ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
Smart Advice from Smart People

Capitalism As Lovecraftian Force

From a recent (re)post at Warren Ellis Ltd: Capitalism is lately cast as that Lovecraftian force that some people should not look directly at for fear of going completely mad and being banged up in the Arkham Sanitarium. Maybe meditating upon it as some Dark God From Beyond Space that is crushing the world into new shapes just leads some people to rub their mouths on it and plead for it to go faster. And never stop. Malign Velocities, WarrenEllisLtd It feels like an apt description of the state of things here in the early 21st Century. # It’s morning as I write this. My partner is brewing coffee and preparing to head outside, catching a few spare minutes on the balcony before she heads off to work. I’m writing in my pyjamas and the writing hoodie draped over my desk. I’ve been awake for far too long, but the coffee is definitely helping. My feet are cold, and it’s the last days of winter here in the Southern Hemisphere. The traffic hasn’t started yet. The crows are singing a dawn song. We’re past the rosy tinges of sunrise, but the grey clouds muffling the city are a glorious white at the fringes closest to the horizon. It’s a nice moment. A quiet moment. A chance to sit and be. My partner heads outside with her coffee. The morning air is cold and crisp. The sliding door moves easily, a quiet roll along the track. I wouldn’t notice this moment, were

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09/09/2019 No Comments
Stuff

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’ve got my eye on the next five scenes in Project Stairwell this week, taking me up to the end of the first act. It’s a tricky project at this stage of the narrative–there’s a lot of scenes built around the same archetypal structure and power struggles, and a lot of context to get around the action in order to make the character negotiations meaningful.  The feel that I want–and I’m not sure whether I’ll nail it or not–is a series of negotiations that feel like the slow progression towards a boss fight. This often

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08/09/2019 1 Comment
Works in Progress

Status Post: 7 September 2019

ACHIEVEMENTS THIS WEEK: I’ve set up my workspace to deliver really loooooong stretches where I have no internet, just to see how it reshapes things. It turns out, quite a bit. I cleared my average weekly draft count in the space of three days, and I’ve started rethinking what that might mean for workflow. I also hit the point in Project Stairwell where I needed to stop throwing words at the draft and actually stop to figure out what I’m doing. I was sixteen thousand words in at the time, and still not heading towards anything approaching a structure, so I broke down what I’d done and rebuilt it. Definitely not a short story anymore. When I sat down and looked at what I’d done, then extrapolated outwards to figure how every subplot could be expanded and resolved, the result was approximately 37 major scenes I’d need to hit over the course of the story. At time of writing, there are 32 scenes left to write. CURRENT EARWORM: Runway by Stunna Girl, the first four lines of which have been permanently embedded in my subconscious courtesy of being nearby when my partner goes on a TikTok binge. It’s kinda weird to look it up on youtube and hear the rest of the song. CURRENT READING: I’ve midway through a whole bunch of novels at the moment, but the most interesting is reading though the original Jaws novel by Peter Benchley. I’ve been taking an interest in this particular subgenre of

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07/09/2019 No Comments
Smart Advice from Smart People

Vintage Links 006: Presentation Structure, Date Nights, Shuffling Cards, and Blogging

Every Friday I go through my well over-stocked folder of blog posts, articles, and other online produce that’s been marked “To Read” and clear out a handful. The best of them–aka those that still seem interesting or useful here in 2019–get posted here (and you can see the previous instalments using the Vintage Links tag). At some point I should find a version of that intro that I like and repeat it for every future instalment, but today is not that day. THE SECRET STRUCTURE OF GREAT TALKS (Nancy Duerte, 2011) Watch it here I spend a lot of time talking to people about writing–both now, and back in my dayjob at the writers centre–and about 50% of the gig is trying to get people excited about their own work and trying new ideas out (Heck, it’s 50% of the gig in regular blogging as well). This talk may have originated in 2011, but it floated through my feed in 2013–aka the year that I was delivering workshops and presentations on a what felt like a fortnightly basis. This video about the importance of communicating ideas effectively, but it’s also a really interesting because of the kind of tools that Duerte uses to in her analysis. Consider, for example, the way in which she uses the visual examples to showcase the rhythms of certain speeches. It’s an intriguing talk to watch twice–once to get the content, the second to see how it’s applied in the presentation you’ve just watched. Also,

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06/09/2019 No Comments
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

