All Things Aster

Sunday

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It’s generally a bad sign when the cleanest room in my flat is the study, but it appears I’ve reached that point. I predict a day of epic tidying and cleaning in my future, but right now I’ll settle for getting the washing up done and putting away the clean laundry.

That’s next hour’s problem, though. Right now there is coffee and bloggery and answering some emails. Possibly some toast while I try to work out whether the toaster is really broken, or just bitching about the cold. It feels like that kind of afternoon.

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Every now and then I come across people who really, really like the idea of creativity. It drives me crazy. Otherwise ordinary conversations are derailed by statements like “writing? Wow, it must be nice to be so creative” or “I’m a writer and creativity is one of my strengths,” mostly because I then froth at the mouth and stomp around until someone gives me a cup of tea and tells me to have a lie down.

Creativity is one of the most ill-defined words in our culture, with a myriad of different meanings that all rely on understanding the context in which it’s used. And unlike other context-driven words – like, say, love – you can never be entirely sure which context people are using when they deploy creativity. It’s too bound up in myths about muses and inspiration and the idea that somehow creativity is automatically a transcendent thing.

Near as I can tell, creativity is just training yourself to see the connections between things sooner than other people. Or doing it naturally, in an “inspiration” driven rush, and never questioning how it is you just did what you did.

Everything after that is process, actually sitting down and making things, and once you’re at that point there’s very little creativity can do to help you.

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Toast with ginger marmalade for breakfast, confirming that the toaster is either on its last legs or simply unable to cope with winter. Even turned up to its highest setting, the best it seems to manage is “lightly browned”.

It seems to be the month for appliances going wrong around these parts. My mobile phone is starting to develop some of those hiccups that occur when you’ve owned a mobile phone for a a while. Not enough to be unusable, but enough to be occasionally annoying.

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Here is a thing I’ve discovered this week: the version of Claw in my head no longer resembles the (unfinished) draft version of Claw I was writing before my dad’s illness last year.

This isn’t a huge surprise. The news of my dad’s heart attack basically hit like a depth charge to the subconscious, blowing apart the various stories and projects under construction, and it’s only recently that I’ve had the brain-space to go back and start trying to fit things together. But the opening scene for Claw that I wrote this week looks more like one of the closing scenes I’d planned for the first draft, a couple of sub-plots have been dropped away, and the book seems to be drifting towards the darker side again.

Still not sure whether it has a happy ending or not. I’m not even sure if the new beginning is right, but it feels more like the beginning of the book than the older one did.

And it’s becoming a fun book to write again, which is a good sign because, for a while there, I thought it was unlikely I’d ever find Aster stories fun to write again. At some point tomorrow I’m going to get to the first corpse in the book, and I’m unexpected excited about figuring out how to put the scene together.

Posts of a Random Sleep-Zombie

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Very random attack of insomnia last night, especially since there wasn’t any of the usual triggers that set off my sleeplessness. In the old days I used to welcome such things, since I could just wander off and do other things and sleep in the day afterwards, but I am now a working man with a dayjob that starts in the wee hours, and insomnia has become a thing that I no longer care fore.

Things I should post about today, and would do so in more detail were I not yawning:

– Jason Fischer’s short story collection, Everything is a Graveyard, scheduled for release by Ticonderoga Publications in October 2013. The collection’s slated to revolve around Jason’s post-apocalyptic and zombie-themed work, which is the kind of news that makes me extremely happy, if only because it’d be damn handy to have all those stories in the one place.

– The May issue of the Edge of Propinquity is up, including Sabbath, the fifth story in the Flotsam series. I suspect I’ll do a “what I’ve learnt from six months of Flotsam” post sometime in July, whereupon I’ll try and nail down exactly why writing a serial short story series on a monthly deadline is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and this story may well be the poster-child for both why it’s hard and why it’s been worthwhile.

