#the great tag backlog is out of the double digits

[mrbexwrites]

Author Ask Tag

Tagged by @mjparkerwriting here, then @talesofsorrowandofruin here, and then again by @the-golden-comet here

Answering this for Mavis' story arc, as she's been spending a lot of time in my thoughts at the moment:

What is the main lesson of your story? Why did you choose it?: If there is a lesson, I didn't mean to include it. I don't build my stories around a lesson or a theme; I tend to focus on the characters and build around them. But for Mavis, the lesson is probably something akin to 'just because your parents tell you something is right, doesn't mean it is' or 'you need to make your own mind up, rather than relying on blind faith'.

What did you use as inspiration for your worldbuilding?: I usually take pinches of media I've consumed in the past. I consumed a lot of urban fantasy/Sci Fi as a teen (think Buffy, Supernatural, Farscape, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek etc etc) as well as reading loads of Terry Pratchett and traditional/high fantasy. So I've probably taken pinches of all of these and added elements to my own writing.

What is your MC trying to achieve, and what are you, the writer, trying to achieve with them? Do you want to inspire others, teach forgiveness, or help the reader grow as a person?: Mavis starts her arc as an outcast, having displeased her father, who is the leader of her group of demon hunters. She wants to earn his approval and get back into the group, but I decided that wasn't a good idea, so I pulled the rug out from under her feet. She has to face her own biases and assumptions that she's grown up with. I want readers to know that you can learn to be a better person. Just because you've done something shitty in the past, this shouldn't define you. You can be better, and learn from your mistakes.

How many chapters is your story going to have?: Confession time- I don't write in chapters. I write continuously, and then break down my scenes into chapters when I'm editing. Therefore, I have no idea how many chapters that I have.

Is it fanfiction or original content? Where do you plan to post it?: Original content, and I'll probably post it onto Wattpad.

When did you start writing?: I've always sort of written silly stories for myself, and started writing my first proper full length novel when I was about 15. I started to take my writing seriously* during the pandemic. *When I say 'seriously' I mean that I've actively tried to improve and hone this skill with the hope of sharing my WIPs, rather than just hoarding them in my google docs folder!

Do you have any words of encouragement for fellow writers of writeblr? What other writers do you follow?: Other, better, writers than me have wiser words to share when it comes to advice. But that said, find the advice that works for you. What works for others won't necessary work for you. By all means, give it a try, but if it doesn't serve you, then just let it go and find something that does.

Passing the tag onto @spideronthesun @cowboybrunch @sarahlizziewrites @queen-tashie @museandquill @jmhwritesstuff @tpbwrites and leaving an open tag for anyone who'd like to share

[iustusetpeccator]

how I run my blogs

TAGGED BY STOLEN FROM: @invelleity​  TAGGING: @corfortiium​ @paraliminal​ @tnott​ @all-my-potter-babies​ @worth12malfoys​ @lucklessladies​ @proditeur​ @imbricare​ @cerebrumcormeum​ @therearemoreimportanthings​ + you, random citizen!

