Angela Slatter

Awesome Things About 2009 (6/15): Write Club

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I keep saying it, I know, but write club is awesome (For those wondering what the hell I’m talking about, I recommend this post and this post on Angela Slatter’s blog*). Turns out it’s a remarkably popular idea too – I’ve had a couple of conversations where people wondered how Write Club worked, and it seems Angela gets asked about it as well, so I figured I’d share my** thoughts on why write club works for those who may be curious.

Reason 1) Angela Slatter is Fricken’  Awesome
Granted, I say this quite a bit on this blog as well, but it doesn’t diminish the fact that it’s true. Even if you ignore the fact that she’s a superb writer whose keen critical eye has stopped me from looking like a goose a couple of times this year, and the fact that she’s generous with both her time and connections, she’s one of the people I enjoy catching up with once a week.  If you’re going to hang out and write regularly, I suspect it’s handy to actually like and respect the person you’re hanging around with.

Reason 2) Low Numbers
The more people present, the more likely you are to find someone looking for a distraction at the same time you are. When there’s two of you, you’re only likely to simultaneously hit a break-point in the writing about once or twice in a four-hour period, and even then it’s easier to have a quick chat about the problem you’re pondering and make a fresh cup of coffee before going back to work.

I suspect you could probably get around this with larger numbers where the sheer clatter of hammering keys would become pressure to get working again, but that’s only a theory based on seeing photographs of nanowrimo get-togethers.

Reason 3) Chocolate and Good Food**
Seriously, don’t try write club without the chocolate.

Reason 4) Long-Term Projects
It’s telling that both Angela and I were working on novels when the first write-club happened, and that we’re generally better about keeping to a weekly schedule when there’s long-term projects on the cards. Partially this is because there’s two people trying to puzzle out similar problems when you get stuck, and partially because writing individual short stories would have more break-points where you look for distraction due to shorter scenes and quicker finish-times.

I also think Write Club is at its best when it’s keeping me in contact with a long-term project I’d otherwise let laspe when things get hard. There were a few times this year where Friday Nights were the only time I’d work on a draft, but it kept me in contact with the work and saved it from getting burried beneath a mountain of angst and apathy.

Reason 5) Synchronous Goals
Lets not be coy about this one: I want to be a full-time writer. Angela wants to be a full-time writer. Both of us seem to work towards the same kind of milestones in terms of making that happen. For all that the social aspect of Write Club is fun, we’re there to work. We both churn out words away from write-club, every week, and odds are we’d be writing even if write club didn’t ever happen. In no way, shape or form do either of us regard writing as a hobby and we’re generally the type of folks that’ll argue gently prod friends in productive directions if given the opportunity.

Mindset matters, I think, if something like Write Club is going to work. The world spends lots of time telling you that writing is a bad idea, that you can’t possibly make it as a writer, so agreeing that this is bullshit and having similar ideas of what it means to be a professional ensures write club reinforces your process rather than detracts from it.

The other advantage lies in being able to reinforce the habits that work and learn from the skills the other person’s got (Angela is far smarter than I in matters of the writing business, strategy and networking, for example, so there’s always something to be learned from her in these matters. Buggered if I know what I bring to the table, except maybe a dogged belief that neither of us is going to fail. And possibly access to Kim Newman short story collections).

* The short version, for the click-link adverse, is that Write Club is an agreement between two writers to sit in a lounge-room once a week and write. It also involves coffee, chocolate, short bursts of writer-angst, and screaming “write” at the top of your lungs whenever the other person looks like they’re slipping into dangerous levels of procrastination. The process works remarkably well

**Angela, of course, may well disagree with all of the above.

***I’ll admit that I’m probably letting the side down one at the moment. Not that I can’t cook, but I tend to make a lot of stuff Angela can’t eat.

