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Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Seven Things Writers Can Learn from Watching Suckerpunch (2011)

I’m going to be clear: I hate this movie. Loathe it. With the kind of intensity you get by capturing a couple of thousand suns in a nuclear reactor and focusing it into a very, very destructive kind of laser. When we first watched it, very early on in the #TrashyTuesdayMovie annals, it bored me to the point where I gave up actually commenting on the movie and just started live-tweeting 10 ways I would have my revenge on Zack Snyder for the creation of this film. Having re-watched the film in preparation for this post, I find myself revisiting said list and wondering if I was overly generous: 1: Dropped in a vat of piranha, who eat him slow motion while Army of Me plays over the action. #Suckerpunched 2: Getting kicked in the nuts, repeatedly, by film-makers who actually have talent #Suckerpunched 3: Being left to starve after having both legs crushed by a tank #Suckerpunched 4: Fatal katana accident. #Suckerpunched 5: beaten to death by angry Watchman fans wearing brass knuckles #Suckerpunched 6: After being deafened by a thousand idiots screaming “This is Sparta” at high volume #Suckerpunched 7: Rampaging hippos. #Suckerpunched. 8: Accidentally stumbling over a plot in his next film and going into anaphylactic shock #Suckerpunched ‘Cause, honestly, does anyone really believe that Snyder isn’t seriously allergic to plot at this point #Suckerpunched 9: Helicopter crash #Suckerpunch 10: Getting sued for all the time people have wasted in his film, and having to give up

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Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Five Books about Narrative Structure (And a Final Caveat About their Usage)

So last week, when my post about Hellboy II was doing the rounds of the social medias, my friend Brendan dropped past and said, more or less, “I wish I knew one percent of what you know about plotting.” Now Brendan is one of those guys who is both intensely smart and incredibly nice, so when he says stuff like that, my response tends to be something along the lines of “Well, shit, Brendan, that’s easy. Pretty much all I know, I picked up from reading a handful of books. I can put together a reading list, if you want.” Hence we have another blog post featuring a list of books, this time focused on the subject of plotting and writing, although it occurred to me that the most useful thing in terms of understanding the structure wasn’t reading the books. No, what really forced me to get my head around it was tutoring a scriptwriting class taught by Marcus Waters at Griffith which was basically thirteen weeks of hammering the three-act cinematic structure into students heads, with examples. Having to explain concepts to a bunch of other people who have paid good money to learn tends to really focus your energy, and it’s one of the reasons I still do things like the Trashy Tuesday Writing School posts. And applying it to your own work is a whole ‘nother thing entirely (Marcus was the first writer I ever met who was horrified that I didn’t plan things out before

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Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Follow Friday: Fiction Machine

Years ago, in the early days of Twitter, the #FollowFriday hash tag became a way of directing people towards tweeters who were doing interesting things. Over the years its become something less than that – The Oatmeal charts its demise pretty well – but the original concept has some merit. The internet is built on connections, after all, and there’s a lot of interesting things out there. This isn’t twitter, but I still like the idea of the Follow Friday. A recommendation of someone who deserves your attention, plus sufficient context to determine whether it’s likely to be your kind of thing. #FollowFriday: Fiction Machine Grant Watson has long been one of my favourite Australian reviewers. Way back in 2007, when I was doing Clarion South, one of the tutors basically recommended subscribing to a local magazine purely on the strength of Grant’s Bad Film Diaries column. Sadly, I missed the chance to do that. The magazine was shut down within a few issues of me finishing Clarion, and a lot of Grant’s review work seems to have migrated online since then, whether it’s in the form of his Angriest blog. And don’t get me wrong, Grant’s blog is well worth following. His weekly Pull List comic reviews are one of the two resources I actually follow and pay attention to on the comic book front, and his ongoing Star Trek: The Next Generation series is almost enough to convince me that I should watch Star Trek despite my utter

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Writing Advice - Craft & Process

The World’s Worst Story Opening (And How To Do It So It Works)

