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The Mike & Carly Story in Shimmer 12

So I’m spending some time away from the internet this week, trying to get some life stuff sorted out, but I figured I’d drop by to mention the following: Issue 12 of Shimmer magazine is out This is always a source of joy, largely ’cause Shimmer is one of the magazine I consistently subscribe too regardless of financial circumstances. And to quote from their webpage: Issue 12 contains wonders and marvels, from Peter M. Ball‘s punk-not-emo teenage werewolf story, to Josh Storey‘s gorgeous take on the tale of Orpheus, to Monica Byrne‘s story of stigmata in a colony on a distant planet. We’ve got an imaginative reinterpretations of Little Red Riding Hood and the Wizard of Oz, and a sweet little zombie love story. And more! We packed 9 stories into this issue. What they don’t actually mention in that excerpt is that Issue 12 also contains the inimitable Ben Francisco’s Crepuscular, which takes the concept of a firefly and a magical snowman and goes off in a totally unexpected and heartbreaking direction and may well be one of my favourite stories Ben’s written over the last couple of year. Pick it up for $6 an issue in hardcopy and $4 an issue in PDF Or, if you’re still wondering if Shimmer is your thing, hie yourself over here and check out the free bonus story for this issue.

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14/10/2010 1 Comment
Works in Progress

Heading off for a few days

I’m preparing to decamp to the Gold Coast and hang out with my parents for a few days, which is a process that would probably go a lot better if I hadn’t just spent an hour drinking my morning coffee and checking my RSS feeds on the internets. On the other hand, the more internets I get out of my system now, the less time I spend wasting my parent’s bandwidth. I’ve also been deploying kitchen timers and to-do lists this week, which is slowly starting to make a difference when it comes to getting things done. I’m yet to actually finish a to-do list, mind, but I’m usually averaging five or six things on a list of ten goals for the day. I’m still debating whether the timer is going with me to the Gold Coast or not; in theory I’ll be spending the bulk of my time down there doing a rewrite on the sparse first-quarter of Claw (which is messy and needs to be rewritten in order for me to figure out the dreaded what-happens-next) and rewriting isn’t an activity that I do in timed increments due to the concentration required. On the plus side, Claw has grown. I’ve managed to average about a thousand words a day for the last week, gotten some non-Clawwriting done on the side, and generally started to get my shit together on the writing front. My main concern for the next few days is actually finding ways to thin the story

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08/10/2010 No Comments
Journal

4 Things

1) This morning I introduced a friend to the glory that is Hark, A Vagrant, which is kind of like XKCD for literature and history nerds instead of math-geeks. I mention this purely because I just assume everyone reads these things, but every now and then I’ll be all “the hippos will always be hungry; they will never be satisfied” and people will be all “WTF Peter? That makes no sense.” 2) A fairly neat review of Twelfth Planet Press’s Sprawl anthology, which was released at Worldcon and contains new short stories by me and Angela Slatter and LL Hannett and many other awesome folks. In an odd moment of synchronicity, my contributor copy arrived in the mail yesterday too. Should you want your own copy, you can go order one on the TPP website. 3) I suspect being eaten by sabre-tooth tigers would be mildly uncomfortable. And no, you do not context for that. 4) I find myself, post-worldcon, staring at a somewhat impressive pile of credit card debt that I’m not happy about. This is complicated by the fact that I didn’t actually use my credit card for much at Worldcon – I just have various leaks in my budget that tend to add up over time. After spending yesterday going through a year of statements and bank records, the three biggest leaks are: certain kinds of grocery shopping; fuel; books. The first two are mostly a problem because I’m very bad at saying “no, I can’t afford that” when,

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06/10/2010 2 Comments
Works in Progress

To Do

Things I have to do today: write job applications; attend a meeting; pick up the mail at the PO Box; eat dinner with my parents. Things I wish I was doing today: fixing the current wordcount on Claw, since the bits I’ve got written thus far are so damn sparse and rough that it makes me itchy to think about them. What writing I’m going to get done today will take place in small gaps – a half-hour here, twenty minutes there. I suspect this will be enough to hit Minimally Acceptable Levels of Productivity (aka 500 words), but it may not be enough to hit the Comfort Zone (aka 2000 words) or a Good Day of Writing (aka 5,000+ words). All in all, I’m starting to remember how this writing thing goes again.

