Fiction

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‘Tis a busy type of day today, so I’m going to just ramble on about things for the breif period I’ll be home between the first dayjob and the second. Plus there are several workmen helpfully digging up the road out the front of my house, ostensibly to lay down something or other involving pipes large enough to crawl through, which inevitably means my power or my internet or my phone line will go out at some point in the very near future.

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On the list of conversations I never expected to have with my father, the one that starts with do you have any Warhammer 40k novels I could borrow? is pretty damn high on the list. I also never expected the answer to be yes, but you can’t borrow them right now, but you can have the short story anthologies if you like. Yet, somehow, we had that conversation yesterday, and my copies of Tales of the Heresy and Let the Galaxy Burn are bundled together so I can hand them over next time I see him. He can have the novels in April, after I’m done reading them and making notes for the next interview I’m doing for Auscon.

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I threw out a lot of words yesterday. It started with all 2,311 that I wrote in Tuesday’s write-club and ended with the 8,000 or so words that I’d put together for the great-lovecraftian-ghoul-swashbuckley-wahoo! novel draft since the beginning of the month. Instantly all the Sturm und Drang of the last few days went away, and I could finally figure out how to write things that I didn’t actively dislike while I was writing them. They may not be great, but the out-of-control feeling that’s accompanied the act of writing seems to have abated a little.

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A happy birthday for the Galactic Suburbia crew, who just had their celebration to mark one year of podcasting. I’ve been listening less regularly these days, primarily because the dayjob eats time that I used to spend drinking coffee and pondering the state of SF, but I still make a point of catching up with GS when the opportunity presents itself. I recommend listening to the current episode with cake nearby, otherwise you may find yourself pausing the podcast to bake.

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I’ve started a new undertaking – reading the entirety of Federico Lorca’s The Poet in New York aloud, a few poems at a time. I’d forgotten how much I liked Lorca’s poetry – the last time I read him was back in, gods, 1999 or so, back when I was doing my honours thesis in poetics. After I’m done I’ve got his essay, In Search of Duende, to keep me company, but I suspect it’ll be a week or two until I finally get around to it.

These are the kinds of things you do, when you don’t have a television to amuse yourself in the evenings when the writing’s done.

Bookshelves, Write Club, and Interesting Things Said About Cities

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I wasn’t going to spam you with dodgy phone-camera records of the Great Bookshelf Reorganisation of 2011, but I got a phone-call from my dad and at some point he asked for an update, and I like my dad enough that I’m going to oblige him.

The photograph above contains the first seven shelves of the reorganisation – top left is the brag shelf, the first two on the right are the selected nonfiction shelves, and the rest are just books by writers that remind me why I wanted to be a writer in the first place. The vast majority of books on those shelves were written by about a dozen authors, and in a year I’ll have to reorganise the whole thing because many of them are still releasing books.

I’m still not entirely sure what to do with the bottom shelves, though. I tend to fill bookcases based on a theme, but bottom shelves ruin that by being the place where no-one (well, me) goes looking for things. It’s usually where I hide folders and old RPG  books and other stuff that doesn’t get used terribly often.

That isn’t going to work this time around.

I suspect the bottom right will  be given over to art-books and comics and really big hardcovers, although I’m not entirely sure I have enough of them to make an entire shelve work because it’s a deceptively large amount of space that’s also very narrow. The bottom left may remain a haven for folders, should I figure out a way to keep them looking neat.

Tonight I start work on the noir and pulp bookshelf, then figure out where I’m planning on putting the rapidly growing pile of YA novels and short story anthologies in my collection.

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Last night there was write-club with Angela Slatter, who is normally there, and Kathleen Jennings, who is one of the new write-club recruits that we keep forgetting to talk about. As befits the write-club tradition ate chilli and drank coffee and put  a dent in the chocolate supply while nattering about writing.

Not a large dent, since more people means more chocolate, and the uneaten candy will now sit around the house tempting me until the next write club.

Somewhere amid all that we admired Kathleen’s home-made paper doll that can be eaten by butterflies (she’s giving away prints to those who donate to the various natural disaster recover funds), Angela found her books sitting next to my Kim Newman collection on the bookshelves and was summarily pleased by the location, and we sat down and wrote a couple of thousand words apiece.

All in all, it was a pleasant kind of evening, and a short story that’s been plaguing me for the last month finally snapped into focus and became writable.

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There’s a fascinating and brilliant interview with China Miéville over at the BLDGBlog that covers the use of cities in his work and the way inhabiting a space changes it. There’s something endlessly fascinating about the intensity with which Miéville approaches things like this; the way he thinks about genre and narrative, drawing inspiration from academic theory without being bogged down with it, is phenomenal. If he’d been around back when I was an undergraduate, it’s entirely possible I would have paid more attention in University.

The Great Bookshelf Reorganising of 2011

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Reorganised Bookshelf

On Saturday night, around 4 am, I started reorganising bookshelves. It seemed like the thing to do, since I’d been studiously not-sleeping for five hours after going to bed.

Bookcases are one of the places where mess accumulates in my flat, largely because there’s so many of the damn things and I’ve developed a bad habit of taking things down, reading a couple of paragraphs, then putting them back somewhere else. What starts as a workable system quickly devolves over time, and every couple of years I have to start from scratch and reorganize the entire system.

The whole process tends to start around 4 AM, ’cause insomnia is my response to doing to much and thinking too much and generally feeling like things are out of control. Reordering shelves is my way of figuring out what is and isn’t important in my life, and everything goes on from there. It’s a mental reset, fighting back against my natural tendency towards entropy.

So far I’ve got two shelves down. There are many, many more to go.

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I mention this primarily because my friend Alan, and possibly my dad, were interested in knowing when the issue of Weird Tales with my story in it was available. And it now seems as though Weird Tales #357 is out in the world, and when all your friends are Lovecraft geeks this is about as cool as it gets.

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This has been doing the rounds of twitter and facebook recently, but for those behind the curve: a guy tries to sell “a story to topple Star Wars and Harry Potter” on ebay with a starting bid of $3,000,000.

There’s also a pretty good take-down of his sales pitch over at Bleeding Cool, but essentially what’s going on  is a new iteration of an old conversation that goes something along the lines of “oh, wow, you’re a writer? I’ve got a great idea, let me sell it to you and we can split the money it earns once you’ve written it.”

For those of you out there with a great idea: please don’t do this. It irritates writers and perpetuates the myth that ideas are somehow all it takes, rather than work and persistence and the occasional stroke of luck

Most writers will reply with something along the lines of “ah-huh, great, but I’m a little busy right now,” after which the writer walks away and mock you with their writer-friends, who understand that ideas are the cheap part of the equation and worth very little until someone builds a book/movie around them.

When you try to sell your idea on ebay for large sums of money, it just means you’ll be mocked in public. The internets are like that, sometimes. So are writers, really. I suspect we’re subconsciously bitter about the fact that our career is so frequently undervalued, both socially and monetarily, that the three million asking price is like a red cape to a bull.

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I tweeted this a little earlier this morning, largely ’cause I suspect there’s more gamers following my twitter/facebook feeds than there are following this blog, but just in case I’m wrong: RPGnow is raising funds for the NZ Earthquake victims. Folks who donate $20 get a bundle of over $320 RPG/gaming  ebooks donated by gaming publishers.

This is, as they say, a good cause worth supporting and the RPG ebook community has been very successful with such things in the past (and a tip of the hat to Melinda, who comments here occasionally, for giving me the heads up).