ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
Journal

Swancon 36

A few months ago I decided to do the sensible thing by my financial situation and give up any plans of going to Swancon 36 (aka Australia’s nat-con). It was the right decision back that – I was unemployed and broke and heavily in debt, and although there were all sorts of good reasons to go to Perth (Peeps! Ellen Datlow!) the money just wasn’t there. Admitting that fracking hurt too, ’cause occasionally I’d talk to Alisa over at Twelfth Planet Pressabout using Swancon as a rough launch date for Claw, and I do so love being around when a new book goes out into the world. Several things have changed since then. For starters there’s no chance that Claw will be out by Swancon, largely because the recent mess of dayjob and parents having heart surgery meant I just wasn’t able to meet the original deadline*. On the other hand, Swancon still has a chance to catch up with peeps and Ellen Datlow as a guest, and my recent acquisition of a day job means there’s the possibility of being able to afford to go without crippling myself financially for the next three years. I spent most of the week running numbers, just making sure that it was possible, and what it came down to is this: I can afford the flights, I can afford the membership, and I can probably afford to eat while I’m in Perth. What I’m struggling with is the attempt to find accommodation that’s

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21/11/2010 1 Comment
News & Upcoming Events

Electric Velocipede

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before, but there’s a new issue of Electric Velocipede on the horizon and I have a story in it. Apparently Electric Velocipede were handing out promotional postcards at World Fantasy that challenged people to match six opening lines with the authors who wrote them. You’re invited to follow the link and find out why this causes me some form of squee. There may well be some kind of contest associated with it,  although there’s no closing date mentioned in the post and I’m a little behind the times, so it’s entirely possible said contest no longer applies. Or can’t be entered online. I can’t really say for sure from perusal of the post, but I’m all for embracing the mystery. After seeing the full table of contents I have to admit that I’m looking forward to the double-issue, largely ’cause I share a ToC with the esteemed L.L. Hannett and I’m always pleased to be in the same magazine/book/etc with friends.

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20/11/2010 No Comments
Works in Progress

On the Appeal of Easy Targets

So I’ve set myself some modest goals this week: 500 words a day of writing; three blog posts*; at least one day where I limit myself to two coffees**; buy one Christmas present so I don’t get stuck shopping during the evil December shopping crush. Thus far, I’ve failed horribly at all three, although I can at least make progress the first of my list by clicking publish. This is the curse of modest goals – it’s too easy to let them slide, figuring there will always be a moment later where you can get things done, but for the moment they’re a necessary evil because the immodest goals were just too damn intimidating for me. Monday was a rough day for writing; Tuesday was much improved, largely courtesy of a 3k night at write club, but today I’ve been letting the side down again, focusing more on planning than writing new words. Still time to rectify that before bed, just, but we’ll see how I go. I keep reminding myself that the size of the goals isn’t important at the moment, it’s the routine I’m chasing. Figuring out ways to get things done, finding an hour or so to write when I need it, getting used to putting words on the page again. I suspect that none of the three thousand words I wrote yesterday are going to be used, but the frustration of the story failing to come together eventually served as the catalyst for figuring out what

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17/11/2010 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

The Sunday Round-Up

So this week I managed to finish reading Georgette Heyer’s Cotillion, start reading Kirstyn McDermott’s Madigan Mine, watched the third season of The Big Bangtheory, and went down to the Gold Coast to spend some time with my dad while he makes his way through the three months of rehabilitation that follow open heart surgery. I worked a whole bunch and got to play with the company website. I tried to write fiction without any real success: 2,500 words total for eight days of work. I had a long fight with my local vendor of mobile phones after the phone they sold me under the promise that it would do everything my old phone did proved to be false, yet this wasn’t deemed sufficient to replace the phone for something else. I managed to lose track of what day it was twice, getting messages from people asking “dude, where are you?” while I sat there going “what? Come on, it’s only Tuesday, isn’t it?” All in all, the events of the last month have left me weary and my one-coffee-a-day regime is well and truly gone. So in lieu of actual content, let me recommend some stuff: – The Writer and the Critic podcast – Author Kirstyn McDermott and critic Ian Mond recommend books to one-another and get together every month to talk about that. It’s just kicked off with a discussion of Marcus Zusak’s The Book Theif and Catherynne M. Valente’s Deathless, and given that its’ two smart and articulate people

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14/11/2010 No Comments
Journal

Hello!

