tiktok won’t just starve performers of the “free” attention by depreferencing them in the algorithm, it will actively punish them by failing to deliver their videos to the users who subscribed to them. After all, every time TikTok shows you a video you asked to see, it loses a chance to show you a video it wants you to see, because your attention is a giant teddy-bear it can give away to a performer it is wooing. (The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok, Cory Doctrow)

From there, you enter a cycle. Random bursts of attention to make it feel like the algorithm is favouring you, followed by long stretches where your reach is throttled to entice users into coughing up cash.

WHAT’S THE ACTUAL BENEFIT HERE?

Here’s my problem with the current state of social media: writers and other artists still treat it like an old-school follower platform. I’m certainly guilty of it, spending days creating month-long posting schedules to maximize the reach of my content and try to prompt engagement.

And, as ever, the problem isn’t that social media has no benefit. The fluctuating algorithmic reach is still potentially useful and can feed readers towards work. It allows you to cultivate fans over time, especially the small subset of followers who actively show up and engage with everything you post.

I’m not saying get the hell off social media, just because it’s algorithmic.

I simply started thinking about the return on investment with regard to that time, and how I could maximize it.

I want to loop back to the two goals writers typically have with social media use, mentioned at the start of this entry:

We want to reach people who aren’t familiar with our work.We want to build our following and talk to people who like our work.

Algorithmic social media is terrible at building a following and connecting you with your followers, but it has an upside: a For You page or algorithmic feed is very good at putting your content in front of people who might be interested in your work.

That has a benefit to us as writers, especially in the early days of a platform before the enshittification has really set in. TikTok in 2020 was an incredible lead generation tool, just as Facebook was in its earlier days.

My concern isn’t that it can’t do these things, but that it can’t do these things as effectively as other options.

As noted back when I looked at the capital exchanges inherent in social media, it makes more sense to run adds or use lead-generation tools like newsletter swaps that feed potential readers into a tool where they can still follow me (like a newsletter) than it does to spend six to eight hours generating posts to do the same job organically.

YOUR NEW MINDSET: DE-PLATFORM LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER

I spend a lot of time listening to other authors talk about how they use social media, and as someone who mentors other writers a lot, I spend a lot of time doing courses about how to maximize engagement on platforms and use it to drive readership.

I think it’s important to understand these platforms and use them; I just think we need to engage with a different goal. To borrow a phrase from social media guru Justin Welsh:

Social media is one of the best to master because you can gain attention and then slowly de-platform prospects and customers to something you own – like an email list. (Why People Fail On Social Media, JustinWelsh.me)

If I’m showing up on a social media platform in a professional capacity as a writer or publisher, this is pretty much my goal. I want to get people to leave Facebook or Threads or Instagram, and go to a platform where the Old School Follow is still in effect.

A place where I can clear away the noise of a thousand other posts and the clatter of algorithmic distractions, and talk to readers who actively say, “yes, talk to me more about this thing we’re both interested in.”

Email lists are old-school tech, and so clunky that lots of people devalue them or outsource their creation to “free” services like Substack, but the truth is they’re the most effective follow-based tools writers have these days (and, in terms of data they can generate, even more effective when you learn to use them well).

Every writer finds their own way of doing this. Some use ads to drive people to free reader magnets—and I certainly do a lot of that. I’m also putting a lot more writing up on blogs, creating hubs where I can capture followers (newsletters, Patreon) and use engagement on social media as tendrils that reach out and snare potential readers like kraken plucking sailors off the deck of a ship.

It’s slow and steady work, but ultimately less disheartening than fighting the algorithm for each new release. 100 followers who engage with you regularly often prove to be far more valuable than a thousand follows on a social media site where you need likes and reposts to find other people.

This post appears courtesy of the fine folks who back my Patreon, chipping in a few bucks every month to give me time to write about interesting things. If you feel like supporting the creation of new blog posts — and getting to read content a few weeks ahead of everyone else — then please head to my Patreon Page.

If you liked this post and want to show your appreciation with a one-off donation, you can also throw a coin to your blogger via payal.

All support is appreciated, but not expected. Thank you all for reading!

The post When The Algorithm Doesn’t Love You Anymore appeared first on Peter M. Ball.

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I’ve been re-reading old bullet journal this morning and found this page, from 2016, which led to the most important writing gig I’ve ever had:

I produced this on my friend Meg’s back deck, trying to sort through the complicated steps required to apply for a PhD and break them into tangible, completable steps. I basically broke down everything I had to do–and especially the things I didn’t know how to do–and laid things out.

I wrote this on the 29th of August, 2016.

By January of 2017 I was in the program, on scholarship, producing three short books (White Harbor War, On Writing Series, and the yet-to-be-released Cerberus Station Rumble). For three and a bit years, the university paid my bills and I got to sit and think and write.

