ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
Works in Progress

Write Club

We held the second write club of the year today, and I’ve discovered the seemingly terrifying power that comes with combining a walk across the magic, story-inducing Kurilpa bridge in the morning with a two-hour block of writing alongside Angela Slatter at the State Library. And the net result is a day where I’ve produced 3,500 new words I’m more or less happy with, most of which make up the first chapter of a new Aster novella. About two thirds of this was done at write club, which is now partially time-limited due to the fact that we’re borrowing space from the State Library, and the rest has been done after I got home later in the day and had a nap. Turns out I rather like this writing thing. I think I’ll do more of it once this blog is done. I’ve been pretty stringent about not applying deadlines to my year, either externally-imposed or self-imposed, but I think there’s a faint plan starting to coalesce in terms of what I’d like to do and when I’d like to have it done. It’s been ages since I had a plan I wanted to pursue, rather than one that I needed to pursue ’cause there were things that needed doing. It makes me feel all tingly and eager when I think about it.  

Read More »
08/02/2012 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Revisiting The Cure

Several years ago I owned The Cure’s Three Imaginary Boys on vinyl and it was one of my favourite things ever. I owned Faith on vinyl too, at least temporarily, although I suspect it got traded away in one of those poorly thought out relationships that sustained itself on angst, the novelty of having sex, and the trading of meaningful gifts instead of actually liking one another. Maybe it didn’t get traded, I can’t be sure, but if it did there would be some other treasure among my collection. There is paranoia that sets in at a certain stage of those types of relationship, a lingering fear that you’ll be the one who gave less and thus become beholden to someone you no longer really like. It’s only worse when you’re young and stupid and trying very hard to be intense about things, because intensity seems like something worth chasing. But I digress: we were speaking of the Cure. Albums on vinyl, which I prized as talismans to hold up against the banality of the city I lived in. Other Cure albums I owned on tape:  Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me; Pornography; Disintegration.  These weren’t a talisman against anything really, just a part of my music collection, for I came to CDs late in life and still bought cassettes long after my friends had given up on them. Like so much music I used to enjoy, I stopped listening to them once I acquired a car with a CD player

Read More »
06/02/2012 No Comments
Works in Progress

Just a tired and random kind of evening, posted a day late

You’ll have to forgive me if this is a touch vague today, but I didn’t really sleep last night. Not in a bad way, just one of those instances where you starting a show on DVD and figure you may as well finish things while the momentum is there. There may have been beer involved, and a particularly frustrated end to the day on Friday. It largely means that all I’m good for today is drinking coffee, listening to Misfits songs, and making idle kind of notes for stories I’ll work on tomorrow. It’s a good way to cap off a very good week. It’s an out-of-order way of going about it, but one of the best bits was the release of this years Locus Recommended Reading List which included Dying Young in the novelette category and Memories of Chalice among the recommended short stories. I’m particularly happy about the latter, to be honest, since I spent years circling around that particular story before it finally came together and got accepted by Electric Velocipede. The list also includes a bunch of talented Australian writers (Jason Nahrung’s blog post seems to be the best round-up of Australians on the list) and a bunch of people I know (congratulations, particularly, to Thoraiya Dyer and Tansy Raynor Roberts and probably some others that I’m missing in my sleep-addled state). Of course, my favourite thing about any recommended reading list is seeing what isn’t included rather than what is. I always tend to go through them mentally filling

Read More »
04/02/2012 No Comments
Journal

Undergoing Maintenance

So there’s a bunch of things on the website that I’ve been meaning to fix for ages and last night I finally got around to it, which inevitably led to the decision that maybe it’s time to gussy the place up a bit given that I’ve been using the same theme and layout for three years now. It’s something of a work in progress, since there’s plenty of changes I’ll be making when I get the time, but for the moment it feels a bit cleaner and the links on the front page work and my parents can finally stop saying “You’ve only got Horn on your website. When are you going to put up a link to Bleed? You should really do that.” Well, now it’s done. I have a vague feeling that I should go and clean my room. # And my spell-checker is trying to tell me that gussy isn’t a word, but this is one of those situations where I’m totally sure that it’s wrong. For some reason I always assumed this was an Americanism, which the various spell-checkii are pretty good at detecting, but I suppose I could be wrong. Any Americans out there want to confirm? # Finally, since it is actually Sunday morning and I spent much of yesterday remembering just how much I used to love the Velvet Underground:

