Journal

Where I post about the things that happened in my life. Sometimes they’re diary entries, sometimes works of non-fiction, sometime just random photographs.

Work, Work, Work, Work, and a note about Robin Laws’ new book

PETERMBALL Journal

I woke up this morning and mainlined Rihanna’s Work in the hopes of easing my way into marking. Mostly, it resulted in sitting there thinking that the genres we once thought of as “popular” grew increasingly more interesting once the mass market collapsed and there was no need to produce hits that were palatable to everyone.

People try and seperate technology and the market from the aesthetics of art, but they’re far more intertwined than people think.

5 assignments left at time of writing. If I can get my focus back, i should be finished tomorrow.

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Robin Laws has a new book out, Beating the Story: How to Map, Understand, and Elevate Any Narrative. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but I’ll recommend it to you right now for a very simple reason: Robin Laws is fucking smart, and he thinks very deeply about the mechanisms of narrative.

Lots of folks who read fiction don’t know this yet, because he’s spent a good chunk of his career working in roleplaying games and writing tie-in fiction. I followed his design work for years because he was one of the first designers who looked for a connection between the kinds of stories an RPG told and the mechanics used to tell it. He produced work that was unexpected and surprising, experimental without being inaccessible.

In short, he wrote games that were fucking smart.

He started getting involved in editing original fiction through Stone Skin Press a few years back and put out a series of anthologies. One of them, The New Hero, featured an introduction talking through the differences between iconic and dramatic heroes that caused me to re-think a bunch of my default assumptions about narrative. Over the last year, I’ve been re-reading those introductions and stealing bits to use in my thesis.

I do this because Robin Laws is fucking smart.

What excites me about this book isn’t the large-scale structural stuff, although I expect that will be awesome, but the space devoted to looking at beats within an individual scene. Figuring out the rhythms and building particular effects. The microstructure of story, rather than the macro-structure typified by three-act structures and scene breakdowns.

We don’t often talk about microstructure in that much detail. This will be just the third book I’ve seen attempt a breakdown of things on this scale, and I’ve been reading this stuff obsessively for the better part of twenty years.

I haven’t got that that yet, but I’m looking forward to it. And I’ve already tagged a whole bunch of pages where he talks about character journeys through fiction, so I can use them as part of my thesis.

Bullet Journals and Questioning Goals

PETERMBALL Journal, Stuff

Two links, to start with.

First, Lifehacker has a really interesting post about finding your real goals by asking why you want/do certain things, which is one of those things I urge writers to do an awful lot in You Don’t Want To Be Published. It’s also a remarkably useful skill in other aspects of your life–I’ve used it to solve problems in day-job gigs, supervisor’s meetings, and personal relationships, and it proved to be a remarkably big part of the conversation I kept having with my psychologist last year.

Second, the bullet journal is my productivity system of choice because it’s hackable and adapts to my schedule, getting complex on the months I need complexity and streamlined on the months when my workload is relatively focused. I picked up the BuJo habit from Kate Cuthbert, and it’s slowly spread through a whole bunch of friends and family, to the point where a large chunk of our family Christmas is now spent talking notebooks and layouts.

With all that in mind, this article where a behavioural neuroscientist is interviewed about why the bullet journal system works is one of my favourite things this week. Go check it out.

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Two years ago, right about the this time, my GP surprised me with a diagnosis of anxiety and depression. It wasn’t surprising because I thought I was okay. Just surprising because I assumed that the not-okay was normal, that the constant anger and frustration I’d been feeling for a while was the result of short-term stress.

The stress, of course, had been there for a few years and never seemed to end. That was beside the point. I’d gotten used to the feeling that I was a dysfunctional, inhuman fuck-up masquerading as a competent human, and largely assumed everyone was like that and just better at coping or wearing the mask. I assumed these things weren’t signs of my mental health deteriorating because a) I could always point to a cause (or causes) for my stress, b) I didn’t seriously think about killing myself, although I had all kinds of intrusive thoughts about self-harm during really bad days, and c) I assumed people would notice if something was really wrong.

I wasn’t sad enough to be depressed. Things weren’t bad enough. I got really good at talking myself out of getting help. Once I started getting help and recognising how out-of-whack my baseline was, I noticed a couple of friends using much the same rationalisations, which ultimately how I ended up pitching this post about the ways we talk ourselves out of getting help at my former blogging gig.

