ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
Smart Advice from Smart People

Nancy Kress on Fixing the Ending

Nancy Kress recently did a short post on how she fixed a story ending that wasn’t working, although it sneaks in as part of a post about other things. The short version, for those not inclined to follow links, goes something like this: Step One: go back to the last point where the story last excited you. Step Two: Change the action of a secondary character. Step Three: Chart the protagonists response to that change. I may have sat there staring at the advice for a good ten minutes this morning, wondering how the hell I’d never thought of it. I mean, it’s simple and rather obvious, but seeing it articulated like that as a process is somewhat revelatory.

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21/01/2011 4 Comments
Journal

Apathy versus Anger

Today I spent my free time at work engaging in what is quickly becoming my favorite procrastination activity: daydreaming about ways I can quit my job to write and making lists about the things I need to do in order to make that happen. On one hand this makes for a nice change – this time last last year I was unemployed and dreaming of ways to pay rent – but after three months in the new day job things have evolved to the point where it’s a hindrance rather than a help. You see, somewhere along the line I ceased being the office assistant and became the unofficial web-guy for the company. My day’s went from data-entry to content production and putting together a plan for the company to revise the website and engage with social media. I’m far from an expert on this kind of stuff – I got the job by virtue of being the sole person in the office who knows *exactly* how much I don’t know about SEO and webmarketing – so it takes up brainpower. The net result is that I spend hours writing or thinking about writing or putting together plans for writing, then I come home and stare at the manuscripts I’m meant to be working on and my brain is full of fuzz. And since I’ve rarely had the kind of job where I show up and do this full-time, in an office, it’s getting harder and harder to stop kicking

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20/01/2011 No Comments
Journal

After the Rain/After the Flood

So the buzz on twitter is that the After the Floods e-Anthology has raised over $1200 for the Queensland Flood Appeal, to which I can only say you fucking rock, fans of Australian SF. The special editions title becomes even more poignant now, when the floods are over and the clean-up begins, than it was when we were watching the water rise. I spent much of my day playing courier for the Day Job, delivering orders that’d been held up by the water, and I got to see a fair chunk of Brisbane while I was driving around. Some of the city has held up remarkably well. Some has not. I got home from work and read that there’s a major arterial road that’s potentially ready to slide into the river, which is something that seems oddly surreal. I’ve got friends who are only just making it home after leaving their houses. My sister has absconded to the Gold Coast for the weekend because it seems like it’ll take that long for power to be returned to her home (She was gearing up for a birthday part this weekend, fifty or so people coming over for champagne. Not surprisingly, that’s been postponed and a small mountain of party food and drink has been dumped due to the lack of refrigeration). There are people only four or so blocks from me who are just getting power back this afternoon.  All of this made sense when the floods were happening, but somehow it’s

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14/01/2011 1 Comment
Journal

Flood, Part 2

News is that the floods have peaked, and peaked at a slightly lower level than expected, which is one of those bright sides that only remains a bright side until you turn on the television and look at the large swathes of Brisbane underwater. I went for a poke around my suburb this morning, just a little after sunrise. My street seems to have fared pretty well – we’ve had a couple of very small patches of water covering the road and there’s various detours, police barricades and other stuff keeping people from driving through them. Since I’m within the area that they’re blocking off, it’s a safe bet I won’t be driving anywhere today, but all in all it didn’t seem so bad. Then I found this, about 5 minutes walk from my house. To put the above in perspective – that big reflective thing that looks like a river used to be a main road. The trees just to right of it used to mark the edge of the local creek, a body of water so unpreposing that I hadn’t actually realised that’s what it was – I’ve lived here three years now, walking past the creek once a week, and always assumed it was just a particularly ambitious drainage ditch. Somewhere underneath all that was one of the local parks. If you look closely, you may be able to spot the pedestrian footbridges poking through the waterline. On the other side of that water is the street

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13/01/2011 No Comments
Journal

Flood

Brisbane is bracing itself for the worst flooding the citiy’s seen in over a century, and it appears the worst of it will hit around 4 AM tomorrow morning. While I live in one of the affected suburbs, it kinda looks like I may be up high enough to avoid the worst of the waters. Roads may be cut off, but I should stay safe and dry (and if not, well, I’m ready to run for higher ground and there’s plenty of it around). I went to go take some photographs of the local creek (which, until yesterday, I always thought of as a particularly ambitiuos bit of drainage system rather than an established body of water), but was promplty stymied by water covering part of the road about 300 m from my house. Since I wasn’t in the mood to wade, and the local traffic makes dashing onto the road itself rather stupid, I’ll instead send you over to see Angela Slatter’s images of the local hood.

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12/01/2011 2 Comments
Works in Progress

Process Notes

1) I’m writing in third person this year. This really isn’t my preferred narrative POV, but so it goes. I shall write slowly and suck more, neither of which are fatal conditions. 2) My writing goals are as they always were: take over the goddamn world. 3) I need to remove all forms of fiction from my work area for the foreseeable future. This would be easier if there wasn’t a bookshelf over my desk. 4) I’ve given up on planning this year. I write what needs to be written, then I write other stuff. 5) The parenthetical aside is a thing of evil. 6) There are edits that need doing. I should probably go do them.

