ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
Works in Progress

Embracing the Suck

I submitted a bunch of stories earlier this week. And when I say a bunch, I’ve now sent out more stories in the space of 48 hours than I have in the past two years. I’ve rebuilt my submission list; I know where everything’s going if the stories get knocked back. I’m embracing the mantra of the twelve-hour turn-around when an editor says no, getting it out to the next market as soon as it’s feasible to do so. I remember how this goes now: write, submit, keep submitting. And, really, the most important bit: be willing to let people see you suck. My failure to submit wasn’t because I didn’t write stories, it was ’cause I kept putting off redrafting and developing the stories I had. There were notes and ideas and a whole bunch of things I kept meaning to do, but I never got around to do them. I was chasing the idea of the perfect story, which has never been my strength. It’s time to embrace the suck and build some good habits again.

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13/06/2013 No Comments
Smart Advice from Smart People

All Writing is Political

I’m about to commit a metric butt-load of white-male-privilege sins by being a white-male-guy whose linking to another white-male-guy saying sensible things about writing and feminisim, but just this once I’m going to be okay with it. Chuck Wendig wrote a post about Sexism and Misogyny in Publishing. It got some responses, ’cause Chuck knows his shit when it comes to building an audience on the internet, and so people link his posts around. Then he wrote a response to the responses, and called out this particular piece of bullshit in a way that had me punching the air like a madman. “BUT IT DOESN’T SERVE THE STORY!” Worst excuse ever. I hate this excuse. I hate it like I hate the DMV, hemorrhoids, airline travel delays, and bad coffee. I hate it because it suggests that writers are not in control of their own stories, that they are merely conduits for some kind of divine unicorn breath, some heady Musefart that they can’t help but gassily breathe onto the page. I AM VESSEL. STORY IS LOA. I hate it because it absolves you of ever having to change anything — whether that means changing a character’s race or sex or even just making edits to improve a story. I hate it because it allows you to rely on lazy crutches, institutional biases, stereotypical culture patterns, and a whole lot of horrible shit-ass storytelling. I hate it because it excuses you from making effort or taking responsibility. Chuck Wendig, CHALLENGING RESPONSES TO SEXISM AND MISOGYNY

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12/06/2013 No Comments
Works in Progress

Make Your Content Easy to Share

Today’s post is a short-but-passionate plea to a whole bunch of bloggers out there: install some form of social media sharing on your blog. If you’re not sure what I mean, go to your blog and see if you have something like this at the base of your posts: It may not be an exact match for this, but there should be something like it. A way of linking the post you’ve just made, quickly and easily, to places like facebook, twitter, and other forms of social media. If you have it, go upon your way, my friend, for you and I have nothing further to speak of. If you don’t have it, keep reading. Personally, I don’t care what form of link salad you use. My particular preference runs towards Share This ’cause it’s what I know, but most platforms will have a bevvy of options and WordPress, at least, offers the function to anyone whose installed Jetpack (and, if you’re using wordpress, odds are you have). Hit Google for ten minutes and you’ll probably find some options that are workable with your Content Management System of choice. So here’s what I want you to do. Pick one. Install it. Hit Google again to figure out how, if you aren’t particularly technologically savvy, or ask one a friend who speaks fluent blogger. Hell, if you’re really desperate, give me a link to your site in the comments and I’ll try and find a decent how-to for you. Just make the

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11/06/2013 7 Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Completely Gratuitous Post of Newly Acquired Shiny Thing

So I’ve got a whole bunch of work on my plate this year where the income that’s generated is basically earmarked as “paying for Peter’s travel and con expenses.” It’s the stuff that allows me to go to the UK for World Fantasy at the end of the year, to Perth for the RWA conference in the middle of the year, and generally acquire a couple of shiny things (passports, luggage) that will make the increased amount of travel I’m doing a little easier. Today I got to pick up one of those shiny things that I’ve been patiently waiting to buy for a long while. Case in point: Picked this up on sale, along with a whole bunch of widgets, ’cause I’ve been looking for a portable computing option that isn’t Shifty Silas the Laptop. Something I can take along on those trips where all I really need is the ability to answer email, check out my RSS feed, run the kindle app, and occasionally update my website/mess around on projects stored in the cloud while I’m travelling. That it’s the perfect size for reading digital comics is completely coincidental, I swear. Right now I’m in the process of updating all my apps, and I’m in need of recommendations for Android-based word-processing apps that will allow for off-line writing (aka the one thing Google Office isn’t willing to let me do). If anyone’s got recommendations, I’d love to hear them.

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08/06/2013 3 Comments
Journal

Bookshelves

The internet is full of gloriously sexy photographs of beautiful, artfully messy bookshelves. This is not one of them.

