Category: Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Last night, my partner introduced me to Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares, starting with the infamous Amy’s Baking Company episode where shit hits the fan, then working our way back to the UK editions of the show which involve marginally less schadenfreude. There’s a joke when I make in writing classes about writers being reluctant to embrace the business side of their craft, basing their expectations off a handful of outliers, which is kind of like trying to invest a million dollars into a restaurant because you’re a big fan of Jamie Oliver. It wasn’t until the second or third episode of Kitchen Nightmares that I realised how many people actually do that, and how reluctant they are to take on board the suggestion that they, maybe, should try learning a little about how things actually work in established, successful restaurants. It makes me oddly comforted to think writers are not alone in this particular behaviour.

The first blog I truly followed belonged to Neil Gaiman, when he added the American Gods dairy to his website back in 2001. It was quickly followed by Caitlin Kiernan’s Low Red Moon journal, which quickly metamorphosed into her Livejournal (and has stayed there, even now, after Livejournal has become an archaic thing occupied by Russians and die-hards refusing to walk away). I’m not sure when, exactly, I started my own web presence. The first site I owned was coded by my friend Sean and set up on a friend’s server, a place to flag gaming things. It was quickly followed by a Livejournal, where I didn’t need to know HTML or ask friends for help to make an update. This blog, which turned ten in November last year, was a grudging concession to the idea that I needed a site I controlled more than I needed Livejournal’s friend’s feature. When I was young, you’d occasionally find books full of

For years, I worked on the theory that I was not built for podcast listening. I didn’t like the formats people used, and the signal-to-noise ratio didn’t add up when I looked at fitting them into my schedule. Then I discovered the genre of podcasts I really enjoyed: short, topic-focused essays and the interview series, as exemplified by Writing Excuses, the Allusionist, and Chris Jericho’s wrestling interviews. Recently a whole host of the podcasts I listen to regularly went dormant, so I started searching for things to replace it. The one that’s really captured my attention: BBC World’s 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy. The series is everything I want from the format: short, informative, and generally built around a seemingly innocuous topic that ultimately changes the way you see or understand the world around you. Which isn’t a bad result for something which spends 8 minutes charting the history of things like barcodes and spreadsheets. The transition from

Just prior to my dad going into hospital last month, I wrote an entire blog post about choosing who gets to monetise your attention as an artist working in the early 21st century. If you got something out of that post, I recommend that you set aside an afternoon to read Mike Monteiro’s Ruined By Design: How Designers Ruined the World, and What We Can Do To Fix it. Specifically, the list on page 115, where he runs through the ways in which various online institutions make their money, culminating with a a statement that is both incredibly glib and still nails a particular discomfort I’d been feeling for a few years in social media: “Twitter makes money by getting you to fight with Nazis.” Mike Monteiro, Destroyed By Design Of course, given that it occurs 115 pages in, Monteiro’s built a lot of scaffolding around that statement. He’s talked about the ways in which engagement is monetised and how

Right. Friday. Back at work this morning, teaching a two-hour tutorial on Georgette Heyer’s Venetia and writing craft. It’s interesting teaching the same books two years in a row, because I can see the impact current craft interests have on the way I read. For instance, reading John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story over the last year kept me looking for the ways Venetia’s subplots serve as echoes of the central conflict, and gave me a new appreciation for the way she’s surrounded by people who are perceived but not really seen by others. Similarly, after reading Damon Suede’s Verbalize while sitting by Dad’s hospital bed, I kept paying attention to transitive verbs and the way they build the narrative (If you’ve not heard Suede talking Pride and Prejudice on a podcast, google his name and track down one of his interviews with Joanna Penn or Kobo Writing Life about the book). And because I’ve been immersed in Kenneth Quinn’s

I didn’t expect to enjoy The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I picked a copy up on the cheap a few years back, part of a workshop I was taking where one of the exercises involved best-selling novels. There was a remarkable dearth of best-sellers on my bookshelves at the time, so I grabbed a bunch of ebooks to get me up to the quota I needed: Stieg Larson; one of the Alex Cross books; the most recent Nora Roberts I could find. I loved the Roberts. Didn’t enjoy Kill Alex Cross, but developed an appreciation for what James Paterson does via books like Zoo and his Bookshots Novellas. And yet, despite all that, I still went into Steig Larson’s crime novel with a sense of trepidation. It occupied that space: a best-seller. Not my thing. A book loaded with assumptions predicated on how much it sells, none of which it actually fulfilled when I sat down and devoured it

