ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
Journal

Restlessness

I’m trying to buy an apartment this year. I’m not terribly good at it. I can find places I quite like in locations I’d enjoy living, but the response I get when consulting with expert is basically the equivalent of a warning siren and the robot from Lost in Space flailing its arms in a panic. When I find places that are really quite solid investments, well made and reasonably priced, I look at their location and the streets that surround them and realise, should I live in this place alone, my future will involve unacceptable levels of boredom and self-loathing. There have been suggestions, in Australian media of late, that we’re far too hard on suburbia. Perhaps this is true. I grew up in the suburbs. I live in Brisbane, which is mostly a sprawling suburban expanse that goes on forever and ever, amen. I’m not good at that. I like the idea that there are people around, people I can go engage with. I like the idea that I can leave my house and there will be things to do within walking distance, regardless of the hour. This limits my options, in Brisbane. It limits my options quite a bit. I started this process expecting to be renting, trying to find a place to move before Christmas.  When I realised I could afford a mortgage, the plans changed but I stayed packed, ready to move at a moment’s notice. All the advice I’ve been given about buying a

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30/01/2014 1 Comment
Smart Advice from Smart People

Mark of Cain, Youth Radio, and Pneumatic Drills

An excerpt from my favourite bit of online reading this week: We did play Mark of Cain on Triple J, but not in the breakfast program. This is because Mark of Cain sounded like a pneumatic drill slowed to the pace of a Fitzroy junkie looking for his tram ticket and so were only played after 9am. We called this dayparting. This is an industry term used only by people who know about music scheduling for radio. It comes courtesy of Helen Razer’s defense of Triple J over on Crikey, and references a time period where I was a moderately enthusiastic fan of the radio station, Razer as a presenter, and yes, godsfuckit, the Mark of Cain. I mean, I’ve more or less got an entire story drafted that’s all about the summer they released this cover: There are still days when I can fire that song up and listen to it non-stop. One of these days, I’ll even figure out how to make the story I wrote about it non-shit. But for all that I’ll take any excuse to post youtube clips by bands I love, the debate that inspired Razer’s article is an interesting one and her conclusions are pretty much bang-on in terms where I’d stand in the argument. Worth reading, if you’re interested in music, radio, and the representation of young people in Australia.

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18/01/2014 No Comments
Works in Progress

Bring me my coffee and my mighty atomic steed

Allow me to sum up my day in a single image: Me and coffee, we’re going to get real close today. Real, real close. I’ve hit the downhill slope on the latest writing project. Six thousand words to go, all of which is last act stuff where I’m tying off loose ends and resolving bits of conflict. In some ways, this is the easy stuff. I don’t have to make up anything new, I just have to follow the clues littered through the draft and write the things that logically fit into the story. On the other hand, it leaves me with this nagging feeling that I’ve got a job that’s almost finished, but not quite done. I’m not good with that feeling. As soon as I have one of those open loops, mentally speaking, my subconscious will spend some quality time finding some others when I should be sleeping and my old friend insomnia comes galloping over the hill to pay me a visit. I managed to eke out about four and a bit hours of sleep, and right now I’m feeling better than I should be given that it’s quarter to seven as I write this and I’ve already been up a couple of hours. In other news, if you’ve been missing my bloggery about all things writing-like, you should probably hie yourself over to the AWM Speakeasy blog at some point in the coming weeks. After a couple of slow years where we rebuilt things like the AWM

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13/01/2014 No Comments
Works in Progress

Streaking: 7 Days In

I’ve written a minimum of 1,402 words every day for the last seven days. There’s nothing special about that. I’ve done it plenty of times before. But I’m noting it, in this instance, because one of my goals for 2014 is to put together a writing streak. This is predicated on the Seinfeld approach to productivity, where you get a calender and built up a chain of X’s marking the days where you’ve achieved a certain goal. After a while, the Xs accumulate, and the desire to keep from breaking the chain becomes part of your motivation to keep working. I’m actually using my calendar to track two different streaks. The first half of the cross gets put in when I clear five hundred words for the day – a kind of minimum viable productivity level that’ll keep me in touch with project du jour – while the second half is put in when I clear the 1,600 words I need every day to hit my goals for the year. Once I break the chain – and lets be honest, I’ll break it eventually – it becomes the goal I chase. I start a new streak the following day and try to build a longer one. Discovered immediately after writing this post: Jerry Seinfeld doesn’t want credit for the Seinfeld productivity secret. WRITING STATS FOR 2014 Current 1,400 word Streak: 7 days Current 500 word Streak: 7 days Project Du Jour: Exile (Flotsam, Book 1)