SPEED:  Everything gets replied to in roughly chronological order, and the queue is currently set to two replies, two musings of some sort, and one bit of Rita’s gossip every day. I’d absolutely love to kick things up a notch, but anytime my drafts hit double digits I have a Moment, so I guess slow and steady is how it’s gonna have to be. If you want speed, catch me on disco! REPLIES:  I’m a rambler, okay. Like I’m actually one of the few people who like purple prose (think Anne Rice), and honestly? I’m aware it’s not objectively Great—but it is what it is. I would like to be a bit more concise so my words have more weight, but I don’t dislike my style, so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Also mad respect for people who can write tightly, I admire the shit out of you folks! STARTERS:  If my replies are rambly, my starters are absolutely insufferable. I like to set a scene, provide some context, indicate the mood, etc. I don’t expect people to match my length except in the roughest sense, though, so we good. INBOX:  I mean, you’re welcome to send shit, but I am terrible for letting things sit in there for months and then deleting them, be it starters, headcanons, what have you. I have a massive backlog of stuff that’s gonna get dealt with soon, either posting or deleting everything, but uhhh... If I can’t be arsed writing the thing, I just won’t. SELECTIVITY:  I’m selective about who I write with because frankly, I’m a neurotic bitch and small things can annoy me A Lot. Plus like I said, I keep an eye on my draft list at all times and don’t see the appeal of having 36,085 mutuals and 3,748,994 threads going on at any one time. I like my writing gang just now and I’m not actively looking for new partners, tbh—but if you slide into my IMs, I won’t turn you down or anything. WISHLIST:  LOCKHART LOCKHART LOCKHART. Also Poppy Pomfrey and Minerva McGonagall and maybe even Emmeline Vance. And something for Nerida and Nadya because I love them to bits and they don’t get any attention. HONEST NOTE:  When people leave me hanging (i.e. don’t reply to my IMs for a length of time), I get really self-conscious. I’ve got a pretty healthy level of self-esteem overall, but I’ve never been good at making or keeping friends, and I always worry I’ve said the wrong thing or come on too strong or w/e. So if you’re not great at getting back to me, and unless you actually let me know why, I might well unfollow you because frankly, communication is everything to me. But also if you talk to me and we get along, I will find a way of making our muses work no matter what. Muns > muses, always.

[shypixiered]

Reflections on ShuMako Week 2019

I participated in @shumakoweek​, submitted six fics and one piece of digital art. This is my second such event after September’s @makotoniijimaweek2018​.

While for Makoto Week I aimed to do five out of eight and ended up doing nine out of nine, for ShuMako Week I came in with the plan of doing seven out of seven, which I did.  

That wasn’t the only difference in feel however. This time I didn’t have the surprise thrill that was Makoto Week. All that was left was the work. Coupled with some real life burnout and other things going on, it’s been a fight to keep my spirits up. Like Makoto Week, I’ve distilled some thoughts from my participation:

I prefer to write longer fics. Looking back at how I’ve felt over the past two months since I was able to start preparing (after I completed Makoto’s Lies), I’ve learned is that my biggest love is multi-chapter fics where I get a chance to build the romantic tension and get to do far-reaching things with the plot. However, I have more ideas than I’ll finish in a lifetime, so some have to be put aside and some have to be dealt with on a smaller scale.

Weeks like Makoto Week and ShuMako Week are great opportunities to do something modest with those ideas and also to experiment with different forms. However, between the two events I wrote 13 short fics… that’s burning through formats and ideas pretty fast and thus I started swinging from “getting to do something with ideas I’d love to get to” to “I really rather be working on my long form ideas.” I think it showed too. I wasn’t as happy with my ShuMako Week offerings as my Makoto Week ones going in. I’m really fortunate that support of the readers on AO3 who helped me see the good in my own fics this past week.

Perhaps if I had more time I could play a little more at the medium form length…

ShuMako Week felt more constrained to me. I’d like to say some of of my discomfort with ShuMako Week is because I felt much more constrained. I felt that I had to produce stories that were what we like about ShuMako rather than exploring side facets. I was even hesitant to consider heavy angst or tragic endings.

Makoto Week felt very open in contrast… but if I’m going to put something under the ShuMako tags, for ShuMako Week especially, I’d feel bad doing something that’s not “ShuMako” enough.

As an example, I struggled with the Date Night / Double Date prompt, coming up with 16 different fic ideas but rejecting most. Some I worried were not ShuMako focused enough (the other couple taking too much space). Some felt too cliche in tropes I don’t have a strong attachment to. Some were to be too similar in writing form/style to my other ShuMako Week fics. Some just weren’t particularly interesting enough. 

