ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Writer-brain

My boss, Kate Eltham, is leaving the writer’s centre in a couple of months. She’s heading off to be the next chairperson of the Brisbane Writers Festival, and I’ve got to admit, that’s something that excites me. She spent six years turning QWC into one of the best resources for writers in the country, and I’m pretty sure she’s going to turn BWF into one of the finest damn literary festivals in the world. That’s the kind of person Kate is – smart, ambitious, transformative. As a Brisbane writer and reader, I’m really looking forward to seeing the kind of festival program she runs in 2013. On the other hand, as a guy who works in the writers centre, my first thought upon hearing the news was fuck, time to be a writer again. And I gotta tell you, that thought hurt. I haven’t been a writer in a while now. A year, at least. Maybe longer. I’ve written, certainly, but in my head there’s a difference between someone who writes and someone who’s a writer. It’s a really personal distinction, and I don’t require other people to subscribe to it, but for me a writer is someone who embraces writing as a job. Even if they’re not making a living from it yet, their entire process is built around getting paid, getting the next job, building a career. They’re people who embrace the fact that they’re a small business and they’re willing to concede that “how will this piece help

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22/06/2012 2 Comments
Smart Advice from Smart People

Writing Advice Picked Up on the Weekend

The cold that chased me through the Rabbit Hole and Continuum finally caught up with me over the last weekend. I picked up a couple of books to keep me entertained over the weekend of coughing, spluttering, and spending some quality time in bed. By the time you read this, I’ll have spent two days living on cold-and-flu tablets and Peter Corris novels, in addition to some non-fiction in the form of The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers.  Thus far, my favourite entry has been a conversation between Paul Aster and Jonothan Letham, which included one of those perfect answers you can’t help sharing: PA: You try to surprise yourself. You go against what you’ve done before. You want to burn up and destroy all your previous work; you want to reinvent yourself with every project. Once you fall into habits, I think, you’re dead as an artist. You have to challenge yourself and never rest on your laurels, never think about what you’ve done in the past. Just say, that’s done, now I’m tackling something else. It’s certain that the world is large enough and interesting enough to take a different approach each time you sit down to write about it. Yes. That.

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20/06/2012 No Comments
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Why Count Words

It’s been about two weeks since the QWC Rabbit Hole, and you’re still reading blog posts that I drafted during the manic two-and-bit days of writing. This, it should be noted, is quite by design – I knew I was heading down to Melbourne, knew that the Continuum weekend wouldn’t give me enough time to write anything for the week that followed, and I knew that one of these days I wanted to get sufficiently ahead of the blog that I could have some posts in reserve. One of the more interesting conversations I had during the rabbit hole was with a participant who didn’t quite understand why we counted words. She was writing…well, to be honest, I don’t really know, but I’m guessing it was memoir…and the concept of hitting a set number of words every hour/day, even the concept of writing 30,000 words in a weekend, was utterly alien to her. We ended up discussing it during a tea break, after expressing our mutual distrust of the instant coffee on offer. “Why do it?” she said. “What’s the point? Surely they need to be good words.” Me, I’m all about the word-count as a metric. It comes with the territory when you’re writing short stories, and there are limits to how many words you can write before things become, well, difficult to sell. Also, short fiction writers tend to get paid by the word, so you can do all sorts of interesting “can I buy food with this

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18/06/2012 No Comments
Works in Progress

Four Words All Creative Practitioners Should Live By

RESPECT YOUR GODDAMN AUDIENCE. Okay, here’s your warning. I’m going to rant my fucking pants off in this one, ’cause I’m mightly passionate and this post has been sparked by something that really pissed me off. If you’d prefer to skip the rage, feel free. Go read something else. I won’t be offended. Just remember those four words, ’cause everything else is just a cautionary tale explaining why they’re important. Respect your goddamn audience. There’s plenty of reasons to follow this advice, but here’s the big one: if you don’t, there’s pretty good odds I’m going to hunt you down and carve out your fucking spleen with an ice-cream scoop. Especially if I’m part of that audience, and you’ve contrived things so I don’t have the option of leaving when it becomes obvious that your fucking lack of respect is wasting my goddamn time. This one irritates me enough that it probably should have been a conversation with the spokesbear entry, if only so I can present the illusion of having an even keel, but the truth is that this is one of those things really pisses me off. I’m firmly of the belief that anyone who takes their audience for granted should be herded into an open field and hunted for sport, preferably by the audience members who were utterly ripped off by the creator’s complacency. There is no leeway there. There is no reasonable part of me when it comes to this. An audience is a privileged, not a right. Treat

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15/06/2012 4 Comments
Works in Progress

