Angela Slatter

The Writer in a Silly Hat

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I was given a particularly silly hat for Christmas, and the first thing my mother said was oh god, it’ll be up on his blog by tomorrow morning. My mother is a wise woman, but she failed to take into account the delays inevitably caused by moving house and cleaning and the other minutia of the last few weeks. Not that she’s wrong about me posting a picture here, just the time frame:

Best. Present. Ever.

The hat came about because my sister buggered off to Nepal a few months back, planning on walking to the base camp of Everest, and asked if there was anything I wanted. Usually when my sister goes places I shrug and mumble something non-committal and end up with a motley array of t-shirts when she returns, but Tibet proved to be a special case. “You know what?” I said, “I’d really dig a sherpa hat.”

The fact that she found one with its own woolly Mohawk is really just a bonus, even if she spent the entire trip with people asking her if she actually liked her brother. Now I just need winter to roll around so everyone shall know me by my resplendent blue-green headware of awesomeness. 

Until Winter, I shall content myself with writing and admiring said headware on the noggin of the Spokesbear.

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I am, officially, relocated to a new domicile and deadline free.

The new place features somewhat tighter quarters than I’m used to, what with cramming pretty much everything I own into the one room. I’m somewhat amazed that *exactly the same bookcase* appears in the background of webcam shots despite the relocation, because apparently it’s that bookcase’s destiny to be set up opposite my computer in every place I live.

It’s also, coincidently enough, a brand new year. I don’t do resolutions and such, but I do have some plans for 2012. Not big plans, admittedly, but there’s a fairly well-sketched plan of things I’d like to write and things I’d like to read and a single credo – no damn deadlines for the first six months – dominating my approach. The first thing I’m working on are a handful of stories – mostly so I can kick the writer-brain into shape again – after which I’m disappearing back into novella land for a while.

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I caught up with the inimitable Angela Slatter at a friends birthday party recently, and she mentioned that the Lair of the Doctor’s Brain project she’d been working on with her co-brain, L.L. Hannett, was ready to launch. I’ve been eagerly waiting for this series to hit the blogosphere for months now and it doesn’t disappoint – they’ve started big with an interview with China Miéville and a series of illustrations from Kathleen Jennings.

I’m also pretty sure that every aspiring writer in the known universe has linked to this by now, but I’m nothing if I’m not a joiner: Chuck Wendig’s 25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing (Right Fucking Now) is pretty damn spiffy. And, you know, full of smart advice in amid the swearing, as is so often the case with Wendig’s work.

And since I’m feeling a bit grumpy that the Dresden Dolls are touring and I’m not going to their Brisbane concert tomorrow night, I’ll going to link to their cover of War Pigs and say, well, fuck, go listen. It’s pretty damn rare that I actually want to go to concerts these days, what with the crowds and the young people and the drinks you have to take out a mortgage to afford, but dammit, I really wanted to go to this one and that clip is one of the reasons why.

-sigh-

Ah well, I should probably be writing things anyway.

Mostly About Things I’ve Read Online

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I met Laura Goodin several years ago at a writers workshop. She was forthrightly American in many ways, despite being expatriated to Australia for several years now, and we frequently found ourselves coming from stories at very different angles. Despite her handicap as a non-native Australian, she wrote one of the finest SF cricket stories I’ve ever had the privilege of reading. Since then she’s been busy doing a series of impressive things – writing plays and opera’s, for example, and enrolling in PhD programs. She’s also published a story over on daily science fiction titled The Bicycle Rebellion and it’s rather sad in a sweet kind of way, and it’s perhaps one of the more intriguing stories I’ve seen from Laura over the years (which, considering her knack of publishing SF stories about Demon-pigs in BBQs and Futurism gone mad in magazines that don’t generally publish science fiction, is saying something).

I first met Angela Slatter about…well, six weeks or so before I met Laura Goodin…but after years of blogging about Write Club I’m assuming I don’t need to provide a great deal of context for Angela. She’s awesome, she writes remarkable things, and among the remarkable things she’s written is the latest editorial for the Weird Fiction Review. And if you were sitting around, wondering what to do with your holidays, you could do a lot worse than checking out said editorial, As the Weird Turns, and using it as a suggest reading list for the next month.

