ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
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 10k into Wail and the momentum has sprawled a little this week, largely because I’m working scenes on both sides of the first act turning point without being happy about how I’m managing the reveal. The goal is to get the story drafted to the midpoint, along with notes about how the scenes will be revised based upon changing needs. What’s inspiring me this week? Surprisingly, the most inspirational thing this week has been sitting down with the draft version of the Cortex RPG Rules sent out to Kickstarter backers and figuring out how

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09/09/2018 3 Comments
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

Some Days You Want To Punch A Shark

Some days you want to punch a shark, but you don’t, because sharks are big and aquatic and in possession of teeth far sharper than yours. Some days you want to punch a shark, but you don’t have the bus fare to get the the aquarium. Some days you want to punch a shark, but if you cannot go to the aquarium, how do you handle the logistics? You have to get to the ocean and meet the shark in its home terrain, figure out how to handle the rigours of breathing or floating while throwing a punch that will mean something? Do you know how to scuba? Do you know how to surf? How do you even know where the sharks are going to be? Some days you want to punch a shark. Usually, it’s a Monday. Some days you want to punch a shark, but you fear what might happen when you give in to that impulse. Some days you want to punch a shark, because punching sharks seems badass. You are not a badass. You are soft and quiet and you enjoy a cup of tea. This is not a bad thing, really, but perhaps you have been told otherwise. Some days you want to punch a shark, but you know this is wrong. So wrong.  Some days you want to punch a shark, so you daydream about going surfing. About drifting in the water where the sharks are local. Hanging out there, waiting until you see

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08/09/2018 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

The Blackhouse

THE BLACKHOUSE is the first novel in Peter May’s Lewis trilogy, police procedurals set on the Isle of Lewis out in the Scottish Hebrides. It’s a novel about the isolation, the traditions that built out of that isolation, and the history of a protagonist who goes home, reluctantly, in order to investigate a crime. I bought it after seeing May at the Adelaide Writers Festival a few years back, then hearing people rave about his books over and over. I spent the entire read with a notecard beside me, jotting down page numbers where he deployed techniques I could lift for my own projects. Then it became a process of jotting down page numbers purely because May delivered a great description, deploying language with a precision that a lot of writers never manage. The Isle of Lewis may be a real place–the kind you can visit and touch and walk through–but for the vast majority of readers it needs to be constructed as carefully as any fantasy setting.  It’s a detective story, but very little of it is really about the detective. It’s about a place that’s Other, and what it means to come from there. What it means to have started there and learned to survive in another world by forgetting it. Recommended.

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07/09/2018 No Comments
Works in Progress

Eighteen Things I Ended Up Thinking While Working On My Current WIP Today

This would all be easier if it was done already. This will probably be okay, but it’s not really the best I could do, is it? I should pull everything down and start over, from scratch. I swear I could do better if I just started everything over from scratch. Life would have been much easier if I’d just said, way back at the beginning, that the setting for these novels was The Gold Coast, 2007, instead of pretending they were some mystical Ur-City that exists in every hardboiled novel. Because of Raymond Chandler, all hardboiled novels are set in San Fransisco or Los Angeles. Even the ones that are’t.  It’s hardboiled, not noir. Stop calling it noir. Noir is a colour. It only applies to film. I’d really like a hotdog. With mustard. A good hotdog would be nice right now. If you’re writing a series about a character who has returned from the dead twice, you’re kinda in a jam every time you write a plot that has nothing to do with the character returning from the dead. It’s one of those details that’s too big to ignore. Seriously, motherfucker, would it have hurt you to plan ahead with this? I don’t care if it’s a good hotdog, really. Oh, I like this bit.  That character isn’t bad either. You know, that baby shark song is incredibly heteronormative? I’ll fix that bit when I sit down and edit. Yes, even though I don’t really edit. I’m pretending that

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06/09/2018 No Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Looking at MicroStructure in Mary Robinette Kowal’s “Evil Robot Monkey”

EVIL ROBOT MONKEY is a short story by Mary Robinette Kowal, available for free on her website (in html, PDF, and audio) and included in her short collection, Word Puppets. It’s a little over 900 words long (or 6 minutes of audio); a complete story in a single scene, and it’s one of the best pieces of fiction I’ve ever come across for explain the way story beats works.  The premise of this story is simple: uplifted monkey wants to sculpt clay as a escape from his not-so-pleasant existence; circumstances conspire to keep him from doing this. That’s the guiding macro-structure, but it’s the individual beats that give the piece an incredible amount of nuance for its word-count. FOUR BEAT PATTERN There’s a lot of argument about what gets classified as a beat in a story, but for my purposes I’m looking at a specific pattern: we get a clash when two characters wants are in conflict, they each deploy a tactic to try and resolve things, and those tactics see the scene reach a new equilibrium–a moment when the characters involved pause and take a new tack, based upon the information they received in the prior beat. That pause–and the decision to try something new–marks the end of the beat.  With this in mind, Kowal’s story builds around four basic beats. Beat One begins with the protagonist, Sly, sculpting in his enclosure. A bunch of school children bang on the side and ruin his current work, triggering the opposed wants. The

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05/09/2018 No Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Understanding the Micro-Structure of Scenes

