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News & Upcoming Events

Things I’ve Got On The Horizon

I had this crazy idea in my head. I thought things would slow down, once GenreCon was over. Self, I said, if you get through this, it’s all unicorns and nachos. You can finish your writing project, bugger off to Melbourne for a holiday, get ready to kick off 2016 right, you know? For the most part, that’s still happening: I’ve got a few days away from the office; I head off to Melbourne this time next week; I’m scribbling away on the laptop or a notebook most mornings. I’ve watched too many Jason Statham movies on Netflix, without really meaning too. But the writer’s life, it’s all about the hustle, and 2015 still has a few things I should mention before it’s done. THING THE FIRST: CREATING CHARACTERS WORKSHOP On DECEMBER 6 Should you have a burning desire to taught how to write by yours truly – and honestly, I cannot think of any reason why you wouldn’t – you might want to book into the Creating Compelling Character’s workshop I’m teaching for Queensland Writers Centre on December 6. This is one of my favourite workshops to teach, since it gets right to the heart of stories and storytelling. The last time I ran it was back at the beginning of 2014 and it got perhaps the best response from anything I’ve taught in the last few years. It got me interested in writing the series of posts about what writers can learn from Die Hard (which I’ll now have

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06/11/2015 No Comments
Big Thoughts

Genre, Gender, and GenreCon

So, after GenreCon, the inimitable Kat of BookThingo posted this online: Conference programmers note: This is what an all-women writers’ panel looks like! #aww2015 #GCoz A photo posted by Kat (@bookthingo) on Oct 31, 2015 at 11:37pm PDT The image is from the final plenary of GenreCon the weekend, when we had all seven of our special guests on-stage. It’s a sessions where a question from the audience generated a particularly frank discussion of gender, genre, and the impact of both on a writing career (particularly in SF). That conversation was cut short, largely because we were running out of time. I hated doing it, but it had to be done due to the constraints of our agreement with the venue, and I apologise to all the people who had follow-up questions they didn’t get to ask. But it has me brooding on the topic a bit. And I tend to talk about the things I brood about here. Now, at this point I will acknowledge that I am going to talk about this as a white man chock-full of privilege, which means the statistical odds of saying something stupid on this topic start high and get higher the longer I talk. But, since it came up… Well, here we go. I got asked a few times, over the weekend, if we realised we’d assembled seven women as our guests. The official answer from the conference is no, we didn’t. We just assembled some awesome writers and they happened to be

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05/11/2015 3 Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Resolving the Word Count Conundrum

So I got caught up in an interesting debate on twitter on the other night, largely revolving around the question of whether or not 50K actually constituted a novel-length work and the difference between answering yes to that question, answering yes, but it may be extraordinarily hard to sell, depending on your genre, and answering no, it’s a goddamn novella. If that sounds like a waste of time…yes. If it sounds like something you have passionate feelings about…yes, it’s that too. Writers get passionate about wordcounts. We get passionate about what they mean and where the arbitrary lines between form may be, and occasionally we spew some truly stupid shit in the name of trying to unravel its mystery. It gets even weirder when you start considering the importance of genre on the discussion. For example, I used to think short stories were around 3,000 words long, largely because that was usually the upper word-count on any short stories we submitted during my writing degree. The one time we actually wrote longer than that, in my undergraduate course, was in a subject devoted to the novella, where we were permitted to break out an 8,000 word story. That sound you hear? It’s the vast majority of Sci Fi authors laughing hysterically at those word-counts. SF is a genre where the short story is still relatively well-respected and, compared to many genres, well-paid. Our awards have neatly codified word-lengths that make things obvious – short stories don’t end until 7,500 words, novelettes fill the

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04/11/2015 1 Comment
Journal

I’m Reserving the Right to Reverse This Decision

It’s NaNoWriMo season and the internet is awash with writing advice, much of it focused on the early stages of getting words down and belting out a first draft. At the same time, I holed up in my apartment with the lights off, illuminated by the glow of NXT playing on the WWE network, quietly trying to shake the very mild panic attack that inevitably follows every conference I’ve ever attended. It would seem a stupid time to start considering returning to regular blogging, with a focus on the craft and business of writing, and yet I find myself doing so. It’s been five months since I swore off using the blog for such purposes, but I’m surprised how often those old blog posts about writing have come in useful since then. GenreCon was the most recent example – the news filtered through that I was going to need an opening night speech on short notice, and once I knew the topic I wanted to talk about, it was surprisingly useful to be able to dig up an old blog post and find the key take-away that could be adapted to a new purpose. I did something similar a few months back, when someone asked me to do a presentation about writing. There were three or four posts I’d written that addressed the topic, so it was easy to pick ’em up and adapt them as needed. I’ve lost track of the number of times, at work, that having already thought about a