ONE: MAPS by the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s A few years ago, I noted a trend where every autoplaylist I left running would eventually return to the Arctic Monkeys Do I Wanna Know. That epoch in youtube has apparently moved on, for now it is an inevitability that all playlists will find their way to Maps instead. TWO: I THINK WE’RE ALONE NOW by Tiffany I think I looked up this song once because I couldn’t remember it, and wanted some context for a joke that’s made in Mega Python vs Gateroid. I haven’t even watched Mega Python vs. Gateroid. THREE: I HATE MYSELF FOR LOVING YOU by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts There are Joan Jett songs that I love. There are Joan Jett songs that I do not love. This is one of the former. FOUR: DIRTY DEEDS DONE DIRT CHEAP by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts There are Joan Jett songs that I love. There are Joan Jett

The most interesting essay in Tom Bissell’s collection, Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation, takes a close look at the differing styles of writing books and the kinds of promises they make to prospective writers. Ostensibly a survey of several different books, Bissell pithily outlines the rules of engagement for each type: the users manual, exemplified by Strunk and White, which focuses on the mechanical aspects of crafting sentences; the Golden Parachute books, such as Donald Maas’ Writing the Breakout Novel, which trades equally on the promise of creative fulfilment and future commercial success; the Nuts & Bolts crowd, where a mid-list writer share techniques and exercises that worked for them; the tea and angels crowd, driven by the same impulse as the nuts and bolts crew, but with a considerably more mystical and muse-driven approach.  Then, of course, there’s the Olympus books: written by highly esteemed writers, wether it’s Stephen King or Margaret Atwood or Joyce Carol Oates, and

My friend Lois shared this post about the difference between Supper and Dinner, and the meaning of dinner changed as a result of industrialisation and the rise of the middle class.  Meanwhile, this week’s my newsletter will feature a short semi-essay about the origins and goals of of the Short Fiction Lab series. If you’ve read Eight Minutes of Usable Daylight and Winged, With Sharp Teeth, and you’re curious about the behind-the-scenes stuff, there’s still time to sign up. I just finished Sharp Ends, Joe Abercrombie’s collection of short stories set in the same world as his First Law Trilogy. It was a weirdly enjoyable colleection–the stuff that I loved, I really, really loved. The story I disliked proved to be a major stumbling block, though, and meant I left the book 80% read for the better part of nine months before finally finishing things off. There is, however, something to be said for Abercrombie’s riffs on the sword-and-sorcery partnership

The free period for Winged, With Sharp Teeth is over, which means I’m now sitting here and prodding the numbers with surprise, saying things like, “Really? That many people from the German store? Who’d have thought it?” Some people went on and pre-ordered Eight Minutes of Usable Daylight, which is out now if you live in Australia and out in approximately eight hours from now if you’re in the United States. Alas, I cannot tell when the Germans will get it, for I’ve not had to get into the habit of doing that math off the top of my head over the last week. I did try to Google it, but the math stymied me–there’s a reason I work with words wherever possible. Yesterday was a bit of a lumpen, unexpected day. I had plans, but they did not come together. I progressed stories, but the writing was hard. On the plus side, I did get Amazon-based print version of The Birdcage

I’m reading Randall Garrett’s collection of LORD DARCY stories at the moment, and it’s proving to be hard going. The kind of book I dip into a story at a time, then set aside for a long stretch while I go find something that’s more my speed as a reader. I have issues with Garrett’s pacing, but that’s a conceit of the genre–he’s essentially doing Sherlock Holmes stories in an alternate universe where magic exists and thaumaturgical forensics is a studied art–and I have never been a voracious reader of the pure mystery story.  I’m making a concreted effort to finish the collection because it plays into my thesis, being a significant source of inspiration behind Elizabeth Bear’s New Amsterdam stories featuring the forensic sorcerer Abigail Irene Garrett and the immortal vampire detective Sebastien de Ulloa. Those stories I devoured at a rapid clip when I first encountered them, immediately pre-ordering collections every time they were announced. The difference isn’t