I also worried Saennhilation was not ShuMako Week enough because while the idea of a proposal drives the plot, it’s not particularly romantic or couple-focused. My original plan was to have a second piece for Day 7 to balance it out: the start of a longer fic, but I don’t want to post that until I have all chapters done and I wasn’t able to finish it in time.

I was overwhelmed by the support. Going in, I expected I’d be writing to near silence given how crowded these weeks are with submissions. I had little darlings in The First Time They Knew and The Phantom Thief of Cookies but I didn’t know if they were enough to carry. I was overwhelmed and touched by the positive response to them on AO3. With everything else going on it was a real pick me up and I’ve been reminding myself of it when facing a couple tough patches in the last few days.

I think I’m ready to leave Fanfiction.net. There are still a few features I really like on FFNet — cover images, seeing chapter breakdowns on hits, the ability to private message other people, and the limits on tagging every character who is glancingly in a fic (or only planned for future chapters). However, had people not been so supportive on AO3, I probably would have felt really hurt by the lack of interest in all of my ShuMako Week fics on FFN. Posting is tough enough on the self esteem as it is. While FFN has a lot of nostalgic appeal to me too, I think the people I was staying for have mostly migrated. I plan to still respond to messages there, but experiment with not posting fics anymore.

I reached out to many, but I didn’t quite meet my goals. During Makoto Week, I tried to prioritize supporting participants. (I’m still quite behind in my non-week backlog.) This time I did the same with renewed vigor due to my observations during Makoto Week. While I read the majority of the fics and left a comment, there are still many I want to read. Now I’m taking a pause to make sure the rest of the fics I read get the attention they deserve when I do read them.

I prefer leaving comments to kudos. There’s something about the binary nature of kudos that I still haven’t reconciled. I rather just comment on someone’s fic. I love comments myself so I consider it more important to do so for others. However, I understand people for the most part prefer it the other way, if they’re going to interact at all, so I see the importance of having this feature.

It’s better working with others. Even with all the mutual stress going on, it was more fun to work with others, whether that be directly in the collabs with @melkechi or tossing around and refining ideas around with both her and @phoenix-eve (poor them having to sit through so many bad Double Date ideas of mine…).

Organization is often under-appreciated work. Organizing collabs is a lot of work that doesn’t often get recognized. My thanks to Mel for reaching out to me for ours and my appreciation for her and everyone’s hard work organizing their collabs.

Similarly, organizing these weeks, reviewing all the work, making the posts… this is also work. My appreciation to the organizers of all of these weeks, the ones I participated in and the ones I didn’t quite get to. I’m hoping to have a piece for another upcoming week and sad that there are a few both in the recent past and upcoming that I just had to skip. I’m still a rather slow writer.

[brianobrienny]

How CMOs Can Convince Stakeholder to Go All-in On Agile Marketing

Agile I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: marketing and agility go together like peanut butter and chocolate.

Agile marketers report faster campaign delivery, better ROI on their marketing activities, better alignment with business objectives, and happier team members (among many other things).

Pair those benefits with marketers’ common inability to say no to incoming work, our multitasking mania, and the ever-growing list of channels and tactics we need to master, and it’s no wonder most marketers will jump at the chance to optimize their process.

But sometimes going Agile isn’t up to us.

What happens when you need to convince someone else that agility is the way forward?

What if someone doesn’t believe that peanut butter and chocolate are best buds? How do you convince your stakeholders to support the earliest phases of your Agile journey?

Put simply, you act like a good marketer. You talk about what’s in it for them.

(Or, in the peanut butter/chocolate example, just give them a Justin’s Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup.)

Here are three ways to help your stakeholders realize that Agile marketing is just as good for them as it is for you by answering some of their most commonly raised objections.

Why Stakeholder Buy In Matters in Agile Adoption

Marketing doesn’t exist as a standalone department; we’re crucial intermediaries between the products and services our organizations produce and the people who need those things.

We connect people and stuff in very important ways.

Sales, product development, customer service, legal and compliance — all of these groups (and more) play a role in our ability to be this bridge.