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07/06/2013 No Comments
News & Upcoming Events

The Mammoth Book of Angels and Demons

I forgot I had a story in The Mammoth Book of Angels and Demons. When the author copies appeared in my PO Box last week, I opened up the package and blinked at the two books inside for a while wondering why the hell I’d ordered a duplicate. This shouldn’t be taken as a reflection on the book – I mean, shit, I looked at the names on the front cover and there was no doubt in my mind that I might have pre-ordered a copy. Instead, it’s  a reflection of the long lead-times in publishing and my own scattershot state of focus over the last twelve months. The timeline goes something like this: Paula Guran commissioned the reprint rights for One Saturday Night, With Angel, back in August of last year. The payment for the story came through in November. I put the details into my rights tracking sheet and promptly focused on other things.  The books showed up. I paged through them. I found my story and had one of those, oh, right, moments. Then I went back and checked the table of contents and, oh man, did my natural tendency towards suffering from impostor syndrome kick into overdrive. If you made a list of short story writers who made me want to be a short story writer, this book would include all of them except William Gibson. I mean, Caitlin Kiernan is fucking phenomenal. Neil Gaiman is Neil Gaiman. Gene Wolf. Lucius Shepard. Charles De Lint. Peter Beagle. It’s rare that

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04/06/2013 2 Comments
News & Upcoming Events

4 Things: GenreCon, Novella Diary, Upcoming Workshop, A Reminder

NEW GENRECON GUESTS Wait up, I’m going to deploy the banner, ’cause I *really* love our banner this year: We made some pretty big announcements over on the GenreCon site yesterday, all in the form of names being added to the conference guest list. I won’t belabour the point here, except to just post some names: John-freakin’-Connolly (best-selling Irish crime novelist who understands a thing or two about other genres); Kathryn-freakin’-Fox (best-selling Australian thriller writer who knocked the Da Vinci Code off a bunch of best-seller lists a few years back); John-freakin’-Birmingham (my family will know him for He Died With a Felafel in His Hand; everyone else should get to know his Weapons of Choice series which have been taking over bookshops over the last couple of years). Add those names to Chuck Wendig, Anne Gracie, Anita Heiss and Kate Cuthbert and I start to get really excited about programming this year’s conference. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I’m going to try a particularly subtle form of marketing: COME TO MY FREAKIN’ WRITING CONFERENCE, PEOPLE. IT’S GOING TO BE WALL-TO-WALL AWESOME! NOVELLA DIARY UPDATE It’s not dead, just sleeping a little. I’ve moved away from the daily updates a little early in favour of doing a weekly update on Friday, where I usually have a little more time. Also, I’m hoping that moving the updates to the Friday will break me out of my now-customary weekend stall. UPCOMING WORKSHOP If you’re in the Rockhampton area around June

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30/05/2013 2 Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Pick Your Poison: Upcoming Trashy Movie Writing Schools

Every now and then, my flatemate and I argue about whose responsible for the ongoing #TrashyTuesdayMovie phenomenon. I say the blame is entirely his, since he’s the one who maintains the schedule and the associated wiki and generally makes sure that we have copies of the movie. He blames me on account of the fact that I continue to show up and tweet every week, and I keep talking it up among people I know. Also, that people I know keep adding fucking films to the list. I think, with the creation of a banner graphic to accompany this post, I have officially lost the argument. Not that it’s a great banner, nor even likely to be the final version, but I was having a slow evening and felt the need to crack open photoshop. Tonight we’re going to kick off the first of Six goddamn Josh Kirby films, which I gather are actually one long film that’s been broken up into arcs. We both blame Jason Fischer for this, since we didn’t even know Josh Kirby existed until he foisted Quest of the Delta Knights on us, which led to some furious IMDB searching in order to keep ourselves from nodding off while watching the film. The lead of Delta Knights went on to make Josh Kirby. So did a young Charisma Carpenter. That wasn’t what sold us on the series. We were totally lured in by the titles: Josh Kirby: Planet of the Dino-Knights; Josh Kirby: The Human Pets; Josh

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28/05/2013 8 Comments
Smart Advice from Smart People

