Writing games are tricks, exercises, things to try to get your writing brain in the mood. I find them useful when a story's giving me trouble - I can't think of a way out of the corner, or I can't think of a corner to get into, or I'm just not feeling in the right mood to write that story - as well as generating new ideas, and just keeping my writing-mind in shape. And on the plus side, they're usually fun to try, and you can end up with the germs of some great little stories.

Out of habit

Writers, and indeed any artist or creator who relies at least in part on inspiration to function, have a tendency to rely on magic habits. Tuesday morning, 7am in the third left chair of the coffee shop on the corner, with an A5 notebook and a chewed-up fountain pen. Monday, after the ironing, before the dishes with an unlit candle and Enya on iTunes. Whatever yours is - a formula that you feel you can write with.

It probably does work for you. I have some of my own - I get up at 5 several days a week to by in the city by 7am. My shift doesn't start until 8:30, but by leaving early I miss peak hour traffic, get a free train ticket and ninety minutes of relative peace in the university before it opens. I write then - it's one of the few times I've managed to carve out successfully for regular writing.

The challenge here is simple - work out what your habits are - place, time, implements, and try changing them all. If you write in the mornings on computer in your office, take a notebook to the park in the afternoon. If you're a notebook-in-the-coffee-shop person, try writing in your lunchbreak at work on the computer (check your work's policies before you try that one, though.)

Mix up your habits. For one thing, it'll show you that you don't need those totems to write. Want, maybe, but not need. You could still write if you didn't have them. But the change will also free up your creativity a little - you may find new ideas, new expressions and new connections forming, which will improve your writing in general.

I'm in the middle of a transition at the moment, a change in how my whole life works that's going to take a good six months to perhaps a year to settle down. Gone is a major sink in my time, even though I've brought in new activities and new responsibilities at my job(s). And in its place is a surprising lack of writing - the extra time available to me hasn't automatically converted itself into more words on the page.

Which is frankly a "duuuh" moment, but it's not what I expected. I spent much of my time earlier this year railing against how little time I had to write, and now that I have time, I find an amazing number of things to do instead of writing, including nothing at all - staring off into space and running whatever story I feel like through my imagination. More fool me, really, I should have known better.

Are you a schedule-person? Someone who prefers to do things in a certain order, at a certain time? Do you subscribe to the 'do (activity) at the same time each day to develop the habit of (activity)' method?

I've never been in a situation where I could write at the same time each day unless I wrote at 3am, which isn't really an option, as I often have to be up at 5. I still wrote, it was just always much more of a 'and somewhere in today I have to find time to write' affair. I was never a "six pm: write novel" kind of person. I've never been that kind of person for anything in my life.

So the 'leaked' iPad app list is out over here courtesy of Gizmodo. There's a link on the page you can browse the whole archive yourself, including visit individual app pages.

There are a lot of duplicates in there - and I don't mean the full version plus the lite version, but identical copies of the same app turning up more than once. This makes me rather doubt the 1350 apps claim (were they just hoping people wouldn't look too hard?) but some are looking useful:

I hate the middle sections of novels. I think I've written about this before, but the middle section, 'Act 2', has always been the most difficult for me. The first act, I have the fresh excitement of a new story and new characters on a new world (even if it's a here-and-now setting, it's still 'new') making up the rules as I go. I charge forward to the crescendo and tumble myself down the other side... into a dank, tensionless swap I have to slog through to reach the home-run-stretch of Act 3. The excitement of act 1 has climaxed, and we're dumped back into a slow rebuild of tension for the next one, but there's no clear path. If I'm going to can a novel mid-way through, the middle is where it'll happen.

Which is why I was concerned for Shadowren, my current fantasy novel. At the moment, and for the next two months at least, my time is overcommitted and almost all of my writing is taking place not at home, but at one of my workplaces in the early morning before my shift starts. For technical reasons, it's extremely difficult to access my novel there, so I've been writing shorts instead. I haven't touched the text of Shadowren in weeks. And the point where I left of was up to its armpits in Middle Swamp Of Doom. Not only was I finding it like dental surgery to write, I had no real idea which direction the swamp exit was - I had only the vaguest and not-very-enticing idea of what the ending would be, and absolutely no idea as to 'why'. It was like a Hollywood director saying there has to be an explosion, while the scriptwriter has no idea what there'll be to blow up.

