ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

GenreCon 2013: The Aftermath

So I’ve been organising a con for the last few months, and now it’s over. GenreCon 2013 has been laid to rest, the attendees have all departed and flown back to their home cities, and my twitter feed is filled with people either thanking me for putting the con on or congratulating me on its success. Which means my life returns, more or less, to what passes for normal around these parts. A least until October 24th, when I fly to the UK to attend World Fantasy and get to experience the whole con thing from the attendee’s side. The internet is slowly starting to fill with people posting con reports. Some of the ones that have crossed my path are here, here, and here. This is my report, which isn’t really a report, ’cause when you convene a conference, you don’t really get to see much. Perhaps a more accurate thing to say is this is a series of vaguely coherent thoughts and feels I’ve had since the conference ended. One Holy fucking Jesus, that thing ate my life. I mean, there are many projects that are all-consuming, whether they’re work-related or writing-related, but this was like inviting Godzilla into your house to snack on all the available free time. I am seriously fucking tired right now. But it’s a good kind of tired. I’m building up to some epic napping in the very near future. Two In a lot of ways, I’m one of the most visibly faces

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16/10/2013 3 Comments
Smart Advice from Smart People

Writing, Not Blogging

I keep reading articles that say blogging is mandatory for writers nowadays. That agents and editors won’t take you on if you don’t already have a platform. This is hooey. Let me repeat that. Hooey. Cat Rambo has a sensible blog post about not blogging up on her website this week, which I’m linking to because: a) it’s good, common-sense advice that syncs into the things I routinely tell people who ask about writing and social media and stuff; and b) it neatly explains why I’ve been absent around these parts, and left everyone hanging half-way through the Die Hard series. The TL:DR version: I’m being mugged by life at the moment, and most of my brain-meats have been expended getting the GenreCon Program up and running. The head-space I’ve got left over goes on projects in order of deadline, ’cause when you’re working with limited time and mental resources, ya gotta prioritize the things that need to be done and the things that help you recharge. I am about halfway through my draft of Die Hard, Part Three, though. With luck, I’ll get it finished over the weekend (which is looking gloriously, outrageously free of day-jobbery) and posted next week.

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27/09/2013 1 Comment
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Avril Lavigne Channeling Tank Girl? I Am Down With This Combination.

As predicted at the tail end of my Die Hard post last week, blogging service is somewhat irregular this week and we’ll be picking up on my narrative deconstruction of Bruce Willis’s greatest movie role next Tuesday. However, ’cause I love you all, and because I’m fairly sure I’m about to put together a sequence of words that will make my friend Kevin spontaneously combust, I’m going to do a spot of youtubery. I was alerted to Avril Lavigne’s latest video clip via this article on SF site Tor.com and, for the love of god, it really is all the shiznit they promise it to be. If you’re not interested in following the link, let me give you the short version (Kev, brace yourself): Avril  Lavigne and Danica Fucking McKellar  team up to channel Tank Girl while fighting knife-wielding Lobsters. Also, bad guys in gas masks. Plus, you know, self-referential meta-text as part of the set-up. Presumably this clip could have ticked more boxes on my short list of automatic awesomeness, but that would require a) catchier music (Avril is still Avril, this is going to be all about the clip), and b) the producers delivering a crate of high-end bourbon to my house. With that, I leave you to a few minutes of free-floating pop-cultural signifiers and visual awesome-sauce. See you next week, when we kick off part three of the Die Hard posts.

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22/08/2013 2 Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

What Writers Ought to Know About Die Hard, Part Two

So my friend Kevin was in town this weekend to talk about a project he’s putting together, which meant we spent a lot of time talking about narrative structure and the way character works and how to do a lot of effective storytelling without wasting too much time on things. Die Hard, unfortunately, wasn’t in the list, but it’s amazing how much you start noticing when your reading of an episode/movie moves from the passive to the active. I do this kind of thing for fun, since I’m kinda obsessed with structure, and even I start noticing different things when I have to actively explain how things work to someone else. What follows is a pretty close examination of the Die Hard‘s first act, which means we’re going to spend a whole bunch of words looking over what’s effectively just twenty minutes of film. This post will probably stand alone, but it builds on some of the things I mentioned last week. You may want to go back and review if you haven’t read part one of this series. This is also going to be a longish post, ’cause First Acts are generally packed to the gills with information. You may want to get yourself a cup of tea and a biscuit or two. You’ll also want a copy of Die Hard handy, ’cause if you can get to the end of this post without wanting to re-watch the movie, you’re a better man than I. THE FIRST ACT – A BEGINNER’S GUIDE

