Flotsam

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I’m working late at the dayjob today, having started late under the assumption that driving back from the Sunshine Coast would be a foolhardy undertaking this morning. I’ve had to much good food and not enough sleep, and I’m suffering from the vague ick that comes from sleeping in an overly air-conditioned room.

When I got to work I was told about the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. Every couple of minutes someone plays a youtube clip of the events, or downloads a snippet of news from the internet, or simply sees something new on twitter. Some people have family over there, others were just planning to head over to NZ for a holiday in the near future.

I’ve never been to Christchurch, but I hear it’s nice. I’m starting to suspect that  nature has  it in for the whole southern hemisphere of the planet at the moment.

If you have the resources to do so, it may be a good time to consider donating to the New Zealand Red Cross and similar organizations.

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In happier news, I was paid for a story today. There is nothing like receiving payment for stuff you’ve written to remind you that it really is the best job in the world.

This is important because tonight I’m going to go home, tired and cranky and my lungs filled with air-conditioner induced muck, and I’m going to try and do some more work on Flotsam, and some more work on the novel with the unwieldy title, and some more work on the Black Candy rewrite.

Odds are I’ll be fighting for every new word tonight and I’m going to dislike every minute of it, but the dislike is momentary, and will have more to do with me not yet having a grasp on the projects than anything else.

So, yes, coolest job in the world. I’ll remember this.

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While I was writing this the news came through that there are 65 confirmed dead in Christchurch. Parts of the cathedral and arts center suffered damage. Seriously, consider donating.

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Still reading Moby Dick. It’s still awesome.

Ditmar, Etc

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So about six months ago I won the Best New Talent Ditmar, and I have to admit that I’m rather fond of the trophy. It’s a clean design and it’s got a nice weight to it, and it makes for a nigh-perfect book-end on the brag shelf in my living room. Plus its not made of glass like the Aurealis Award, so it’s somewhat easier to photograph with the camera in my mobile phone.

I didn’t really expect to win it, so it was rather nice when it happened, even if I was so convinced I wouldn’t win that I wandered off to have dinner with friends instead of going to the ceremony. At the time my name was announced, I was tucking into a particularly good hamburger at a nearby restaurant.

Oops.

On the plus side, at least I was surprised.

I mention this for two reasons. The first is that my dad’s health problems hit not long after Worldcon last year, which means I’m not entirely sure I got around to thanking all the people who actually put me on the ballot to begin with and then voted for me. It’s further complicated by the fact that I have no idea who they might have been, ’cause I was quietly believing that no-one actually read what I wrote at the time.

To those people, whoever you were, thank you. The trophy is both shiny and useful and it’s always rather nice when someone says “hey, good job.”

The other reason is so I can mention that the Ditmar awards are fan-run, fan-voted, and fan-nominated and the online nomination forms are over here, plus instructions for doing things the old fashioned way if you’re so inclined.

Should you be stuck on some categories, allow me to throw out some names.

  • Best New Writer: Christopher Green, L. L. Hannett, Thoraiya Dyer
  • Best Collected Work: Angela Slatter’s Sourdough and Other Stories
  • Best Fan Writer: Robert Hood for the Undead Backbrain.

There’s more, of course, but that’s a taste of where my nominations are going. Three brilliant writers, one absolutely gorgeous short fiction collection, and a blog that feeds my love of giant monsters and zombies. You are, of course, encouraged to make up your own mind. Just close your eyes, ask yourself what work you’ve read in 2010 that truly blew your mind, then put the answer in the appropriate spot. It’s actually pretty easy.

And for what it’s worth, I don’t regret the hamburger. It really was amazing.

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The latest issue of the Edge of Propinquity is out, including part 2 of the Flotsam series, Warnings. The brief goes something like this:

Keith Murphy needs information about his boss and the seer Bruce Mim is his best bet for getting it. Unfortunately Mim is one of the Other, native to the Gloom, and a deal must be struck before Keith learns what he needs to know.

