ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

There Is Nothing Surprising About a Writer Getting Rejected (Even JK Rowling)

THE SET-UP STAGE ONE: JK Rowling releases some of her rejection letters from the Robert Galbrath books via twitter. STAGE TWO: Bloggers and journalists everywhere write articles and posts about this, because pretty much anything Rowling does is news these days. She’s JK-Fucking-Rowling, after all. STAGE THREE: Every fucker everywhere starts talking about extraordinary it is that JK-Fucking-Rowling – one of the best-selling novelists of all time – still collects rejection letters. STAGE FOUR: I lose my fucking mind and plots a world tour where I can visit every writer who used such a phrase and shake them by the neck while screaming “NO. IT. FUCKING. ISN’T.” until they swear they will never do it again. THE ARGUMENT: THERE IS NOTHING EXTRAORDINARY ABOUT REJECTION Not mine. Not yours. Not JK Rowling (particularly not when she’s writing as Robert Galbrath and no-one knows yet). We want it to be news because, as a culture, we’d like to believe that extraordinary talent will conquer the limitations of producing art in a system dominated by capitalist concerns. Great art will conquer, talent will shine through, the good books will rise to the top of the slush pile and find their way to stores. It’s bullshit. It’s part of the same cultural narrative that puts a premium on ideas rather than work, and convinces people that just because they’ve written something there is, automatically, an audience waiting for it. The truth is this: publishers are businesses who supply product. While many of the folks involved on the

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30/03/2016 1 Comment
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

Technical Difficulties. Please Stand By.

I went to a con. My brain is not working. I have a presentation to the board of the Writers Centre tonight. I want to lie here and moan about sleep. I want to get up and write about the con. I want to finish a short story and go start rewriting my novel. I want to read all the books I acquired, which was comparatively little for me at a con, and it will still keep me going for the next year. I want to write follow-up emails for the unfinished conversations. I want to say thank-you to a bunch of excellent moderators who chaired panels I was on, and excellent moderators who chaired panels I went to see and really enjoyed. I want to talk about how important cons are, and how important they aren’t in the scheme of becoming an SF writer. I want to write big, detailed posts about SF and masculinity, and large-scale story structure, and small-scale story structure, and Die Hard. I want to do so many things. I’m not doing any of them. Instead, my morning is best summarised with this: The Spokesbear is disappointed in me. But then, he always is. See you tomorrow, peeps.

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29/03/2016 No Comments
Journal

Some Days, You’ve Just Got Nothing But The Books You Recommend

I wish I knew what to post about today. I would claim that my brain feels spectacularly empty, but that would be a lie. My brain is brimming with things I could write about, I just lack the confidence of articulating them well within the space I’ve got allotted before I head off to the final day of the Contact. I keep thinking of answers I should have given in panels, or things I could have explained better, but sitting down to write those out would mean giving context. I keep thinking about interesting questions and conversations I’ve had, but still haven’t had a lot of time to process. I keep thinking about the peeps I’ve run into, and the new folks I’ve met over the last three days. New authors, established authors, eager readers and fans. The folks I wish I could have talked too longer. None of that’s going to happen. My train arrives in ten minutes and the con awaits, and there will be time enough to think when it’s done. Instead, let me distil this post down to the most important thing I have talked about all conference. In fact, the conversation I’ve had over and over, with all manner of people: I really, really strongly recommend reading Anne Gracie’s romance novels. Start with Bride By Mistake and work your way through. The really are that incredible.

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28/03/2016 2 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? Two-part week for me: I’ve got an article deadline on Thursday, and a short story redraft that I set aside right before heading to Contact over the weekend. I’m about a quarter of the way through the rewrite, and I’d really like to get it finalized and out to beta-readers within the next two weeks. What’s inspiring me this week? I’m off to a con in mere minutes, so this weeks inspiration is a short list: The Coen Brother’s Hail, Caesar; Jason Sizemore’s memoir about being a small-press SF publisher, From Exposure; the glorious array of peeps I’ve

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27/03/2016 14 Comments
Works in Progress

#AmWriting

I’m off to Contact 2016 this morning. I expect I will see a large number of the folks who are usually reading this blog over there, at the Hotel Jen, but for the rest of you, a blog post. I am writing a story at the moment. Technically, I am rewriting a story, because the first draft already exists in a notebook that I’ve been carrying around for the last month. Originally I thought this would be more akin to editing, but it’s not. The story that goes into computer is mostly akin to the hand-written draft in terms of structure – everything else gets changed. Don’t get me wrong: editorial processes are useful, at this point. I’ve been working my way through all the planning suggestions in Charlotte Nash’s How to Edit a Novel, which provides an incredibly useful process for editing work, but my handwritten drafts are very spare and very messy and very, very wrong. And so I am cataloguing problems in every scene, then redraft it from the ground up as I type. Getting the voice right, clarifying the context and the mood and the themes. I’m taking my time and getting shit right. It’s taken me six months to get to this point. Six months, four notebooks full of drafts, and the words I should figure out what my redraft process looks like uttered so many times that it became meaningless. What got me started on this particular process was a deadline and the temporary loss of the laptop

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25/03/2016 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Would that it were so simple?