My Next Life As A Spaceship

Over the weekend, Matt Farrer (AKA the Shira Calpurnia scribe and general literary bad-ass) did a small thing on twitter where he’d write a description of a spaceship named after you. It roughly coincided with one of those rare moments when I scanned my carefully curated twitter lists, so naturally, I signed on. I am rather pleased with my star faring namesake. Its official designation is "Human Lifepoint Pietro 47-R-Delta" but most Capellans refer to the spherical scaffold of O'Neill cylinders as "the Peter Ball". Famours for its libraries, festivals and zero-gee gardens, it is the only source of bio-grown coffee in the sector. — Matthew Farrer (@FullyNocturnal) September 1, 2019 Naturally, about 30 seconds after I nabbed the embed code for this, Twitter started up the outrage engines and I retreated lest madness find me. On the other hand, Matt’s whole list of ships is spectacular, and worth following all the way to the end. Fortunately, the nice thing about blogging it here is the ability to skip straight to his original post and follow the thread, therefore avoiding Twitter’s latest attempt to monetise my outrage.

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05/09/2019 No Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Building Pyramids and Focus

I knew Father’s Day would be rough for me this year, so i didn’t push myself to do too much writing last week while the advertising was in full swing. Instead, I gave the week over to all sorts of catch-up projects and a bunch of forward planning in an effort to make good use of the anxiety-driven energy that set in. One of those projects involved sitting down and implementing the Pyramid Technique for figuring out where my writing-and-publishing priorities are currently sitting. This technique is borrowed from Dan Blank’s Be The Gateway, where he uses it to help clarify life priorities. This feels like a good time to do this, as I’m heading into the second half of the year with the distinct feeling that I’ve got a lot of planes in the air and nothing is really landing. PHASE ONE: THE INITIAL PYRAMID The process I’m using ran something like this: Grab a bunch of index cards Every writing and publishing project that has my attention gets a card, regardless of what stage it’s at, or where the results will be published. All that matters is that it’s on my mind mind, and getting a fraction of my attention or work time–and both publishing tasks (like creating Short Fiction Lab bundle) and writing tasks (like drafting a story, a novel, or a series bible) are taking up mental space. Scribble in deadlines for any projects that have them. Sit down at the table and start arranging the

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04/09/2019 No Comments
Stuff

Black Swan Thinking

Many years ago, I worked a shift at dayjob where shit well-and-truly hit the fan. We were preparing for one of our busiest periods of the year–lots of incoming calls from lots of panicked writers looking to double-check a big opportunity™ deadline, while simultaneously trying to prep for other big projects that were coming up. Big opportunity™ deadline days weren’t fun days at the best of time, but within the first hour of this one kicking off shit started going wrong. One staff member’s flight home had been delayed by twenty-four hours. Another staff member called in sick (from memory, they were heading to hospital). Our then-CEO was incomunicado for the day (for reasons I don’t recall), and the two other staff members on deck were both relatively new to the organisation. On top of that, i was relatively new to the role I was working and the projects I was working on. It was a time of transition, new staff coming in and old staff taking on new positions, everyone trying to find their feet in the new landscape. All other tasks on the docket went by the wayside as two of us downed tools and answered phone calls for the next seven hours. An unrelenting stream of phone calls, constantly asking the same handful of questions. The third staff member present–who, from memory, wasn’t actually meant to be there and had come in to get ahead on the big opportunity™ deadline project–pitched in and did some of the

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03/09/2019 1 Comment
News & Upcoming Events

OUT NOW: One Last First Date Before The End Of The World

What do you do when your date tells you Ragnarök starts next Tuesday? Logan expected his date with Stina Lorne to be a disaster, quickly ending after dinner when they acknowledged she was out of his league. Instead they went for a long drive, then a walk along a familiar beach. In fact, everything seems to be going better than Logan could have imagined when he asked her out last week. Sure, his date is convinced she’s the descendant of Fenrir, demon wolf of Asgard. And yeah, she’s talking about the apocalypse kicking off in the near future. Logan’s not sure that matters, yeah? After all, nobody’s perfect, and even the best relationships take work. One Last First Date Before The End Of The World is the fourth release in the Short Fiction Lab series from Brain Jar Press. This experiment has been filed under: mythic fantasy, first dates, the day before the apocalypse, and slipstream romance stories.   Available now in Kindle (Aus | UK | USA), Kobo, and other great bookstores. This release is on sale for the remainder of the week, giving you the opportunity to pick it up for 99 cents US. Come Sunday, it’ll be joining the rest of the Short Fiction Lab line at $2.99. And with that, I’m off to drink coffee and write new words.