– Un Lun Dun, which has slowly re-insinuated itself into my readerly affections after the hiccup I mentioned yesterday and become, more or less, the kind of book I was hoping it would become when I started reading it a few months ago. Really, you should read it, especially if you’re unlikely to get as caught up in the concept of the binja as I did.

– Getting the dates wrong on my Daily SF story in yesterday’s post, since it’s coming out on the seventeenth rather than the sixteenth. So, yes, sometime tonight there will be a new story in the world, and it will be my last non-Flotsam story in a while.

– Something else, I’m sure, although I can’t really remember it. Oh, wait, I know: starting a new draft of Claw, the third Miriam Aster novella, that throws out a large chunk of what I’d written in the period known as last-year-before-my-life-exploded and substitutes something, well, good instead. I found myself unexpected scribbling notes for this last night, and suddenly the beginnings of an entire scene fell out of my head, and I looked at it for a long time and thought, “okay, sure, we’re going with this.”

Un-Moroccan Chicken and Un Lun Dun

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It’s Monday morning here, but due to the vagaries of international timezones I suspect there will not be much of Monday left by the time Say Zucchini, and Mean It arrives in my in-box. Such are the drawbacks of living on the other side of the world, I suspect.

Tonight I shall make the most un-Moroccan Moroccan chicken imaginable, given that it will consist primarily of pumpkin soup with chickpeas and bits of chicken in it, spread over a layer of couscous. The couscous, by and large, is probably going to be the best bit. Possibly also the only bit that qualifies as Moroccan.

It will, at least, be healthy un-Moroccan chicken, if the Australian Heart Foundation website is to be believed, and that’s probably a good thing after the week of pizza that occurred when I was last chasing a deadline.

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There’s a rather nice review of both Horn and Bleed over on the Living in SIN blog, which is  not the kind of blog you’d expect it to be from the title and entirely safe for work. I keep meaning to point people towards reviews of my story in Eclipse 4 as well, but every time I think about it I’m writing a bit of the blog during a coffee break at the dayjob, far away from the bookmarks where I group such things together and keep them handy for linkage.

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I kept trying to disappear into the bunker over the weekend, but somehow events conspired to ensure I never really made it there. I kept being distracted by, say, dinner with my sister and our friend VillainousMog who was visiting from London for the first time in two years and made for some excellent company.

On Sunday I was distracted by sleep and goodreads and the search for a good hotdog and the usual Sunday night gaming session, which meant I hit the end of the weekend feeling oddly relaxed and socialised and in possession of about three thousand words to account for two days work.

Which isn’t bad, I’ll grant you that, but isn’t really the stuff of a heroic effort in the word-bunker either. Still, the novel has a shape forming that’s actually novel-like, and the short story I’m working on hit a point where I figured out what it wanted to do, and I suspect that this afternoon I’ll get back hitting 2,500 words in a day, if only because I’ve run out of distractions and large portions of my house are now clean.

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I started reading China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun over the weekened, which was going swimmingly until such time as I hit one of those things that makes me go “oh, really? We’re doing that? Okay, I guess,” and then suddenly be much less interested in the book.

It’s the sort of thing that happens to me and books all the time. I’ll be enjoying myself immensely and then, out of nowhere, there’s be a parenthetical aside in a third-person narration, and I’ll find my enjoyment deflated and listless from there on. Un Lun Dun doesn’t do the parenthetical aside thing, but it introduces a concept and bit of wordplay that’s distracting enough that I can’t get back into the story.

It’s like that moment when you’re at a party, having a good time, then you realise that you’re actually quite drunk and you can’t get your equilibrium back once that realisation happens.

Still, I persevere, slightly less enthused than I was before, but still enjoying myself. And because The City and The City was brilliant and full of words that didn’t alienate me, and so I’ll trust in pretty much anything Miéville does after that.

And because, more often than not,  Miéville manages the opposite thing, where the right word or concept is introduced at exactly the right time, and thus there is a moment of joy to be had.