Back in May, Chuck Wendig did this post about breaking rules. I like Chuck. He’s a smart guy. Knows his shit when he talks about writing, too, which is why we flew him out as a guest for last year’s GenreCon. But I’ve gotta admit, when he put up his post saying, well, fuck the rules, and included the following list of rules worth fucking, it kinda made my testicles crawl into my body and seek refuge from the terror he’d unleashed upon the world: Don’t open on weather. Don’t open with a character looking in a mirror. Don’t open on a character just waking up. (Wendig, IN FICTION, NOTHING IS FORBIDDEN, EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED) Oh, Jesus, I thought. Why in hell would you tell people that? Don’t you realise what you’re unleashing on the world? Those poor fucking editors. Hell, those poor writers. DAMMIT, WENDIG, WHY ARE YOU USING YOUR POWERS FOR EVIL? Then I got distracted. ‘Cause deadline’s wait for no fucking man and I had a copy of Frost to turn in that wasn’t yet finished. But that last one on Chuck’s list, it stuck in my head. Don’t open on a character just waking up. It irritated me, ’cause I’ve got a real pet peeve associated with that particular piece of writing advice. It is, without a doubt, the worst possible way I can think of to open a story. So bad, in fact, that I tend to wax lyrical on the subject when you give me an audience of writers.

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Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Five Books (And One Blog) That Got Me Into Romance

Once, many moons ago, it was pointed out to be that my objections to the romance genre were largely the result of lingering, passive sexism and a considerable snobby streak. I’m okay with being a snob, but the sexism thing bothered me. Self, I said, you cannot dismiss the entire genre just because it’s not targeted at white, male, middle-class readers. For one thing, you are not a fan of the patriarchy. For another thing, you get pissed off when people use the same thing to denigrate SF. Go ye and find yourself some romance books you like, or at least read enough that you’re informed about the genre and not operating under some appalling double-standard. That was about ten years ago, more or less. These days…well, I still wouldn’t claim I’ve got a grasp on the genre, for the realms of romance are vast and wild, but I am a convert. I read a bunch of romance. Occasionally I’ll talk romance with a bunch of other romance fans and squee over the books I love. I know a bunch of romance writers who are releasing new and interesting work. Plus, and this is a big one, I’ve adopted a simple philosophy that keeps me in contact with good romance fiction: when Sarah Wendell, of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, recommends a book, I go forth and buy the damn book. I am not Sarah Wendell, but I did like the following books enough that I’m strongly recommend them to readers

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Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Seven Things Writers Can Learn From Watching Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

I re-watched Hellboy II: The Golden Army recently. Not, alas, as part of the #TrashyTuesdayMovie series, which is on hiatus for the foreseeable future, but simply ‘cause I was in the mood for a certain type of movie and Hellboy II was in my DVD collection, waiting to be watched, and I found it before I found my copy of Blade: Trinity. One of the nice things about re-watching movies—particularly movies that fit into the flawed-but-interesting category, such as this one—is the way it allows you to look for patterns. What starts out as a disappointing movie experience gradually mutates into a narrative puzzle; you take it apart, look at all the components, and figure out how you’d take an alternate route. Somewhere at the core of Hellboy II is a brilliant genre film with mass-market appeal, a film that’s both pulpy and smart in equal measure. A film, quite frankly, that does exactly what Victor Shklovsky says all art should do—make us re-examine the familiar in a new light. Like its spiritual sister film, Speed Racer (great visual style, mess of a plot), it’s one of those pieces that’s all potential and no real payoff. But there are always useful things to be learnt from films and books you don’t like, if only you’re willing to subject yourself to them again and again in order to figure out why, and I’ve chosen to take this bullet in order to give you the seven most important things writers can learn from watching Hellboy II. ONE:

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Works in Progress

What I’m Doing This Quarter

So, June 30th. We’re about to slide into the second half of the year, which I’m kinda looking forward too, ’cause Exile is currently scheduled to come out towards the end of July. More details on that in a couple of weeks, once there’s details to talk about, but I’m looking forward to it. Better yet, tomorrow I’m scheduled to turn over Frost to the folks at Apocalypse Ink. It’s a strange kind of thing, hitting deadlines in the US. There’s a seventeen-hour time difference Brisbane and the parts of the USA where I’m mailing the file, which means the first of July becomes a really, really long day if it needs to be. In a strange, unsettling departure for this series of novellas, I don’t actually need it to be a long day. Frost is more-or-less ready to go, so all I have to do is give it a final read through and attach it to the email. Two books down. One to go. Fortunately for my sanity, I’ll be taking a break from the Flotsam series for a couple of months. Book Three in the series, Crusade, isn’t due until November, so I’m afforded a little time to in another couple of genres. On my list of things to tackle over the next three months? HOT FOR TEACHER. You know how I’ve been threatening to try and write a romance for a while now? Well, it seems that the time has come. July I’ll be knuckling down with a bunch