Conversations about narrative structure often focus their attention on the macro level: here is the three act structure; here is what needs to happen at the midpoint; here is how you nail the ending. Rarely do they spend a lot of time looking at the microstructure of individual scenes, beyond some very perfunctory (albeit important) advice about making sure each involves conflict and changes/advances the overall story. Which is a pity,  because understanding the microstructure of a scene is a surprisingly useful thing to have in your toolkit as a writer, particularly when you’re trying to resolve particularly thorny narrative problems. It’s one thing to say that a scene is built around two characters coming into conflict, and another to see how writers use that to generate specific effect Shawn Coyne gives a neat outline of beats within a scene in The Story Grid; Robin Law’s Beating the Story offers some useful frameworks when he breaks stories (and scenes) into alternating patterns of the things you hope will happen and the things you fear will occur, coupling it with the concept that a scene/beat begins when a petitioner wants something from someone who may-or-may not grant their request.  I’ve pointed people–students especially–to both over the last twelve months, but I keep trying to refine my thinking. Trying to boil it down to a core idea that’s easier to explain. This is where I’m at: scenes begin when two characters come into conflict; the beats within the scene are the ways we trace

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04/09/2018 No Comments
Journal

Making Do

I broke the camera lens on my phone twelve months ago. Three times I tried to get it repaired, and three times I was rebuffed or quoted a bill far larger than I wanted to pay for a working camera. The rest of the phone worked fine, and I could still take blurry close-ups of anything truly important. If I really got desperate, I could use the selfie-camera and rely on the auto-zoom. No problem, I thought. I can do without a camera. I’ll make do with what I’ve got. I placed sticky tape over the shattered lens and got on with things.  The first problem came a few months ago, when I needed to photograph a doctors receipt for the Australian medicare app. Getting an image clear enough required several attempts, many knock-backs, and a convoluted set-up that involved lying under a coffee table and trying to take a clear selfie of the receipt on the tabletop above me. It was a minor thing, not enough to convince me I should change, even though I’d make occasional overtures towards getting the lens repaired. It wasn’t until the phone refused to change that I finally moved on, accepting what needed to be done.  So, last week, I got a new phone. Found myself in possession of a working camera once again. Just to cover the little things, like taking photographs of bills when needed. Or scanning documents and receipts, when I want a virtual record instead of the cheap, flimsy

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03/09/2018 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 locking down the first act of Wail this week–there’s a bunch of scenes already down, but I’m coming up on the moment when the story transitions and escalates into the second act through the discovery of bodies and the reveal of the “monster-of-the-week” at the heart of this novella. Wail is slower to write than I’d been hoping–I tend to average 1,200 words a day instead of 2,000–but a lot of that comes down to managing continuity and making decisions in that regard. Occasionally it slows down due to research, such as the discovery

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02/09/2018 5 Comments
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

Pinch Hitter

I got called in to deliver a seminar presentation on short notice. Twenty-six hours from “yes, I’ll do it,” to being in the room talking submissions and the publishing industry and answering questions about how it all works. Building content off the powerpoint provided and trusting in experience and prior seminars to fill in the rest of what I needed. It went well. Better than expected, since the last time I did a library seminar was around three years ago. I love a quick turn-around project, every now and then. The pressure to deliver on a tight deadline, coupled with the knowledge that you’re a last minute replacement, means I’m hyper-aware the the primary virtue of the work is getting it done on time and good enough instead of fretting about being great.  Over the years I’ve done it with freelance game design, short stories to fill anthology gaps, lectures, workshops and seminars. They’re almost never the best work that I’ve done, but they’re among the most satisfying projects I get a chance to do. 

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31/08/2018 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? This week I start the drafting process on Wail. I kinda hesitate to mention this one–I’ve got all sorts of superstitions about working on a third Miriam Aster novella given the difficulties I’ve had in the past, but the upside of doing the PhD has been the opportunity to sit down and think about why I had so much trouble using Horn as the basis for a series.  What’s inspiring me this week? John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story. A lot of books on story tend to fall back on the three-act structure and its variations,

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26/08/2018 7 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 more-or-less finished a very rough draft of Median Survival Time last week, but there’s still five scenes that aren’t quite right. The main task for this week will be going through and redrafting them, getting them into a format that better suits the novella and the ending. If those are done in time, I move on to the detail-pass–going in and adding all the little details and flourishes, looking for ways to tighten up the setting and the character perspectives. What’s inspiring me this week? I’m about two-thirds of the way through Peter May’s The

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19/08/2018 No Comments
Stuff

Taking a Look at Hoth and the Transition to the Second Act

Last year, my friend Kevin opened a can of worms a while back when he started a Facebook thread about the Rebel’s retreat from Hoth in Empire Strikes Back, suggesting it should be thought of as a win. The rebels  were beaten, he argued, but they’re a guerrilla force up against a considerably larger and more well-equipped army – in this context, fleeing in an orderly fashion and getting the bulk of their forces away counts was textbook planning for a guerrilla army in that position. Lots of people argued it was a loss: the rebels were routed, barely escaped, and were largely scattered.  I kept out of the thread initially because what I know about military strategy was learned by playing Command and Conquer, but someone else brought up the the fact that the narrative demanded a defeat at the beginning of the second act and suddenly, lo, I knew things. I hadn’t ever taken a close look at the narrative structure of Empire, but when I did I was surprised by how well it actually sets up that transition within the larger structure of the movie. HERE’S THE THING ABOUT TRANSITIONS INTO THE SECOND ACT In narrative terms, defeat and victory are meaningless, because you’re talking about a transition between two approaches to a problem. Mostly, that transition means moving away from an approach that’s comfortable, and towards a course of action that will actually resolve things.  Consider Luke in the first act of Star Wars. He dreams big,

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17/08/2018 No Comments

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