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There’s ten days until I move house. There’s still several rooms that need to be packed. I also have two deadlines between now and then. I suspect I’m going to keep mentioning this out loud, since it’ll remind me that I should probably go write the things I need to write in order to meet said deadlines.

It’ll also remind me to never again schedule deadlines and the relocation of everything I own in the same month. Especially when that month is December.

There is no cheer or good humour in me today. I’ve spent most of my time sporting this facial expression:

I Hate Everything

As I drink my celebratory snifter of port…

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It’s a cool winter evening and I’ve turned off most of the lights in the flat, shuffling around the study by dim glow of the desk lamp, swaying in a slightly dreamy manner to Bauhaus songs while I poke bits of Flotsam with a stick.  In theory I should be writing right now, but I figure if I don’t sneak off and blog now, I’ll get all caught up in drowning Keith Murphy in the demonic equivalent of a baptismal font and it’ll be another week before I post here again.

I’m going to mention, first off, that Angela Slatter is in the process of delivering a very special series of Friday Drive-By interviews focusing on the contributors to the forthcoming Stephen Jones anthology A Book of Horrors. The first link takes you straight to the page she’s set up for it on her website, which means you miss out on the very charming otters that appeared on the post announcing the interview series, but it’s definitely worth keeping an on eye on things if you’re a fan of Angela’s work (as I am),  Stephen Jones’ anthologies (er, yes, fan of them too), or just Angela’s drive-by interview series in general (yes, sorry, I’m a fan of those too).

Hold on, I’ve run out of Bauhaus songs. It’s time to move on to Joy Division (If you’ve never seen the Australian film Three Dollars where David “Faramir” Wenham dances like Ian Curtis, you’re missing out).

Okay, so, other things. I wrote a little more of my morning commute story today, figuring out a bit more about the characters involved. Lunch breaks at work seem to be a boon to getting things done on the writing front, since there’s enough time there to get about two or three pages filled in the Moleskin notebook I’m using, which adds up pretty quickly when the page or two I get done on the train is factored in. The weird part, of course, comes with writing things out of order – I’m just kind of putting down scenes and seeing what the characters do and trusting that sooner or later a beginning and an end will show up.

Interestingly, this isn’t a story I could write electronically. Short bursts of time are terrible when I’m trying to type things on a computer, where the pages are infinite and the keys make pleasant clattering sounds as I work, but a fifteen to forty-minute stretch is kind of ideal for hand-writing. I suspect it’s got something to do with the page itself imposing a kind of structure on the writing, but I wouldn’t swear to it.

I’ve discovered, once again, that working above a bookstore is a dangerous proposition. Last week I picked up Brett Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park while strolling through the shop before work; this week I found myself buying a copy of Notes from the Underground (a book I’ve always meant to read, but never gotten around too) and China Miéville’s Kraken. Fortunately, I’m back to reading books faster than I buy them, so I don’t feel too bad about the purchases.

I also discovered that my Klout profile lists me as an expert of pancakes, which suggests I tweet far to much about breakfast, I suppose. Admittedly, I am only a very small expert of pancakes, but that’s more-or-less in keeping with my pancake consumption. Given the option, I’d choose to be an expert in something much cooler: ninjas, perhaps, or obscure seventies punk bands from Brisbane, but considering I know even less about those topics than I do about pancakes, perhaps it’s best the option isn’t mine.

A friend emailed with the question have you ever googled sinister ducks, which I hadn’t prior till then, but immediately gave it go. I’ve already posted the results almost everywhere, but suffice to say that a good search engine and youtube will satisfy your curiosity and it’s well worth it.

And, since it seems to be the thing to do at the moment, I should mention that I’m on the googleplus in a very “well, this thing exists, lets wait for it do something interesting” kind of way. I’ve never really been an early-adopter of social media before and, based on this experience, I’m rather glad of that. Facebook and twitter were both much more fun to learn when there were lots of people already using it. Google+ just feels like I’ve shown up for a party a few hours early, so I’m standing in the corner and looking mawkish while I wait for the rest of my friends to arrive (I am, rather sneakily, hiding behind the pseudonym Peter M Ball, should you be +enabled and looking to add me to a circle).

  • And with that, the spokesbear says I’m done, for it’s time to go back to the wordmines.