I went to Clarion South with Chris two and a half years ago. He’s a smart man, very interested in things, and on something of a roll of late as far as publications and sales go. Over the last week Chris started distilling some of the major lessons we learned during the workshop into a series of very short, controlled blog posts. Given his terse nature, these are short and easy to digest, and they’re basically the high points of the workshop in collected form (and since he doesn’t believing in tagging posts, I’ll send you straight to the first entry and let you follow along from there).
2) Philip Pullman on How to Write a Book
This amuses me in its accuracy.
3) Reviewage andPimpage
– My comrade-in-writing Ben Francisco – and the first man to tell me “this should be a novella” – engages in some Horn Pimpage on my behalf
– The Fix diggs my story Clockwork, Patchwork, and Ravens which appeared in Apex Magazine back in May
– The Internet Review of Science Fiction describes On the Destruction of Copenhage…as “mundane surrealism.”
A very short-but-interesting post from Elizabeth Bear on the re-writing process, showing the evolution of a paragraph through multiple layers of revision.
5) My Projects
Man, the last week has been all about the new projects. I started the new novel draft, started revision of another project, started preparing for the next draft of Claw, agreed to do some work for Gen Con Australia, and tentatively agreed to take on another project I cannot yet talk about. I also ticked another entry off the 80-point-plan of awesome, making my year 3.75% awesome. If you see me looking wild-eyed this week, it’s not because I’m stressed – I’m just learning to cope with an opportunity-rich environment again 🙂
6) Oh, hell, let’s cap it off with a youtube clip
Because I’m far to fascinated by this film-clip at the moment.
I love a good cover version, especially when the artist finds a new spin. You could say it feeds directly into my own impulses to mash genres together and see what results, but musicians tend to be somewhat cooler in their experimentation. To whit, 6 cover versions I think everyone should listen to at least once:
If you’d prefer not to listen to the youtube playlist, I’ve broken ’em down one-by-one below.
There’s a strong possibility that the pang of pure melancholy I feel when I hear the opening guitar notes to the Paradise Motel’s Flight Paths album is a pure Pavlovian response to one of those albums that served as a soundtrack for three or four straight years of my life, and the real centerpiece of the album is the cover of the Car’s Drive. The Paradise Motel take what was a minor pop hit, slow it the fuck down, and imbue it with the kind of sorrow that’d have a small passel of emo kids huddled in a corner wondering why one needs guitars and black hair in order to appear miserable. No youtube clip for this one (correction; there’s now one linked above), but if you listen real carefully you can hear in the soundtrack of the He Died With a Felafel in His Hand movie (speaking of which, why don’t I own a copy of that film yet? Seriously?) or get lucky if you spend enough time poking around Last FM.
There is some crazy kind of power in taking hideously poppy songs and slowing them down, discovering the sadness in them. The Paradise Motel does it above, the oft-mentioned Mad World cover from Donnie Darko does it as well, but none of it takes something quite as crazy as Beyonce and achieves the same affect as Antony on the Johnstons.
I’m a sucker for the Dresden Dolls and they have a wide variety of very mighty covers out there, including Black Sabbath (War Pigs) and their version of Pretty In Pink, but their live DVD made me a huge fan of this Carol King cover. Largely, for once, thanks to the awesomeness that is Brian Viglione. Much as I love the Amanda-Fucking-Palmer solo stuff, I find myself missing the male half of the Dresden Dolls more and more. I think it’s the facial expression that make this song.
Somewhere along the line I became a Herd fan, and they’d become the band I’ve seen more often than any other. I’m not sure when that happened. I’m pretty sure this one will be lost on people who aren’t Australian and therefore missed the Red Gum original, and I know plenty of people who are all “ooo, sacrilege” that a hip-hop group has covered what is essentially one of the best-known Aussie protest songs, but when you see this being performed it starts making total sense that it needed to be covered and the Herd needed to do it.
Let me make something clear: I don’t like Cold Chisel. Not ironically, not unironically, not even a little. I have sung along to Khe Sanh only once in my lifetime (this is, in the eyes of many people I know, as un-Australian as you can get), and that was when I saw someone doing it as a cover. It’s not that Cold Chisel can’t write an okay song (Don Walker teamed with Tex Perkin’s is a musical combination that’s truly droolworthy), it’s just that Jimmy Barnes’ voice gives me the shits. Then Sarah Blasco comes along and does a nice, gentle cover of Flame Trees and I’m hooked.