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13/08/2013 3 Comments
News & Upcoming Events

A Call for Reader Questions: Dancing Monkey 2013

If you fire up the time-machine and travel back to August of 2012, you’ll notice that about this time of year my life gets increasingly hectic. Weekends that used to be free for writing and bloggery get siphoned up by Writers Festivals, Conferences, and other work-related things. I start spending more time in airports than usual. Projects that have been ignored for a little too long start lurching their way to the top of the to-do list.My brain, known to be unreliable at the best of time, starts misfiring like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve discovered, from hard experience, that it’s best not to set my own topics in this period. No-one is particularly interested in reading an endless cycle of well, guess how I fucked up today and seriously, me and airports, it’s like I’m cursed; I’m not particularly interested those posts either, but I know I will if I find myself ready to blog and unable to think of something. Which brings us to this post: the beginning of the second ever Dancing Monkey Post Extravaganza series.  Once again I’m throwing open the doors of Man Versus Bear and crowd-sourcing topics you’d like to see me tackle in the coming weeks. Give me topics. Set me challenges. Fire away with single words that can be used as a writing prompt, if you want, and I’ll store them in a file and use them to fill the empty hours when the writer-brain is willing but the thinky-brain is weak. If you’re interested in

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08/08/2013 3 Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

What Writers Ought to Know About Die Hard (Part One)

Normally, when I sit down to write a Trashy Tuesday Writing School post, it’s because I’m trying to redeem some element of sitting down and watching a terrible movie. Films like the Josh Kirby series, which started badly and ended badly and reached a high water mark around number 3, or Speed Racer, which is a triumph of style but a massive failure as a script, or Robot Jox with…well, you get the picture. I should not that trashy isn’t applied to these films as a statement of quality – I adore the Speed Racer film for its ambition, and loathe Josh Kirby for…well, reasons that will require a blog post of their own. Trashy is instead used as an aesthetic judgement, a way of categorizing films that are unified by a sense of pop-cultural kitsch and the ability to seep into the popular consciousness. True, not all trashy films are good. In fact, most of them are pretty terrible; at best, they’re guilty pleasures. We could talk about the how and why of that, ’cause the psychology of it is both interesting and kinda terrifying, but that’s not what today is about. Today is about that rarity: a Trashy film that is also good on almost every level you can imagine. Today is about Die Hard, and what writers can learn from it. See, Die Hard easily one of the trashiest of trashy films (on account of explosions, quotable lines, and narrative goofiness) while still being one of the

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06/08/2013 14 Comments
Journal

Pints

The text message hits after ten PM, but I answer it ’cause I’m still awake and ’cause that’s what I do. It says, pub?, and I’m all, hell yes, but instead I text back about putting on clothes, ’cause I’m in bed, in my pajamas, just futzing around on the internet, and the possibility of hitting the pub at this hour seems more attractive than continuing to write emails I don’t feel like writing anymore. The pub isn’t really a pub at this hour of the evening. They’ve shut down the public bar, the outside areas. Reduced the venue down to the gambling lounge full of pokies, open ’til late for the folks who can’t stay away, but we ignore the rows of brightly coloured machines and make our beeline for the bar, ordering pints and taking them outside so you can smoke and I can sit there, watching the empty car-park that’s only really empty when we show up at this time of night. It’s been, god, how long since the last time we hung out? I’ve been buried under an avalanche of work grief, my stress levels rising day by day, hour by fucking hour. I’ve hit the point where I get cranky when people ask for simple things. I’ve hit the point where I have a temper tantrum at work, and my boss takes me aside to have a chat about the way I’m choosing to cope. We drink a pint of beer. We start to catch

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30/07/2013 No Comments
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

How Are You Rocking the Casbah This Week?

I’m going to be a bit scarce around the online world this week. We’re launching the all-new AWMonline next Monday (fingers crossed) and there’s a few projects I need to catch up on after focusing all my attention webwards for a few weeks, otherwise the deadlines will sneak up on me and kick my arse. In my absence, I leave you in the Spokesbear’s capable, if adorably fuzzy, paws. He’ll be here all week, being all intently interested in what you’ve got to say, and we’re both really interested in hearing what’s new in your world. Tell us about your hi-jinx and adventures, peeps. Let us live vicariously through your lives. Show me there’s a rainbow at the far end of the journey. What have you been doing that rocks the Casbah lately?