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02/09/2019 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? Writing is top of the agenda this week, after the bulk of last week was taken up by grading papers. A good chunk of my between-marking downtime was spent working my way through issues on the Project Stairwell draft, creating a to-do list of things to hit when I started drafting again. The story is an interesting challenge because it’s really four seperate mini-stories, three of which have their own micro-story nested within them. Getting it right means keeping the reader interested in each part, and seamlessly transitioning from one to the other. I haven’t

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01/09/2019 No Comments
Works in Progress

Status Post: 31st August, 2019

BIG NEWS THIS WEEK: One Last First Date Before the End Of the World was released today. What do you do when your date tells you Ragnarök starts next Tuesday? Logan expected his date with Stina Lorne to be a disaster, quickly ending after dinner when they acknowledged she was out of his league. Instead they went for a long drive, then a walk along a familiar beach. In fact, everything seems to be going better than Logan could have imagined when he asked her out last week. Sure, his date is convinced she’s the descendant of Fenrir, demon wolf of Asgard. And yeah, she’s talking about the apocalypse kicking off in the near future. Logan’s not sure that matters, yeah? After all, nobody’s perfect, and even the best relationships take work. One Last First Date Before The End Of The World is the fourth release in the Short Fiction Lab series from Brain Jar Press—home to stand-alone short story experiments in fantasy, science fiction, horror, and fabulist literature. This experiment has been filed under: mythic fantasy, first dates, the day before the apocalypse, and slipstream romance stories.   AVAILABLE NOW AT ALL GOOD EBOOK STORES BIG ACHIEVEMENTS THIS WEEK: I marked a stack of assignments in a relatively efficient manner, rather than giving into procrastination and leaving everything until the last minute. I also did a metric buttload of reading this week, polishing off a bunch of books that I’ve been meaning to finish for a while. Which means it

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31/08/2019 No Comments
Smart Advice from Smart People

Vintage Links 005: Literary Fame, Publishing Crashes, Breathing, & Research

It’s Friday, September 30, and so I launch into the fifth instalment of my Vintage Links series. It’s been an interesting week clearing the To-Read folder, as i’ve had my first run of posts/articles that were either a) no longer online, or b) now taken over by godawful spam sites that have camped on the former name. The Bizarre, Complicated Formula for Literary Fame (Joshua Rothman for the New Yorker, 2015) Read it at the New Yorker’s Website When you work in a writers centre, you tend to accumulate articles about how various writers get famous or made a giant splash. They’re almost always talking about outliers, because the kinds of folks who get the big coverage are exceptions to the rule, but they’re also the source of information for how publishing works for many new writers. They assume every successful writer’s career trajectory mirrors Stephen Kings, or Dan Browns, or JK Rowlings, or…well, you get the idea. This…isn’t one of those articles. Rather, it’s a look at what makes Romantic poets like William Wordsworth more famous and remembered than their contemporaries, via an academic study by HJ Jackson at the University of Toronto. The answers are surprising, involving writing different types of works, creating work that is easily illustratable, and work that is highly adaptable. I’m intrigued by how well this seems to marry up with the insights on creativity from David Epstein’s book, Range, which argues for the power of being a generalist rather than a specialist and

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30/08/2019 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

RECENT READING: Do Anything by Warren Ellis

Warren Ellis takes a look at the history of comics using the metaphor of Jack Kirby’s Robot Head as the central metaphor and anchor for his free-associating path through the topic. That doesn’t do the book justice, though. I don’t think any description ever will. Because one of the things that unifies Ellis’ disparate project tends to be his interesting in breaking down a form to its components and rebuilding it into something new. Ten years, when this book was just a column on Bleeding Cool, he took that approach to a weekly essay on comics books. The days, you can see him deploy the same approach over on his website, courtesy of the way he’s thinking out loud about comic book publishing and developing his vision for a weekly newsletter in an ongoing web series. I discovered this book by a circuitous route. I’d been a fan of Ellis for years, courtesy of his work on Transmetropolitan and his Authority comics for Image, and gradually followed him into fiction writing (go read Normal) and writing for screen (Go watch Castelvania on Netflix). Mostly, though, I became a fan of watching Ellis think out loud on his blog and in his newsletter, watching him interrogate ideas and chart his interests for readers who may be curious. Do Anything was an old project by the time I latched onto his social media, but it would occasionally get referenced because it was written in a very particular way: an ongoing serial essay

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29/08/2019 No Comments

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