Try and describe the taste of coke (regular or diet). Then go and drink a mouthful, to see how accurate your recollection of the taste is. Bonus points if you can do it without falling back on either the fizz or the use of cola as a flavour descriptor. I’ve been trying to do this – and failing – for most of the day.
Data-Point the First: The latest issue of Apex Magazine is out, which includes my story Clockwork, Patchwork and Ravens. Go forth, read, and while you’re there consider picking up some of the fine works of fiction Apex Publishing has out (I’m currently stroking the cover of Open Your Eyes, which showed up in yesterday’s post and gets coveted like a covety thing because I haven’t yet had time to read it). Data-Point the Second: Edits for Horn rolled in last night, which means I’m going to be AWOL for a few days longer (baring posts where I show up and pimp stuff, like this one, but I figure you’ll forgive me my exhibitionist tendencies by now). Data-Point the Third: The blog silence up to this point has been generously provided by a head cold and a mild fever that kept me awake. Avoided the blog because I figured endless posts of I’m sick weren’t that interesting (and I sufficiently grumpy that I wasn’t interested in bantering about swine-flu or the general male tendency to crumple like a used tissue when ill). No real wordcount on anything either, but I managed to pull together enough energy to plan stuff. Data-Point the Fourth: I give you the book haul of the last week: For those who can’t make out details in my blurry, flash-obscured photograph the pile works out something like this: Six Easy Pieces, Richard P Feynman (Cheap and seemed interesting, plus I need more non-fiction in my life) The Empress
Black Candy Draft Projected Total: 80,000 Total Words to Date: 8,288 Words Done in Previous 24 48-hour Period: 2,037 Deadline: July 23rd Spent twenty-four hours wibbling over what I’d done, trying to work my way into the project. Cut what I’d done for the second chapter (not deleted, just cut away for the moment and set aside until I hit a narrative beat where the events feel more appropriate), then spent the last twenty-four re-starting the chapter from scratch. Much happier this time around, even if it does give me negative progress on the wordcount. I predict this will happen a couple of times in the drafting process for this one – I’m sufficiently clueless about what I’m doing that I’ll happily rewrite and expand upon existing scenes from the novella-length-draft without realising that they shouldn’t be happening yet.
As grass-roots movements go, this is kind of cool. 2013 Update: The post that inspired this is largely dead and gone now, but the basic theme was still pretty cool – help out small press horror publishers by going and buying a damn book already. It came with some handy suggestions, too, most of which are out of date. Oddly, my suggestion below? Still going strong four years later. In fact, they’re going stronger. ‘Course, not being a particularly straight-forward-out-and-out-horror kind of guy, the only company on their list I’ve got any experience with as a reader is Apex (whose bailiwick is SF-Horror fusion, and thus situates itself firmly in my mental cross-hairs as both a writer and a reader). Still, I’m all for people spending money on books, so for those of you on my friendslist who are inclined to set aside $20 for the small press horror industry I make the following recommendation: my inner pulp-geek has a fierce and hardcore love of Hebrew Punk. Well worth checking out.
It is Friday. I have a hankering for some Sonic Youth. I blame the Gilmore Girls. And, no, that’s not a random non sequitur – for a fluffy, family-friendly show the Gilmore Girls is loaded with Sonic Youth references (and occasional guest stars).
Meet the new project du jour destined to occupy my evenings: Black Candy Draft Projected Total: 80,000 Total Words to Date:9,466 Words Done in Previous 24-hour Period: 609 Deadline: July 23rd Yep, I’m taking another stab at the problem dubbed “Peter Doesn’t Have a Finished Novel.” This became the most likely candidate because I have a basic outline of what happens (care of the sketchy-novella-length draft I wrote at the start of 2007) and it’s total comfort-zone writing (Noir SF with squicky sex). I may have overburdened this with to many ideas for it to actually work as a novel-length MS, but I figure it’s the best starting point I’ve got to get a feel for writing at that length.
I don’t know where you will be on June 7th of this year, around 5 pm or so, but there’s a very good chance that you can find me here. To quote from the Conjecture blog: Horn by Peter M Ball Book 2 in the Twelfth Planet Press Novella Series There’s a dead girl in a dumpster and a unicorn on the loose – and no-one knows how bad that combination can get better than Miriam Aster. What starts as a consulting job for city homicide quickly becomes a tangled knot of unexpected questions, and working out the link between the dead girl and the unicorn will draw Aster back her back into the world of the exiled fey she thought she’d left behind ten years ago. All in all, Miriam Aster isn’t happy. The last time she worked a case like this it cost her a badge, a partner, and her life. This time things are going to get much, much worse. (Launching Sunday, 7th of June at 5pm).
The Dancing Monkey challenge from lauragoodin: “write a blog post about being on a Brisbane ferry. At night. And it’s raining. And you’ve spent your last money on the fare.” I suspect it’s not what Laura intended, but every time I read that request all it translates into is “please tell me what it was like being twenty-three.” It’s all the qualifiers to the original request that do it – when I was twenty-three I’d just finished my honours year in which I wrote a lot of poetry, just moved to Brisbane for the first time, and just started my PhD. Being at the tail-end of my love-affair with goth as a movement, I was prone to attaching all sorts of significance to thing that happened in moments of poverty, rain and night. Lets not make this *all* about nostalgia though. Instead lets talk about exactly how lucky you are if you live in a city with a decent public transport system, because I’ll admit that my first few years in Brisbane was largely spent listening to people bitch about the buses, trains and ferries while resisting the urge to shake them and scream “what the fuck are you complaining about.” Everyone I’ve ever met is adamant that the public transport system in their home city is the worst available, but I think I can mount a safe argument for the Gold Coast (aka the city that I spent most of my teenage years growing up in) has one the worst
Classes yesterday, meetings today, marking tonight, and marking tomorrow. With luck, I’ll be back on Thursday with some monkey dancing. ’til then…
Went away after the last post, wrote 898 words, then realised I was done. The net for Draft One is 20,799 word, and there is a part of me that’s still kind of shocked that I’ve written something that long. I don’t do long that often, and I can still remember two years ago when writing the 10k novella for my AHWA Mentorship was a long, drawn-out battle to get words on the page; when I look back and realise that this has all been done in less than a fortnight, it freaks me out. I can safely say without looking at it that this is one of the most god-awful draft I’ve ever written, full of random asides and irrelevant scenes that aren’t going to make any sense to anyone who isn’t me. Which is okay, really, because I’m slowly starting to figure out that this is going to be the process I end up using for novellas (or, at least, for this particular style of novella) – it’s literally a race to the finish line where I keep writing until I’ve got the shape of the story worked out, some of the key moments nailed down, and an ending that everything is working towards. Tomorrow I’m going to compare what I’ve written to the plan I started with – I suspect there’s not going to be many similarities between the two short of the occasional image. Draft two will be about going back and adding a bunch of
Claw Draft Projected Total: 21,000 (which will probably expand out to 25,000 next draft) Total Words to Date: 19, 881 Words Done in Previous 24-hour Period: 3236 Deadline: April 30th So close to the end, and yet I find myself paused but a thousand words (and one scene featuring the reconciliation of the hard-boiled detective and her possessed Russian Blue sidekick) from being able to say the draft is done. I had a significant bout of insomnia last night which left me crabby and unfocused for much of the morning, then a family visit this afternoon for lunch and coffee and cake and chocolate. I’m about to go wash up, have a shower, and rug-up in bed to do the last 1000 words of the draft before having an early night. Which is good, ’cause I have to write a lecture tomorrow. As well as notes on the next drafting project which will occupy this space in the blogging schedule as of Monday evening…
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