So, apparently I lied yesterday – I am back today. I didn’t mean to lie, or expect to be here, but after a day at the final Year of the Novel course at the Queensland Writer’s Cetnre there was a part of brain that clicked over and said wait, yes, I am meant to be writing, perhaps it’s time to reclaim that bit of my life again. And so I have critted work, and pondered problems with the novel-in-progress, and chatted with the awesome Angela Slatterabout when we can kick off write-club again and which day we can use so we can get some continuity going (we’ve traditionally used Fridays, Sundays and Thursdays, all of which have become untennable due to semi-regular scheduling conflicts). It’s been chaotic fortnight around these parts – it kicked off with the news of my dad’s heart attack on the 24th of October that saw me spend much of the week on the Gold Coast, either at the hospital or at my parents place doing stuff to help my mum out. It was followed with my first week of work at the new day job (acquired  on the day my dad went in for his triple bypass) while the list of post-operative complications from my dad’s surgery filtered through (short version: collapsed lung, a longer-than-expected stay in Intensive Care, and a slower build-up to post-operative physio than we would have liked). The good news is that Dad’s looking like he’ll be getting out of the

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06/11/2010 No Comments
Journal

Hello my neglected blog, how are you? I’m still away, doing a mixture of taking-care-of-family type things and wtf-when-did-I-get-a-day-job type things. I wear a tie to work. It’s very strange. I’ll be back soon. Not today, and not tomorrow, but soon. Until then, I’m just going to point out that I’m listening to Guns and Roses this afternoon, and it’s all Jason Fischer’s fault. Yours, Peter

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05/11/2010 No Comments
Journal

Updated

I’m temporarily back in Brisbane this morning, prepping for a job interview after lunch. My dad goes in for a double-bypass tomorrow morning, so I suspect I’ll be driving back down to the Gold Coast tonight. I’ve not been this familiar with the Gold Coast highway in years. He’s met with all sorts of specialists in the last few days, and the ultra-sound of his heart has shown that while the current episode wasn’t a heart attack, there’s been a minor attack at some point in the past. The current plan, barring acts of employment, is to come back to Brisbane on Monday night once we’ve got a firm idea of what’s going on post-surgery. In the mean time, should you miss me, might I suggest heading over to Shimmer where they’ve posted the reading I did of my story from issue 12, The Mike and Carly Story, Without the Gossip.

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27/10/2010 No Comments
Journal

Bad News

I’m going to be scarce this week. Yesterday my father went to hospital with what we’re not technically calling a heart attack (he has blocked arteries, but the “heart episode” didn’t result in damage to the heart muscle), and we’re currently waiting to find out when the bypass surgery is going to happen. Presumably it’ll be some time this week, after the blood thinners they gave him when he was first admitted have started to wear off. All in all, none of this news is as bad as it could have been – my dad has been extraordinarily lucky given the circumstances, and open heart surgery has been around long enough that the bigger concern than “they’re cutting him open and messing with his ticker” is “how is all this going to interact with his Parkinson’s medication.” It helps that my sister is a radiographer with experience working with cardiac-style cases, so we have a fairly accurate barometer of how serious things are and how much worse they could have been. I, on the other hand, have irrational flashbacks to episodes of the Gilmore Girls in which not-a-heart-attack heart problems were a plot point, which is both totally inappropriate and oddly comforting at the same time. I am going to be on the Gold Coast for the next week, for obvious reasons. I’ve tried to contact people and cancel all the things that need to be canceled, but I’m putting this up here as a safety net. If we’re meant

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25/10/2010 1 Comment
Big Thoughts

