I’m going to break the radio silence for a moment because this is too cool not to share it. Step 1) Head on over to Vodkandlime’s livejournal and check out the “Twilighted” book-cover for Horn. Step 2) Be greatly amused.
Gen Con Australia kicks off on Thursday. It ends on Sunday afternoon. I’ll be working there, so drop past and say high if you’re around. That said, I have a mountain of work to get done in preperation and I’m behind *again* (courtesy of computer trouble again – word stopped working on the laptop. That’s two sets of computer problems in a month. I wasn’t at all manly about it, and if if this keeps up I think I’ll be writing the next novella on google-docs using my mobile phone). So I’ll see you all next Wednesday, folks, cause I’m kicking off the radio silence right about…now.
Because I’m tired and unable to articulate much today, so I give you the general mood of my week via youtube clips from the family Wainwright. ‘Cause even if my week isn’t awesome, I can share the awesome of others. 1) Anger 2) Absurdity 3) An Ill-defined longing for longing
Right what is says on the tin – it got inspired by a facebook meme but my natural love of verbage meant it raged out of control. Anyway, this is actually a pretty good summary of what the interior of my head looks like when the subject of writing comes up. Some are me-specific, some a general, and most were written down fast in order to see what the first twenty-five thoughts that came to mind actually were. I take no responsibility for accidents caused if you follow any of these hastily constructed thoughts and give the usual warnings of upcoming writer-angst (it’s been that kind of week): 1) There is no “one true way to write,” but there are several commonly touted pieces of advice that both make sense to me and largely represent an decent list of “things worth doing unless you’ve got a good reason not to.” 2) This list is not one of them. 3) There
One of those sports that still hasn’t lost its novelty – there are two new reviews out there for the dedicated Horn-spotter. The first is available online at Specusphere – as usual, there’s a random sampling to whet your appetite: Horn is a memorable, unique, and highly polished work. Spanning noir, horror, fantasy and several other sub-genres, it has widespread potential appeal. The novella is an excellent showcase of Ball’s ability as an author, and also a fine example of Twelfth Planet Press’s intriguing novella range. The other came out in the September issue of Locus magazine courtesy of their short-fiction reviewer Rich Horton: New from Australia’s Twelfth Planet Press is a first rate novella chapbook, Horn, by Peter M. Ball. Miriam Aster is a freelance detective, having blown her police career with some unprofessional behavior, but she’s still called back for certain cases as a consultant. Cases, apparently, involving visitors from Faerie. This story starts with a teenager found raped
1) Two Reasons Angela Slatter is awesome The latest Clarkwesworld magazine has an interview with eight Emerging SF authors, including the insightful and rather startlingly talented Angela Slatter. She says some smart stuff, as do the rest of the interviewees, and it’s well worth a read. If, however, you like you’re writing advice in a more direct and focused form, I really suggest heading over to Angela’s website and read through her advice on editing. Actually, I’d advocate printing out the entire post and keeping it handy next time you’re proofing something. I’ve been lucky enough to have stuff edited/proofed by Angela before and I can say with certainty that she knows of what she speaks here. 2) Interesting Writing Advice from Across the Interwebs Still on the writing front, I’d also recommend going and taking a listen to Mary Robinette Kowal’s guest-spot on the Writing Excuses podcast. It crams four really useful pieces of advice to fiction writers (based on
The Speed Racer movie fascinates me. Not because it’s a good movie – it’s not – but because it’s made by people just smart enough to do interesting things and just dumb enough to make some very simple mistakes. As a writer, this is a combination that keeps me looking at something, wondering what the hell happened and why it all falls apart. I’ll be honest for a second – Speed Racer should be the kind of glorious failure in the style of films like Southland Tales. The Watchowski Brothers remake has a lot going for it in terms of a really strong aesthetic, a willingness to be stylized rather than naturalistic, and a moderately strong cast. It was never going to be a successful film because the choices they were making ran up against the basic demand for pseudo-realism in cinema, but at the very least it was ambitious and willing to take chances. Sadly, this is coupled with
Ever wondered what I look like after pulling an all-nighter? I’m not sure why you would, but through the magic of built-in laptop cameras and my own hazy logic this morning you’re going to get it anyway. Current stimulants: coffee, panic, a bowl of port wine jelly, three short bursts of sleep (45 minutes or less). If you need me, I’ll the guy who thinks he’s a hummingbird.
Stop what you’re doing, right now, and go back up your computer. Not just saving your on a zip drive, but actually backing your files up and keeping them somewhere far away from your PC. I usually say this once a year in October to commemorate the computer crash of 06 that complete wiped out about seven years of work, including a bunch of stories and the PhD thesis I’d been working. Like most people, I thought I was safe because everything was backed up on my zip drive. Unfortunately, said zip drive was plugged into my computer at the time, so the power surge that wiped my PC out took the back-ups with me. It was, needless to say, a very bad day. I cried for a while. Eventually I started throwing things. This warning comes early this year because I just lost my second PC in three years. It just went “nope, done with this,” and stopped working
I just thought I should mention it because, you folks, honestly, you rock my goddamn world. I say this full aware that it’s one of those phrases I overuse, but this week I mean it quite literally. My world, it is rocked. I spent part of yesterday studying my to-do list for the next couple of years – not months, like I ordinarily work, but whole damn years – and realised there is a stuff on there. Stuff with tentative release dates and upcoming deadlines and the possibility of more stuff on the end. Stuff that I don’t have to write and figure out a market for, because there are folks who are waiting for it and setting deadlines and expecting it to sell once it’s released. There’s still a part of me that’s absolutely bewildered by the fact that there are enough of you paying attention to what I write in order to justify that. Writing’s always been a
This is not the blog post you were meant to be reading today. Not that you’d know this if I hadn’t told you, but there it is. The blog post I had planned for today was inspired by a question Karen Miller asked earlier this week (“isn’t it time the boys of the Science Fiction grew up”) and put forward a bunch of thoughts about why they wouldn’t, because not growing up is kinda integral to the contemporary cultural narrative of geekdom and folks seem to be unwilling to change it in any significant way. You’ll probably still get that post, sooner or later, since I’ve half-drafted it in my head and it’s still kicking around and gathering arguments, but I just don’t have the energy to unleash snark and ranting on the world today. ‘Cause this week, really, it’s been rather awesome. How awesome, I hear you ask? This awesome: I had two three short stories accepted in the
1) Chris Green Distills the Clarion Wisdom I went to Clarion South with Chris two and a half years ago. He’s a smart man, very interested in things, and on something of a roll of late as far as publications and sales go. Over the last week Chris started distilling some of the major lessons we learned during the workshop into a series of very short, controlled blog posts. Given his terse nature, these are short and easy to digest, and they’re basically the high points of the workshop in collected form (and since he doesn’t believing in tagging posts, I’ll send you straight to the first entry and let you follow along from there). 2) Philip Pullman on How to Write a Book This amuses me in its accuracy. 3) Reviewage andPimpage – My comrade-in-writing Ben Francisco – and the first man to tell me “this should be a novella” – engages in some Horn Pimpage on my behalf – The Fix diggs my
