ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
Smart Advice from Smart People

Two Things I Took Note Of from “Garth Nix In Conversation with John Birmingham”

Last week, I ventured out into the streets of Brisbane to see Garth Nix in conversation with John Birmingham at the Brisbane Square Library. The in-conversation was nominally about Nix’s new book, Angel Mage, which got described as “Three Musketeers meets Joan of Arc with Angelic Magic and Kick-Ass Heroines.” As these events are wont to do, the conversation took a turn through inspirations, process, and industry lore, courtesy of two career writers digging into one another’s work and trying to figure out how they did what they did. Nix is largely a make-things-up-as-I-go-along writer, and Birmingham is not, and the disconnect in their respective approach proved fascinating. I walked away with two quotes from the event, both marked in my notebook so I wouldn’t forget them. Nix got the first of them, when talking about “research” and the slow filtering of everything he reads into his process: “We are all descendants of everything we’ve ever read.” Which is one of the best ways of describing the ongoing research process of writers I’ve ever come across (Historical novelists used to confuse the heck out of me–how in hell did they do that much focused research?–but then I sat down with a couple of historical writers and listened to them talk, and really they’re immersed in that stuff all the time. They live and breathe it for fun, then take what they need for fiction when it becomes relevant.) Later in the event, Birmingham nailed one of the great things about

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07/11/2019 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Book Math

I picked up a copy of William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties in 2001, a shiny trade paperback find in a second-hand bookstore. The latest in a long line of Gibson books that started with my long-since read-to-death paperback of Burning Chrome that I acquired in high-school after our IT teacher showed us a documentary on cyberpunk. I purchased Haruki Murakami’s short story collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, brand-new in 2005. At the time I was reading Murakami a lot, was just starting to write my own short fiction in earnest, and taught classes in both Murakami and short story writing to university classes. I made a special trip into the city to buy Brandon Sanderson’s Alloy of Law from the inestimable Pulp Fiction Booksellers. I’d never read Sanderson before, but the reviews tempted me with its promise of a traditional European fantasy setting progressed to the point where it effectively contained a Wild West. I made a similar trip to acquire Elizabeth Bear’s Blood and Iron, the first of her novels picked up after falling hard for her short fiction collection, The Chains That You Refuse, and the Jenny Casey trilogy.’ These are all stories about how the books first found their way to my shelf, where their value was clear and situational. I picked up the Gibson because it was part of a series I hadn’t yet finished, the Murakami because I was a fan of his work and was grappling with the short story form. The Sanderson’s value

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06/11/2019 No Comments
Gaming

Putting the Gamer Hat Back On

We recently dug out the big box o’ board games here in Casa Del Brain Jar, separating out everything that we can rock with two players and working our way through them. I haven’t played board games regularly in about six or seven years—not since my primary board-gaming friends decamped for Melbourne for good—and I have a bad tendency towards playing other people’s games when I do. Then we spent a week playing Zombies!!! and Killer Bunnies and my partner’s copy of the pirate-themed card game Splice, and my brain started poking at board games I might want to pick up soon. My partner started researching games and identifying those that looked interesting. At the same time, I’ve been poking at new RPG systems for the first time since 2011. Getting familiar with the Blades in the Dark system so we can pick it up in place of our now-completed-after-nine-years Thursday Night Superhero Campaign. Kicking the tyres on a Shadowrun game I might run at some stage. And it’s funny—for a few years, I didn’t really feel like a gamer. I played games every now and then, but I wasn’t really part of a gaming community in the same way I had been as a younger man. I didn’t get excited about new releases of games, didn’t go searching for new opportunities, and didn’t really gather to talk about them online or at conventions. The part of my brain that used to be all about gaming communities got subsumed by

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05/11/2019 No Comments
Journal

Bad Correspondant

There are currently 38 unread emails sitting in my inbox, a component part of 86 emails left in the inbox overall. The oldest dates back to September 12th and I barely remember September at this point. My comfort zone is keeping the unread email under 10, and not leaving things in the inbox at all. The drinks coaster on my desk is starting to feel appropriate.

