ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
Journal

Cold Snap

It’s cold in Brisbane this week and I’m not sleeping as well as I should be. Large chunks of today were spent fighting to stay focused, which is much less fun than it used to be. I’ve been watching the first season of In the Thick of It between stints at the keyboard and suddenly find myself looking at Peter Capaldi’s Doctor Who in a whole different light. # Last week, I removed the Facebook app from my phone and slid the Kindle app into the space the Facebook icon used to occupy. Not because I’m abandoning Facebook at all, but I was trying to disrupt the habit of using the House of Zuckerberg to kill time. It’s turned out pretty well, so far. The time I used to spend scrolling through the same items in my feed is now spent reading short fiction, clearing the backlog of magazines I subscribed to via Weightless Books. The last few days have been devoted to working my way through the latest issues of Uncanny and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, which is a whole lot more short fiction than I normally get through in the space of a week.

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14/07/2015 No Comments
News & Upcoming Events

Counting Down the Days Until Crusade

We’re two or three days away from the launch of Crusade, the third book in the Flotsam novella series. The following appeared on the Apocalypse Ink blog a few days back, along with the launch date and blurb: Damn, I like that cover. I’d be talking about this being the end of Flotsam and my time with Keith Murphy for a stretch, but I’ve got at least one more short-story to finish before the end of July, along with a handful of other deadlines which keep crowded together in my head, reminding me that they’re due very soon and perhaps I should be working on this other idea a little more, given it’s deadline is also very close. Work is another whole passel of deadlines coming due, thought fortunately they’re not all on my end. We’ve formally put out the call for people interested in being part of the GenreCon program in October, with the July 31 the deadline for expressions of interest (we put the program together in early August). You should volunteer, if you’re coming along. LET ME MAKE USE OF YOUR AWESOME. # I’ve just turned off the Goth Playlist on youtube that’s been my background music all evening so I can listen to the Lovecraft Ezine’s Vodcast featuring an interview with Angela Slatter. Largely because she described it like this on her blog: we talked about a lot of stuff including: being Accidentally Lovecraftian; fairy tales and their influence; advice for new writers; how reading Caitlín Rebekah Kiernan’s

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13/07/2015 No Comments
Gaming

Some Thoughts on Disconnection and Narrative in Marvel Heroic

I’ve been running a superhero campaign for a few years now, and tonight we hit ninety-seven sessions. In contrast to our usual approach, this one was dice heavy – the heroes raided the compound of an demonic ninja cult, fighting lots of guys in black outfits along with mystically endowed sumo-wrestlers, shadow-warriors, claw-wielding pretty-boys, and evil spirits possessing the body of a stone-and-iron golem. I spend a lot of time thinking about the system after sessions like this. We started the campaign using Mutants and Masterminds, back when the third edition was released. We shifted over to the Marvel Heroic RPG about nine months back, largely because it added a more dynamic element for folks who didn’t want to build their powers around hitting things, and it’s been… Well. It’s been great, and it’s been slightly nightmarish in equal measure. The Marvel RPG has a lot of moving parts, compared to the Mutants and Masterminds system. It handles comic-style action pretty well, when everything’s working correctly, but getting it working correctly is an uphill battle. Partially this is a flaw with the layout of the book – information is spread across multiple sections and comparatively simple things like “how does the villain escape spider-man’s webs” are half-hidden in sections that don’t make instinctive sense to you’re scanning for a rule on the hop. For instance, we’ve been using the rules for about nine months now, playing weekly, and I spent last week compiling a four thousand word document on all the

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03/07/2015 21 Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

When I disappear…

I was going to start this post with something completely different, but then the latest issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet arrived on my e-reader, and the opening paragraph of Alyc Helms‘ The Blood Carousel is too good to not share it: They say any child brave enough to ride the carousel can win her parents back from death, but every child must bring her own mount to pay the ticketman. Unicorns would please him best, but to catch one you need innocence, and innocence cannot find the carousel. Glorious, glorious story full of foxes and magic and not-quite-childhood bullies who live next door. I could think of a good half-dozen friends, who would probably love it, and it makes me glad I finally got around to resubscribing after losing track of when my subscription lapsed a few years back. Worth seeking out if you’re a fan of folklore-influenced fantasy. # So…yes. When I disappear, mysteriously and on short notice, send people to my house and look under the avalanche of unread books. There’s pretty good odds that’s what has done me in. When I moved in to my apartment fourteen months ago, I knew there wasn’t enough room for the books. I’ve spent the last year aggressively culling, sending books to good homes, and its still barely made a dent. There remains an awful lot of books left in teetering piles, and boxes shoved under beds and stacked in quiet corners. Some books, quite honestly, are in danger of toppling through windows one day.