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10/01/2011 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

The Cure

A friend of mine just posted this on facebook. Due to overwhelming nostalgia and flashbacks to teenage angst, I, of course, am immediately posting it here. ‘Cause, honestly, I don’t care how long it’s been since you last listened to the cure, it’s still too damn long. And now I go back to the edits and line-proofs, in the hopes I get them done in time to not piss off editors. Catch you on the morrow, peeps. Don’t let the Monday get you down.

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09/01/2011 2 Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

They had me at “Horse Mounted Gatling Guns”, they lost me at “Megan Fox”

So I sat down and watched the Jonah Hex movie over Christmas. This was a mistake. Don’t get me wrong, I really wanted to like this movie. I mean, it has a bounty hunter who can speak to the dead and horse-mounted gatling guns in the first ten minutes, and that kind of absurdity is the kind of wrongness that I’m willing to roll with. And for the first first half-hour or so, things were looking pretty good – it wasn’t a great movie, but it was zany and weird and it had undead fucking cowboys and that kind of shit is awesome. Then Megan Fox showed up. A few years ago I had a friend who worked off the theory that Kate Beckinsale was the kiss of death for a film. As soon as she appeared on screen you were pretty much doomed to a cinematic experience that sucked. At best you’d get a film that achieved a kind of stylized aesthetic to try and cover for the lack of plot and continuity (see Underworld, and Van Halen), and at worst you got the kind of film that made you wish you could beat someone with a cluestick until they admitted their failings and gave you your two hours back (see Pearl Harbor). Now Megan Fox seems to be performing the same function, ’cause I swear to god that every scene after her first appearance, even the ones she wasn’t actually in, the film made less sense and tried to cover it by

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05/01/2011 10 Comments
Works in Progress

Is This Thing On

Today is the day I returned to work (both day job and the real job), and that means my blogging hiatus is over. Admittedly, it should have been over back on the first of January, but those of you following the twitter feed will already be aware of the somewhat crappy way I kicked off 2011. I spent New Years Day dealing with the catastrophic aftermath of an accident with a bottle of red wine, a somewhat less catastrophic car accident on my way to pick up cleaning supplies and a bunch of new work shirts, and an encounter with a rusting hot water system in the garage that caused my elbow to swell up to twice it’s normal size. If I’d blogged on the day, I probably would have spent five hundreds trying to say what can be summed up as, essentially, fuck fuck fuck. I’ve just spent the last two hours banging out some much needed worded count on Paradise City, the first of my Flotsam stories to appear in the Edge of Propinquity this year, and it appears that I’ve finally found the goddamn awesome that’ll give the series its own identity. And really, thank fuck for that, ’cause it’s about time I tracked something down. This project’s been haunting me for the last two months – I’d pitched it a while back and it got accepted a scant few days before Dad’s heart attack, so I kind of lost track of everything in the month that

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04/01/2011 No Comments
Journal

Things I Would Be Blogging About, Were I Blogging this December

1) The rejuvenating power of The Birthday Party’s Release the Bats when you’re tired, pissed off, and generally unwilling to engage with things. 2) How unfeasibly cool it is that Angela Slatter had her books mentioned on Ellen Datlow’s list of book recommendations for XMas. 3) The somewhat tricky process of making the first installment of Flotsam, my series due for the Edge of Propinquity next year, work the way I want it to work. 4) Getting the chance to interview Dan Abnett for a friend’s podcast, only to have the technology fail us at a crucial moment and steal away the audio. 5) Plans for the blog in the new year, many of which have already been discarded as unworkable because, yo, I am weary of plans. After being lured back to the working world by the promise of paying rent and eating meals that consist of more than potatoes and Soylent Green, I’m finding the ideas of plans kinda abhorrent at the moment. I feel the need for spontaneity somewhere in my life, so the blog may as well be it.

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20/12/2010 1 Comment
Journal

The Festive Season

Someone wise and adroit once said that it’s better to not blog than to blog poorly, and after reviewing my to-do list for the rest of the year I’ve decided to take heed of that advice. The Spokesbear and I are going to take a partial sabbatical from the internet over December while I get some stuff done. I’ll be on e-mail and checking facebook and doing all the stuff online that I’m required to do for work, but there’s going to be no blogging taking place until the 1st of January. Links to cool stuff (such as the best of the year list over at Last Short Story) will take place over on twitter. See you all in 2011, and may the holiday season treat you well.

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01/12/2010 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

The Magic of Trent’s Book Corner

1) This amuses me. 2) It’s also posted because my parents read my blog and sometime in the next month they’re going to start the yearly dance of “what do you want for Christmas and I’m forced to give them a list of books and DVDs that are not easily available in their hometown of the Gold Coast with nothing but mall-spawn bookshops catering to tourist’s looking for a beach read. Now apparently I’m being unfair with that accusation, for they have a Border’s now, but after fifteen years as a reader in one of the least reader-friendly cities I’ve ever been in, I remain unaccountably bitter. In any case, when they ask this year, I’m going to tell them “All I want for Christmas is a copy of Managing Death,” for it should be widely available on release and Trent is an awesome dude. And ’cause the first book, Death Most Definite, was a cracking read. And ’cause the video corner amuses me.

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22/11/2010 4 Comments

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