Claw

Posts of a Random Sleep-Zombie

PETERMBALL Journal , , , , , , ,

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.”

Heading off for a few days

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , ,

I’m preparing to decamp to the Gold Coast and hang out with my parents for a few days, which is a process that would probably go a lot better if I hadn’t just spent an hour drinking my morning coffee and checking my RSS feeds on the internets. On the other hand, the more internets I get out of my system now, the less time I spend wasting my parent’s bandwidth.

I’ve also been deploying kitchen timers and to-do lists this week, which is slowly starting to make a difference when it comes to getting things done. I’m yet to actually finish a to-do list, mind, but I’m usually averaging five or six things on a list of ten goals for the day. I’m still debating whether the timer is going with me to the Gold Coast or not; in theory I’ll be spending the bulk of my time down there doing a rewrite on the sparse first-quarter of Claw (which is messy and needs to be rewritten in order for me to figure out the dreaded what-happens-next) and rewriting isn’t an activity that I do in timed increments due to the concentration required.

On the plus side, Claw has grown. I’ve managed to average about a thousand words a day for the last week, gotten some non-Clawwriting done on the side, and generally started to get my shit together on the writing front. My main concern for the next few days is actually finding ways to thin the story down a little so I don’t blow out the wordcount horribly – I’m about two-thousand words over where I wanted to be at this point, and I’m only a quarter done.
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Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 7
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 10/30
Rejections in 2010: 21/100
Claw Word Count (Finish Date: 15th November)
 

Musings

PETERMBALL Journal , ,

Today is wet and dreary and therefore full of awesome. I’m always far fonder of the world when it’s overcast and dreary than I am during the sunny days, especially now that it’s spring and the demolition-force humidity and heat of Summer are just on the horizon. I am steadily ignoring the fact that there are multiple breeds of football dominating the airwaves at the moment and pretending the rest of the world has gone away for a while. It’s always easier to write on such days, although I’ll admit that I miss the comfort of having another cup of coffee and watching the world through my office window.

Soon I will head off and make myself some soup.

Until then I will sit and think about Claw, which is proving to be unruly and hard-to-tame due to my insistence on a) not repeating the opening tropes that were used in Horn and Claw; and b) my desire to make use of the supporting cast from the previous two novellas, thus adding to the already considerable backstory-baggage that Aster already carries around with her. I try to calm myself with the thought that it will all be okay once the first corpse is onstage, but this is a lie. Once the corpse arrives, I will simply have a different set of narrative problems to puzzle my way through. And if I write another 400 words on Claw this evening, I can spend a few hours thinking about Black Candy and getting a thousand words done on that. After which, if I’m lucky, I’ll have time to get some short story work done before I slumber.

And really, this is the way days should be.

Although I wouldn’t complain if I started figuring out how to make these stories and novellas and novels work a little faster.
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Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 1
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 10/30
Rejections in 2010: 21/100
Claw Word Count (Finish Date: 15th November)