Current list of things to focus on getting out: one novella, one short story, two essay collections, one short story collection, one RPG chapbook, one RPG essay collection.

One of the nice things about the looming threat of unemployment was the kick in the pants it gave me to gather together all the half-done writing projects.

The real curse of doing a long stint of freelancing is finding a reasonable answer to "please give us a list of referees who you reported to directly over the last five years"

A redundancy when you can line up another gig and use the payout to clear a bunch of debt is actually not so bad. A redundancy when you have nothing else and have to live on the payout is...not so great. At the eleventh hour, yesterday, it started looking like I'm getting to go with option A...

Judging by the most recent round of Author Spam, they've relaised pretending ot be a high profile editor making contact from a GMail address is...suss. Instead they're going for that luster of authenticy that comes from using AOL instead.

Final work day before redundancy hits. Sitting on the bus singing the doom song.

(My panic responses are fucking weird, and I understand that. What I'll actually do is keep applying for regular jobs and writing stuff I enjoy writing. I do like to daydream, though)

Officially at the stage of impending unemployment where I convince myself everything will be fine, and I'll just write 26 books a year until I brute force my way back to a sustainable income.

Me: I've been sick for a week. I'll ease myself back into drafting. Also me: Writes a 2,000 word essay in one sitting.

Good morning to all my fellow gamers still old enough to remember THAC0. How are your joints doing today? Did you also injure yourself by standing up too fast?

If you've never read Theadora Goss's story "The Rapid Advance of Sorrow", you really should.

How would you describe your social media reach?

When I inevitably retreat from social media, it will be because I can no longer deal with indie authors being slightly bewildered to discover that Amazon isn’t in their side.

Quitting time for the day job today. Looking forward to the weekend writer sprint.

Hey fellow writers. My coffee mug just gave me a useful reminder. Perhaps it would be useful for you, too?

And while I applaud the intent, social media is an entertainment platform. We go to the places where there's an audience. Platforms need to build a critical mass of users, and my first question of any new platform is "how are you going to do that."

Thinking about this a lot today, because I keep seeing adds for a kickstarter hoping to develop a "new, innovative, artist friendly" social media platform that combines the best features of three or four different platforms.

And then they quietly imploded and went away, because they had a promise but no plan to move through the three chokepoints that was based in reality.

They dreamed big. They launched. They lured in a bunch of writers with big promises and potentially locked up publication rights that could have been leveraged better.

Almost all the brave new disruptors of the era I worked for the Australian Writers Marketplace never got what Substack understood, though.