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Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Adventures in 80s Terror

THE HYPOTHESIS Ladies and Gentlemen, I posit that you will not find a clip that packs more 80’s music video cliches into three minutes than Cameo’s Back and Forth, released in 1987. THE EVIDENCE This has it all: big hair; bad fashion; Flashdance leotards; synchronized dancing; a vaguely glam metal guitarist performing a home invasion where he plays riffs at people. The only way you can cram more 80’s into this thing is the addition of a Corey. I DARE YOU TO PROVE ME WRONG In fact, if there’s something more 80s out there, I really want to know about it. Links in the comments, people. Links in the comments.

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Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

No, Not Black Leaf!

Okay, I’ll admit it. When someone first told me there were people transforming Jack Chick’s Dark Dungeon’s screed against Dungeons and Dragons into a feature-length movie, I kinda thought there were too many people in the world with a surplus of free time on their hands. But this? This looks like fucking genius: Couple this with the news that Wizards of the Coast will be letting us download the PDFs of the Basic Rules for free (and, hell, the fact that there is a basic rules set, which harkens back to my boxed-set-loving gamer roots), and this may be as excited about D&D as I’ve been since 2006 or so. Which is…kinda weird, actually. I thought me and my interest in the big RPG brand had parted ways more-or-less permanently for a while there. Seems we’re not quite done yet, even if I never quite get around to playing a session of 5th Edition.

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Journal

Exile, Frost, and the Return of the C’Thulhu Peeps

So, the three things I’ve got planned for my weekend. LINE-EDITING EXILE The final round of Exile proofs edits landed in my inbox this morning, confirming that I’ve more-or-less managed to patch the big ol’ story holes that were in the first submission but left in a bunch of numpty-headed mistakes that need to be fixed. I’ve got about a week to turn these around, but I suspect it’ll take less time than that ’cause of the holy-shit, this is almost done factor. Which may make this the first deadline I’ve actually hit in the process of getting Exile together since Jenn at AI contacted me back in February of 2013, asking if I’d be interested in turning Flotsam into a novella series. I suddenly find myself thinking of a Neil Gaiman quote from his Make Good Art commencement address: “You get work however you get work, but keep people keep working in a freelance world (and more and more of todays world is freelance), because their work is good, because they are easy to get along with and because they deliver the work on time. And you don’t even need all three! Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. People will forgive the lateness of your work if it is good and they like you. And you don’t have to be as good as everyone else if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to

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Journal

A Small But Important Victory

Woke up early this morning and wrote 2,000 words. Not a bad start, since I’m aiming to have the draft of Frost finished by June 9th, which means 2000 words is the minimum daily rate I need to hit in order to achieve that. After all the dramas that surrounded Exile, Frost is going in on time if I have to kill myself to do it. It’s also the rate I’m aiming for that’ll make my big yearly to-do list achievable, if only I can maintain the pace, so it’s an important victory in this rebuilding my writing process process The rest of the week will not be quite so manic; I’m largely planning on running my ‘writing day’ from 9 AM to 9 AM, which means I’ll be getting a jump-start on tomorrow’s 2000 words when I come home from work tonight. It’s a routine that’s worked for me pretty well in the past, particularly when writing longer works. It should keep me pretty productive, at least during the week days. Next step, figure out how to keep myself writing on the weekends, which is always a bugbear of mine. But I’ve got another five days to figure that out now…

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Journal

Sunday Morning

It’s the tail end of a Sunday morning, which is as good a reason to break out the Velvet Underground as I can imagine. ‘Cause if you have heard this song before, it’s probably time to hear it again. And if you haven’t heard this song before…well. You know what to do. I spent yesterday fixing up some stories so they could go into the submission cycle again. Mostly ’cause the thought of starting Frost from scratch is still vaguely irritating, and I’ll start coming up with wild maybe I’ll find the USB if I… type hypothesis every time I sit down to write. Today I have to ignore that feeling and get on with it. I’ve got, more or less, two weeks to get this baby written and mailed off to beta readers before my yearly schedule is in all kinds of trouble. And with that, I’m off to write something…

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