Feel free to go read, or go back to the start of the series. Then send scholars who know what they’re talking about to scold me for my blatant mishandling of myth.

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Wait a second. I’m off to make coffee.

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If you haven’t been following Hark, A Vagrant lately I suggest you duck over and take a look at the Young Ada Lovelace comic and the Crazy Nancy Drew valentine’s day sketches. It remains the smartest webcomic I follow at the moment, and the most willing to make the audience work to get the joke. The Ada Lovelace wikipedia page may help, but if you’re anything like me you’re going to finish reading and wonder why no-one has yet done a steampunk story about the unrequited love between Lovelace and Babbage, their passion ultimately thwarted by her vampiric father, Lord Byron.

There’s a reason I don’t mess around with history much when I write. Leave me alone with a wiki for five minutes and I’ll have John Flamsteed prostituting himself to aliens before you know it.

And since I’m on a roll, another link – a while back I used the sneaky back-channel of email to convince my friend Laura Goodin to write a blog post about juggling in response to a post by Seth Godin about juggling. She’s also admitted I was right: A Princess of Mars is complete pants.

It’s also been pointed out that the youtube clip I put into yesterday’s post have some issues playing, so I’ll provide a directly link to the How to Be Alone video and trust you all to defy conventional netwriting wisdom and follow a link purely because I said it’s one of those beautiful pieces everyone should see. Rather than risk embedding a second non-functioning youtube clip I’m also going to post a direct link to a clip of Bad Wine and Lemon Cake, the Jane Austen Argument song that finally broke me and convinced me I could buy MP3s instead of CDs.

My neighbors, of course, have no need to follow the link. They’ve probably been hearing the song bleed through the walls for a week now.

Finally, there may be signs that I will achieve my teenage ambition to be notorious over in the final thirty seconds of the Salon Futura interview with Weird Tales editor Ann VanderMeer. My inner Oscar Wilde is greatly appeased.

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I really did make coffee, btw. I’m also really fond of this particular mug.

Coffee, Keyboard, Thumbtacks, Pizza Voucher

Fists of Steel: Write Club Edition

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Tonight there was write club, which is usually good news for the wordcount. I managed to bang out the first six hundred words of the next Flotsam story (faster than expected), but fell a couple of hundred words short of my goal to finally crack 5,000 words on the great-lovecraftian-ghoul-swashbuckley-wahoo! novel draft. I also tinkered with the Black Candy draft for the first time since starting the gauntlet, working out how it’s going to fit into the daily routine. And because I cannot help myself, I even added a hundred or so words to a short story that I’m resolutely not-writing and will continue not-writing until it magically becomes written.

I absconded from proceedings slightly early because day-job demands rising early and I now turn into a miserable bastard if I’m not in bed by 11 o’clock.

I was already a miserable grump this evening because I got the news that the owners of my flat are planning sell in the near future, and the real estate agents are bringing around potential buyers over the next couple of weeks. This largely means that I need to stay on top of the cleaning (not something I’d planned to do during the gauntlet), start fretting about the finances in case I need to move, and do further fretting about what this may mean if I don’t have to move but the new owners actually plan on listening to the estate agents when they advertise the block as a “renovator’s delight” and actually attempt to renovate. Or, if they’re sensible, knock the entire block down and build something worthwhile on the site.

I mean, my flat is basically a dump, but it’s a dump that’s close to work and relatively cheap for a two-bedroom place in its location (it’d cost me an extra fifty bucks a week to move to any of the one-bedroom places nearby). Plus I’ve been here for three or four years now, which is just long enough for me to settle in and finally get everything unpacked. The only upside to the whole thing is that they appear to be selling the flats as a block, rather than one-by-one as was originally reported, which may well mean investors are more likely to pick the place up than people who want to move in.

And lo, with that, the clock strikes ten to eleven and I must away to slumber.