A few years back Tori Amos put together a covers album called Strange Little Girls, built up around the concept of singing songs traditionally associated with men and seeing what happened when a woman sang it. It’s an impressive album, one of my favorites, but I think Nina Gordon’s cover of NWA’s Straight Outta Compton takes the cake when it comes to recontextualizing songs by the gender of the performer.
Honorable Mentions: Smells Like Teen Spirit, Tori Amos (good, but slipped out of contention due to much repetition and too many Tori Amos covers); Come As You Are, The Charlie Hunter Trio (Someone, somewhere, is spinning in their grave); Crazy Mary, Pearl Jam (woulda made the list, but so close to the original Victoria Williams Song); Ziggy Stardust, Bauhaus (see above, plus one day a bunch of goths will argue about who is sexier while performing this song – Bowie or Peter Murphy – and it will result in the end of the world); Love Will Tear Us Apart, Nouvelle Vague ( actually, they should be on the list above, but I ended up listing their entire catalogue of covers and couldn’t pick a favourite); actually, even now I need two spots for Nouvelle Vague, cause Too Drunk to Fuck has to be on the lists somewhere (really, French women channeling Jello Biafra to bossa nova? Sign me up – it’s the stuff of awesome).
Feel free to feed my cover-version addiction and tell me what I missed 🙂
I’ve been all words, words, words this week, resulting in big long posts both here and elsewhere, so today I’m aiming for short and brief. Lots of getting in, doing the pimpery, and getting out. And this time it’s not all about me, just like, two thirds about me. You know how it is.
A project set up by Laura E. Goodin, a friend from Clarion and fellow believer in the power of the middle initial, to deliver readings by Illawarra’s established and emerging science fiction, horror, and fantasy authors. Laura is one of those folks whose not content to be contained as far as her creative ambitions, so she’s managing this while simultaneously picking up momentum as a short story writer and playwright (with, I suspect, a host of novels getting written as well). I get tired just reading her blog and trying to keep up with her various projects, especially given her propensity for making them all work. The first three installments of Outlandish Voices (featuring readings by the Rob Hood, Cat Sparks, and Richard Harland, a trio of writers with some pretty damn impressive credentials) are online now and there’s more to come.
The Stuff of Glee: Horn Reviews
Two reviews hit the world in recent weeks. One from Genrereviews, which (quite-rightly) says some awesome things about the cover art before kicking on to the discuss the story. My favorite bits, excerpted:
The other review was in the Courier Mail courtesy of Jason Nahrung two weeks ago (I was slow on the uptake that weekend) and doesn’t seem to have migrated online yet, but there’s a good selection of excerpts over on Girliejones’ blog. And to borrow a phrase from my redoubtable publisher: Copies of Horn are available from Twelfth Planet Press, Pulp Fiction in Brisbane, and Fantastic Planet in Perth.
Updates: Awesome
So here’s the thing about my plans to awesomeify my year – I’m kinda hesitant to blog about it, in specifics or in general, because I’m assuming it’s very uninteresting to watch from the outside and lots of it will come off like bad self-help book cliches when I try to pin the process down and put it into words. And none of it is big, life-changing stuff – I’m not trying to reach Kathmandu or walk around Australia for charity. I’m just trying to put together the life I want to live as best I can, and that largely comes down to pretty basic stuff (write more, read more, spend more time with friends). The list is mostly about reconfiguring mental processes, reminding me to compartmentalise bad stuff until I can do something about it, and prompting me to do more rather than endlessly fritter away time on the internet. It’s about doing things that scare me a little, which is why the Spokesbear finally made it onto the site (if you look at the bio, you’ll notice I’ve been threatening to post pictures of the bear since I started petermball.com – it just took nine months or so to work myself up to it).
This week I’ve read a lot. And I’ve danced around the house a lot too. This, by me, is awesome. I got interested in stuff again – discussions, books, music, ideas – rather than falling back on the stuff I already know. Somewhere along the line, probably during the PhD and the “comfort food” binging after my life went kablooie (twice) over the last few years, I fell into a heavy groove of repetition – the same bands, the same books, the same jobs. New stuff went in, but slowl, and often it’d just become part of the groove again. I’d see new films, for example, but only if they seemed like they’d produce a similar feel to something I’ve already seen.
So this week I read new books. I listened to albums I haven’t heard in over five years. If I hadn’t signed up for a media fast over August (no TV or film), I would have gone and rented a bunch of films that looked like they weren’t my cup of tea. I tried to be interested in stuff again, even if it wasn’t my thing. And here’s the interesting side-effect of that: I think, for the first time in ages, I can actually look at my week and say “yeah, I did enough.” For someone who never feels like I’m doing enough to be productive, that’s fairly huge.