Back in February I wrote a blog post about the things writers and publishers can learn when comparing the CIA’s Practical Timelines for culinary students to traditional recipe formats. The Practical Timeline essentially breaks down what we think of as a “recipe” into four categories of information:

What ingredients do we need?What tools do we need?When needs to be done?When does it need to be completed?

The page above was the first time I applied that thinking to a complicated project with a bunch of small, daunting steps that could have derailed me. This single page plan basically worked thorugh five layers of questions:

What do I need to gather together for the applicatoion?What do I need to do?What do I need to find out?What are the smaller tasks?When order do I need to do things?

I doubt I’ll ever write anything that pays me as well as the years I spent on a PhD scholarship, and one might think that’s what makes this page valuable.

And you’re partially right. But I’m looking at it for another reason.

NOTEBOOKS MAKE PROCESS VISIBLE

I’ve been thiking about this page a lot this week, as I recently asked one of my mentees to consider working in a notebook for a stretch. They’re very much an at-the-keyboard kind of writer, and normally I’d roll with that, but they’ve hit a period of feeling disconnected from a project.

I usually advise a short stint of writing in notebooks for a few reasons. First, because filling a page is more tangible than typing 250 words, particualrly in the era where word processes infinitately scroll and add new pages as each one is filled.

Second, because making writing tactile is often distracting enough to shut up that little perfectionist voice that wants to focus on why things are bad. And writing in a notebook is, tangibly, not a finished draft. It frees you up to make mistakes.

But the third reason–and the most significant, for me–is that notebooks make processes visible. When we write on a computer it’s easy to write and rewrite and lose track of how things iterate and develop.

We don’t get a sense of whether we write good lines on the first draft, or come up with them as part of a process. Our creative thinking tends to disappear because it’s hard to go back and see what was after you’ve made a change.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but there are times where it’s incredibly useful to be able to see how something developed. Looking back at my 2016 notebook, I’m actually surprised by how much pre-work I was doing on the page.

I’ve got about twelve years of journals showing how I work. They don’t always have a complete picture–my focus on a bullet journal waxes and wanes, depending on what else is going on–but it’s enough to see patterns and the relationship between periods and how strings of “bad” weeks often lead to work I’m incredibly proud of in retrospect.

This post appears courtesy of the fine folks who back my Patreon, chipping in a few bucks every month to give me time to write about interesting things. If you feel like supporting the creation of new blog posts — and getting to read content a few weeks ahead of everyone else — then please head to my Patreon Page.

If you liked this post and want to show your appreciation with a one-off donation, you can also throw a coin to your blogger via payal.

All support is appreciated, but not expected. Thank you all for reading!

The post The Most Valuable Page Of Notes I’ve Ever Written appeared first on Peter M. Ball.

The theory of constraints is a business management philosophy popularised in Eli Goldratt’s 1984 book, The Goal, although it builds upon work by earlier thinkers, including Germany’s Wolfgang Mewes.

These days, The Goal is better known as a book Jimmy Donaldson—aka MrBeast—used to make all his employees read and assimilate.

Now let’s be clear: I don’t really get Mr Beast, nor like him. I think his whole schtick is emblematic of a fundamental problem with algorithmic social media, and I’m vaguely baffled he’s a millionaire or famous. I sure as fuck don’t know how he has a line of snacks, let alone an Amazon show.

Which means I’m not interested in the content he produces, but I’m oddly fascinated by articles and insights into how Mr Beast came to grace our YouTube streams. He’s emblematic of a shift in the marketplace, and I like to understand those for my own good as someone who makes a living on creative work.

Similarly, The Goal is not a good book. It engages in a particular rhetorical cheat beloved of business books, articulated by Sci Fi author John Scalzi as “confirming the usefulness of the book by creating characters that are helped by its philosophy, but which don’t actually exist in the real world”. (Stinky Cheese) Suffice to say, there’s a reason I’m linking to many references here, but not that one.

The theory of constraints is also an argument for the “just in time” model of business infrastructure, which was exposed as a enormous problem during the recent pandemic. It’s great for maximising profits, but terrible for withstanding shocks to the infrastructure and black-swan disruption events. 

On the other hand, when used as a guideline, there are some useful ideas in Goldratt’s book. Starting with a simple question: what’s currently stopping you from putting out books at the speed you need?

Goldratt argues there’s three key types of constraints on any process: the limits of the equipment used, the skill set of the people involved, and written and unwritten policy assumptions that prevent a system from operating at capacity. 

The key to levelling up a business is identifying those constraints, coordinating the rest of the system to work at the limits of the biggest bottlenecks, and then slowly elevating everything by improving equipment, skill sets, or policies. 