Some Awesomeness, Some Writing Advice, Some Help Needed, and Some Horn Spotting

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1) Two Reasons Angela Slatter is awesome

The latest Clarkwesworld magazine has an interview with eight Emerging SF authors, including the insightful and rather startlingly talented Angela Slatter. She says some smart stuff, as do the rest of the interviewees, and it’s well worth a read. If, however, you like you’re writing advice in a more direct and focused form, I really suggest heading over to Angela’s website and read through her advice on editing. Actually, I’d advocate printing out the entire post and keeping it handy next time you’re proofing something. I’ve been lucky enough to have stuff edited/proofed by Angela before and I can say with certainty that she knows of what she speaks here.

2) Interesting Writing Advice from Across the Interwebs

Still on the writing front, I’d also recommend going and taking a listen to Mary Robinette Kowal’s guest-spot on the Writing Excuses podcast. It crams four really useful pieces of advice to fiction writers (based on puppetry, interestingly enough) into the space of fifteen minutes. I transcribed them and put them in the folder where my draft of Black Candy is waiting for me to start rewriting, just as a reminder that I need to think very clearly when I start replacing all my habitual non-verbal tags that get scattered through dialogue.

3) Help Needed/Gen Con Australia

Do you know someone who loves fantasy and SF authors and roleplaying games who doesn’t suffer from stage fright and will be in Brisbane between the 18th and the 20th of September? If so, get them to drop me an e-mail at peter.ball@genconoz.com because I’m in need of some volunteers who’d be willing to MC some panels at this year’s Gen Con Australia. This is your basic call for interested folks – e-mail me for more details.

Yes, I realise this is an odd way to go about it, but I’m short on time and the usual pool of folks I’d ask has gotten shallow in recent years, and I figure most of you who are reading this are SF and Fantasy fans who might know some folks. Given that we’ve had to do this fast and there were set-backs due to the computer-crash*, I’m going to go with odd-but-direct rather than time-consuming-but-standard. 🙂

*after all my gloating about my back-up plans, it was discovered that I’d failed to back-up the outlook files for the account used in this exercise.

4) Horn Spotting

Horn got a nice write-up from Narelle Harris on her blog. As always, there’s the excerpt:

Horn is a novella, a fast read at 80 pages – a short, sharp uppercut of a book. Parts of it are hard and ugly, as they need to be for this kind of story, but it’s also a ripping yarn. It may leave you desperate for whisky and a cigarette, but you’ll finish it knowing you’ve fought the good fight.

As usual, I’ll mention that copies of Horn are still available from Twelth Planet Press (Not *many* copies, sure, which still blows my mind, but there are still some there if you’re so inclined…)

And now I need to go figure out what’s happening with the sequel. And figure out something to cook for write-club tonight. And get some gen-connery organised. ‘Tis a busy day in the office for me, which is as it should be really.

Write-Club

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I recommend going over to Angela Slatter’s blog and reading this entry on Write-Club. It should provide context for how I managed to achieve this in the space of two months*:

The short version, for the click-link adverse, is that write-club is an agreement between two writers to sit in a lounge-room once a week and write. It also involves coffee, chocolate, short bursts of writer-angst, and screaming “write” at the top of your lungs whenever the other person looks like they’re slipping into dangerous levels of procrastination. The process works remarkably well, as evidenced by the fact that I may actually be capable of finishing a novel draft for the first time in about a decade. Angela Slatter (the other half of write-club) has already finished her novel draft, done a fair chunk of a novella she’s co-writing, and started the revisions on her novel. Angela has more detail. Go forth and read.

I’m quietly confident that I’ll get the novel done sometime during this week’s Write-Club on Friday, despite the fact that I know there’s some interruptions coming during the week. I really, really want to get this draft over with so I can go back and start fixing things, making stuff awesome, and generally playing with stuff now the structure is in place.

*I’m actually kinda shocked that it’s only been two months since I started the draft, but I went back and checked the Black Candy notes on the blog and the first entry shows up on April 30th. I’ve been keeping a list of things that surprised me about writing at this length (such as, say, not knowing how to structure a chapter) that I’ll probably blog once I finished the first draft.