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03/11/2015 No Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

GenreCon, Thank-yous, and Networking Redux

Yesterday’s post was written pre-conference. Today, I’m writing from the other end, at home, on my couch, half-asleep and vaguely unsettled because my nerves are still dancing the GenreCon fandango. I’m tempted to be all false modesty here, but every indication from twitter comments and in-person discussions seems to indicate that the conference was great. We’ll send out feedback forms to all the attendees in a few days and we’ll no-doubt learn about the things we didn’t do so well, but the vast majority of the people seemed to have gotten a lot out of the conference. The comments on the program have been great, with guests and panellists just knocking it out of the park in session after session. I sent out a lot of thanks in the closing ceremony of the conference. I’d like to do so again here, in shorter form: I get an awful lot of love for running GenreCon, largely because I’m the name at the bottom of the emails people get, but I cannot overstate the importance of the team of people who come together and make it happen. From the writers and editors who are part of the program to the QWC staff who support all the logistics through to the team of volunteers – and I will stress, these guys killed it this weekend, stepping up to a little extra when we lost people to illness – it’s an incredible team effort and I feel enormously privileged to have worked with all of

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02/11/2015 5 Comments
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

Pre-Conference Thoughts

I’m writing this in the past and setting it to post on Monday. Right now, as I write this, it’s 10:53 on Thursday evening and I’m ensconced in a hotel room at Rydges South Bank, watching the minutes tick by as the start of the conference gets closer. I’ve seen about twenty people I know this evening, courtesy of Lisa Hannett’s book launch. Almost all of those people started our conversation with some variation on “I’m surprised you’re still standing.” But this is not the exhausting bit. Even when the disasters hit – and the one rule of running a conference is that disasters will hit – once you get to the night before the conference it’s pretty much out of your hands. You just kinda…hold on. Answer the questions you can, do what needs doing to keep things running, roll with any punches that come your way. It doesn’t make it any easier to get to sleep. Partially it’s the nervous energy, thinking about what’s coming. Partially it’s the faint sting of shame, brooding over the things you wish you’d done better. Partially, it’s just ’cause you’re punch drunk, and you feel like you’ve been taking hits and swinging blind for so long that you’re not sure how to just stop. So you check your email and answer messages. You make notes about things you’d like to do differently next year. You check Facebook and Twitter and even Google+, ’cause you’re brain is looking for things to focus on and sleep eludes you. Weirdly,

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01/11/2015 No Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Transmissions from Conference Land: Let’s Talk About Facebook

Peeps, we need to talk about Facebook. Specifically, this trend that I’ve noticed with this year’s GenreCon where people have eschewed email and started sending me important queries about the conference via the Facebook PM system. Don’t do this. For the love of all the Gods in all the Heavens, don’t do this. Carve these words into your heart and cleave to them for the rest of your writing career: Facebook is not the place for any kind of one-to-one professional communication.  I’m not talking about the quick, easy stuff – it’s not like the messenger/chat system on Facebook is entirely broken. I use it for all sorts of things: asking the important questions about whether we’re good for write club and whether we need donuts; asking quick questions of friends that have an easy response; the occasional chat with old friends who moved away. It’s great for that, it really is. But it’s pants for anything important. I get the impulse to try it, I really do. About twenty years ago we moved away from a dominant form of communication that happened on your terms – you’d make a call on the phone, someone would answer, and they’d have to deal with you immediately – and towards a form of communications where people got around to answering you in their own damn time – the email. And we’re all totally aware that email can suck for quick responses. You know that you’re sending the message off like a note in a fucking bottle, hopping

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29/10/2015 1 Comment
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Transmissions from Conference Land: Swordspoint

A few months back, Kathleen Jennings leant me her copy of Swordspoint on the assumption I’d probably like it. The fact that I actually took it is a pretty good indication I thought she was probably right, since I generally don’t borrow books from people I like. No matter how many times I point out, no, seriously, it will take me forever to get around to reading this, it never seems adequate to the task of explaining how long it will take me. Case in point: I’m pretty sure what I’m writing off as a few months, up there, is actually about a year. Possibly two years. It’s entirely possible that I’d forgotten I’d borrowed it until I came across it while re-arranging a bookshelf a few weeks back, ’cause that’s the way my brain works when it comes to unread books. Do not lend me books, is what I’m saying. But, maybe, go track down Kathleen and borrow her copy of Swordspoint, ’cause it’s a pretty damn extraordinary book. Ellen Kushner’s novel about the nobility of Hill and the duelists in Riverside is one of those stories that’s winding and tricksy and never quite what you’re expecting, but ultimately lands as one of the best fantasy novels I’ve read in years (and I’m only twenty-eight years behind the times, if I’m doing my calculations correctly). Interestingly, it’s not necessarily a book I’d recommend to all fans of fantasy – this is a story that’s got a lot more in common with