I went to see Hail, Caesar on Tuesday night and I’ve been thinking on it ever since. It’s a great film that is not, when you get to the end, a great film. A confusing contradiction that makes perfect sense once you’ve seen it, because it does so much right that it’s vaguely disappointing when you get to the end and find yourself asking, “so, that’s it?” It reminded a good deal of seeing Zoolander for the first time back in 2001. A whole lot of people love that film and regard it as a classic, but it drove me crazy. The plot is…slight. An excuse to hold together a whole bunch of comedy set-pieces that are, on their own, funny, but never add up to something bigger. The difference, in this instance, is that I loved Hail, Caesar. It was exactly three scenes into the film before I knew I’d purchase a copy of it when it come out on DVD, because the spectacular performances, visuals, and comedic moments are worth revisiting. There is so much this movie gets gloriously right. The Coen’s strengths are quirky characters, exceedingly well-composed imagery, and getting something phenomenal out of their actors. The film plays to those strengths in scene after scene, particularly when it comes to the actors. There are an incredible array of performances throughout the film, from major parts like Alden Ehrenreich’s portrayal of Hobie Doyle (which is incredible) through to minor parts Scarlet Johansson’s DeeAnna Moran, Tilda Swinton as a pair of twin gossip columnists,

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24/03/2016 2 Comments
Journal

You Toy With My Natural Emotions

By the time you read this, I will be on the doorstep of my local computer repair place, anxiously waiting for them to open so I can picking up goddamn laptop. They assure me it is fixed. And only two days outside their initial projections, which is something of a miracle given the way technology fails tend to creep up on me. Assuming they are right about the fix – please, gods, let them be right – I will give them money and cart the laptop to Write Club where I will promptly WRITE ALL THE GODDAMN THINGS. I do not like it when my technology fails me. It will be good to be back. In the event this proves to be a cruel taunt on the part of the fates…well, we shan’t consider that.

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23/03/2016 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? Still laptop free, which is limiting things a bit. This means that the majority of my focus is going to be spent doing rewrite notes for a novella I’ve got sitting around, preparing for the moment when I have a computer back. What’s inspiring me this week? Daredevil Season 2. I totally didn’t meant to watch the entire thing in the space of 24 hours, but I skipped the obvious point where I could have gone to bed after the first act and just found myself going one more episode far more often than I should have. The

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20/03/2016 16 Comments
Journal

And Now We Are Thirty-Nine

I turn thirty-nine today. As is traditional, I am posting the first-thing-I-Do-On-My-Birthday-Ugly-Selfie, because no birthday is complete until my parents ring wondering why in hell I would put such a thing on the internet. This year, we celebrate the new reality of me and sleep: Occasionally, just for the hell of it, I will wake up and say Luke, I am your Father, just ’cause the breathing effects are right. It was about this point, last year, that I fell asleep while driving and finally got to the point that my doctor to thought hmmm, maybe sleep apnea? We should send you for tests. It took a really long time to get to that point, but I’m incredibly happy that shit got sorted out. Years of feeling like I was somehow broken, and suddenly there was a fix. Thirty-eight was a pretty good year, as a result. I look forward to thirty-nine. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I shall go and celebrate my birthday the best way I know how: breakfast at my local cafe, write club, avoiding Facebook until the deluge of birthday well-wishers has subsided, and crossing my fingers that I’ll get a phone call from the repair place letting me know I can come pick up my laptop.

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18/03/2016 No Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

In Search of a Deliberate Error

Still waiting on the laptop to come back from repairs, which means my internet access is largely dependent on an old desktop and the wifi hotspot on my phone. It’s been ten days, which means we’re heading into the outer limits of the time I was quoted. Were I the kind of guy who believed such quotes, I would estimate that I’m back online (and blogging regularly) towards the middle of next week. Because I know my history with computers, I figure it will be me and the phone for another week or two. at the very least. Still, one of the advantages of being laptop free is that I’m catching up on a whole bunch of reading. I spend a lot more time with a tablet while the computer is out of commission, which means it’s relatively easy to slip into the Kindle app and catch up on some of the ebooks I accumulate for travel reading. This week’s reading is Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath – a kind of self-help-by-way-of-popular-science book that looks at the psychology of decision making and how to do it better. I kinda wish I’d read it two or three years ago, since a lot of the discussions about decisions that get made in business environments is fascinating and extremely useful in the day-job. On the writing front, however, the proposition that holds some appeal is the notion of deliberately making mistakes. The idea that we learn from our mistakes is one of those ingrained pieces of

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17/03/2016 2 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? Finally coming out of the weeks of holidays, workshops and travel, which means I’ve got an uninterrupted week to sit down and focus on some writing for a while. Primarily, this week, this means working on a short story draft I’ve got perculating and (return of the laptop willing), finishing off some layout work that I owe the Altered project. What’s inspiring me this week? Incredibly spoiled for choice this week, since I’ve both read and watched things that have spectacularly knocked things out of the park (including Joe Lansdale’s novella Briar Patch Boogie and

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13/03/2016 11 Comments
Journal

Plums

There is a line in Joe R. Lansdale’s novella, Briar Patch Boogie, that took my breath away when I read it. It goes a little something like this: It was still raining and you could hear the drops falling into the water like plums falling off trees. It’s a good line, in isolation. A clear, beautiful image and a nice cadence to it. It’s a great line within the context of the story, where it tells us all sorts of things about the narrator and the things they notice and the contrast between his internal life and the way he presents to the world around him. Nothing terribly surprising about that; Lansdale is fucking incredible at this stuff. He’s one of those writers who is utterly in control of every aspect of his work, building scenes and characters and stories with incredible precision. A man who loves the language and the character, the sound of the words on the page and on the tongue. I’ll be taking a whole bunch of Lansdale short stories away with me, when I hit Gladstone this weekend. More than I would usually take, for a quick trip away, because I’m now travelling without my poor, broken laptop and need something to fill the hours when I’m not taking workshops. Were it not for the inconvenience when it comes to work matters, I could quite get used to being computer-free around the house.

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11/03/2016 No Comments

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