Infrastructure Bottlenecks

Goldratt’s book is built around the management of industrial production processes with a lot of moving parts and people involved. It doesn’t feel like a natural fit for a small press publisher with a single person handling much of the workload, nor a writer who is essentially a one-person fiction factory.

As I’ve mentioned a few times now, a writer’s infrastructure requirements are light. There’s not much to refine and level up there, even if there are a handful of technological innovations (online submissions, easily accessible ebook production tools and distribution, the bookfunnel app) which lead to quiet revolutions in how we produce and distribute work.

Still, the theory of constraints has helped make a bunch of decisions around my recent infrastructure changes. It encouraged me to sit down and look at the biggest bottlenecks when putting out Brian Jar Press books and selling them at the quantity we needed.

And trust me, there were many. The website wasn’t operating at peak capacity. I wasn’t drawing in enough new readers and operating them in the right way. I was spending a lot of money to replicate the same two systems.

All stuff that I’ve talked about improving over the last few weeks.

But that was looking at the tech stack — the equipment.

The rest of the process was looking at the other two potential bottlenecks: the people and the policy/system assumptions.

Or, given that I’m the sole employee of both Brain Jar Press and GenrePunk Books: where in the process do books get derailed?

There’s obviously a long list of possibilities here, but here’s the short-list I identified:

Line and copy edits, particularly when it’s another author’s book instead of my own.

Writing emails to people I don’t know well enough to predict their response, particularly when asking for a favour or communicating when we’re behind.

Mailing out pre-release review copies for blurbs and review.

Managing cash flow, especially during leaner months when there are no new releases or constant outreach to bolster the direct sales store.

One of these, I knew about. If Brain Jar Press books sold enough copies to justify outsourcing copyedits and line edits to a reliable editor, our release schedule would probably triple in the space of a few months.

I’d call copyedits my personal bugbear; the perfect storm of a task that doesn’t play to my strengths, triggers my social anxiety hard, and is important enough that I’m cautious about who I trust with it.

We had someone who was the right mix of reliable, trusted, and affordable, but they were lured back to full-time work in a job they love. And while I have a series of great line editors I’d like to work with, but they know what they’re worth and charge accordingly. They’re a long-term solution for speeding things up if circumstances change (either we sell more books, or I get a part-time gig), but I need another plan in the short-term.

So there were some decisions to be made in the short-term, that will ultimately help.

The other two… well, they also led me to an immediate step I could take that might level things up: focus on mental health.

The Grinding Gears of Executive Function

Let’s be really clear about something: I haven’t been making all these infrastructure changes because things are going right behind the scenes. They’re very much a response to alarm bells blaring and oxygen leaking out of the hull.

I try to put a cheerful varnish on things when I post about them. Often, when things are bad, I won’t talk about them until months after the immediate emergency is past. 

Narratives build up around writers and publishers. Stories we tell ourselves, and stories other people tell about us. Even when you’re in a bad place, and help would be worthwhile, it can be professionally tricky to say, “Everything is a little shit right now.”

As Kameron Hurley noted, way back in 2015:

I’ve heard from a lot of writers (including the late Jay Lake) about how people stopped offering them opportunities on the assumption that they were unable or would be unwilling to tackle them. I didn’t want people to count me out, but I had to wait until I knew I was already better before noting that, you know, back in July I was a fucking nut and yeah, no, it just kept getting worse. This summer was pretty bad. (Why I Chose To Write Publicly About Anxiety)

Similarly, the last thing any publisher wants is an emerging narrative suggesting that they aren’t in good shape, undermining the confidence of readers and authors alike.

This is compounded by the trickiness of explaining business to folks who don’t run businesses. Brain Jar Press books, for example, are profitable enterprises. In the eight years since launching my publishing efforts, I’ve produced exactly one book that hasn’t made a profit.

But those profits can take a while to manifest, especially because we’re not built to sell books at the same velocity as other publishing houses. That’s why an understanding of asynchronous income and profit is useful when you’re getting into publishing. 

Every book makes a profit, but that doesn’t mean your expenses get covered straight away. Try to grow too fast, spend too much on a project whose initial sales aren’t as strong as you’d hoped, and you’ll end up with more money going out than you’re bringing in.

Given time, that will even out.

But time isn’t always an asset you can leverage. It’s been one of Brain Jar’s strengths for the last eight years, but it stopped being one around the end of March, and things got…harder.

My spouse had been dropping hints they were concerned about my mental health towards the end of last year, and I started talking to my doctor about it back in January. Then the chaos of 2025 started, and the inertia set in. Following up kept getting pushed to the back of the to-do list, after fixing holes in walls and wisdom teeth removal and cyclone prep and more damage to our home.

Which meant it was six months before I finally got around to follow-up and taking actual steps.

