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 while I was in the middle of typing. Fortunately, I learned my lesson last time, so all I lost with this crash was the work I’d done from the last few hours and a bunch of computer game save files that don’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. At most, if it’d taken the zip disk with it, I would’ve lost about a weeks worth of stuff. While this is stressful – I was trying to hit a deadline for Gen Con Oz this afternoon – it isn’t
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 bit like that for me – consciously I know there are people I don’t know reading the stories, but somehow it never sunk in and reached the subconscious level. For years it was just me, and they were dark and unpublished times. Then it was me and the Clarion peeps, and then other writers in the Australian community I met through those folks, and then some of my other friends who don’t write (many of whom I knew for years, and knew I wrote, but remained utterly separated from anything I
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 space of four five days. This, as you might expect, is the kind of start that makes my week awesome. I had a project pitched for 2012 that I can’t talk about; I pitched an idea back that may well see me talk about it much earlier than that; nothing set in stone yet and we’re still hammering out the finer details, but overall, this is looking pretty cool. Completely trashed the current draft of Clawafter having a chat with Twelfth Planet Press about how to proceed with a series of
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 story Clockwork, Patchwork, and Ravens which appeared in Apex Magazine back in May – The Internet Review of Science Fiction describes On the Destruction of Copenhage… as “mundane surrealism.” 4) Rewriting as an Animated Giff A very short-but-interesting post from Elizabeth Bear on the re-writing process, showing the evolution of a paragraph through multiple layers of revision. 5) My Projects Man, the last week has been all about the new projects. I started the new novel draft, started revision of another project, started preparing for the next draft of Claw, agreed to
I love a good cover version, especially when the artist finds a new spin. You could say it feeds directly into my own impulses to mash genres together and see what results, but musicians tend to be somewhat cooler in their experimentation. To whit, 6 cover versions I think everyone should listen to at least once: If you’d prefer not to listen to the youtube playlist, I’ve broken ’em down one-by-one below. 1) Drive, the Paradise Motel There’s a strong possibility that the pang of pure melancholy I feel when I hear the opening guitar notes to the Paradise Motel’s Flight Paths album is a pure Pavlovian response to one of those albums that served as a soundtrack for three or four straight years of my life, and the real centerpiece of the album is the cover of the Car’s Drive. The Paradise Motel take what was a minor pop hit, slow it the fuck down, and imbue it with the kind of sorrow that’d have a small passel of emo kids huddled in a corner wondering why one needs guitars and black hair in order to appear miserable. No youtube clip for this one (correction; there’s now one linked above), but if you listen real carefully you can hear in the soundtrack of the He Died With a Felafel in His Hand movie (speaking of which, why don’t I own a copy of that film yet? Seriously?) or get lucky if you spend enough time poking around Last FM. 2)
On one level, it really doesn’t take much to make me a happy man. This morning happiness is achieved via high volume and the Kaiser Chiefs singing Sha-na-na-na-na during the chorus of every song on their first album. Once that hits a certain point on the decibel meter I’m all glee and shiny rainbows. Which is just as well, because otherwise I’d be writing blog posts about the various ways revising Claw is kicking my arse this week. Although I think that’s probably a good thing, in the end, since it large kicks my arse in the same way Horn did – I have a bunch of scenes I’m pretty happy with, plus a bunch of characters and a plot, but they refuse to come together in a way that’s meaningful just yet. It occurred to me a while ago that this approach is something I’ve inherited from many, many years of playing roleplaying games. The way I plan a game session is exactly the same – pick five or six set-piece scenes that offer a cool setting, or character, or monster, and then find a way to link them together in terms of plot or dungeon complex. The difference there is that the linkage is largely a matter of genre convention; as a general rule, you can trust the players to follow the expected path as long as they know the genre you’re referencing. When writing fiction the approach is a little less satisfying, because finding new ways to get to the same
So as a result of my request for female authors one of my off-line friends decided it would be a lark to say “you know, you really *should* read Stephanie Meyers.” And after the requisite laughter that follows such a suggestion, I said “yeah, right-o” and promptly organised to borrow a copy of Twilight from my sister (who had, in turn, borrowed it from a friend, and wishes it to be quite clear that this is not her book I am borrowing; she was lured into reading it by its popularity among non-reader friends, and her response to the novel are probably even more negative than most). To be honest, the book wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. I mean, it didn’t touch me anywhere inappropriate or threaten to eat my children or anything like that. It just kinda ambled along telling an familiar-if-unpretentious story for the first half in which Bella and Edward stay away from each other, then turned into overblown teenage angst which made me want to slap the characters as they referred to one another as heroin addictions and such, then had an inexplicable vampire-attack-chase-scene-watchamie to come to its unlikely conclusion without any real meaning ’cause, yo, the bad guy was just there to make for an ending, yeah? Then there was prom. I could gripe, because this is a very easy book to gripe about, but I figure there’s enough of that. And, honestly, after years of reading some of the more florid ends
There’s always something a bit oogly-boogly about blogging your responses to fiction written by people you know (especially if you don’t necessarily know well them well), but today I’m going to bite the bullet and recommend Karen Miller‘s The Innocent Mage as one of those books that folks interested in writing fantasy should really pick up and take a look at in order to understand its narrative tricks. I’m kind of envious of writers who can write big, doorstopper-sized fantasy novels at the best of times but this one manages to go somewhere interesting in its avoidance of standard genre tropes. I mean, The Innocent Mage feels like a traditional fantasy novel – you can run through the check-list of elements needed for a big doorstopper fantasy and they’re all there: Ancient enemy from the distant past? A young lad of simple beginnings heading out into the wised world? A prophecy ordaining a great battle between good and evil? The deeds of kings, sorcerers and princes brought to the fore? Check, check, check, and check. This kind of stuff is the baseline of the doorstopper fantasy genre, and their presence no doubt contributes to The Innocent Mage’s ability to satisfy as a big doorstopper fantasy experience. And it does satisfy, very well, on that front. I’m still recovering from the sleep debt I accumulated by staying up until six in the morning reading the book. What surprised me wasn’t what was in the book, but rather what wasn’t. Things like, say, sword-fights.
