All Things Aster

A frustrated Spokesbear is dangerous

PETERMBALL Journal , , ,

I’m drinking my second cup of coffee of the morning, revelling in the fact that I’ve been awake for nearly three hours now and I don’t yet feel the need to take a nap. Huzzah for reaching the end of the medication, although the celebrations are tempered by the fact that I head into the dentist for stage two of my root canal this afternoon. I know nothing about the art of dentistry, but the implication after my last visit was essentially “if the infection’s still there, we’ll have to remove the tooth instead.”

I’m okay with removing the tooth, to be honest, as long as it doesn’t come with another round on medication. Experience says I have a predilection towards sloth that shouldn’t be encouraged and I have phobias about returning to the slacker mindset that dominated my early twenties. Or, to return to my new years resolution: don’t fuck it up, dumb-ass. I’ll take a week of jaw pain over a week of sleeping any day.

My medication-induced narcolepsy would bother me less if the project du jour wasn’t doing the rewrite on Cold Cases, the second Miriam Aster novella. It’s not that I begrudge the fact that it needs rewriting – I dig rewriting – but there’s a certain element of I’d really like this to be done, now, please, when it comes to this book. I’ve lived with it for far too long* and it’s still playing coy, refusing to reveal the right beginning or structure. And it still suffers from its lingering bout of sequelitis, despite my attempts to strip out the signs of infection. Frustration abounds. Especially since I’m only paddling around in the shallow end of the rewrite, grabbing an hour here and there, rather than diving in and immersing myself in the book again.

The Spokesbear, of course, is raring to go. He’s been making notes, re-reading Horn to wrap his head around the narrative voice, and generally preparing for two weeks of total immersion in the manuscript. Impatience makes him testy and unbearable, but what can you do?

Right now, the best I can think of is go eat some porridge.

*well, not with Cold Cases specifically, but much of last year was spent thinking about the book that would follow Horn, and this is the second attempt at it.

Whip It and Writing

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , , , , ,

1) Whip It

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a blog post-reviewy thing about Whip It for about two weeks now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just not going to happen. Not because I think it’s a bad film – it’s utterly charming in its ability to recognise that something can be simultaneously camp as hell and the most important thing in the whole damn world – but because it fits into the same space as contemporary art where I find my critical vocabulary isn’t really up to the task of expressing what I’m thinking about after seeing the film.

My short, haphazard take on the film goes something like this: it’s endearing. Specifically, the kind of awkward-coming-of-age endearing you find in Taylor Swift film-clip, only Whip It comes without the puritanical undercurrent that usually causes me to froth at the mouth when encountering Swift’s oeuvre (and thus, Whip It comes closer to having actual substance).

The film actually reminds me, very strongly, of Bring It On (another film that didn’t seem like something I’d like that somehow turned out to be highly entertaining) and I kinda wish it existed in a world where Bring It On didn’t because there’s far to many parallels there.

The sound-track is phenomenal in its eclecticism, but gets bonus points for including both the Ramones and Yens Leckman.

The acting is solid. The most irritating thing about the film is Drew Barrymore’s character, but only because it’s exactly the same character she played in the Charlie’s Angel’s films with a tendency to act stoned on top. Plus it has Ari Graynor in a minor role (Graynor seems to have become the new incarnation of the cinematic past-time once dubbed “Breckin-Meyer-Spotting”)

It’s also a goddamn spectacular film to watch from a writing point of view because there’s not a damn subplot in the whole thing that doesn’t get a resolution in the end. Admittedly this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but there’s something powerful about knowing that if a film introduces conflict it will provide resolution to it, even if said conflict is just a five-second scene between the protagonist and a minor character in the opening minutes of the story. While Whip It telegraphs a lot of punches on the macro-level (I doubt anyone can’t pick the father’s final scene in the film a full hour before it happens), it gets a pass on this because the resolution of the really minor conflicts are also dragged back into the main plot and made meaningful.

It’s a neat trick, and one I’m gleefully lifting given that I’m in the midst of writing the second draft of Black Candy and dealing with a dozen or so minor characters who walk onstage and do very little after their first appearance.

Seriously, though, you can probably ignore all that and go with this instead: my friend Chris and I are the kind of snarky, mid-to-late-thirties blokes who are continuously disappointing by films and prone to venting our disappointment in Waldorf-and-Statler type critiques. As a general rule, it’s a bad idea to go and see film you think you’ll like when either of us are around.

Both of us hit the end of Whip It and said “Yeah, I need to own a copy of this.”

 2) Minimally Acceptable Levels of Productivity

So I set myself the goal or writing 14,000 words words last week. I didn’t succeed. In fact, I struck a point significantly below success:

On the plus side, it means I’ve hit the minimum accepted levels of productivity for seven straight days now (aka if Peter doesn’t write a thousand words a day he ceases to feel like a human being and makes life miserable for everyone) and actually started to live like a real human being again. There are even parts of my house that are clean, and food that isn’t ordered from the Domino’s website.

That largely means the weekly goal achieved what it needed to achieve, right in time for the rewrites of Cold Cases to land in my inbox.

One last outburst before we go to radio silence

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , , , , ,

My attempt to roll out the productivity and conquer The Fear hit a road-block yesterday – what seemed to be a minor computer problem (power jack coming loose from the laptop casing) has rolled out into a terrifying ordeal which will culminate in the absence of a computer in the house for 5-to-1o working days while the problem’s corrected. The computer goes in this morning, so…well, basically I’m quietly screwed after that. No word-processor, no e-mail, no basic tools of research. I can work with a pad and pen, but these are only good for the drafting rather than the actual finishing and submitting of work. This…complicates…that whole submit lots of things in February plan.

Meanwhile, in more positive parts of internetland, the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2009 has just been released. Horn got recommended in the novella section and my Strange Horizon’s story On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War-Machines of the Merfolk is mentioned in the Short Story listing.

My mind, it is blown by this turn of events.

(Congrats also to Lisa Hannett and Paul Haines and a bunch of Twelfth Planet Press projects and a bunch of other friends I’ve probably missed, but I’m skim-reading everything right now due to the dwindling battery power).