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04/11/2019 No Comments
Sunday Circle

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them). After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all. Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here). MY CHECK-IN What am I working on this week? My major goal this week is landing the second chapter of my exegesis draft and officially hitting the 50% done phase of the critical side of my thesis. It’s slowed me down a little because it’s a gear-change part of the chapter–l’ve got to take the arguments I’ve been setting up and apply it to actual series works. This is the bit that I find tricky about theory–I can apply it to my own work easily enough, but always feel dicey about using it to critique other people’s creative products. What’s inspiring me this week?

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03/11/2019 No Comments
Works in Progress

Word Count Versus Progress in Thesis Land

I’ve been wearing my thesis hat a good deal through October, because there’s an official deadline to get an exegesis draft finished by November 30. It’s gotta be somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 words. My impulse is to aim for the middle, assuming some stuff is going in ’cause I missed it while I will pull out other things ’cause they don’t need to be there. Meanwhile my supervisor stresses that I’ve met university requirements so long as the exegesis clocks in at 20,001, and pointedly suggests that that minimum viable length will be just fine given that I’m submitting next year. My draft currently sits around 18,616 words, so I’m doing okay on the productivity front, but it’s also a stark reminder that there’s a big difference between word count and progress. It looks like I’m almost done on the surface, but the stuff that’s actually “rough draft” only makes up 11,519 words of it. The rest is all random bits, theoretical chunks of a larger jigsaw where I still searching out the edge pieces. Short pieces that may or may not fit into the overall thesis structure, written out of order and frequently trying to lock down a particular idea or argument. It’s valuable to have them, but they won’t make sense if someone asks to read where my research is at. A few months back, when I started this process, those segments counted as good progress. They were how I got the computer every morning and started

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29/10/2019 No Comments
Sunday Circle

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy—just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them). After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all. Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here). MY CHECK-IN What am I working on this week? I’m gearing up to announce the next short story collection this week, which means focusing on proofing pages, producing meta-data/blurbs, and doing the text around the main text ahead of the launch-date at the close of the month. On the writing front, it’s all engines go on the thesis—I’m aiming to get the critical half drafted by the end of November, then switching back to the creative work over the Christmas break. What’s inspiring me this week? My partner and I mainlined the first two seasons of The United States of Tara this week, which is a

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27/10/2019 No Comments
Gaming

Almost Done: Some Thoughts After the Penultimate Session of a Very Long RPG Campaign

The most read posts on this website, year after year, are Thirteen Things I’ve Learned About Superhero Games After Running 30 Sessions Of Mutants And Masterminds and its follow-up Fifteen Things I’ve Learned About Superhero RPGs After Running 150 Sessions of My Campaign. They’re both RPG-centric posts about an ongoing superhero game I’ve been running since early 2011. Last night I ran session 199, and when we convene for session 200 last week it will be the last game of the campaign as it exists in its current format. One of the original players is moving interstate, and we’re hitting the end-point of plot elements originally set up somewhere in issue 20. The heroes just beat-up the Herald of a world-devouring galactic horror, and next week they’ll fight the ancient robot from the dawn of time trying to bring that galactic horror to earth. Which is not bad for a group of heroes that got their start chasing down escaped velociraptors and re-skinned knock-offs of the Vulture, all while fretting about whether they’ll fail English. I’ve run long RPG campaigns before—D&D campaigns that spanned three or four years and took the heroes from 1st level to the top of the XP chart—but it surprises me that the longest in both years and the number of sessions has proven to be a superhero-based game because, frankly, I’ve tried to get one running several times over the last few decades and they usually falter very early on. Fortunately, we’ve had a good

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25/10/2019 No Comments
Journal