I mention this today because getting help was incredibly useful, and I wish I’d done it earlier. Ignored the little voice that told me it may be depression, but it’s not particularly bad and got help immediately, instead of waiting for things to build to a crisis point.

This doesn’t change the fact that asking for help is fucking hard. When your mental health is wonky, you get really good at convincing yourself there’s nothing wrong.  avoided it as long as possible, only went because I’d started crying in front of people at work.

I got myself through the clinic door by saying I was only there to assuage my parents fears, but I went. I got help and getting help led to tools that helped me manage things. All that weight that had settled around my life ceased being a crushing pressure, and became something that could be cleared away or shaped into something useful.

Getting help is hard, but it’s fucking worth it.

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Today was not a good day for marking, which makes me wonder if the day off was a mistake. I dragged my feet getting to the computer, daydreaming about actually writing something of my own instead. I spent far too much time writing the section above this, then deleting it, then writing it over again.

Somewhere amid all that, while deleting a section about self-care and watching for warning signs, I realised that reading The Writers Room was entirely the wrong call this week. All these interviews with people thinking deeply about the craft of writing just fed into the unsettled feeling that has set in after a week of marking, making it harder to fend off the whispering anxiety that tells me I’m taking too long or doing the job poorly.

Twenty assignments to go at time of writing. 60,000 words or so. I think my plan of being done by Sunday may be a little ambition.

 

Going A Little Stir-Crazy

PETERMBALL Journal

The marking continues, moving into the final third, but things have now reached the Heart of Darkness stage. The cycle of the last week has been pretty consistent: I grade papers until my brain fries, then flake out in front of the TV watching bad movies until I fall asleep. There’s been no time for writing or research over the last week, and very few opportunities to leave the house. The system the university uses for submissions means I need to have an active internet connection in order to mark papers, and that means a lot of my usual change-of-scene haunts aren’t feasible.

Net result: I’ve been getting a little stir crazy, and I’ve started ranting to my partner on a semi-regular basis (never a good sign).

Fortunately, I was far enough ahead that I could afford to take today off and get out of the house. I headed for breakfast at the Low Road Cafe, went late-night shopping with my partner, and generally spent today catching up on things that weren’t grading papers. Between all that I read a little, finishing off the Tor.com version of Caitlin Kiernan’s Black Helicopters (which is spectacular) and starting on Charlotte Wood’s collection of long-form interviews with Australian writers, The Writers Room.

The latter, at least, involves a vague genuflection towards research reading, courtesy of James Bradley’s answers regarding genre and his love of superhero comics. Specifically, this explanation:

One of the things I think is really fascinating about the superhero comics I’m interested in is that in the Marvel Universe and the DC Universe you actually have the single largest fictional creation that’s ever been made. They are vast. There are hundreds of thousands of characters, spreading over fifty, sixty, seventy years. The Mahabharata is not that big!

I love the sense of narrative complexity and interconnectedness that arises out of that scale, so if you’ve been reading them for forty years like I have, you’re always operating with a deep well of knowledge that enriches it all.

Peter Parker is still around—he was a fifteen-year-old character when I started reading them as a kid, but these days he’s in his late twenties, and although he hasn’t aged that much in some ways, I’ve seen him change and grow. And there’s that sense of narrative exaltation that comes from the way suddenly, something will click into place. You’ll go, ‘Oh my god, that man, the villain here, it’s the Molecule Man, I remember the Molecule Man from 1982. And he’s back!’

If it’s done well, it’s like having a little jolt of that quality Cocteau describes when he says that everything that happens in a story should be absolutely surprising and completely inevitable.

James Bradley in Charlotte Wood’s The Writer’s Room

There’s a moment in a Raymond Chandler short story, a single line that refers to the events of another short story even though they have minimal bearing on the current tale, and it’s one of my favourite moments in Chandler’s work for exactly the same kind of narrative exaltation.

Approximately six days to go before I clear all the grading off my plate and reclaim the daylight hours for writing and thesis work. On the plus side, my partner will be at a training course for at least half of that time, so there is no-one but the guinea pigs to rant at.

And Low Road does a spiced mushroom breakfast taco now. I didn’t notice it on the menu because I don’t look at the menu that often, but I had all kinds of jealousy when my partner ordered it.

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