Read More »
29/01/2012 4 Comments
Journal

Saturday Gloom and Notebooks

So I seem to have lost the ability to just sit down and blog at the moment, because the long stretches of silence means everything seems far to trivial when I finally sit down to start posting things. I want to, say, pop in and blog about the fact that I’ve just spent the day with my inner goth turned up to eleven, listening to songs I haven’t listened to in years while rereading the big ol’ copy of The Annotated Sandman, Vol 1, that I picked up on Friday night, which means it’s now coming up on nine o’clock in the evening and I’m surprisingly maudlin and in a bitter-sweet kind of mood that would totally result in me dying my hair black if there was black hair dye in the house. Fortunately, there isn’t, so I’ll continue on as a vaguely normal person on the morrow, but you know how it goes. I’ve had a day catching up with a former version of myself, the one that used to gad about looking like this: For the most part I don’t miss being twenty all that much, but every now and then it’s nice to remember that twenty-two-year-old Peter got a few things right, even among all the enormous cock-ups that I managed to achieve between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. And part of me still wonders when, exactly, I migrated away from the feather boa as a standard look and became a jeans and t-shirt kind of guy for

Read More »
28/01/2012 No Comments
Journal

The Umbrella Does Nothing

I spend a lot of time walking across this bridge these days: Twice a day, four days a week, in fact. It’s on the path between the train station and work, and avoiding it means traversing a somewhat less pleasant bridge that qualifies as the long way around, so its really a no-brainer to take the Kurilpa Bridge even before I made my startling discovery that the bridge had secret, magical, powers of plot development. In seven of the last eight mornings where I’ve walked across the bridge, I’ve reached the other end with a new scene in my head, typically one that will fix a story I’ve been working on for a while, or advance a novel I plan on writing in a way I’m not really expecting. It’s magical and kind of awesome and usually results in my tapping frantic notes into my phone at the far end so I can email them home when I actually have writing time. On the eighth morning I crossed the bridge it was raining, and I learned a very different lesson: you do not walk across the Kulilpa Bridge while its raining. There’s no cover and the wind encourages the rain to hit the bridge in a rather horizontal fashion, and you’ll spend the enter walk wailing “The umbrella does nothing” in your best McBain impression. And afterwards you’ll spend the day at work in wet socks and wet pants, and your toes will shrivel into raisins. It’s distracting to try and work

Read More »
22/01/2012 1 Comment
Journal

The Writer in a Silly Hat

I was given a particularly silly hat for Christmas, and the first thing my mother said was oh god, it’ll be up on his blog by tomorrow morning. My mother is a wise woman, but she failed to take into account the delays inevitably caused by moving house and cleaning and the other minutia of the last few weeks. Not that she’s wrong about me posting a picture here, just the time frame: Best. Present. Ever. The hat came about because my sister buggered off to Nepal a few months back, planning on walking to the base camp of Everest, and asked if there was anything I wanted. Usually when my sister goes places I shrug and mumble something non-committal and end up with a motley array of t-shirts when she returns, but Tibet proved to be a special case. “You know what?” I said, “I’d really dig a sherpa hat.” The fact that she found one with its own woolly Mohawk is really just a bonus, even if she spent the entire trip with people asking her if she actually liked her brother. Now I just need winter to roll around so everyone shall know me by my resplendent blue-green headware of awesomeness.  Until Winter, I shall content myself with writing and admiring said headware on the noggin of the Spokesbear. # I am, officially, relocated to a new domicile and deadline free. The new place features somewhat tighter quarters than I’m used to, what with cramming pretty much everything I own into

Read More »
04/01/2012 1 Comment
Journal

The Perils of Working at a Writers Centre

One of the perils of working in a Writers Centre is the moments of downtime when your colleagues will turn to you and ask, so, what are you writing at the moment? Not a bad thing during the times when you’re actually working on things and eager to talk about it, but right now I’m kinda…not doing anything. Or rather, I’m giving myself a break after a year of deadline after deadline, accompanied by the fact that I’m still in the process of moving out of my old place (there’s a bunch of stuff still waiting to go into storage, and a whole mess of cleaning to do after Christmas is done with). So when asked during the walk to collect lunch for the office today, my response was, well, nothing really.  Mostly what I’m doing at the moment is catching up on things. Specifically, catching up on email, which has been a little…untouched…during the process of packing and moving house. Ordinarily this isn’t a huge problem, but for some reason everyone emailed me asking for things at the same time and I was forced to send back a lot of replies that went along the lines of I’d love to, but can it wait a week until I get my living situation sorted and my internet reconnected. If I don’t sit down and clear the emails I owe people tonight then it’ll be another week until I get to them, and that’s no good to anybody. Of course, this