New Cubicle

When I started my PhD they gave me a cubicle at university, ostensibly a quiet place to work and store books and be close to research tools. I’ve done a few tours in the post-grad world and they’re almost never that–put enough postgrads into a room looking to procrastinate, and the distractions will come thick and fast. My little work space was relatively heavy with distractions, so I worked from home a lot of the time. All my stuff was already there, and there weren’t so may distractions. Last week, I got the news that my post-grad desk was being relocated to a bank of cubicles on the top floor. A slightly larger space, less of a thoroughfare, and with about three times the number of post-grads around. Fewer people who went through their initial study at the same time that I did, though, which means I’m largely a stranger who can wander in and just…work. Not sure whether that will tempt me to use it any more than the last spot, but it has the potential to serve as a going-out-to-work space that doesn’t actually require me to buy a coffee or food court snack. That’s a thing worth keeping in mind until something happens to change it.

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23/10/2019 1 Comment
Smart Advice from Smart People

Great Writing Advice (and a book to go get)

I spent a good chunk of last week writing about symbolic capital in the publishing industry, then read Nic Mamatas Ask Nick column over on LitReactor where he answered about why some writers get multiple failures on their resume and still draw advances. The answer, of course, is that publishing isn’t an even game and some people are “special.” Largely because, frankly, publishing is an industry where Symbolic Capital matters and there’s a whole lot of people involved who come from money and treat that capital like it’s very important. But that belies the intelligence and wit that Mamatas brings to the topic: Are you special? Depends. Where did you go to school? Who did you meet there? Where do you live now? How close is it to the L? Who are your best friends; who do you date? Do they all have the same “publishing haircut” (asymmetrical bobs for women, Princetons for men)? Is exposed brick good or bad? Are you suspicious of anyone who can write a book in a year? Are you from a “good” family (which is different than a “good family”)? Do these questions make perfect sense to you? No? You’re not special. Some authors are subsidized despite failures due to the reputational economy within publishing. While this is mostly a phenomenon in literary publishing (including literary non-fiction), it happens in genre publishing as well. Gene Wolfe was a thrilling talent and rightly considered one of the best science fiction/fantasy writers of the 20th century,

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22/10/2019 No Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

We’re all selling the ethanol buzz

When talking about the writing business with folks, one of my recurring refrains is that we don’t really sell stories to people–we sell a token of identity. It may be an aspirational identity, or one that the reader already identifies with, but even the use of the word reader in this context underlies my point. Over the weekend I was catching up on my blog reading and was intrigued by Fast Company’s article about the way our sewerage holds markers that can be used to identify our income. It caught me off-guard with its reminders that consumption is an act of cultural identity, but the researchers noted that: Surprisingly, (higher) income correlated with more alcohol and coffee consumption. Regarding coffee, researchers point to the intelligentsia institution that coffee has become, in which this choice of beverage is actually a statement about one’s self. You could easily say the same thing about wine, whiskey, or craft beer, too—all of which are tasty, and culturally prized delivery systems for a chemically identical ethanol buzz. Types of writing are just as cultural coded as the types of coffee we drink and the booze we consume. Certain types of fiction are culturally prized because they’re positioned in a certain way in the culture, while others are disparaged. While it used to divide purely along genre lines, you now add in the complications of delivery method (ebook versus print), the perceitved professionalism of the creator (indie vs traditionally published vs fanfic vs blogger) and other

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21/10/2019 No Comments
Sunday Circle

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. You can find a more detailed post and how and why it’s a useful thing to do here. Want to get involved? It’s easy—just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them). After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all. Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here). MY CHECK-IN What am I working on this week? The project sitting top of mind as I sit down to do my weekly plan is a lecture I’m delivering Wednesday, but that’s a small amount of my weekly work in terms of raw writing time. The larger focus is going to my PhD exegesis. At time of writing I’m about 4,000 words off minimum viable length for a submission—not the same thing as being done at all, but the point where the pressure is off a little because I know that worst-case scenario there is something

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20/10/2019 No Comments

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