When I was fifteen a friend gave me a tape featuring a fair mix of punk bands, including three Misfits tracks (Astro Zombies, I Turned Into a Martian, and something else I can’t remember). I ran the hell out of those three songs, but unfortunately the tape came sans info about who did what so it was about six years before I realised who the Misfits actually were.
This time as part of a three book review on Mondyboy’s blog covering a trio of Twelfth Planet releases – Horn, Dirk Flithart’s Angel Rising, and the New Ceres Nights anthology (featuring work by a whole bunch of worthy peeps including Dirk and Angela Slatter). I’m officially locking myself away and doing minimalist blog posts until I’m done with the current Black Candy draft and the various trips to the hopital (and at the risk of being inappropriate I really hope the later resolves itself first – given the absence of euthanasia legislation in Australia we’re basically watching a family member dehydrate and starve to death, and frankly that’s bullshit).
I recommend going over to Angela Slatter’s blog and reading this entry on Write-Club. It should provide context for how I managed to achieve this in the space of two months*: The short version, for the click-link adverse, is that write-club is an agreement between two writers to sit in a lounge-room once a week and write. It also involves coffee, chocolate, short bursts of writer-angst, and screaming “write” at the top of your lungs whenever the other person looks like they’re slipping into dangerous levels of procrastination. The process works remarkably well, as evidenced by the fact that I may actually be capable of finishing a novel draft for the first time in about a decade. Angela Slatter (the other half of write-club) has already finished her novel draft, done a fair chunk of a novella she’s co-writing, and started the revisions on her novel. Angela has more detail. Go forth and read. I’m quietly confident that I’ll get the novel done sometime during this week’s Write-Club on Friday, despite the fact that I know there’s some interruptions coming during the week. I really, really want to get this draft over with so I can go back and start fixing things, making stuff awesome, and generally playing with stuff now the structure is in place. *I’m actually kinda shocked that it’s only been two months since I started the draft, but I went back and checked the Black Candy notes on the blog and the first entry shows up
1) More Hornspotting today, this time courtesy of a review over at Horrorscope by Craig Bezant. 2) Apex Publishing are offering pre-orders on Descended from Darkness, the anthology that brings together a years worth of stories (including my story Clockwork, Patchwork, and Ravens) from Apex Magazine. 3) Last night there was write-club, and I wrote up a storm on the Black Candy draft between chatting with Angela Slatter and exchanging texts with Jason Fischeras he had his own write-a-thon in Adelaide. Then, because my sleep patterns are horribly messed up and 1 AM seems like a really appropriate time to be doing things, I came home and wrote even more. Net result was about six and a half thousand words:
I suspect that many lads of a certain age who read this journal will have just had a sudden moment of “oh, yeah, I remember then,” before wandering off to youtube one of their other videos. I say this because I spent about two years with Transvision Vamp’s first album on the tape-deck of my car in my mid-twenties and every male friend who got a lift would hear the opening bars of I Want Your Love and get an immediate flash-back to their adolescence. And yet once you get past the gratuitous objectification of Wendy James, there still something fascinating about Transvision Vamp. I have a moderate fascination with Andy Warhol and his relationship to celebrity that was heavily reflected in the band’s first album (Pop Art, which included a song about Warhol’s death). I’m intrigued by the number of former punk musicians who ended up playing pop-rock in the background (including former members of the X-Ray Specs and the Partisans). I’m freakin’ amazed that James’ post-Vamp solo-album was written by Elvis Costello, and moderately bummed that I never actually tracked it down in a record store. I’ve spent years trying to work out whether they were a punk band who got coopted or an experiment in controlled branding that used capitalism against itself, and I’ve never realy come up with an answer. I really do need to go find a copy of Pop Art on CD though.
Today is a little chaotic, so I give you the following post in four-point structure. 1) More Horn-spotting over on Jeff VanderMeer’s blog today, this time in the form of a Horn review. 2) My parents have currently made it from Turkey to Singapore, currently scheduled to land in Brisbane sometime tonight. Went over and saw my sister this morning, whose generally closer to my extended family than I am and pretty exhausted after spending much of the evening at the hospital. She’s not sure whether my uncle will hold on until my parents get back, but she managed to contact my mother via phone during one of his moments of lucidity last night. 3) In what may be one of the weirdest articles I’ve seen in some time, “Zimmer frame gang ‘tortures adviser’ who lost $4 million.” 4) Against all odds I managed to fight through the lethargy and waiting to get something done yesterday, even if it wasn’t quite the baseline 2k words I look for if I’m going to call a day “productive.” To whit, the current Black Candy draft stands at:
So it appears my primary activity today has been waiting and that three thousand words is beyond ambitious. Got the news that my uncle was hospitalised not long after this morning’s post, alongside a request from my sister that we get in contact with my parents and bring them home from their overseas holidays on the chance they’d get back here before the inevitable happens. On one hand that’s all pretty easy – this wasn’t entirely unexpected and it’s mostly a matter of e-mail, SMS, and some websearching for the phone numbers of hotels – but on the other hand there’s a lot of waiting around for news so we can move onto the next step. I’m not terribly good at waiting. Nor at knowing what’s appropriate during the period where all you do is wait. At this point I’ve basically rattled around my flat for six hours, and I think I’m hitting the point where I either need to do something of go stir-crazy. Writing may well be it.
So last night, in a fit of mild insomnia, I busted out a bunch of words and managed to make Yesterday a productive day. Then I engaged in the sport that girliejones has dubbed Horn-spotting. Then my internets went wonky, so I went back to bed. Anyway, for the record: I’m tempted to try and hit 50k today, although given that it’s almost lunchtime and I’m yet to write anything (and the house needs cleaning prior to an inspection tomorrow) that may be a tad too ambitious.
So last night I started twittering in a fit of moderate curiosity, working off the theory that “hey, I write a bunch of status updates about coffee on facebook anyway.” I’m not sure I truly grasp the medium yet, but we’ll see. I mean, I said the same thing about facebook originally, and I’m still hovering about over there (although I’m still picky as hell about which applications I’ll add in). Now I’m off to see if I can break this habit of being distracted by shiny things and get back to the writing.
One of these days I’m going to learn that no good comes of Sundays when I factor it in as a day in which I can do work. No matter how much I pretend it’s a day in which I can get things done, the fact that it’s my designated day to engage with the outside world largely means that I’ll whittle away the time doing nothing until the appointed hour when I get to actually go out and see real people.
So last night I watched Death Race, which disappointed me by being adequate for a film built around stunt-driving rather than the dire mess of a film I was hoping for. Cars went grr, machine guns went bang-bang, there were explosions everywhere, and the most interesting aspect of the story gets his head caved in by a passing machine-gun barrel travelling at 90 mph far earlier than he should have. Exactly the kind of stunt-porn I needed last night, really – dumb enough that I could shut down and watch it, with enough blank spots in the plot that I’m still thinking of ways to redo the story and have it make sense twelve hours later.
My life seems to be settling into a comfortable word-count routine again, which is good news in terms of getting the novel draft finished but somewhat crap in terms of interesting blogging. I have noticed how much easier this whole novel-writing-thing is when you actually have a midpoint to the story – perhaps the first real tangible sign I’ve had that this whole planning thing (even in the minuscule levels of planning that I’m doing) is likely to work for me. I actually caught myself thinking “36,000 words, that’s nothing” as I looked over the notes last night. Slowly but surely the writer-brain is finally catching up with the ambition. Today there will be writing, followed by marking, followed by Death Race if time allows. And if all that gets done before eleven o’clock tonight, there may even be a few hours spent tinkering with the Claw draft.
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