And, as always, I’d forgotten what it was like to actually address mental health trickiness instead of just enduring it. It’s like swapping from an old junker of a car with grinding gears to a brand-new loaner that actually turns the corners without protest. I can decide about what to focus on without that feeling like I’m trying to redirect the fucking Titanic before it hits an iceberg.

I’m just moving past the “early days of this antidepressant will come with side-effects” phase, but I’ve still submitted my first new short story since 2023 (and have now got three stories out on submission for the first time since 2013). My spouse got frustrated with me as we got ready for work, and I didn’t spend the next four hours going over the minutiae of that conversation and mentally preparing myself for the worst.

I started thinking of how to get ahead on books I’m behind on, and didn’t want to lie down on the couch and panic.

You’d think I’d be prepared for this shift, since it’s been a repeating pattern once I found an antidepressant that worked, but mental health is a tricky thing.

What’s The One Thing?

One of the more interesting variations on Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints is Keller and Papasan’s business book The One Thing, which suggests approaching your to-do list and goals with a simple question:

What’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will become easier or necessary?

The phrasing here is… well, horrible… but the intention is surprisingly useful. Getting into the habit of asking that takes time and effort, but ultimately pays off.

Here’s the thing about problems, particularly when you’re worn down or burning out: we get stuck on a solution or a process, and stop considering alternatives. There’s a natural tendency to assume that if we keep doing the same things, but do them harder, it will somehow work.

And that’s not always the best solution.

Sometimes you need to step back and identify the real problem. The one thing that—if you do it—speeds up everything else.

I’ve used this in many ways in the past. Back in 2023, I used this philosophy to get unstuck on a story I was writing. After getting stuck on a particular scene, I stepped back and created a big list of the details I needed that weren’t coming as I was writing. Doing that one list made everything easier, and I finished the story in a few hours.

In business, it’s useful for clarity. For months, I’d been bemoaning the fact I couldn’t bring on board paid copyeditors and start getting things moving. Everything became focused on the same problem and solution cycle: earn more money to bring on copyeditors so I can earn more money.

And it wasn’t working, because cash flow had been up in the air for a few months. And because I was using a solution from another time, and kept thinking about trying to do more.

The trick of Keller and Papasan’s approach is simple: you don’t decide on the one thing. You make a list of the possibilities, then refine it down to the one thing that will actually help.

It’s a small thing, but the shift in perspective is useful.

The Slow Level Up

These days, I’m working on doing less. Slowing production to the speed that I’m capable of, making time to diversify the income streams a little. Three books that come out on schedule are, after all, more valuable than six books I struggle to get out and another six I’m too burnt out to do.

Similarly, I’m fixing one bottleneck at a time. An assortment of things emerged when I created a spread of potential solutions, instead of focusing on the editorial blockage.

Right now, it’s easing the anxiety and getting back to a more even keel.

Then, it’s fixing the cash flow and rebuilding financial reserves under the “new normal” of our working lives.

This is a slower process than the therapy and medication, since there’s a bunch of small debts to clear after one or two projects didn’t hit targets over the last two years. I also have a “year ahead” target that needs to be met, so the expenses for the coming twelve months are covered.

This one is frankly going to be hard. It’s going to involve prioritizing projects differently, and focusing on a combination of what’s easy to release and what’s offering the greatest short-term return (this is, somewhat, related to the fact I’m writing short fiction and submitting it again; also my return to Patreon. Drop me a comment if you’d like me to talk through this logic in a future post).

Then I’m going to focus on building up Brain Jar’s customer base (one reason I recombined the Brian Jar and GenrePunk stores, since I have a lot of easy ways to draw people to the store by giving fiction away when it’s mine).

This is the next step because there’s an ideal sales target (about 250 copies) that makes bringing on board a paid copyeditor a feasible thing for me. Some of our books do that within a year, but not all of them.

The whole business changes once I can do 250 sales for a new release in the first twelve months.

Only then will I try to fix what I regarded as the “key” thing to fix and start outsourcing parts of the editorial process.

It’s a slow process of leveling up. It will be incremental gains that take time. But it’s the most feasible one I’ve come up with after thinking about this for a while, and the first plan where the next steps are relatively clear.

Logjams and One Thing

My focus in this piece is the business side of things, but you can apply this to almost everything in writing and publishing.

On the writing front, for example, I can produce drafts at great speed. I wrote a whole damn novel in three weeks back in June, just to clear my head, but that’s not the same thing as producing a book (rewriting is my logjam there. Any release schedule I imagine needs to fall in line behind how fast I revise books, rather than produce drafts).

When I work with clients who get stuck, unravelling their work is often a similar process. What’s the thing that’s blocking this draft? What’s the list of things that may make solving that logjam easier, and which feels like the right one?

We get so locked into the one problem, one solution mindset that it’s hard to step back and diversify our thinking, but it almost always makes things a hell of a lot easier.

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