So we've talked about finding a writer group that's right for you. But when you've found one, how do you make sure you're right for them? The last thing you want is to find the perfect group and then either ruin the dynamic or be asked to leave. We all know "that guy" in the group - the loudmouth, the bore, the delusional wanna-be who thinks everyone should worship their writing like gospel. And frankly, it's pretty obvious how not to be 'that guy' - just step outside your own head and consider other people for a moment. But there are specific, less obvious 'that guy's for writer groups, and they can make things just as difficult - sometimes more so, because it's not necessarily obvious that they're detrimental to the group. I've been both of them in my day, often at the same time: I'm talking about the Egoist and the Opinionator.

One of the most difficult tasks of a writer is carving time out of the day to write - and then actually sitting down and writing during that time. A lot of the time, I find the latter part of that far more trying. It's one thing to assure yourself you can squeeze in a thousand words or so between the time you get to work, and the time you're actually supposed to start working, but when you're sitting at the desk, bleary-eyed and fug-mouthed, the thrill of creating story is the last thing on your mind.

Most of the time, the answer is "just write". Wield the stick or wave the carrot and just get it done, don't allow yourself to wallow in that "but I really don't feel like it" pity party, because nobody writes in that place.

Writing is, at its heart, a very solitary occupation. Unless you're co-authoring, with some kind of arrangement that has you both at the same keyboard metaphorical at the same time (you could, after all, be authoring in Wave from across the planet), your work involves long hours spent by yourself at a keyboard, squeezing brain farts out through the alphabet.

Most writers are people who relish their alone-time, but keeping your writing career in isolation hampers your development - it's hard to get a new perspective on your writing if you're the only one looking at it or talking about it.

“Popular fiction is trash. Art isn't worth anything unless it means something, unless it's saying something, and if you're not going to say something, you might as well keep your mouth shut.”

 When I offer that challenge out loud, every artist I know immediately leaps on the defensive, or offensive, depending on their individual levels of aggression and how many coffees they drank beforehand. And rightfully so – it's a load of pants. Intellectually, we know that everything we create is an expression of how we see the world, a sharing of our individual experience and perception. Everything we create makes a statement, even if that statement is, on our bad days, a strange sort of bubbly noise followed by a hiccup.

 And yet despite knowing that, every one of us at some point or another feels that their work isn't any good. Not worth reading, let alone writing. Not going to change the world, not even going to change our bank balance. It's just going to squat over our thoughts and occasionally belch cliches. A voice in our head tells we're just embarrassing ourselves, and we wonder what the point is.

 I'll tell you what the point is.

The concept of "Writer's Block" is one of the most self-pandering excuses in our procrastination toolbox. "Oh, I can't write anything, I have Writer's Block!". Cue dramatic sigh, sweeping exit stage right. When deployed correctly, it can give you an apparently valid excuse to not write for years. But that's what it is: an excuse. There's no such thing as writer's block.

I've hit the middle of my novel. This has always been the most difficult part for me, in first drafts. 

One of the most maddening things about writing is the occasional impossibility to get your bum in the chair. When writing time looms, it suddenly becomes absolutely imperative that the laundry be folded, the desk tidied, the todo list re-written, the emails sorted, the gym attended, the cat vacuumed, the bookstore ransacked, the obscure detail researched and the ceiling stared at.

I love writing. I love story and character. I have a corkboard by my desk with story ideas plastered over the top of each other, because I ran out of room, and I can't wait to get to them. Except right now, I really have to do my accounts.

At the start of the year, I posted about creating goals that were realistic and within your control. Now it's nearly two weeks into the year - have you given up on any yet? How will you keep yourself working towards them in February, or August? What are you doing to make your goals something you do, rather than something you think about?

Time for the yearly tradition of making promises to ourselves with the best intentions, and the sticky-note on the side saying "unless it's really really hard"... as the years go by, I've seen fewer and fewer 'really's attached there, so I'm taking a new tack with my goals: they're things that I intend to do anyway, rather than additional things I'd like to dream I'll do. And they're entirely within my control.