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01/07/2015 1 Comment
Journal

State of Play

I’m meant to off at a friend’s place tonight, enjoying the double-barrelled awfulness that is Avengers Grimm. Instead I’m here, in my apartment, trying to sort out a story for a deadline that crept up on me, being slightly grumpy ‘bout the fact I still don’t have hot water. I’ve been thinking ‘bout blogs, lately, and how they have changed in the last ten years, ever since we started sharing things on Facebook and Twitter. Mostly, I’ve been thinking ‘bout the those changes jibe with the blogs I tend to follow, versus the kinds of posts that I actually sit down and write. And I’ve been thinking about the fact that I sound angry, these days, whenever I sit down to write a post, especially compared to my posts from 2011 when I was, in fact, a seething ball of rage. And after pondering this, for the last few days, I’ve come to a conclusion: I think I’d like to stop now, please. Not blogging – I always kinda liked blogging – but certainly the concerted effort to blog in a way that preferences Twitter and Facebook. The posts, specifically, about some aspect of writing or publishing, the posts with the titles designed to hook readers, the posts – let’s be honest – designed to be shared around. And lets be honest: that stuff works, if your goal is attracting people – folks find something smart or funny and they immediately share it around. It’s the default state of blogging in our feed-driven universe,

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30/06/2015 4 Comments
News & Upcoming Events

The Last Great House of Isla Tortuga at Far-Fetched Fables

Occasionally you check the internet and remember things you’ve forgotten about. Case in point: The June 14 edition of the Far-Fetched Fables podcast featured Matthew Fredrickson doing a reading of one of my first short stories, The Last Great House of Isla Tortoga, which first appeared in Jack Dann’s most excellent 2008 anthology, Dreaming Again, which was my second-ever short-story sale and the first I ever made in SF. So I’m a bit late to the party on this one, for various reasons, but I recommend going and taking a look. Not just ’cause Matthew does an excellent job on my bit, but because there’s a similarly excellent reading of Donald V. S. Duncan’s The Green Square. It’s nice, listening to other people read to you, sometimes. A bit weird when it’s your own words, and they don’t sound the way they do in your head, but that’s what comes of letting stories out into the world. Other people read them and make them their own. If you’d prefer to read the story, rather than have it read to you, I put a slightly revised version up on the website a few years back and kinda, sorta forget to let people know it was there. So I’ll do that now, and resist the urge to ramble about the project I had in mind when I first put it up. # I do not have hot water at the moment. The whole system went kaput on Friday evening, when I got home from work, and it took me

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29/06/2015 No Comments
Smart Advice from Smart People

Bruce Sterling (and Others) on the State of Contemporary Science Fiction

With a hat-tip to Jonathan Strahan,who shared this link on Facebook, the Nerds of a Feather blog series where they’re interviewing cyberpunk authors about the current state of SF is awesome, particularly the section where the interview Bruce Sterling: It’s true that the mid list has dwindled and more money and attention goes to fewer science-fiction creatives, but that’s also true of movies, nonfiction books, acting, pop music, all kinds of pursuits. Even heads of corporations have a one percent of ultra-wealthy moguls towering over them. I dunno why, but it’s clearly something broad and systemic, it’s not about some personal injustice done to some particular writer somewhere. I would also argue that popular writing kinda needs a lot of dross available. Popular writing needs room for badness. You don’t get great writing without a lot of just, writing. When I look at a bookstore rack and it’s all junk I feel a sense of relief: it’s like the swimming pool still has water in it. BLOGTABLE V: Cyberpunks on the State of Science Fiction, Then and Now (Part 2) Go take a look, if you’re so inclined. It’s interesting reading.

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11/06/2015 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Read This: Riding the White Bull, Caitlin Kiernan

If you’re a writer and you’ve never read Caitlin Kiernan’s work, you should probably rectify that at some point. She’s an extraordinary writer who basically looks at all the things we think of as rules, throws them out, and creates deliciously dark and beautiful fiction. Easily one of my three favourite writers active in the world today, and an author whose books I think up without question every time there’s a new release. And if you haven’t read Kiernan before, I strongly recommend head over to Clarkesworld this month, as they’ve just reprinted one of the best of Kiernan’s stories, Riding the White Bull, in which she moves away from her usual brand of Lovecraft-tinged darkness and toward…well, go see for yourself.    

