ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
Smart Advice from Smart People

Having Something to Say

So, let me clear: if you are a fan of Warren Ellis work in any way, and you have not subscribed to his email newsletter, you should fucking remedy that right fucking now. If you are a fan of smart creators doing smart things with networking tools, you should also fucking remedy that right now. If you are…look, fuck it. The man is smart. He talks about things in a smart way. Go forth. It is a surprising thing when I actually look forward to making a cup of coffee and sitting down to read an email, but I do this every week and it’s always fucking rewarding. Case in point. This is the part of the job that doesn’t get talked about a lot, not least because it’s hard to talk about, but also because it doesn’t involve Productivity and Goals and The Magic Of Writering and The Grand Statement and all that good stuff in interviews. Sure, we all talk about the important Staring At The Wall And Farting Around time, but it’s also about sifting through the shitpile at the back of your head and deciding if you actually have anything to say.  Any idiot can recycle the monomyth and plug in a setting and a handful of blank characters, but that’s not the same as having something to say: about the world, life, a thing, even yourself. I have a whole folder of loose ideas that dried up and got thrown in the folder because they

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04/05/2016 No Comments
Journal

Welcome to May

It’s cold and grey in Brisbane this morning. My alarm just went off, alerting me that it’s time to get up, which would be awesome but for the fact that I have been awake for two and half hours now. There are very few things I miss about having undiagnosed and untreated sleep apnea, but the ability to wake up early, realise that it’s bullshit o’clock, and go back to sleep is definitely one of them. These days, if I wake up at bullshit o’clock, I get up at bullshit o’clock. On the plus side, I get some writing done. Words on the story draft. Words on the novella re-write. Words here, which tend to be the third priority in a day, and thus becomes the thing that suffers when my priorities undergo tectonic shifts. It is cold and grey out there this morning. Perfect writing weather. I kinda wish I could fuck off work for the day, sit here on my couch, and finish a goddamn story. But that would be unprofessional of me. Goddammit.

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03/05/2016 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’ve spent the last week kicking around potential endings for a short story I’ve been writing, on and off, for about four years now. Still haven’t quite figured it out, but the most recent sequence of scenes is probably closer than I’ve been for a while. What’s inspiring me this week? I sat down and watched the first season of Faking It on Stan this week, and discovered that it is a show that is drastically undersold by it’s pitch. The surface description is all “two friends fake being lesbians in order to achieve status in

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01/05/2016 20 Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Fudgy, Cream-Filled, and High-Performance Technology

The Marvel/Audi cross-over comic appeared in my Facebook feed this week. For those who haven’t seen it yet – presumably because you haven’t yet trained the Facebook algorithm to show you the geekiest damn thing possible at any given time – the short version is this: Audi has a lot of product placement in the upcoming Captain America: Civil War film. They are building on that. Part of the way they’re building off that is a custom, eight-page Avengers comic that places Audi cars front and centre. You can read it online, for free, ’cause there is no point in trying to get people to pay for that shit. There is nothing particularly mind-bending about the comic. In fact, it’s exactly what you’re expecting from the concept: the barest minimum of a storyline, character beats that remind you that you’ve been watching movies with all these characters in them, and a couple of really on-the-nose moments where they talk about the technology in their cars and Black Panther being king of the road. What’s fascinating is the comic’s existence. I mean, it’s not like this is new idea. I knew Hostess Fruit Pies were a thing as a kid, despite the fact that they were never sold in Australia, simply because there were a series of Fruit Pie strips in my comics where Spiderman or Captain America fought a particularly cheesy villain, defeating them by the application of snack foods. It makes me particularly happy you can find all these strips online now. But

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26/04/2016 No Comments
Journal

