Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx
James Stewart vs. Kubrik
Via the often excellent Grant Watson on Facebook: Honestly, this is the most interested I’ve ever been in Kubrick’s work.
PeterMBall
09/04/2020
Via the often excellent Grant Watson on Facebook: Honestly, this is the most interested I’ve ever been in Kubrick’s work.
Back in the old days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and WiFi hadn’t yet migrated to phones, blogging used to feel like the first step of an interactive process. You’d post something, and other folks would respond on their blogs, setting up a slow moving conversation as other folks joined in on their blogs. Interactivity was part of the appeal, and even in the absence of interactive responses, the potential of interactivity remained. The membrane between you and the readership was thin, and highly permeable. Over the years permeability feels like it’s fallen away. Conversations sped up as responses moved to tools like Facebook and Twitter, or became siloed to the comments section because folks weren’t maintaining their own feed of information. The nature of blogs transformed as folks figured out how to take this weird conversation platform and monetise it as a content publisher, setting off a boom of increasingly focused blogs devoted to tightly constrained topics, evergreen content
Right, then. Tuesday. It is Tuesday, yes? The weirdness is setting in. I’m sitting in my flat pondering ways to break every rule I know about publishing, and marvelling at the fact I’m coaxing folks to come along for the ride. My inbox is filled with freshly signed contracts, my messenger services filled with chats about future projects. And for all my bluster about breaking rules, I’m going back to resources from 2005 when the publishing paradigms of RPG gaming splintered thanks to ebooks and thinking about the ways to transplant them into 2020. This has largely involved picking up an idea that’s been kicking around my computer since 2008. The nice part about everything going mental is that there’s really no reason going full tilt at ideas that seem interesting, rather than second-guessing whether they’ll pay off. Brain Jar Press is on the verge of getting its own online identity. The webpage is getting some attention. We’ve launched a
The great irony of Warren Ellis: The Captured Ghosts Interviews is this: it’s an interviewer with a comics writer who thinks very carefully about the design and packaging of the written product, and yet it’s released with an incredibly ugly , half-arsed cover that’s seemingly designed to discourage purchasing. Which is a pity, because the contents of the book offer some fascinating insights into Ellis’ mindset, work processes, and usage of the internet, circa 2010/2011. We live in an age where access to interviews with creators are at an all-time peak right now, what with the plethora of websites, podcasts, and livestreams devoted to archiving creative insights. What marks The Captured Ghosts Interviews as something special is it’s origins: these are the full transcripts of the interviews Meaney and Thurman did while making a documentary about Ellis and his work, which means you’re getting all the messy asides and digressions rather than the best sound-bytes. It also means they have
Interesting post about the omnipresence of grief here in the age of contagion, over at the Harvard Business Review. Emotions need motion. It’s important we acknowledge what we go through. One unfortunate byproduct of the self-help movement is we’re the first generation to have feelings about our feelings. We tell ourselves things like, I feel sad, but I shouldn’t feel that; other people have it worse. We can — we should — stop at the first feeling. I feel sad. Let me go for five minutes to feel sad. Your work is to feel your sadness and fear and anger whether or not someone else is feeling something. Fighting it doesn’t help because your body is producing the feeling. If we allow the feelings to happen, they’ll happen in an orderly way, and it empowers us. Then we’re not victims. That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief, Harvard Business Review It’s a useful thing to consider as I’m figuring out the impacts of the
I’d like to talk a little about writing (and, really, just surviving) in the age of contagion we find ourselves in. This is a tricky subject because I loathe the impetus that capitalism puts on being productive at all costs, especially when you’re sick or stressed out. It’s the same impetus that makes COVID-19 so tricksy, because we’ve all spent far too long soldiering on at work while ill, and that’s seeped into the western mindset. On the flip side, writing’s important to me. It’s a big part of my self-identity and it’s the thing that keeps me calm. And, as I wrote in my newsletter today, a goodly part of the challenge in writing through the age of contagion isn’t working while sick, it’s working while the world is trying to scare the pants off you. The tactics that make it possible for me to write through the age of contagion largely coincides with the tactics I use to