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04/06/2015 No Comments
Journal

Morning Shift

So this is pretty much how my morning went: Peter gets up fifteen minutes before his alarm goes off at 6:00 am Peter sits down to write a half-hour ahead off schedule Peter finishes the 1,300 goal he set for his morning writing shift forty-five minutes early. Peter wombles around the internet for ten minutes, then realise everyone else is asleep or on their way to work. Peter gets bored. Peter goes back to writing. And that, folks, is why I’ve missed getting up early to get writing done. It wasn’t possible for much of the last year, courtesy of the apnea and my tendency to sleep through alarms, so I gradually cut back my morning writing to a bare minimum of getting up a half-hour early and getting a couple of hundred words done (and, even then, there were mornings it didn’t happen). It’s nice to be back. # Speaking of things coming back, tomorrow night will see the return of this: It’s been about two years since we last did a #TrashyTuesdayMovie, but my former flatmate lured me back by waving American Ninja Two around and saying, essentially, neener-neener-neener. Since American Ninja 1 was one of the most batshit crazy films we watched during the first run of films, I pretty much broke immediately and said yes, Tuesday night. Let’s do this.  It may be a one off. It may come back regularly. I need to talk to The Flatmate and figure that out. But there’s something vaguely

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25/05/2015 2 Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Don’t Hide the Brush Strokes

My friend Kathleen posted this to facebook yesterday and it’s one of those articles where I find myself reading and nodding enthusiastically. Artists frequently hide the steps that lead to their masterpieces. They want their work and their career to be shrouded in the mystery that it all came out at once. It’s called hiding the brushstrokes, and those who do it are doing a disservice to people who admire their work and seek to emulate them. If you don’t get to see the notes, the rewrites, and the steps, it’s easy to look at a finished product and be under the illusion that it just came pouring out of someone’s head like that. People who are young, or still struggling, can get easily discouraged, because they can’t do it like they thought it was done. An artwork is a finished product, and it should be, but I always swore to myself that I would not hide my brushstrokes. “MAD MEN” CREATOR MATTHEW WEINER’S REASSURING LIFE ADVICE FOR STRUGGLING ARTISTS, Fast Company Seriously, go read it if you’re an aspiring creative type. It’s loaded with useful things.

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22/05/2015 No Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Sneaky Writer Tricks: Estrangement and Disruption

So two lads with cellos do a pretty kick-ass cover of Guns’n’Roses Welcome to the Jungle in this youtube clip. As a fan of string instruments and the Gunners, I encourage you to check it out before we move on, ’cause it’s going to be relevant: Let me be completely honest here: this kind of thing rocks my world, and it kind of demonstrates one of the sneaky writer tricks I often mention to people in writing workshops: try to find a way to make the familiar strange. Everyone has their own definition of what makes great art, but mine has a lot in common with a Russian theorist named Victor Shklovsky who basically said that the role of art was estrangement – taking something familiar and making it alien so that the viewer is forced to re-examine it in a conscious way. Shklovsky essentially argues against the automatism of perception – the process where something has become so familiar that we no longer after actually think about it – and uses art as a disruptive force against it (if you’re interested, I wrote a longer post about this back in 2009, and you can find Shklovsky’s original essay reprinted online in a whole bunch of places). A good cover version of a song is essentially the modern manifestation of this theory – they take a song that’s become so familiar that it blends into the background, then make you revisit it and re-examine it. It’s one of the reasons my all-time

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13/05/2015 No Comments
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Your Stories Are Not Sacred God Poop

I’m hopped up on a combination of cold and flu tablets and the first full night’s sleep I’ve had in about five years, courtesy of the CPAP machine, so you’ll have to forgive me if I’m feeling a little punchy today. There’s this “How to Survive a Relationship With a Writer” meme going around on Facebook at the moment – hopefully the link above will take you too it, but Facebook is always hit and miss on such things. Said meme is full of 10 points designed to  make living with your writers SO easier and, like most such memes, is basically played for laughs. But it’s appeared in my feed three or four times now, and every time I lose my shit when I hit point ten: 10. Leave your writers a lone when a rejection letter arrives. After the deadly silence, screaming, crying, moaning, and muttering have subsided, offer your writer a cup of coffee or tea. And a cupcake. And a hug. People, we need to stop doing this. Rejection letters are not the enemy. They are not something that should be sending you into a screaming, crying, moaning, rage. They are not something where your significant other should be coddling you and trying to make you feel better about the world. We may be playing this list for laughs, but at the core of the humour there is truth, and the truth of this one is that writers get a pass on all sorts of bad behaviour

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12/05/2015 9 Comments

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