Let me put today in context for you: I’m laughing at puns. Otter puns. And Jason Fischer is nowhere nearby, which is kind of strange given that about 90% of the punnery that takes place in my world can be traced back to him in some form or another. And I *never* laugh at the puns. Well, hardly ever. I just thought I should mention that, given that a few people have signed up for the blog feed following some fairly serious discussion of feminism and such in other venues last week and they should probably warned. *Sometimes* I bust out the heavy duty cultural theory that tends to burble along in the background of my consciousness, but most of the time it’s all otter jokes and pro-wrestling references. I tend to think both mindsets equally valid and interconnected, really. On the otter hand (hee!) I’m also spending my morning thinking about the moment that came when Girliejones first announced Female Appreciation Month and I suddenly realised that I couldn’t actually pull together a months worth of books by women that I remembered well enough to point to and say “there, right there, that’s awesome.” I could get to five pretty easily, ten without breaking a sweat, but by the time I started getting into the twenties I was basically scouring my bookshelves and pulling down any of the books written by those of the female persuasion that I’d at least, basically, read. This caught me kinda off-guard, because if you’d
I’ve been all words, words, words this week, resulting in big long posts both here and elsewhere, so today I’m aiming for short and brief. Lots of getting in, doing the pimpery, and getting out. And this time it’s not all about me, just like, two thirds about me. You know how it is. Cool Stuff: The Outlandish Voices Podcast A project set up by Laura E. Goodin, a friend from Clarion and fellow believer in the power of the middle initial, to deliver readings by Illawarra’s established and emerging science fiction, horror, and fantasy authors. Laura is one of those folks whose not content to be contained as far as her creative ambitions, so she’s managing this while simultaneously picking up momentum as a short story writer and playwright (with, I suspect, a host of novels getting written as well). I get tired just reading her blog and trying to keep up with her various projects, especially given her propensity for making them all work. The first three installments of Outlandish Voices (featuring readings by the Rob Hood, Cat Sparks, and Richard Harland, a trio of writers with some pretty damn impressive credentials) are online now and there’s more to come. The Stuff of Glee: Horn Reviews Two reviews hit the world in recent weeks. One from Genrereviews, which (quite-rightly) says some awesome things about the cover art before kicking on to the discuss the story. My favorite bits, excerpted: In a lot of ways, Horn sticks pretty close to what have become the
So I’ve been thinking about where ideas come from lately, because I keep seeing this idea floating around that explaining where they come from is somehow secretive and difficult to do. I didn’t get that, the hesitation thing, because I’d always thought the ideas were kind of simple to explain even if no-one was asking me to do so. Then I got interviewed for the first time and realised how hard it is to come up simple, easy answers off the cuff, and there’s petty good odds that if I had been asked the idea question (which, thankfully, I wasn’t) I would have resorted to some kind of “writers hate that question” rhetoric on the basis that it’d stall for time while I thought up a decent answer. So, as an in-case-of-emergency measure, I figured I’d work out an answer before I needed it. And my explanation goes a little like this: Imagine an equilateral triangle. Put “confluence” at one point, “other people’s ideas” at the second point, and “knowing how stories work” at the third. The ideas happen in the middle of the triangle, because ideas are basically a combination of those three things. Sometimes I’ll lean towards one point more than than the other two, but all three are usually at work in some way. I think it’s probably the “knowing how stories work” work part that makes the entire idea process so mysterious to non-writers. Ideas are actually pretty cheap and easy. Everyone has them, all the
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