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05/10/2010 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Six Thoughts Upon Reading The Maltese Falcon

I started reading The Maltese Falcon yesterday, which is one of those books I’ve been meaning to read forever without getting around to it. I lay the blame entirely on the film, which is awesome and fulfilling in a way that the other big hardboiled-to-noir adaptation* never really manages, and thus makes it easier to excuse the act of reading in favour of another round of Bogart playing Sam Spade. In any case, after starting to read I had some thoughts. Six of them, to be exact: 1) The more I read hardboiled fiction the more I’m aware of the way it infiltrates our culture, seeping in through other media when we’re not looking. It’s a genre that lends itself to the intertextual, to endless moments of “so that’s where that came from” as you go back and find primary sources. I knew the tropes of noir film long before I came across it’s classic stories, largely because I’d inherited the narrative beats through cartoons that riffed on them, and because they’d been deployment in films like Bladerunner and the early fiction of William Gibson. 2) Noir is a genre of spiritual exhaustion, a kind of precursor to the sense emotionally bankrupt doom that started seeping into the big L literature I was reading in my undergraduate days. Its heroes exist in liminal space – not quite on the straight-and-narrow, not quite down among the criminals – but they’re guided by a kind of self-developed morality and nobility that exists

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04/10/2010 2 Comments
Works in Progress

Metrics!

For the first time in a long while, I’ve managed to write two thousand words in the space of a day. While this is certainly good news around these parts, it comes with the somewhat sickening realisation that Giving Up Coffee is Working. Interestingly, kicking the draft version of Claw into gear has involved sketching the bare bones of a scene – basically, getting the conflict and the final line down – then trusting that I’ll be able to come back and flesh things out once I’ve got the structure in place. This is a new and different territory so far as my process goes, and may well come back to bite me in a few thousand words time. ________________________________________________ Current Writing Metrics Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 2 New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 10/30 Rejections in 2010: 21/100 Claw Word Count (Finish Date: 15th November)

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03/10/2010 2 Comments
Journal

Coffee, Meaning, and Getting What You Get

I woke up this morning with a desire to blog, only to discover that the back end of my website is down for some kind of regular maintenance, and this presents problems because I’ve grown so used to using it that the thought of posting straight to livejournal seems redundant. So instead I write this elsewhere and assume it’ll go online sooner or later. It’s 8:36 in the morning. It’s raining. I’m barefoot and wearing my oversized winter writing coat and listening to old Cure songs. There’s a list of five things I want to accomplish today sitting beside the keyboard. The first thing on the list is the production of words for Claw. The second thing on the list is the revision of words for Black Candy. If you read yesterday’s post, you may be seeing a theme. Right now I’m missing coffee. Not the caffeine or the taste of it, just the comforting way it used to fit into my routine on mornings like this, it’s ability to be the thing that happens next when I reach a certain point in a blog post and get stuck and need a few minutes to think. I miss the way coffee marked time, gave me a thing to do without doing anything. Tea doesn’t have this quality. Tea is a moment of thought, a decision that’s made and a process that’s undergone. And there’s no measuring required for tea, no judgement about how much or how little to add to

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03/10/2010 No Comments
Journal

Musings

Today is wet and dreary and therefore full of awesome. I’m always far fonder of the world when it’s overcast and dreary than I am during the sunny days, especially now that it’s spring and the demolition-force humidity and heat of Summer are just on the horizon. I am steadily ignoring the fact that there are multiple breeds of football dominating the airwaves at the moment and pretending the rest of the world has gone away for a while. It’s always easier to write on such days, although I’ll admit that I miss the comfort of having another cup of coffee and watching the world through my office window. Soon I will head off and make myself some soup. Until then I will sit and think about Claw, which is proving to be unruly and hard-to-tame due to my insistence on a) not repeating the opening tropes that were used in Horn and Claw; and b) my desire to make use of the supporting cast from the previous two novellas, thus adding to the already considerable backstory-baggage that Aster already carries around with her. I try to calm myself with the thought that it will all be okay once the first corpse is onstage, but this is a lie. Once the corpse arrives, I will simply have a different set of narrative problems to puzzle my way through. And if I write another 400 words on Claw this evening, I can spend a few hours thinking about Black Candy and getting

