March 2024 Update
It's been a few weeks! Let's catch up together.
Hello, subscribers. It’s been a while since you’ve last seen a post from me, so I’m stopping by to give an update on what’s going on, what plans I have for the future, and what you can expect next.
What’s Going On
Where have the stories been? The short answer is that I’ve been dissatisfied with the quality of my writing and haven’t felt like anything I put effort into is worth uploading.
The long answer is a little more complicated.
My work-life balance is not superb right now. For this moment I define “work” as anything not related to the craft of writing. There are a few explanations for this.
We are exiting a busy season at work which lasted from mid January to last week. This mostly exhausted my mental capabilities.
I underwent some health troubles in February, now resolved. This took my full attention during that month.
I have been spending too much time trying to recover from the demands of work and health to dedicate time to any flash fictions or short stories.
What little writing I have done has been inefficient, crude, and mediocre.
I have been participating in a few other hobbies to keep myself active and happy while I struggle with this trough in my craft.
The result of these past few weeks has been no flash fictions, of course. As a silver lining, there have been no bad flash fictions sent to your inbox. No slapdash jobs. No half-written slop just to fill the quota for the week. I’m pleased about that, but annoyed I couldn’t deliver anything at all.
What’s the Plan?
I have been looking into and applying techniques from a type of time management called “timeboxing”. You may be more familiar with “time blocking”. Both techniques involve allocation of time for an activity.
Time blocking means you schedule a block of time for an activity and try to get it done in that frame. Think of it as, “I have nothing from 1 to 5 on Saturday, so I’ll try to wash my car and do a little writing.”
Time boxing means you schedule a block of time for an activity and limit the time you spend on it. This ends up looking like, “I have nothing from 1 to 5 on Saturday, so I’ll budget 1 hour to wash my car and 1 hour to work on plotting for my novel.”
No matter where you are at at the end of your timebox, you stop the activity and assess how you did. This is extremely effective for busy business leaders, but it can be great for writers, too. Of course, nothing is stopping you from continuing on after your X-long hour block is over if you’re on a roll! But stopping when you say you will forces you to assess if you were efficient and productive during your time, and if you wanted more time to write, allocate more next time you sit at the desk.
The result of timeboxing is that you get higher concentrations of dedicated work done focused on one task at a time, rather than lackadaisically trying to fill a time block with activities.
I aim to use this technique over the next several weeks to encourage more productive writing in the scant time I have in my schedule. The plan is that each hour or so will be more productive than if I lazed around all Saturday and plinked out 1400 words.
What this will produce is higher quality focused writing, perhaps at a slower pace at first, but over time it will snowball.
What Should I Expect?
Nothing will change.
Well, the astute observe will notice one thing has indeed changed.
I recently got some help from Maya over at
on redesigning my Substack. I have a divider (one of my all-time top wants), a new publication page, and a nice icon that better reflects the aim and aesthetic of my Substack.If you want to give some feedback on the redesign, Substack has a new survey feature. I have 2 questions about the redesign that’ll help me out.
As far as writing goes, I will try to continue my timeboxing habits to produce stories of value and quality. I will not publish a story I think is subpar or will detract from the quality of my Substack. I can’t tell when a new flash fiction or short story will come next. I hope soon.
I am also working on a detective novel. Until recently, I thought I was going to finish this novel and shuttle it out this summer. Then I discovered the appalling flatness of the characters, relationships, plot—everything was horrid. So I am currently undergoing a full overhaul, starting with the MC, who in the previous draft was a shadow of Philip Marlowe illuminated with a dim flashlight. He will now be his own character with his own motivations. Here is some concept art I’m using as a base.
My new motto after the aforementioned disaster is “Write characters, not caricatures.”
In the meanwhile, I hope you will fill out the survey about the Substack redesign. Thank you for being a subscriber, and I’ll see you on the other side of a flash fiction very soon.
-Miles.