A short list of things that have amused me today: A Facebook writing thread where someone referred to their graveyard of unfinished projects, and I’m so tempted to write a blog post titled “All Writers are Necromancers” The email sign-off “With Kindness,” which seems like an aspiration act in 2020. The emerging wave of apocalypse marketing showing up in my social media feed, advising me to transfer all my assets into Gold and Diamonds (I’m, like, dude, your targeting is off-base…) Folks starting to ponder their two-week lockdown reads. My cat trying to play with the cat in the mirror. Not Quite The End Of The World Just Yet having a weird, print-only resurgence of sales over the last four weeks. In less amusing news, this twitter thread from SFWA president Mary Robinette Kowall is worth a read: I’ve run big events a few time in the past, working for both profits and non-profits, and I’ve got a lot of
A few months back, I went to see Garth Nix and John Birmingham in conversation at the local library, and Birmingham busted out a little bon mot that’s stuck with me: If we write something, and we do our jobs right, it’s going to get published. It’ll go to our publishers, and if they don’t want it, we can publish it ourselves and take home that sweet 70% self-pub royalty. This doesn’t imply that it’s going to be massively successful or make scads of money, of course, but it puts writers in a really interesting position. For the first time, publication is guaranteed if you start a project, and that frees you up to take chances you wouldn’t necessarily take in publishing environment focused on brick-and-mortar bookstores. I’ve been thinking about this a lot this week, because it feeds into the research I’ve been doing on writing series for my thesis. Series fiction has traditionally been one of those things
I winnowed my inbox down to nothing yesterday, and the damn thing crept up to 19 overnight. Unfortunately, my email program has decided to play silly buggers and refuses to delete anything unless I mirror the inbox from my phone and do everything in basic HTML Fortunately, Gmail has a “my internet is ass and I’m basically on dailup” version of its interface for just this situation. But it makes me wonder what folks will actually do in Australia in the unlikely event we do get locked down on a two-week quarantine. Our internet is vaguely shit at the best of times–last year, we could tell when new episodes of Game of Thrones started because our connection ground to a halt. I do not think it’s built for the number of folks who may be asked to telecommute, entertain themselves, and generally search out important information if a mass lockdown actually happens. It almost makes my pile of unread books
On our first morning in Adelaide, my beloved sent me out to the local market to procure us some breakfast. “Grab some fruit and hommus,” they suggested, “we’ll avoid the exorbitant buffet charge.” And lo, I went forth and acquired grapes and pears and hummus from the local Romeo’s market. And, because I am me and they were weird as fuck, I brought back a terrifying tray of Jam Donuts which appeared to be a regular cinnamon donut cut in half so the cream and jam could be piped in. The weirdest damned approach to a jam donut I’ve ever seen. I cannot see any way it would be less effort than the usual way, but it definitely caught my attention. In any case, today is a regroup day. Inbox is sitting at 89, which is at least 83 emails over my comfort zone, and I’d like to winnow that down after finishing the day’s wordcount.
I’ve spent the last three days in Adelaide, doing a lightning tour of Fringe Shows and generally being the bad kind of friend who doesn’t let anyone know that I was in town. Caught a total of six shows, ate a lot of great food, and hung out with the fam. The fringe is an interesting experience when you’re a writer, because you really start seeing the difference between the “competent, polished, and dull” and the “flawed, but interesting and ambitious.” We hit one of the former in a final night, and largely walked away angry–there was nothing technically wrong with the show, but it was centred around a gimmick and had nothing at it’s heart. Strip away the gimmick and we could have had a similar experience by wandering into a pub and making requests of a decent cover band. I hit two of the latter–shows that were not good, but were interesting as heck–and my immediate response was
If you’re a reader with a KU subscription and a hankering for great fantasy, allow me to turn your attention to the MARCH KU FANTASY READS page assembled by dark fantasy author Melissa Padgett. It brings together seventy-odd titles that cover the spectrum from sword-and-sorcery, urban fantasy, romantic fantasy, epic fantasy, and more, all brought together in one place to make it easier to browse and find new books, authors, and series you might love. On my list to investigate further: PH Solomon’s Bow of Heart books, Trevor Darby’s Myth Squad books, and Padgett’s guide to sociopathic princesses. I may well be pointing Kay McLeod’s Carnelian Fox my partner’s way given it’s confluence of things they will likely love. The page is running until March 15, so check it out over yonder. Not in Kindle Unlimited (aka Netflix for Readers) and interested in finding out more? Amazon’s got you covered.