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02/10/2010 No Comments
Journal

Cutting back on coffee, redux

So it’s been a week since I started cutting back on caffeine, replacing my 9+ cups of coffee a day with a single cup in the morning and the occasional cup of tea in the afternoon. It’s made for a trying week, especially since it came with a side-order of mandatory workshopping and a slew of ongoing problems with my internet access*, so I haven’t yet gotten around to answering all the various people who keep asking “why, for the love of god, why?” whenever I mentioned this on various social media. The short-answer goes something like this: I recently availed myself to the counselling service the Australian social-security system offers to the long-term unemployed, during which we spoke of many things. The Fear was among them, as was my frustration at my inability to put a consistent writing routine together due to increasing anxiety about bills, rent, insomnia, the inability to find consistent employment, and assorted other issues I generally don’t blog about ’cause they aren’t much fun. Actually articulating these things was a weird experience for me, since my usual approach is to ignore them as best I can and get on with things, but since that approach has been less and less effective over the last three years I was willing to try something new. Somewhere along the line we got into the topic of my coffee consumption, and the fact that drinking a cup of coffee is generally my response to stress, boredom, anxiety, being around other people,

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27/09/2010 2 Comments
Journal

Withdrawal

Please let it be known that I’ve been good this week. I mean, there was no writing worth speaking of, but I made it through the various things required of me without blowing people up with my INVISIBLE MIND LASERS, even though parts of the week were frustrating enough that I only endured the passage of time by pretending I truly did have said mind lasers and slipped into a mental debate about the ethics of using them to eliminate pesky annoyances. The next time I’m locked in the room with disciples of positive thinking for three days, there will be no internal debate. I’m just going to channel my inner Ming the Merciless and destroy the goddamn world. This may be an overreaction, but I’m like that, really. Hyperbole and overreaction are my default state, and the next time I won’t be polite when I point out that it takes 21 days to form a habit shit is fucking wrong. I suspect that there are people out there who it helps, but three days of motivational workshopping is enough to make me wish I was dead. Or other people were. Also, I really miss coffee. I mean, I’ve been up three hours, and I’m already in dire need of a nap.

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24/09/2010 No Comments
News & Upcoming Events

Reviews and Other Stuff

Today has been long and slightly odd and overburdened with irritating moments and it involves me cutting back on coffee (which is somewhat akin to saying “flee, mortals, for I will lay waste to your world”), so for obvious reasons there will not be much by way of bloggage this evening. So instead I’m going to point you towards Narelle Harris’s review of Bleed and another review of the same over on Averagely Inadequate. And if you remember the mysterious squee and snoopy-dance of acceptance that I was being very vague about just prior to Worldcon, there might be a clue as to what I was freaking out in the last paragraph of today’s post on Jonothan Strahan’s Coode Street blog.

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21/09/2010 2 Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

What I’m Watching: Xena, Warrior Princess

So I’ve been watching the first seasons of Xena for the last couple of days. Largely I blame Tansy Rayner Roberts for this, since I borrowed the DVDs from a friend after reading the Xena Rewatch Notes on her blog. I can recommend going and checking those out, should you want to follow an in-depth discussion of the first season, for although I’m enjoying the show I’m primarily going to note the three things that are really, really bugging me. Surprisingly, it’s not the casual relationship to history – I’m totally down with the mix-and-match approach to myth and historical reference points. It’s not the dodgy CGI monsters either (although I’m struggling to figure out where the hell the bat-winged, skeletal dryads came from in one of the early Season 2 DVDs). It’s not even Gabrielle, who is irritating for the first half of the season *with a damn purpose*. It’s not even the complete disregard of the laws of physics that occur during the fight choreography. No, I’m irritated by a couple of very specific things. Basically, they go something like this: 1) Why is Xena a Warrior Princess? Seriously, this is bugging me. I get that Warrior Princess scans better than any of the more obvious sub-title options, but I can’t quite figure out why she isn’t just a Warrior, a Warlord, or even a Warrior Queen. I mean, princess of what? Where’s the damn the lineage? And if you get to pick your own title, why pick the

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20/09/2010 No Comments

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