Bleed (aka the novella formerly known as Cold Cases)

QWC Blog Tour of Queensland

PETERMBALL Journal , , ,

And lo, I have finished the long march from empty page to submitted manuscript and a copy of Cold Cases is now winging its way to the publishers via the miracle of the internets. And well-timed it is, all things considered, since it gives me a few free moments to take part in the QWC Blog Tour of Queensland and answer some quick questions from the fine folks at the Queensland Writers Centre

Where do your words come from?

I borrow most of them from the dictionary. For some reason this whole writing lark works better when other people recognise the words you’re using and understand what they mean. Of course, my dictionary’s kind of old, so it’s missing words like D’oh and jiggy. Those I borrow from television shows and trust readers keep up.

Where did you grow up and where do you live now?

My parents were teachers, so I spent my childhood moving. We basically went between northern Queensland and the Darling Downs before finally settling on the Gold Coast when I was thirteen and stayed put for a long stretch. These days I live in Brisbane, which suits me far better than the Gold Coast ever did. I suspect it’s got something to do with access bookstores.

What’s the first sentence/line of your latest work?

“The first time the Black Dog showed up I was five.”
– From Black Dog: A Biography in the Interfictions 2 anthology.

What piece of writing do you wish you had written?

Oh, man, that’s a long list and it’d get a different answer depending on the day. Lets go with William Gibson’s Neuromancer or Dylan Thomas’ poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. The former blew my mind when I came across it at fourteen and I suspect there’s a little part of me that will always want to be William Gibson, while the latter expresses a sentiment that’s becoming more and more important to me as the years go by.

What are you currently working towards?

I just mailed off the manuscript for Cold Cases, the manuscript that should follow up my unicorn-noir novella Horn, so I’m looking forward to getting some short-stories written before I hear back from Twelfth Planet Press and get stuck into the edits and rewrites. After we’re done with Cold Cases I’ll be starting work on the third novella in the Miriam Aster series and revisiting a long-neglected novel draft.

Complete this sentence… The future of the book is…

Not something that really bothers me, to be honest. I try to remain aware of the conversation and experiments in the publishing industry and I’m excited about the prospect of finally being able to carry e-books around in things like an i-phone, but when you get right down to it I’m primarily interested in being able to make stuff up and share it with other people. If the books the best way to do that, I’ll go with the book. If the future says the best choice is an e-book, or even a different vehicle for story altogether like the computer game, then I figure I’ll do what I can to work with that. Stories existed before books, and so did professional storytellers. I’m not sure either will go out of style, even if the book as a paper artifact does.

This post is part of the Queensland Writers Centre blog tour, happening October to December 2009. To follow the tour, visit Queensland Writers Centre’s blog The Empty Page.

Words, words, words (With bonus Angela Slatter Interview)

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Before I begin, let me direct you to this: Marshal Payne’s Super-Sekrit Clubhouse has a new interview with my Write Club peep Angela Slatter, which should give you a pretty good insight into why I usually use words like “awesome” and “inimitable” when discussing both her and her writing.

Angela remains one of those folks who fuses talent, hardworking dilligance and bucket-loads of smarts in her approach to writing (although she’ll refute the latter with Simpson’s referenes, giving half a chance). She speaks wisdom and her writing is good – so go read about her now, while she’s still an ’emerging writer’, and then  you can join me in the nodding and looking smug when people start talking about how this awesome new ’emerged’ writer in the years to come.

And if you don’t, well, I’ll mock you -with a very mocking mock – because that’s the kind of guy I am.

Okay, back to the entry. Or, to put it another way, a Cold Cases update

It appears that if you past your writing progress in the forms of Lord of the Rings references they become a lot more palatable in this newfangled world of social interactivity, so allow me to adapt from one of yesterday’s twitters/facebook updates and say this: I walk, I walk some more, there is a swampy bit, and I keep reminding myself that if I keep walking I should be hitting Mordor in the near future and tossing the deadly weight of the unending draft of doom into the volcano (and I’ll stop the metaphor there, of course, because the next step would be talking about tonight’s Write Club and I suspect any attempt to position Angela Slatter as the metaphorical Samwise Gamgee in the process would result in some form of bodily injury. Although it also reminds I should do a post about the psychology of write-club once I’m done with the novella).

In less fancy terms, the update goes something like this: rewriting continues, two more chapters got added, and I’m within striking distance of hitting the end. I don’t like the book at this point, but that’s kind of natural in the writing process. After all, I’ve just spent five days looking at it and focusing on the things that are wrong wrong wrong and nothing seems to be working. And the weight of it keeps dragging at my attention, reducing the world down to words and more words and more words, with the occasional break for food and sleep.

Every now and then I take a break and re-read a fragment of an old nanowrimo peptalk:

“The last novel I wrote (it was ANANSI BOYS, in case you were wondering) when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book and write something else instead, or perhaps I could abandon the book and take up a new life as a landscape gardener, bank-robber, short-order cook or marine biologist. And instead of sympathising or agreeing with me, or blasting me forward with a wave of enthusiasm—or even arguing with me—she simply said, suspiciously cheerfully, “Oh, you’re at that part of the book, are you?”

I was shocked. “You mean I’ve done this before?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Not really.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “You do this every time you write a novel. But so do all my other clients.”

I didn’t even get to feel unique in my despair.

So I put down the phone and drove down to the coffee house in which I was writing the book, filled my pen and carried on writing.

One word after another.”

I suspect it’s all about tension at this point – a fight between fixing the longer structural problems “this story makes no sense” rather than the short-terms problems like “this scene has too little tension” or “why do I keep setting things inside cars” or “wait, wasn’t it daylight when I started this scene?” In short, there is much to do, and the evil writer brain wants to tackle them all in an omnivorous burst. The spokesbear tells me to go scene by scene and trust in the process.

As usual, the spokesbear is smarter than I am.