Plans

Right. It’s morning and I haven’t yet coffee yet. When that situation arises, you get what you get, know what I’m saying? Being on the internet without coffee seems like an incredibly bad idea, but there it is. No coffee. I am here. Writing this post. Badly. (I have coffee now. It hasn’t helped. I forgot to add the sugar.) It’s ANZAC day here in Australia and the world is oddly silent. No trains. No traffic. None of the bustle that generally comes with weekends, with people out there in the world, getting chores done and taking the kids to work This morning there’s a handful of birds cawing to one another. The occasional sound of a train rolling past. Me, with the keyboard tapping and music streaming through the TV. Pretending it’s not fucking eerie out there. We don’t often shut down, these days, as a culture. The days of stillness are always unsettling, a reminder of something bad that has happened in the past. Or is happening, right now. If the zombie apocalypse started last night, I do not know it yet. I hope it hasn’t. I’ve got plans for today.  

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25/04/2016 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?   There’s a final major scene to redraft on the space mummy story and I’d like to get a new scene rewritten in the novella. What’s inspiring me this week? Delilah Dawson’s post on the topic of Why I Love Reading Smut. It’s short, but it captures a whole bunch of thoughts I’d been trying to articulate on the subject of reading erotica and romance novels, and why it’s important not to refer to such books as “guilty pleasures.” Weirdly, I’d been reading the author referenced at the beginning, Lauren Dane, a whole bunch over the last few

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24/04/2016 16 Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

The Living Daylights

I have been watching all the Bond films, in order, with my dad. Every Sunday, with the exception of the chaos that was March, I go round and eat lunch and we sit down for a couple of hours to watch the next thing on the list. We have done all the Connery films. We endured the brief reign of George Lazenby, who would have been an interesting Bond if he could have signed up for a longer period and worked with directors who were not the director of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. A few weeks back, we hit the Moore era. Moore was my Bond. When I was a kid, and the Bond films appeared on TV, he was always the man stuffed inside the tuxedo and ordering a martini. He defined Bond for me: the cheesy puns; the awkwardness that’s presented as charm; the ridiculous gadgets. I worked off the theory that I liked the Moore era. Oh, gods. Oh, gods, that is not the case. Most of the seventies-era bonds where Moore was in the role are the kind of films I would gnaw my own arm off to escape. I came to dread Sundays, a little, ’cause it would mean another one. Last Sunday, we hit the first film of Timothy Dalton’s career. And again, I never rated Dalton that much. He was not the Bond of my childhood, therefore I resented him when he stepped into the role the same way people resent a

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21/04/2016 No Comments
Journal

Not Really the Thing I Was Thinking About This Morning, But It’s the Thing I’m Thinking About Now

I got nothing today. Well, actually, that’s not true, I got plenty of things on my mind, but a shortage of things that are suitable for sharing with the internet as a whole. So instead, I’m sitting here thinking about the course that I’m writing for work at the moment, which is unlike most courses that I write in that I don’t get to just stand there and talk from bullet points, but actually have to write everything out word-for-word. And how frustrating it is to be doing this, thinking through ideas in painstaking detail, working my way through examples, because it’s basically me figuring out a bunch of things I know about writing, but do not actually know about writing, simply because I do not internalise things properly until I have to explain them to someone else. All I really want to do is sit down and talk about the thing. Dialogue, rather than monologue (which is weird, ’cause man, I monologue like a motherfucker when I’m teaching, but it’s different. It’s a monologue where you can read the room). Anyway. I spent yesterday talking through the internal beats of a scene, looking at the micro-structure of narrative in a way I rarely do. It’s the first thing in years that actually made me miss teaching at universities, because working through the examples largely went straight to the thing used to love doing: taking a work, pulling it apart, examining the technique so you can appreciate it in a new way.