Marketing’s work impacts them too, so if we run off and start changing our processes willy nilly, they’re likely to feel resentful. Resentful people typically don’t add a lot of value to a system, so we need to avoid this outcome whenever possible.

If the breakdown is bad enough, you might even encounter a stakeholder who deliberately holds things up. Their slow down can make it appear that Agile ways of working aren’t actually helping and undermine your efforts.

Agile frameworks were originally developed to help deliver value to customers faster. If marketers are using them for this same reason (as we should be), we’ll start by recruiting internal partners, because marketing isn’t an island.

We need a group effort if our hard-won process improvements are actually going to positively impact our audience and the organization’s bottom line.

Objection 1: Nobody Knows What Marketing is Doing

If you work closely with internal business units or sales, or even product development teams, chances are you’ve heard this lament.

Many stakeholders feel that marketing lacks credibility and is somewhat of a black hole: they send work requests in, and never see them again.

Of course, it’s not that we aren’t working over in marketing. Usually we’re working on approximately 8,753 things. But nobody knows what they all are.

If this is you, you’ll be able to use Agile as the answer to this objection very easily.

One of the most central values of any Agile system is transparency and visibility. We go to great lengths to make sure everybody inside and outside the team knows what’s going on.

Through the 1-2 punch of a prioritized backlog and a visualized workflow, it’s clear what the team is tackling now, what’s delayed, and what’s up next in the queue. Anybody can check on these tools at any time and get insight into how marketing is spending its time.

Digital tools take these capabilities to the next level, allowing us to show how much of a project has been complete, attach relevant documentation, assign due dates, tag stakeholders for feedback, etc.

For bonus points, you can also invite stakeholders to Agile meetings, including daily standup, so they never have cause to wonder what’s up in marketing again:

Objection 2: Everything Takes Too Long

Tough truth time: the more things we work on at the same time, the longer they all take. To deliver work faster, we have to do less.

It’s counterintuitive, but painfully true.

So if you’ve got stakeholders who wonder what the heck is taking you so long to get their request processed, you can hold up Agile ways of working as the shining solution.

Agile forces us to focus on the highest value work, concentrate our effort on it until it’s done, and only then take on new work.

There are two options available for making this happen: the sprint and WIP limits.

Speeding Up Delivery Using Sprints

Sprints are simply short time boxes during which a team of marketers works together to complete a short list of high value tasks. After a sprint concludes, there should be a nice chunk of work — maybe a complete project, or at least a valuable piece of one — to show off.

While typically used as part of the Scrum framework, you can use the sprint mechanism less rigidly to create the focused effort needed to speed up delivery.

First you’ll need a prioritized backlog, because it’s vital to see the full scope of potential work before you choose what belongs in your sprint. Once you’ve got a clear picture of everything you could be doing, get the team together and have them decide how much of it they can really get done in a sprint.

The work they choose will become their sprint backlog, a.k.a. everything they’ll be doing over the course of the sprint. (That means everything, including recurring “business as usual” tasks.)

Keep your sprint short (two weeks is the standard length), because you don’t want to make too many changes to your sprint backlog once it’s set. Ideally nothing goes in and nothing comes out, but there may be times when you need to make small adjustments to the sprint backlog.

If that happens, make sure it’s a trade off; a new request replaces something the team had committed to do. If you just keep adding more stuff to the sprint backlog, you’ll end up right back at the place where everything takes too long and nothing will actually get done in the sprint.

Speeding Up Delivery Using WIP Limits

Sprints work best when the team can predict with relative accuracy how their next couple of weeks will go. They need to confidently set up — and stick to — the sprint backlog, or the whole sprint thing just doesn’t work.

If you’re among those marketers who can’t even tell what you’ll be doing by the end of the day, WIP limits may be your better option for doing more in less time.

Work in Progress (WIP) limits force us to stop starting and start finishing various activities.