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08/01/2014 No Comments
Smart Advice from Smart People

Dignity is a Luxury Rather than A Necessity

I’ve been broke a few times in my life. Sometimes it’s been because I worked contract gigs. Sometimes it’s been because I’m unemployed. Either way, a lot of the stuff that Eric Ravenscraft talks about in his blog post for Lifehacker seems really familiar, particularly the stuff about financial advice being aimed at people who are not you when you’re broke, the deliciousness of service station hotdogs, and this bit in particular: Money isn’t just about paying for goods and services. Money is about dignity. When you get below $20,000/year, dignity becomes a luxury rather than a necessity and, when viewed solely through the eyes of financial advisors, luxuries should be cut first. Eric Ravenscraft, The Financial Advice I’m Glad I Ignored When I Was Broke There were years where I routinely lived on about $18,000 a year. Maybe a little less. These days, I look at the money I used to live on in my twenties and wonder how the hell I did it. Ultimately, what it comes down to is this: I’ve gotten used to the dignity as a day-to-day thing. 

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07/01/2014 No Comments
Journal

2014 is Going to Hurt

I saw my flatmate in the kitchen this morning. For many people, this isn’t really notable. They probably see their flatmates every morning. For me, it’s a rarity. My flatmate gets up early. Seriously early. He’s usually on his way to work by the time I roll out of bed at 7:30 AM and start thinking about having a shower. Usually, if we cross paths in the morning, it’s ’cause I’m catching a flight scheduled to leave before rush hour. So he wasn’t entirely out of line when he looked at me, making coffee, around 7 in the morning, and asked: “who are you and what have you done with Peter?” “This is nothing,” I said. “I’ve been up since 5:30.” It’s a work day. It’s a writing day. It’s the year of the novellapocalypse. When these things meet, I have to get up early. # 2014 is going to hurt. Not in a bad way, necessarily, but in the way that running a marathon when you’re not completely prepared will hurt. The kind of hurt where you’ll ache and you’ll moan, but ultimately there’s a sense of satisfaction behind it. Only, instead of running, I’ll be writing a few things. I’ve got a list somewhere, broken down month by month. I know what I need to have achieved by end of January in order to keep pace with deadlines and expectations. I know how many words I need to write every day, just to keep my head above water.

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06/01/2014 No Comments
Journal

Top Ten Posts on Man vs. Bear in 2013

Last year, when accurate visitor data was still a shiny new concept around these parts, I went and looked at the posts that had achieved the most visitors over 2012. It proved to be an interesting exercise, so this year I’m expanding it to look at the top ten. In order of visits, the most popular parts of the archive were: 1. Why I Have Problems with the Big Bang Theory 2. 13 Things Learned About Superhero Games After Running 30 Sessions of Mutants and Masterminds 3. Why Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ Can Be Dangerous to New Writers 4. What Writers Ought to Know About Die Hard, Part Two 5. What Writers Oughtt to Know About Die Hard, Part One 6. Seven Notes on a Lover’s Discourse While Halfway Through the Book 7. Sri Lankan Love Cake FTW 8. 10 Thoughts on Shame and Writing 9. Running a Villain Audit 10. GenreCon 2013: The Aftermath It’s interesting to note that both the first two spots are consistent with last year, but not a huge surprise. For one thing, a crazy amount of traffic comes to this site following searches for Big Bang Theory and related terms. For another thing, the post about superhero gaming got a lot of eyeballs when it first got posted, and people still link to it occasionally (we’re coming up on the 60th session of our Mutants and Masterminds campaign in a few weeks, which probably means I’ll do another post in this line to celebrate

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02/01/2014 No Comments
Smart Advice from Smart People

Your Audience: Building versus Earning

2013 was a hell of a year. I did a lot of stuff. A lot of that stuff was huge: I ran GenreCon; I produced eight or nine full-day workshops over the course of the year; I went to so many cons that I could spend 2014 sleeping and still not pay back my sleep debt; I went to motherfucking Vienna and rode the Wiener Riesenrad, which is one of the few tourist attractions anywhere in the world that holds some appeal to me (largely thanks to its prominence in The Third Man and Before Sunrise). I discovered that riding the Wiener Riesenrad is a fucking terrible idea if you’re afraid of heights. One of the smartest things I heard last year came via Chuck Wendig, who did an interview at the Get Read online conference where he talked about author platform and maintaining a career as a writer. I meant to post about it back then, when I first heard it, but it was in the immediate aftermath of coming back from the UK and jet lag was kicking my ass. Fortunately, Chuck revisited it in his most recent post about resolutions: I WILL EARN MY AUDIENCE You don’t build an audience like it’s a fucking chair. And you don’t beat your potential audience about the head and neck with that goddamn chair, either. You earn them by being the best version of you. You earn them by being passionate and awesome and not-an-asshole. You don’t earn them by bickering. You

