Fiction

Storms & Minotaurs & OMG, Sleep

PETERMBALL Journal , , , , ,

You know how you're writing a story about the end of the world?

On the evening of my dad’s sixtieth birthday we were all sitting on the thirteenth floor balcony while a storm rolled in. If we were in a movie the rapidly moving sheet of clouds would have been the special effect that signified the end of the world is nigh, so we all unearthed our mobile phones and digital cameras to take photographs.

About fifteen minutes before I took the  shaky, blurred mobile photo featured in this post the view from the thirteenth floor was all clear skies and blue ocean, and it was pretty enough that even my jaded-towards-beaches approach to life acknowledged that it was a pretty good place to celebrate someone turning sixty.

I gave my dad a book – the Collected Stories of Gabriel Garcia Marques, ’cause everyone should read A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings – and a CD/DVD of Leonard Cohen’s 2009 tour ’cause we were meant to go to Cohen’s show last year, but dad’s heart-attack derailed those plans. Then the family collaborated to get him a kindle, ’cause it seems the thing to get a man whose using retirement to catch up on reading. Given my dad’s taste in fiction, and the existence of Project Gutenberg, he may never have to buy a book again.

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The inimitable Jason Fischer released a free ebook version of his story House of the Nameless, which won one of the quarterly contests in the Writers of the Future competition and scored him both publication and a trip to California to further workshop his writing skills.

A dinner at a minotaur’s house brings an unwelcome intruder. Raoul Mithras, a godling both old and new, is forced to pursue an old foe across a surreal landscape, hoping to prevent the awakening of the One-Way-World – if he is not destroyed first.

So yes, free e-book goodness, distributed to familiarize people with his work prior to the Ditmar vote closing since the Writers of the Future anthologies are hard to find in the Land of Oz. Hopefully, if enough people download it, he’ll put the rest of his Raoul stories online as well.

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Last night was a particularly low-key kind of night. I arrived home from work late, I did some paperwork for the second job I’ll be taking up in March, then I proceeded to rearrange my trip to  Swancon due to the fact that the money I’d earn for working the new job that day far outweighs the costs of messing about with re-booking flights and accommodation.

So I’ll be hitting Perth on Friday afternoon  rather than Thursday afternoon, and missing the first eight hours or so of the con, and hopefully I’ll still have the time to catch up with all the people I’d like to catch up with.

After that it was nine o’clock, so I went to bed with a notepad and scribbled Flotsam-y things for a bit, and then I fell asleep. This wasn’t what I’d planned, but tired writer is tired and all that, and I’m trying to get better about managing my sleeping patterns these days.

This afternoon I’ll probably add some more things to the big list of novels I’d like to write, a document that is already far to long given that I’m still working on the first entry, and I’ll rethink my stance on this sleep thing all over again.

Happy Birthday Dad

PETERMBALL Journal , , ,

My father turns Sixty today, so I’m going to take this opportunity to wish him a very Happy Birthday. Given the health problems he had towards the end of last year, turning sixty isn’t something we take for granted in our family anymore.

The rest of my family is already in a resort up on the Sunshine Coast, kicking the celebrations off early. I’m stuck in Brisbane until lunch time, but I’ll be disappearing after my shift at the dayjob this morning to join them.

In theory I’ll attempt to do some writing – I’ve packed Fritz the Laptop – but in practice I expect I’ll be spending time with my dad for the next 48 hours or so. We are, after all, very glad he’s around to spend time with after his  heart surgery last year.

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In totally unrelated news the web version of The Birdcage Heart went live over on the Daily Science Fiction site, for those who weren’t subscribed to the email versions last week.

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The Brisbane summer seems to be making a resurgence this week, assaulting us with the heat and humidity that has long been part of living in the city. This year summer’s been relatively mild, lacking the kind of punishing days where I turn into a puddle on the floor of my apartment, but they’ve made up for it now.

I am not a fan.

Having lived in Queensland my entire life, much of that near the coast in one form or another, I’ve always preferred winter to summer. Summer makes me sluggish and unwilling to work, and the food is generally worse, and I’m not a big fan of shorts.

I’m counting down the days until we’re done with Summer, and I’m dreaming of living somewhere colder.

Not that this is surprising. I do it every year.

Six Thoughts Upon Reading The Maltese Falcon

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , , ,

I started reading The Maltese Falcon yesterday, which is one of those books I’ve been meaning to read forever without getting around to it. I lay the blame entirely on the film, which is awesome and fulfilling in a way that the other big hardboiled-to-noir adaptation* never really manages, and thus makes it easier to excuse the act of reading in favour of another round of Bogart playing Sam Spade.

In any case, after starting to read I had some thoughts. Six of them, to be exact:

1) The more I read hardboiled fiction the more I’m aware of the way it infiltrates our culture, seeping in through other media when we’re not looking. It’s a genre that lends itself to the intertextual, to endless moments of “so that’s where that came from” as you go back and find primary sources. I knew the tropes of noir film long before I came across it’s classic stories, largely because I’d inherited the narrative beats through cartoons that riffed on them, and because they’d been deployment in films like Bladerunner and the early fiction of William Gibson.

2) Noir is a genre of spiritual exhaustion, a kind of precursor to the sense emotionally bankrupt doom that started seeping into the big L literature I was reading in my undergraduate days. Its heroes exist in liminal space – not quite on the straight-and-narrow, not quite down among the criminals – but they’re guided by a kind of self-developed morality and nobility that exists beneath the layer of cynicism (See Sam Spades’ closing monologue in The Maltese Falcon, or the recurring motif of chess and knighthood in Raymond Chandler’s fiction). It’s a desperate morality, sure; tattered and unreliable, but it’s there.

3) Given the two points above, someone has presumably written a book or thesis on postmodernism and the hardboiled detective story. If that’s true, I wish to read it. Also, apropos of nothing, I want someone to write a paper on the influences of Dashiel Hammett’s Sam Spade on the Sparhawk character in David Edding’s Elenium books.

4) Hardboiled fiction written in the third person is weird.

5) The Maltese Falcon may be a classic of the genre, but I’ll throw my weight behind The Thin Man as the best hardboiled story Hammett wrote over the course of his life. Despite my affection for the endless pragmatism of Spade and his emotional engagement with the world, there’s something utterly charming about having two primarily characters who are already married, enjoy one-another’s company, and verbally spar over the course of the book.

6) One of these days I really need to find an Angry Nerd Book Club where I can go be angry, nerdy, and have these types of conversations with other people. I miss talking about books with other people, I think, especially in environments where others understand why people who say “why can’t you just enjoy it instead of picking holes” should be stoned to death with remaindered copies of the Da Vinci Code.

*that’d be The Big Sleep incidentally, which is awesome right up until a point about halfway through, after which it’s just a mess.

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Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 3
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 10/30
Rejections in 2010: 21/100
Claw Word Count (Finish Date: 15th November)
 <– A slightly false metric for the last twenty-four hours, since I’ve hit the point where I can port in scenes from the discarded draft fo the story.