ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Seven Notes on A Lover’s Discourse While Halfway Through the Book

One Habitual marking of quotes is one of those weird habits you pick up when you hang around universities for too long. I still do it, despite being out of the game for the better part of six years now, which means I frequently end up with shelves full of dog-eared books, notebooks filled with hastily scribbled details, and the occasional stray post-it with a quote scrawled across it with the bibliographic details on the back. Since I don’t really teach classes or write essays anymore, the vast majority of the quotes I mark tend to be because I truly adore the phrasing. There’s a great deal of beauty in theory and criticism, if you look for it. Exquisitely phrased ideas that sucker-punch you the same way a perfectly formed poetic line does, or well-turned phrase in a piece of prose. I’ve been reading Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse for the last two weeks. It started as a bit of story research, but it reminded me exactly how much I love Barthes’ writing. He’s far better known for being the man behind Death of the Author, but I’ve probably marked more pages in A Lover’s Discourse than any other book I own (which is impressive, since I’ve never actually finished it – my tolerance for non-fiction is surprisingly low regardless of its quality). Two Selected quotes I’ve pulled from the book, either because they’re something I want to remember, or cause there’s the beginning of a story in there. The

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30/12/2012 4 Comments
Journal

A Catch-22 Kind of Day

On the Gold Coast visiting my parents (and heading off to see The Hobbit with my dad and my sister). It would have all the makings of an awesome day, were it not for the fact that: a) I really want to settle down and have a solid writing day after all the distractions of the holiday period (which, realistically speaking, goes on through to the end of Jan or Feb given the timing of birthdays among my family and friends), and the inability to do that is making me tetchy; and b) I’m on the Gold Coast. I know plenty of people who love the Coast. My parents fricken’ adore it here, which is probably one of the reasons I lived here from ages twelve to twenty-three or so. I always feel bad that I don’t come down here and visit them more often, but then I come down here and visit them, and I realize the one important problem. I really fricken’ hate it here. Hate it in ways that are unreasonable and utterly unfair and often lead to me ranting when I should be spending time, you know, just hanging out and enjoying the company of my family. There’s something about driving two or three hours to get here that irritates the hell out of me, especially since it’s the kind of trip that used to be a one-hour drive before the Coast did whatever the fuck it did to screw up it’s already hideous roads. The kind of

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27/12/2012 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Makin’ a Racket

I’ve been worrying my flatmate recently, ’cause I seem to have developed a jaunty whistle of late. This is not, as a general rule, the sort of thing that happens around our house, least of all to me. ‘Course, historically speaking, this isn’t actually true. I spend a great deal of my day with little fragments of music running through my head. I always have, one way or another, and I’ve always been fond of having music on while I work. What’s really happened is that I’ve inherited my sister’s stereo with it’s five-CD turntable and I’ve moved it out of my bedroom and into the study where I write, surf the internet, and occasionally play computer games. Up until this point, all my music had to run on either Fritz the Laptop (which meant he couldn’t do anything else) or play on the DVD player attached to my TV. Neither of these have been particularly optimal, so my music listening gradually whittled down to playing things in my car and listening to the same Dresden Doll’s live DVD while I cleaned the old apartment. Even upgrading laptops to Shifty Silas didn’t help much – he could play audio at the same time as word-processing, but his speakers were…well, lets just say they weren’t designed with audio in mind. So, there’s suddenly a stereo I can pack with music that floats around the space I spend most of my non-day-job waking hours. Net result: I’ve listened to a lot more music

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20/12/2012 No Comments
Big Thoughts

13 Notes for a Story That Won’t Get Written

I shouldn’t be trusted with the internet at the moment. It’s summer and I am maudlin, and these two things do not go well together. I find myself picking at old scabs and realising that the wounds beneath them never fully healed. I find myself creating drama, simply because drama is easier to handle. Inhabiting drama makes it easier to exist. It’s good for writing, I’ll give it that. Less good for everything else. # Two instincts wage war within me. The first demands silence because silence is my natural state, because what does not get said cannot be examined. # I’ve never hidden my heart. I’ve never placed my heart inside an egg, to be placed inside a duck, to be hidden in a well inside a secret courtyard, located in a keep on a distant isle far from charted waters. I’ve never done this, but I’ve been tempted. # Through it all there are words, ’cause writing is what I do. My whole purpose revolves around articulation, even if I’m not sure what needs to be said. And yet, there is fear in words. There are moments when you look at the aftermath of a days writing and see subtexts you’d not intended, personal epiphanies, the ignored and unsaid seeping through on their own terms. There are days when what is written is both frightening and startling. # There is always the temptation to make old wounds public and internet makes it so easy. Writing makes it easy too.

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19/12/2012 4 Comments
Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

Sri Lankan Love Cake FTW

So the QWC Bake-off is over and I’m pleased to report that my shameless pandering to the internet has succeeded in securing me first place in the fund-raising. Net result: I get myself a hat of awesome and you guys get the recipe for kick-ass Sri Lankan Love Cake *and* my inevitable humiliation via the medium of dance and the internet (Assuming, of course, the chap who gets to decide the music for said dance actually makes up his mind at some point. At the moment he’s wavering between having me dance to All the Single Ladies and having me do the opening cheer sequence from Bring It On). I should really point out that the real winner here is Pancreatic Cancer Research, on account of the fact that our bake-off raised over $1,400 in a two-week period. Near as we can tell, you guys are responsible for a good $630 of that number, give or take a few donations that didn’t come in with a vote. Which is to say, you guys UTTERLY FREAKIN’ ROCK and it’ll be my pleasure to humiliate myself for your entertainment. But that’s in a week or so, depending on how long it takes for the logistics to get worked out. For now, I share this: SRI LANKAN LOVE CAKE WITH HONEY-GINGER CREAM To make this, you’re going to need the following: Half a dozen eggs. 500 grams of Castor Sugar 150 grams of unsalted butter enough honey to make both cake and cream 1 teaspoon

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10/12/2012 1 Comment
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

For what it’s worth…

…I still maintain that this is the sexiest two minutes and seventeen seconds to ever exist in music. If you can resist dancing while you listen to it, you’re a better person than I. The second-sexiest thing ever done in music is Nouvelle Vague’s cover of Guns of Brixton. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what this says about my psyche.

