ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

I spent part of yesterday researching cocktails, for the fantasy element of Fairy Dust, with Whisky Chaser, hinges upon a particular character who makes a particular drink. In my head that drink has been an Old Fashioned, for I have a fondness for them and it’s a nice allusion for the problem that drives one of the characters, but the Old Fashioned is not an exciting cocktail. It involves no shakers or bartending shenanigans, just the combining of ingredients that ultimately become something delicious. So I spent an hour googling cocktail recipes, looking for something with more pizzaz. Came up with nothing, and stuck with the old fashioned for the moment. So I started figuring out where my affection for the Old Fashioned actually came from, and I think it can be traced to my friend Allan over at Type 40 (purveyors of fine pop culture artefacts and props) who drank them when I visited Melbourne at some point, and then I felt that pang you get when you have’t spoken to friends for far too long. I also spent some quality time coveting his Call of Cthulhu investigator’s notepads, but those are outside the budget at the moment. Which, of course, sent me off pondering the problems of finances at the moment (I’m on scholarship; my partner is between jobs), and whether it was time to start considering a Patreon given the limitations on finding part-time work when you’re studying while a university is paying your bills. All of which

There’s an interesting post over on Lifehacker about the cost of electricity in Australia and why it’s unlikely to fall any time soon. I’m linking to it because how electricity is priced tends to one of those mysterious things that people blame political parties for, without truly understanding how it works, and it’s useful to occasionally get people thinking about such things. Then again, my dream political party is the one who runs on a campaign of we’ll tax you so hard it fucking hurts, but we’ll spend it on public services and state-of-the-art infrastructure for the public good. I am destined to be disappointed every election, even if someone actually runs on such a platform. Also, I am reminded that I really should be checking in on The Conversation (where the original post was sourced) much more often than I am. For example, this article about the characteristics shared by “happy city” Instagram pics regardless of which city is being photographed makes for an interesting resource when pondering the design features of various fictional settings. I’m going to try adding it to my RSS feed for a week, get a feel for how much daily content needs to be processed. — Yesterday I wrote 921 words on a short story, Pixie Dust, with Whisky Chaser. I walked 10,000 steps for the first time in weeks, ate some delicious cauliflower tacos with pineapple salsa my beloved made for dinner. I admired my beloved’s stompy, dinosaur-foot slippers as I am wont to do

It’s a bright, sunny Monday where I woke up early and got to work on writing projects first thing, getting a bunch of stuff done before I sit down to write this blog post. It’s cool enough that I notice when I walk around without socks on, but not so cold that I regret this decision within an hour of waking up. Over the weekend I realised that the last three weeks have been rough on my mental health. This shouldn’t be surprising – end-of-semester marking is one of those gigs is custom-built to trigger all my anxieties: high stakes, tight deadlines, and you only get one shot to put together feedback that will help, and you want it to be clear because there’s no chance to explain or expand on things the way you do when critiquing stories for friends. All of this comes together to create a very muddied vision of what “doing a good job” looks like, and my anxiety feeds on uncertainty like a tick, growing fat as it burrows deeper and deeper into the dark parts of my subconscious. I finalised everything last Tuesday, but it took me the rest of the week to start pulling myself out of the slump. There were too many things left unattended too during the marking period, too many things that needed to be dealt with before my brain returned to a space where work was possible. I read a bunch. I watched some wrestling. I sat at my

I woke up this morning and mainlined Rihanna’s Work in the hopes of easing my way into marking. Mostly, it resulted in sitting there thinking that the genres we once thought of as “popular” grew increasingly more interesting once the mass market collapsed and there was no need to produce hits that were palatable to everyone. People try and seperate technology and the market from the aesthetics of art, but they’re far more intertwined than people think. 5 assignments left at time of writing. If I can get my focus back, i should be finished tomorrow. # Robin Laws has a new book out, Beating the Story: How to Map, Understand, and Elevate Any Narrative. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but I’ll recommend it to you right now for a very simple reason: Robin Laws is fucking smart, and he thinks very deeply about the mechanisms of narrative. Lots of folks who read fiction don’t know this yet, because he’s spent a good chunk of his career working in roleplaying games and writing tie-in fiction. I followed his design work for years because he was one of the first designers who looked for a connection between the kinds of stories an RPG told and the mechanics used to tell it. He produced work that was unexpected and surprising, experimental without being inaccessible. In short, he wrote games that were fucking smart. He started getting involved in editing original fiction through Stone Skin Press a few years back and put out

The marking continues, moving into the final third, but things have now reached the Heart of Darkness stage. The cycle of the last week has been pretty consistent: I grade papers until my brain fries, then flake out in front of the TV watching bad movies until I fall asleep. There’s been no time for writing or research over the last week, and very few opportunities to leave the house. The system the university uses for submissions means I need to have an active internet connection in order to mark papers, and that means a lot of my usual change-of-scene haunts aren’t feasible. Net result: I’ve been getting a little stir crazy, and I’ve started ranting to my partner on a semi-regular basis (never a good sign). Fortunately, I was far enough ahead that I could afford to take today off and get out of the house. I headed for breakfast at the Low Road Cafe, went late-night shopping with my partner, and generally spent today catching up on things that weren’t grading papers. Between all that I read a little, finishing off the Tor.com version of Caitlin Kiernan’s Black Helicopters (which is spectacular) and starting on Charlotte Wood’s collection of long-form interviews with Australian writers, The Writers Room. The latter, at least, involves a vague genuflection towards research reading, courtesy of James Bradley’s answers regarding genre and his love of superhero comics. Specifically, this explanation: One of the things I think is really fascinating about the superhero comics I’m interested in