Charlotte Nash on Project Based Writing

So Charlotte Nash came across my radar last year, courtesy of some recommendations people made for emerging writers who’d be a good fit for panels at GenreCon. Unfortunately I missed the panels she was on – curse of being an organiser instead of a punter – but all feedback suggests that Charlotte was a) very smart, and b) knows her stuff. My own experience with her written work hasn’t been as in-depth as I’d like, but pretty much everything I’ve seen supports the smart-and-knows-her-shit theme. Her recent blog post, Project Based Writing, came about in response to my ranting about writing advice last week. Charlotte isn’t a write-every-day-and-hit-2.5k writer either, but her discussion of the issue offers up an interesting alternative. Here’s a snippet: Engineering work is often project-based – a well-defined “deliverable” by a certain date: a tunnel, a bridge, a rocket. And since, to my mind, a piece of writing (a novel, story, blog, whatever) is a fairly clearly defined outcome, project-based is how I approach stories, too. It wouldn’t be particularly helpful if a construction site’s management policy was We’ll build stuff every day (jokes aside, many an engineered project is effectively managed to deliver on time or early). It’s an apt metaphor, I think, and the full blog post is pretty damn awesome. It’s a great resource if you’re unable to write every day, or trying to get a project done in a limited time frame (I kinda wish I’d read this before I attempted the novella diary). Worth checking

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27/05/2013 No Comments
News & Upcoming Events

The Anatomy of a Blog Post in 1200 words or Less

This blog post is written to support a piece of my Year of the Author Platform workshop that’s running for Queensland Writers Centre today, breaking down the anatomy of an individual blog post for the participants. However, since I’m a waste-not, want-not kind of guy, I’m sharing it here in case anyone else gets some use out of it. Since my readership consists of folks who are enormously smart about this sort of thing, I’m also going to use this as an opportunity to grab some feedback. Is there anything I should be telling these folks that I didn’t? Any resources you’d recommend? We’ve got a team of hungry aspiring writers who are eager to siphon your brainjuices, folks, so feel free to throw your two cents in once we hit the comments. Alright, here we go. Strap yourselves in folks, ’cause we’re going to get meta. Things to Pay Attention To Above This Text 1) CATEGORY There’s a handful of things to pay attention to above the first paragraph of this post. The title is the obvious one, but it’s also worth paying attention to the category that appears just above the title, “Blatant Self Promotion.” Categories are a way of sorting web content on an individual site and tend to be very broad – I’ve used this one ’cause I’m also being a bit cheeky and using one Platform building activity (running a workshop) to direct people towards another platform building activity (checking out my website). (Note for people visiting later:

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25/05/2013 No Comments
Smart Advice from Smart People

You Have Great Taste: Ira Glass on Creative Journeys

This week has been a lesson in the ways of the internet. I put a handful of links to a brilliant Ira Glass video on creativity and taste in the middle of my post about On Writing and only 3% of you fuckers went and watched it, despite the fact that I talk the damn thing up ’cause it really is that useful and awesome. I put one link in a post about Robot Jox where I mention that the writer is shitting on his own project, and all of you motherfuckers go traipsing off to snicker to look at Joe Haldeman being all “yeah, this film is a dog, man. What were we thinking.” You people, you people worry me. And I know the excuses that people will throw my way. I hear you sitting up the back, being all, “”No, Pete, it’s not like that, we swear.” To that I say: “bullshit, motherfucker. I’ve got goddamn metrics. Three fucking percent.” “But it’s hard,” you say, “we don’t want to follow a link just to see people being brilliant. We want to laugh at peoples misery and failure.” And really, I should leave you to your foolishness. But I won’t. ‘Cause the Ira Glass video really is that damn good and it really is a useful thing to have heard, at least once, if you’re engaging in any kind of creative endeavor. And ’cause I care. So here you go. No linking required. JUST PRESS GODDAMNED PLAY ALREADY. Think of it like eating your vegetables

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24/05/2013 12 Comments
Works in Progress

Nine Things Writers Can Learn From Watching Robot Jox (1989)

Robot Jox is a fucking awful movie. It’s got an average review rating of 4.9 on IMDB, which is actually pretty good for something we watch as part of the Trashy Tuesday Movie series (and if you’re interested in seeing my immediate reactions to the film, the twitter stream is archived over on the TTM wiki), but it doesn’t change the basic problem. This film is a mess. A glorious, glorious mess. Personally I think people on IMDB are rating the film too high. Of course, I personally don’t really think Robot Jox deserves to be called a film, since it utterly fails to achieve all but the most basic requirements. I mean, it is filmed, and I suppose we could call what’s happening on the screen acting if we’re being generous, but that’s really about it. And yet, I’m going to suggest you go find a copy of this absolute dogs breakfast of a movie if you’ve got an interest in writing, ’cause it’s failures have some pretty important lessons in terms of figuring out how stories work. One of the reasons I adore some terrible movies is the opportunity they afford me to hone my writing chops, figuring out what mistakes to avoid and how things could be done better. So if you’re up for the challenge, I’m going to help you. Track down a copy of the movie, make a tub of popcorn, grab yourself a notebook and let Stuart Gorden’s 1989 masterpiece school you on the

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23/05/2013 4 Comments

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