Read More »
20/12/2011 4 Comments
Gaming

David Bowie and Bing Crosby Singing Christmas Carols

My friend Chris has been running Space: 1889 for our Sunday night gaming crew for about a year now, and it seems to be the first roleplaying game that’s managed to dislodge the mindset of Sunday Night Cthulhu that dogged our weekly sessions after…well, about three straight years of Call of Cthulhu gaming. A few weeks back we kind of bullied persuaded Chris that we should do a Christmas Special, and he somewhat hesitantly agreed despite the fact that he thought we were crazy. So we gathered and we played and there was…well, quite  a lot of Christmas references thrown around. More than you’d expect, given the vast majority of us are bah-humbug types who aren’t all that fond of the Holiday season. I won’t go into the details, since there’s nothing quite so dull as listening to an enthusiastic RPG player waxing lyrical about how awesome their game was, but we all had a blast. I bring it up because the climactic moment of the game (whereupon our mad steampunk adventurers broke the rules of time and space to deliver presents to thousands of Martian orphans) hinged upon the singing of The Little Drummer Boy. Which immediately led me to Bing Crosby and David Bowie singing a Christmas duet. Truly one of the weirdest video clips I’ve ever seen Sadly, we’re running out of time on our Sunday night gaming. Half the group is moving to Melbourne in March, and despite the fact that we’re going to try moving the game online, it’ll inevitably miss

Read More »
19/12/2011 No Comments
News & Upcoming Events

Things I wrote doing stuff out in the world

I’ve been meaning to drop past and blog a few things for the last couple of days, but my times largely been taking up by packing and writing and desperately trying to reach the pre-moving deadlines, and so most of this is old news to anyone following me on twitter or facebook. In any case, my story Dying Young from Eclipse 4 has been selected to be part of Gardner Dozois’ Years Best Science Fiction athology due out next year, which means I can go scratch another thing off the big ol’ list of places I’d like to get published but rarely talk about. There’s a full ToC over on SF Signal, and it looks like a very cool book to be included in. I should also mention that my story, The Girl in the Next Room is Crying Again, is online over at Daily Science Fiction so that those who don’t want to subscribe can go check it out. And with that I’m going back to the words and the packing. One of the stories that absolutely must be done before I move is finally done, which means I’ve got about thousand words between me and finishing everything I’ve got due by the end of the year.

Read More »
13/12/2011 No Comments
Journal

SNUFFLES FOR EVERYBODY

Still packing. Still writing. Still having a rather stressful week at the dayjob, courtesy of unruly technology that insists on not-working even after months of people trying to address the not-working issues. Suspect that I’m going to go into work tomorrow and be told there’s nothing we can do to fix the issue, which promises to be the kind of adventure people have in mind when they curse you to live in interesting times. This despite working late tonight in order to try and rectify things, or at least get the news now so I won’t fret about it for the next thirteen hours. On the plus side, today’s email brought the news of a potential reprint sale that means I may be able to cross yet another goal off my not-so-secret-list-of-writing-goals-I-have-no-control-over-and-therefore-don’t-talk-about – news, as always, once contracts are signed and things are official – and I’ve been quietly filling out the forms that will officially mean I no longer live in my flat, and there copies of books I’d pre-ordered in the post and new books to be pre-ordered so they can arrive in the midst of next year and the dayjob contained one of those conversations you get to have, very occasionaly, with someone who really loves the short story as much as you do. So I guess, overall, it washes out as a win. Or, as the Spokesbear puts it, SNUFFLES FOR EVERYONE! Anyway, it’s, er, eight o’clockish about now. I figure I’ve got another four hours

Read More »
08/12/2011 1 Comment
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Mostly About Things I’ve Read Online

I met Laura Goodin several years ago at a writers workshop. She was forthrightly American in many ways, despite being expatriated to Australia for several years now, and we frequently found ourselves coming from stories at very different angles. Despite her handicap as a non-native Australian, she wrote one of the finest SF cricket stories I’ve ever had the privilege of reading. Since then she’s been busy doing a series of impressive things – writing plays and opera’s, for example, and enrolling in PhD programs. She’s also published a story over on daily science fiction titled The Bicycle Rebellion and it’s rather sad in a sweet kind of way, and it’s perhaps one of the more intriguing stories I’ve seen from Laura over the years (which, considering her knack of publishing SF stories about Demon-pigs in BBQs and Futurism gone mad in magazines that don’t generally publish science fiction, is saying something). I first met Angela Slatter about…well, six weeks or so before I met Laura Goodin…but after years of blogging about Write Club I’m assuming I don’t need to provide a great deal of context for Angela. She’s awesome, she writes remarkable things, and among the remarkable things she’s written is the latest editorial for the Weird Fiction Review. And if you were sitting around, wondering what to do with your holidays, you could do a lot worse than checking out said editorial, As the Weird Turns, and using it as a suggest reading list for the next month. # There’s ten days until

Read More »
07/12/2011 1 Comment

PETER’S LATEST RELEASE

RECENT POSTS

SEARCH BLOG BY CATEGORY
BLOG ARCHIVE