The Lion and the Aardvark: Aesop’s Modern Fables

So about halfway through 2011 I got an email from Robin Laws which said, in essence, I’m doing this anthology of modern fables for Stone Skin Press; might you be interested in contributing? I was. In fact, my first response, which didn’t actually get put into my emailed reply, was oh, fucking, yeah I’m interested. You’re Robin-freakin’-Laws. That kind of enthusiasm is unseemly in an professional email, and I do try to contain my inner fanboy when talking to editors. The actual email probably said something like I’d love to be involved. Here’s the premise for my story. You know. Sedate. Professional. Only twice have I written for editors or been published in markets that my gamer-friends have recognised. The first time that happened, it was when I was published in Weird Tales. This is the second. In this instance, my enthusiasm probably seems somewhat mysterious to any writer-types who aren’t involved in gaming, so the short introduction to Robin is this: he’s one of the smartest RPG designers I’ve ever come across. Lets set aside the fact that he designed the Feng Shui RPG, arguable the best RPG game ever printed, and the fact that he unleashed Battlechimp Potemkin on the world as a result. Lets set aside the fact that he was one of the first game designers I ever found who applied cultural theory to RPGs and saw the solid capitalist impulses underneath D&D’s basic premise that equated the acquisition of capital resulted with increased power and personal competence.

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13/06/2012 1 Comment
Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Great Writing Advice Learned from Pro-Wrestling, Part Two

The second thing that can’t be learned about writing by listening to Al Snow rant: People don’t have a physical relationship with pro-wrestling. This is fricking brilliant, and it’s something every SF writer should memorize immediately. If you look at most forms of athletic competition there’s usually a correlation between the most popular sports and the sports we play as kids. Every Australian male kicks a football around, for example, and gets forced to play cricket as part of their school curriculum. We’re forced to run, at the very least, at school sports days. Depending on your school, you may be forced to swim. When we watch people competing at a professional level, we have muscle memory and experience that tells us how hard these things are and allows us to appreciate the achievements of professional athletes. We know just how good they are, because we know our own limits. Professional wrestling doesn’t have that. How many of us can legitimately claim to have been Irish whipped into the ring ropes, or jumped from the top rope to plant an elbow on a downed opponent. Even the less flashy moves are unknown to us, since most schoolyard fights don’t start with a collar-and-elbow tie-up (it’s interesting to note that in Japan, where Judo is arguably a national sport, pro-wrestling is a lot more realistic and considerably stiffer because people understand the skill required for the various throws in the same way we understand the difficulty of bowling a cricket ball). So without that

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11/06/2012 1 Comment
Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Great Writing Advice Learned from Pro-Wrestling, Part One

Unless you’re a wrestling fan, you’ve probably never heard of Al Snow. He was a wrestler, and a damn good one, and he’s spent years behind the scenes training new wrestlers and talking about wrestling and generally holding forth on the state of the industry. Basically, Al Snow is a smart wrestler whose fond of a good rant, and as a fan of wrestling in general I’m okay with paying twenty bucks for an entire DVD full of his rantings. Some of his rants about wrestling contain remarkably good advice about writing. For starters, Al Snow never lets you loose sight of the fact that wrestling is a business. It may be fake – it’s always been fake – but the wrestlers job is to get in there and put on a match that allows fans to suspend their disbelief and buy into the illusion that it’s real. This is no different to fiction, at all, and it’s one of the reasons I’m always perplexed when people look down on pro-wrestling. In Al Snow’s wrestling world, “good” is less valuable than “profitable.” He looks at Wrestlemania III, arguably the biggest and most-watched wrestling show of all time, and challenges the conventional wisdom of wrestling critics that suggests that the technically brilliant match between Ricky Steamboat and Randy Savage was better than the headline match between Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant. The critics aren’t wrong. You can find both that matches on YouTube if you search, and there’s no doubt

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08/06/2012 No Comments
Big Thoughts

Oh, I’m not a feminist…

I recently answered a bunch of questions for the 2012 Australian Spec Fic Snapshot project, a semi-regular interview series that surveys the Australian SF scene and presents the interviews in a week-long flurry. I don’t know if my particular snapshot will be online by the time this post goes up, but it’s coming and in one of my answers I mention the rise in feminist discourse taking place within SF over the last few years and how happy I am to see that happening despite the fact that my engagement with feminism is haphazard at best. And I’ve been thinking about that phrase, a lot, since I sent off my snapshot response. My initial intention with that phrase was to acknowledge that I’m basically white, male, university educated, and middle class. I am white male privileged incarnate and get to play life on the lowest possible difficulty setting, and even as someone who tries to be aware of that, even as someone who sometimes gets *seriously fucking angry* about displays of privileged and misogyny, I’m going to have blind-spots a mile wide and a history of not-getting-it as long as any ant-feminist idiot on the internet. Worse, I’m a geek. I spent my teenage years feeling white, male, middle-class, smarter than the average person,  and utterly dis-empowered by both feminism and conventional notions of masculinity, even if that wasn’t really the case. I was a gamer and a comic-book fan and a reader of trashy fantasy novels, and all of these are mediums that have a