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23/07/2013 No Comments
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Big Focus: The Calendar Trick That’s Saving My Bacon This Year

I have to write 750 words a day between now and October 24th, otherwise bad things will happen. The kind of bad things where you end up emailing an editor and sounding like a heel, on account of the fact that you aren’t getting done the things you said you’d get done, and really that’s not the kind of email that any writer wants to send ’cause editors do neat stuff like pay us to write things and we’d prefer to seem reliable enough that they keep asking us to be involved in their projects. Now 750 words doesn’t seem like much, but it quickly gets kinda hard to attain. ‘Cause at the same time as I’m doing this, I’ve got a bunch of full-day workshops that need writing. I’ve got at least three Writer’s Festivals/Conferences that I’m going too, which will involve chairing panels or similar activities that have associated prep-work that come with them. I’ve got that pesky GenreCon thing I’m running myself, right at the start of October, and it’s going to start eating my life about halfway through next month. Basically, I have a major writer/travel/work event every two weeks, on average, between now and the end of the year. On one hand, totes awesome, ’cause I kinda live for this shit, but on the other hand it’s the stuff of chaos that leads directly to the I’m Busy response I wrote about on Monday. Enter the Big Picture Calendar So tonight I set up a big-picture

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18/07/2013 No Comments
Journal

Window

There’s this window in my office that looks out over the breezeway, and every day I come in and stare at it and wonder how hard it’d be to break the big panes of glass with an office chair tossed from the vicinity of my desk. I know how this sounds, ’cause I mentioned it once at an office meeting, and people have already given me the look even if they’ve come to understand what’s really behind the impulse. I mean, I don’t want to throw a chair ’cause I’m feeling violent or because I particularly want to engage in a little wholesale destruction, or because I go to work and find myself in a state of uncontrolled rage. I just want to do it ’cause the window is there, and I don’t know for sure if I could break it, and I’d like to know, maybe. To do it for science, as it where, and know what breaking the window would look like. In my head there’s a list of situations where I can finally give in to the impulse, things that would give me permission to make a chair airborne and watch it impact against the glass. They range from the logical – in case of fire, get out this way – but the majority involve zombies or elaborate action sequences or turning into the Incredible Hulk, things that’ll never happen anywhere but in my head, which is probably safer for everyone. And maybe it’s the challenge of

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17/07/2013 No Comments
Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

How Do You Give Up Being Busy?

If you asked me how I’m doing for the last six months, there’s pretty good odds I told you I was either busy, really busy, or completely fucking manic depending on how well we know each other. It’s the default answer to the question for me and a lot of other people in my office (and, lets be honest, worldwide). Thing is, I don’t really want to be busy. I want to be getting a lot of shit done, which means I’m okay with loading up on a whole heap of projects, but I dislike the idea of busy being my default state. So I’ve decided to stop using it, particularly in light of this post from 99u, which points out the inherent problem in talking about the amount of stuff you’ve got on: Saying, “Busy!” has become the automatic non-answer when somebody asks, “How are you?” It immediately shuts down an interaction and any opportunity for constructive conversation is dashed upon the rocks of ineloquence. via 99u, A Conversation About Being Busy is Barely a Conversation at All And lest I seem particularly virtuous in this instance, let me be completely honest: I expect I’ll have an easier time giving up breathing than I will giving up this particular crutch. But I’m working on it. My Problem With Busy I’m travelling a lot this year, I’ve got a stack of major projects at QWC, a workshop to teach every couple of weeks, and a stack of writing projects on

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15/07/2013 6 Comments
Smart Advice from Smart People

A Shift in the Creative Paradigm

From the latest installment of the Lefsetz Letter, tracing the changes that have occurred in our lifetime. As always, Bob Lefsetz is writing about the music industry, but if you’re a writer and you’re not reading this and mentally inserting “book” instead of “album”, it may be time to start paying a little more attention to what’s going on in the industry: CREATION Used to be expensive and we felt anybody who’d made a record deserved attention. Now anyone can record, even on their iPad, and we need a reason to pay attention. As usual, the entire post is pure gold, but I find myself re-posting this fragment because I keep speaking to aspiring writers through work who mistake The Book as an end-goal. They’re all excited by the possibility of epub and self-publishing because it makes getting published achievable, but they haven’t figured out the counter-point of that. What they want isn’t having the book out there, what they want is the attention. And they can’t understand why having The Book isn’t achieving that, ’cause they’re using new technology to try and achieve something attached to a very old paradigm. The nature of creativity is changing. You need to think harder about what you really want from your creative life, ’cause there’s no one-true-path anymore (if, indeed, there ever was). And I stand by my recent post that says if you’re a creative type and you’re not subscribed to the Lefsetz letter it’s really time to start. 

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13/07/2013 No Comments

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