For them to work, an individual or team needs a visualized workflow in the form of a kanban board:

This is a super simple version, yours might look quite different, but the point is that it shows what’s going on as work marches from the backlog to done. When we visualize work this way, we often discover that our “In Progress” column overflows, while very few cards make it across the finish line.

WIP limits help combat that by setting a hard ceiling on how many items can be in any stage of the workflow:

This board has a few more stages so you can see how WIP limits work. There’s a WIP limit of two on creation, so we can’t be creating any more than two things at a time. The same goes for review, while publish has a WIP limit of just 1, probably because we have less people on the team who can tackle those kinds of tasks.

Individual WIP Limits

If you’re using WIP limits as an individual, your magic number is likely to be two. Don’t work on more than two things at once.

In other words, if you’re building slides and filling the social media queue for the week, you can’t also start on a new piece of sales enablement until one of those things is done.

Teams can find their starting WIP limits by doubling the number of people who can work in any given stage, and then working their way down to a number that pushes them to complete work quickly.

So if we have two people who can work in the create phase above, we’d start our WIP limit at four and slowly go downwards from there.

Objection 3: My Project Matters the Most

Our final objection to overcome is the squeaky wheel syndrome: every stakeholder (or project manager, or business unit leader) believes their project is the most important, and they’ll hound marketing team members to do their project NOW.

Wanting to be helpful colleagues, many marketers respond to these requests right away.

This leads to the unpleasant feeling of professional whiplash as we turn from one piece of work to the next, depending on who’s yelling the loudest. Sadly, this hurts everybody.

Stakeholders don’t get their work in a timely manner, because the more we work on the longer it all takes. When we careen from one thing to the next without finishing what we started, the timelines all balloon.

It’s also bad for the marketers, because we don’t get the satisfaction of finishing something, and feel pulled in one hundred different directions.

Once again, Agile marketing can help.

The prioritized backlog forces us to make hard decisions. We have to choose between projects and activities to create focused effort; not everything can be the top priority.

Combining the backlog with regular planning sessions where you get your stakeholders together and have them hash out the real priorities among their projects is a game changer. Typically one stakeholder has no idea what the other ones are asking marketing to do, so they can’t be a helpful partner in prioritization.

Getting everyone together and showing them what’s on deck allows them to collaborate in choosing the highest value work. They will then (hopefully) be less likely to squeak at the team constantly and let them attack the high value work until it’s completed.

Note: you may need a senior marketing leader to attend these sessions and be the final arbiter if your stakeholders can’t agree.

What to Do AFTER You Get Buy In

Whatever objection was the biggest for you, tailor your early Agile efforts to address it. Let’s recap what that looks like:

Objection: Nobody knows what marketing is doing

First actions: Build a prioritized backlog and pair it with an up to date kanban board. Direct any and all status update requests to these new tools.

Next steps: Start incorporating tools for focused effort, like sprints or WIP limits, to push more work through the board in a shorter amount of time.

Objection: Marketing takes too long

First actions: Build your backlog and then implement sprints, if you can predict your work for the next few weeks, or WIP limits if you can’t, to create forced focus on high value work within the marketing team.

Next steps: Track common Agile marketing metrics like throughput and cycle time to show how much more productive your team is getting over time. Bonus points if you can tie this increase in productivity to marketing outcomes.

Objection: My project is the most important

First actions: Build your prioritized backlog (sense a theme here?) and bring your stakeholders together to agree on a single set of priorities for the marketing team. Refer to these priorities anytime squeaky wheel syndrome rears its ugly head.

Next steps: Incorporate “business as usual” work into the backlog along with larger projects to get the full picture of the scope of the team’s responsibilities.

The drive for agility doesn’t have to be an “us versus them” situation. By putting on our marketing hats, we can focus on answering our stakeholders’ common objections through new Agile ways of working.

Then we become partners in process improvement, rather than adversaries.

The post Convince Your Stakeholders to Try Agile Marketing appeared first on AgileSherpas.

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