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06/06/2012 4 Comments
News & Upcoming Events

Where to Find Me in Melbourne This Coming Weekend

So on Wednesday morning I’m going to be running away to Melbourne for a week. It’s nothing personal against Brisbane – I quite like the place, really – but Melbourne has this habit of kidnapping many of my favourite people in the world and forcing them to, like, live there in the land of good coffee and weather that occasionally acknowledges there are four seasons rather than switching from “hot” to “cold” at some randomly appointed times in the middle of Autumn and Spring. Since a couple of those people are crazy enough to say things like “come stay with us, any time,” I’m taking them at their word and spending a few days inhabiting their spare room. And then, on Friday, I’ll be heading off to Continuum for a weekend of writer-nerdery and beer. All of which is really just a set-up for the obligatory “these are the panels I’ll be on at Continuum” post, in case there’s anyone reading this who is interested. And so, in approximate order: I Don’t Get It! (Friday 21:00; Venue: Pelham Room): There are certain works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror that all of fandom seems to love…except me. What are these so-called classics? Why don’t I share the love? Is it possible that a lot of people like these things just because they know a lot of people like these things? Who’s missing the point, here – everyone else, or me? Participants: Peter M. Ball, Deborah Biancotti, Ian Nichols, Patrick O’Duffy, Alan Stewart The Big Bad – Fairy

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04/06/2012 No Comments
Works in Progress

NaNoWriMo? We Laugh at NaNoWriMo…

For the second time since starting the new bloggery regime, I’m writing a post in real time. This time, at least, I did it on purpose. As I write this I’m bunkered down in the QWC office with a team of twenty other writers, all of them ferociously typing away in an attempt to write 30,000 words in the space of two and a half days. We call this madness the Rabbit Hole – the third that the QWC has run – and this time around it’s being run in several locations around Australia. This my second bite of the cherry for the Rabbit Hole. The first time around I was a newly hired employee of the QWC who signed up ’cause it seemed like a good way to generate some work. I showed up and worked exclusively on Fritz the Laptop, who routinely objected to such tasks as “playing music” and “running word” and generally “working for longer than two hours before restarting.” This time around I’m working on Shifty Silas, the laptop I picked up after a fourteen-hour stretch in Rockhampton airport convinced me that Fritz was on his last legs. Silas is the first laptop I’ve acquired since having, like, an actual job, so he’s considerably less buggy than Fritz was. He can actually sustain wireless access without crashing, for starters. And I can type this, listen to music, and run Scrivner in the background without him throwing a hissy fit (in Fritz’s defense, his problems weren’t

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01/06/2012 No Comments
Works in Progress

A Bit About Briar Day and the Years Best Australian Fantasy and Horror

The  final line-up of the second volume of The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror got announced this week. It contains 32 fantastic stories and poems first published in 2011, from New Zealand’s and Australia’s fantasy and horror writers. I’m somewhat late to the party, so I’m not going to re-post the list here, but there’s plenty of details at the link above and pre-orders are all pre-ordery over at the IndieBooksOnline site. I am going to talk a little about the story of mine they selected for inclusion, though. Trying to pick the stories that people will like is generally a mugs game. I’ve produced stories that I thought were okay that have captured people’s attention. I’ve produced stories I thought were great that…well, kinda fizzled. And then there was Briar Day, which first saw the light of day in Ben Payne’s Moonlight Tuber magazine. Briar Day was always a bit of an odd beast. It’s a story where a character tells a story, and on one level that means all the action revolves around a protagonist drinking beer and banging on. On another level there are flashbacks, bits of the story that are told like an actual story, but still in the protagonist’s voice. And on a third level, it’s the story of the person hearing the story. Three levels is probably more than you really need, given the length of the story, but it was something of an experiment – I’d seen other writers use the technique and do interesting

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30/05/2012 1 Comment
Journal

Getting the hell out of hell

Twelve months ago I got a direct message on twitter that said, more or less, send me an email RE the job we discussed. I think it’s the only message I’ve ever received on twitter that made me cry with relief, ’cause it meant there was a chance of getting the hell out of my old job. It wasn’t just that my old day-job was bad – I’d worked bad jobs before. My old day-job actually went past bad and delved into the level of seriously toxic. There were only six people in the office and they were all at war with one another, and the manager had never really figured out why they’d hired me. When I signed my employment agreement there was a big empty space under my job description, and they never actually got around to filling all that empty space in. Occasionally I’d answer phones, or make deliveries to clients. Those were good days. On the bad days I’d update my blog and hang out in twitter, trying to ignore the cold war being fought between management and the sales team. I’ve never wanted to leave a day-job so badly as I wanted to leave this one. It was the first paying job I’d found after two years of unemployment – something that should have been a relief – but somehow it just seemed even worse. I lived life like a clenched fist, perpetually angry. I wanted to break things and get broken in return. Chuck

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28/05/2012 3 Comments

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