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09/12/2012 No Comments
Journal

For instance…for instance…for instance…

6:25 on a Saturday evening. Listening to Joy Division. Thinking about writing something and deciding to blog instead. And, ye gods, man, I’d forgotten how much I love Joy Division. Love Will Tear Us Apart rattles around my head all the time, appearing on all sorts of play-lists and compilation CDs I listen to with regularity, but it’s been years since I sat down and went through Unknown Pleasures in its entirety. It makes me wonder: when, exactly, did I stop being a Joy Division fan? The things that I find myself wondering when I’m not really paying attention. Especially when there were things I actually intended to talk about. I’m sitting here, nodding my head, and all I can think is for instance…for instance…for instance… For instance – plots are afoot regarding the QWC bake-off and my various commitments post-victory. I’m still awaiting the hat of awesome, which may take another week or so given that I’m on holidays at present, and the choice-of-song from the highest donator among my supporters (waves at Craig). Once I’ve got those things, I’ll put together a rough timeline for when my humiliation will be made public and let everyone know. Monday, however, will be the day of tastiness when I post the Sri Lankan Love Cake recipe on the blog. I know my sister has been hanging out for this part (which largely tells me I’ve been even stingier with this recipe than I originally thought). For instance – I recently sold a

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08/12/2012 3 Comments
Gaming

Three Uses for Splash Pages in Superhero RPGs

So the last time I blogged about Supers gaming, I was in the middle of putting together a list of things I could use to streamline my preparation for games. This is still a work-in-progress – despite my efforts, I  came to our  last session with fairly minimal prep work outside of NPC stats and an overview of the plot – but even the beginnings of the process has been fairly useful. For starters, actually writing down the post-game debrief after every session, even after two or three sessions, is already starting to clarify the kinds of habits/tropes I want to make sure I hit every session. One of those, which I’m starting to put on my session planning sheet, is the notion of an in-game splash page. It’s one of those habits I picked up somewhere along the line – if anyone can remember the RPG sourcebook that explained it, please let me know – and I’ve used it on and off for a couple of years when running superhero games. When it comes to my prep sheet, there’s now a lot more on than off, and it’s made an immediate difference in terms of me feeling better a night’s session. In comics the splash-page is an enormously useful tool – it’s  a big, eye-catching illustration that takes up an entire page unto itself, interrupting the action and throwing the focus on a particularly epic or important scene. Historically splash pages come right at the beginning of the session, since

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30/11/2012 2 Comments
Journal

Night of the Wolverine

ONE Wednesday morning. The office – home, not dayjob – is humid and muggy. In the coming months it’ll be muggy as hell, which is probably the queue I need to go buy a fan in order to get through summer. Although, knowing me, I’ll just open a window and go, geez, the office is muggy as hell today. This will usually be followed by the phrase fuck you, Brisbane. ‘Cause, really, there’s no need for this. TWO Meetings at the day-job yesterday. Good meetings, for me, at least. In 2013 I’ll be working at the day-job three days a week and keeping the other four to use for MY OWN NEFARIOUS PURPOSES. Which means, you know, writing. If you do not believe that writing counts as a NEFARIOUS PURPOSE, you obviously don’t live inside my head. This is, however, a case of getting what I wanted without necessarily being a case of getting what I planned for. I dislike living without a plan. Ignoring a plan, sure, I can do that, but not having one freaks me out a little. My plans for 2013 were all you can get done what you can get done in the morning writing shifts. That no longer applies. It’s time to think a little, a little more long-term. The next thirty days are going to be spent spinning through a bunch of projects and potential projects, trying to figure out which will appear on my schedule first. THREE There is not enough coffee. I’m sure you’re shocked by

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28/11/2012 1 Comment
Journal

Four Years On

This is what my author bio used to look like, circa early 2007: Peter is a perpetual student and occasional writer. He lives in Brisbane with a fiancé, two cats and a never-ending thesis. I had reason to look up the story it was attached to over the weekend – a flash piece that was among the first pieces of fiction I unleashed upon the world – and it was a profoundly weird experience. I mean, that was from February-March in 2007, which means it’s a little under six years ago, and pretty much everything in that bio was irrelivant by the time I launched this blog a few later. These days, the only things that remain in any way accurate is my name and the fact I live in Brisbane. I’ve been kinda worrying at that thought for the last couple of days, putting it into perspective. It all feels like stuff that happened to someone else. I mean, most days I don’t actually remember being engaged – the relationship, sure, which had good bits and bad bits, but not the engagement. I vaguely remember asking and going to buy a ring, the conversations about the wedding that followed. The fact that it seems so distant to me these days probably says all that needs saying about why its a good thing we never actually reached the stage with vows and the cake. My fiancé owned the cats, so they went with her. I’m not sure when that happened,

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26/11/2012 1 Comment

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