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01/01/2014 No Comments
News & Upcoming Events

Recent Publications in Daily SF and Coins of Chaos

So these my published stories, much like buses, tend to come along all at once after a very long period of silence. Also, much like buses, I have a tendency to get distracted by shiny things and miss them when they come along, which means I’m left to chase along behind and arrive places very, very late. I’m really not good with buses. And it’s possible this metaphor is getting away from me. Forgive me, I’m out of practice, and the blogging muscles have atrophied Suffice to say that the November-December stretch has been pretty good for me on the publishing side of things, however, since it saw my most recent story coming out at Daily Science Fiction, plus it saw the release of the Coins of Chaos anthology which features one of the few stories I actually finished in 2012. So now, somewhat belatedly, I give you excerpts and links. From Tuesday to Tuesday, Daily Science Fiction They’ve been together long enough for this to become ritual: Deanna Sable in the clawfoot bath, head resting against the curve of the tub, her fingers coiled around a Stuyvesant smoked down to the filter; Kirk seated at the door, bare-chested and nursing his third beer, drawing what comfort he can from the proximity to the cracked tiles. Watching one another, half a smile shared between them, looking for new ways to fill the idle silence. Read the Rest at Daily Science Fiction  From Tuesday to Tuesday hit the interwebs about a month

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12/12/2013 No Comments
News & Upcoming Events

Checking In

Back from Europe (which was awesome, except for the bits that weren’t). Back at work. Writing my last workshop of the year, THE SUBMISSION CRASH COURSE, which will be running at QWC this Sunday (spaces still available). Once that’s done, I have to go find a new place to live. And, you know, move. And I have to write some things. Which means I’m still prioritizing the juices squeezed out of my brain-meats for things that aren’t regular blogging for a little longer, although I expect to be about regularly in 2014 after scaling back my extra-curricular activities a little. Until then, have approximately nine minutes of early nineties AWESOME to tide you over.

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27/11/2013 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Hot for Teacher

If you looked at my buying habits, as a kid, you’d be fooled into thinking I was a huge fan of Van Halen. I owned a copy of 1984 on cassette by the age of twelve, acquired primarily ’cause I thought the smoking cherub on the cover was kinda awesome. My first CD – acquired, begrudgingly, when cassettes ceased being available – was a copy of the Van Halen. We were deep into the nineties by this point, long past the age where the distorted guitar of Nirvana had put hair metal to death, and there was something deeply uncool about liking Van Halen at that point. And, if I’m honest, Van Halen, as an album, did nothing for me. I’d picked it up ’cause I was collecting guitar magazines at the time, and kept coming across references to Eruption and the rest of Eddie Van Halen’s solos. I learned something really important from that CD: don’t front load your album.The three best tracks on Van Halen are the first three, which meant I’d pretty much go from Running with the Devil to the cover of You Really Got Me, then stop. Also, I learned that I really, really hate guitar solos. Maybe, if I’d been better at guitar, I would have appreciated them more. Unfortunately I was destined to be one of those guys who learned a handful of chords, the opening to Stairway to Heaven, and an off-key version of Tomorrow, Wendy before giving up on the guitar for good. Listening to

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18/10/2013 No Comments
Journal

Help Wanted: Writing and Travelling

This time next week, I’ll be on flight to England, wending my way towards the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton. There’s a lot of Australian folks doing that at the moment. I’d wonder how Brighton is going to cope, if it weren’t for the fact that England seems to be overrun by Australians as a matter of course, so they’re probably used to it. Right now, I’m on a lunch break, trailing the not-quite-a-computer set-up that I’m planning to use as a trasnportable word-processor/blogging platform while I’m overseas. That consists of the Samsung Galaxy 2 tab I acquired earlier this year, plus a battery-operated Ligitech bluetooth keyboard that works way, way better than the peice of crap I gold sold when I first picked up the tab (the lag on the first keyboard was bad, and I tend to type really fast). The Logitech is working out pretty well. It doesn’t quite cope with my typing speed, but it catches up pretty quickly, and I’m a short-burst writer at the best of times, so catching up is a workable solution. It’s been pointed out that not-writing was also an option for this trip. These people have been dealt with. I’ve done enough not-writing in the lead-up to my own con. I’d rather not let that become an ingrained habit while I’m at someone elses event. Plus, you know, there’s the epic pile of stuff that needs to be done. I really should get on that. So if anyone’s got any

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17/10/2013 3 Comments

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