This post contains swearing

So this is something of an addendumto yesterday’s post, and it’s written because every now and then I see people I really like get in trouble because they don’t yet grasp the realities of white male privilege until it’s too late. I had this conversation with a friend the last time this issue raised its head, but I don’t think I ever put it together as a complete post, so I figured I may as well have it handy. Be warned that I’m going to swear a lot. Be warned that you’re probably not going to like hearing it, especially because it flies in the face of the way we wish the internet could be. Call it the two-word rule you need to wrap your head around before you launch into a discussion of feminsim online as a white male. It goes a little something like this: Fuck civility. I say this as someone who’s a fan of civility, who dislikes confrontation, and who comes pre-loaded with all the privilege that being a university educated white male delivers in contemporary Western culture. Lets face it, I can be an articulate and moderately well-read guy when I put my mind to it. My first response when confronted with an internet flame-war is to recoil in horror at the chaos and raw emotion on display. On 99% of topics, I’m all for calming down and having a civilized argument. But for the purposes of talking about feminism, or racism, or any other

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21/10/2010 6 Comments
Big Thoughts

I would rage, but I no longer have the energy

I hate it when things I usually enjoy go and do something daft. This week that space has largely been taken up by the Apex Blog, in which one of the regular bloggers has trotted out the argument that feminists complaining about all-male TOC are arguing in favour of political correctness over quality. Which, yeah, way to be a few years behind the debate and all, dude. Thumbs fucking up. I planned on getting irate, but lets face it, I’ve been irate about this before (and Apex has already announced that there’s someone posting a response on their site). Instead, I’m just going reblog the response I had last time this shit came up: Gender and SF (Originally posted in February of 2009) There’s been a bunch of debates about Gender and SF of late, all of which seem to end up with someone defending themselves with a variation of “I filled all the spots on project X with men because I was choosing on the basis of quality, not gender.” This answer flummoxes me every time it’s trotted out; not because the people who use it are not bad people or knowing oppressors, but just because it often reveals itself as a blind-spot in the approach of someone whose work I’d otherwise respect. And, to be honest, I just don’t get how people can’t question that statement, since SF itself has often been denigrated and ignored using the same excuse. Think about that moment that all SF fans seem to

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20/10/2010 No Comments
Works in Progress

Process

So after a week of sturm-und-drang and putting forthblog posts and twitters that worry my parents, it’s time to get back to the talking cats. There seems to a process when I sit down to write novellas. It starts with this is easy, no problem, which is quickly replaced by aaargh! WTF? Who thought I could do this, and it eventually reaches okay, I’ll dump everything and start over, with a plan; planning for the win!  This usually coincides with a healthy slice of screw this, I just want to write short stories, which is usually followed by some OMG, I totally forgot how to write a short story type flailing. Guess which stage I hit a few days ago. Fortunately, I’m already aware I’ve been here before and things worked out. It’s handy to track these things, sometimes. From memory there’s a stage or two that follows this one, although the fact that Claw is part of the series probably helps avoid the dammit, I really need to rewrite this in the third person, that’ll fix everything stage of mania and the stuff follows – aka the parts of the process where things get written – aren’t as well documented because, well, things are actually getting written. But in ten minutes I’m going to turn the internet off and write for a bit. After doing dozens of bits and pieces thus far, I’m trying to bulldoze my way through the manuscript one chapter at a time. The first one is done.

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20/10/2010 No Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Writing, Budgeting, and Shame

My primary activity at the moment is not doing things, which is not conducive to exciting bloggery. For example, I’m not succumbing to the temptation to renew my Locus subscription; I’m not rushing out to buy the passel of books I really want to buy; I’m not going on online shopping sprees to celebrating the moment of parity between the Australian dollar and the US*. In fact, I’m not really leaving the house much for anything, really. All of this takes considerable mental energy on my part, because the impulse is there to do all of them and in some cases (say, Locus) I can even partially justify why I should do them. Such are the realities of paying off credit card debt in my current circumstances – I’ve trimmed my budget to focus as much as possible on paying off the accumulated debt of the last year, and even then the realities of credit interest meant I’m only dropping the debt by $5-$20 a month. Eventually that will change – the payments will knock down the debt, the not-using-the-credit-card will keep new debt from accumulating, and thus there will be less interest as the months go by – but that day is a ways off . At the moment the best option available to me is getting used to not doing things, even if it’s hard and depressing and largely un-fun. So the question becomes: why am I blogging about this? Well, call it a lesson in the psychology of being

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19/10/2010 2 Comments

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