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20/04/2016 No Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

On Algorithms, Authors, and How You Can Help

There is this meme that pops up on Facebook from time to time. It usually runs something like this: Authors do not earn a lot of money, really. If you’d like to help your favourite author, post a review on Amazon. Given enough reviews on Amazon, MAGIC THINGS WILL START TO HAPPEN IN THE AMAZON ALGORITHM. And every time I see it, I cringe a little. Don’t get me wrong – I like reviews. I would like more reviews of my work out there. But the focus here isn’t necessarily on reviews, it’s on manipulating the Amazon algorithms. The numbers change, as do the MAGIC THING, but the gist remains the same: get 50 reviews, and the book will start appearing in the recommendation algorithm; get 20 reviews, and you’ll be included in the “others like this book footer.” Amazon reviews = good things for your favourite book. I am not against Amazon. They are exceptionally good at what they do, and their recommendation algorithm is fucking awesome at predicting my reading taste. Amazon has their shit together, in the retail space. But part of that relies upon them being right. They’re like Google, in that their cache and market dominance is partially reliant on providing the best resource available when you search for something. And I did my time in SEO right about the point Google released the Panda Update to their search algorithm in order to cut down on the number of scraper-sites and article farms that existed purely to draw

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19/04/2016 4 Comments
Stuff

Reacher Said Nothing is a damned weird thing to read

Andy Martin’s Reacher Said Nothing is an incredibly weird book to read. The premise is pure genius: Lee Child is writing the 20th Jack Reacher book, and he’s agreed to let Martin sit in on the process. Martin gets to observe the developing draft, ask questions about process and career, a literature professor studying the act of producing rather than the product at the end. And the book is at its best when it’s doing exactly that, the moments when Martin is reporting conversations and and offering glimpses of the process; or noticing a technique that’s started to appear in the rough drafts and expounding on it. The unevenness comes when it looses that focus: talks about other writers Martin has meet while in Child’s orbit, or contemplating the effect that his being there is having on the process. Thinking through what he is doing, talking about the lack of models and how it may continue in other forms. And I will grant that there are very few books like this. The only one I can think of that’s anything similar is The Writers Tale – a document of emails exchanged between Russell Davies and journalist Benjamin Book as Davies wrote his final season of Doctor Who. Except my memories of The Writers Tale is that it is wall-to-wall fascinating, even when it’s getting self-indulgent, because the words you’re getting are almost always Davies responding to specific prompts or conversations. Everything in The Writers Tale is contextualised. Occasionally, Reacher Said Nothing feels like its no

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18/04/2016 1 Comment
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? The awkward, totally-not-a-dream-sequence section of the story got finished this week, so my primary goal is getting through the rest of the space mummy story. Two or three scenes left to redraft and it’s getting towards a state that is almost…readable. What’s inspiring me this week? A friend introduced me to the Lucifer series on Fox this week, and it is bloody gorgeous. It’s got all the tropes of a standard urban fantasy buddy-cop narrative, except there is never any attempt to conceal the supernatural element. Lucifer, being Lucifer, just straight-up tells people the truth

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17/04/2016 33 Comments
Journal

The Important Things in Life

I am teaching a whole bunch of writing courses in the coming months. This will roughly coincide with a two-month period where I am much more likely to show up at this blog and goof off, rather than talking about writing and publishing, because there is only so much writing and publishing talk I can take in a given week. And I largely hit that limit when I’m not talking about writing in general, and giving specific comments on work, which is a lot of what I’m doing at the moment. Critiquing work stresses me out. It also leads to a lot of goofing off, on twitter. Which has now developed into a weird daily twitter thing, with Conan references, that makes me extraordinarily happy. I am still extraordinarily proud of the October 3 entry. “Conan, what is best in life?” “…hugs. It’s hugs, right? Come on, hugs are awesome.” — Peter Ball (@Petermball) October 17, 2015 “Conan, what is best in life?” “Not being chained to a wheel for your teenage years. Not being chained to a wheel is aces.” — Peter Ball (@Petermball) October 28, 2015 “Conan, what is best in life?” “Go away. Supergirl is on.” — Peter Ball (@Petermball) April 3, 2016 “Conan, what is best in life?” “…” “…” “Hold on, it’ll come to me.” — Peter Ball (@Petermball) April 4, 2016 “Conan, what is best in life?” “Raindrops on roses and whispers on kittens. God, it’s like you’ve never heard the damn song.” —

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15/04/2016 No Comments

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