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28/10/2015 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Transmission from Conference Land: The Odd Couple

I meant to post this over the weekend, but…conference brain. Instead, you’re getting it here. *AHEM*…GO SEE THE ODD COUPLE I got interested in Neil Simon’s 1965 theatrical version of The Odd Couple after reading James Scott Bell’s Plot and Structure, where he goes back to the play several times when he’s looking for examples to illustrate a particular point. It stood out because The Odd Couple is one of those cultural touchstones, the characters of Oscar and Felix made iconic by the movie version featuring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, or the sitcom with Tony Randall and Jack Klugman. And, like most touchstones, it’s been worth smooth and toothless by that long familiarity. This is not the play that James Scott Bell describes in his book. I went and Googled some details of the play and got…intrigued. It sounded smart. It sounded good. Then I discovered it was getting a run at the Queensland Theatre Company, and naturally, I had to go. And then I learned that my friend Colin Smith, who I hadn’t seen since he played in one of my superhero campaigns a few years back, was playing the role of Murray, so I gathered together my usual crew of theatre-going peeps (aka my sister and my parents) and we booked tickets. It was…outstanding. A smart script with a talented cast and perhaps the nicest set I’ve seen in a theatrical production in years. Everything and everyone involved in the production was incredibly on-point, making it one

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27/10/2015 6 Comments
News & Upcoming Events

Transmission from Conference Land: Things I Should Mention

By the time you read this, you and I are living in different worlds. You are living in the real world, where real things happen. I have travelled to Conference Land, where my head disappears into spreadsheets and phone-calls and a couple of hundred people wanting things done all urgent-like. There is no downtime once you enter Conference Land. There are simply times when you are working on the con, and times where you are sitting quietly, not really doing anything, ready to leap into action the moment the next emergency lands. GenreCon begins Friday. One of those phrases that resonates through my consciousness with a big, earth-shattering KABOOM! And in the silent aftermath, amid the desolation where all thought is wiped away, I start thinking of random things I should be telling people about. FIRST: LAMENT FOR THE AFTERLIFE, BRISBANE LAUNCH If you’re in Brisbane for GenreCon and looking for something to do on Thursday night, might I suggest heading along to Avid Reader bookstore for the launch of Lisa L. Hannett’s novel, Lament for the Afterlife. I’ve been friends with Lisa since she came to Brisbane for Clarion South in 2009 and promptly became the second half of Angela Slatter’s brain, and she was already a fabulously talented writer back then. She’s only gotten better in the years since, and I am looking forward to this book so damn much. Basically, my recovery plan for GenreCon is over basically consists of reading this book, going to Melbourne to play boardgames for

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26/10/2015 No Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

600k Year: A Conclusion, More or Less

Warning: word-count neepery associated with the 600k challenge follows. You can skip today’s post if that’s not your thing. Right. So yesterday, at Write Club, I did this Which means I’ve now written nine of the ten chapters I had planned for the novel I’m working on and there’s just one more to go. Probably about 65,000 to 72,000 words, depending on how accurate my words-per-page assumptions are, with another eight to ten thousand words left to chase down before I hit the end. It…may not be done by GenreCon. Which hurts to admit, since I was confident I’d get able to do so until about Monday, but we’re starting to hit the point where the conference stops having things that need to be done and starts to have minor disasters that will eat hours of your time as you fix them. Since I’m the only person whose disappointed if this book doesn’t get done in time, and there’s about 180 writers counting on me to get GenreCon right at present, it’s becomes one of those needs of the many situations. SOME STATS ON MY FAILURES Since my deadline for the 600k year dare coincides with the GenreCon banquet, I think it’s safe to say I’m not going to make it. I can accurately track 285,559 words that were done on computer between November 1, 2014, and August 17, 2015. After that we’re in the land of rough estimates, ’cause I switched over to the notebooks, I’ve filled 528 notebook pages – approximately 90,000

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23/10/2015 7 Comments

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