Oh dear god the world’s gone crazy and we’re all doomed

Sometimes the World is Just a Three-Minute Sex Pistol’s Song

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , , , , ,

Last night I started reading Laura van den Berg’s short story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us,  which became one of those books that you start reading at a reasonable hour and stop reading in the wee hours of the morning, many hours after you planned on going to sleep.

It’s not simply that it’s a good book, more that it’s fiction that’s brushed with that touch of magic that great short stories are capable – brief and delicate and surprising and altogether beautiful. Not quite fantasy stories, but certainly on that strange intersection of literary and almost-fantasy-but-mostly-weird where all sorts of interesting things happen.

It reminds me very much of reading Miranda July’s short story collection for the first time, or the peculiar rewriting of the familiar that comes from your first exposure to Kelly Link.

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I may be a little scarce online this week. I’m trying not to be, of course, but the Third Edition of the Mutants and Masterminds roleplaying game landed in my mailbox over the weekend and that means the next week or so will be a frenzy of updating my old superhero campaign notes and preparing for the resumption of the superhero game I’m playing with some friend on Thursday nights (temporarily on hold due to teaching commitments).

Yes, this is quite possibly the geekiest thing I’ve ever put on my blog, but it’s not like that should come as a surprise to anyone. I am, after all, a huge freakin’ nerd and roleplaying games where I get to create my own superhero universe from scratch are my kryptonite.

If you need me, odds are I’ll be over in the corner of my office, giggling to myself while I try to figure out how many ranks of fighting and agility guys named Shadow Boxer and Archon should have while Justice League: Umlimited is on the television in the background.

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I found todays post on unemployment and the creation of a perpetual youth underclass on Tiger Beatdown kind of fascinating, especially since it touches on the same issues that were brought up by an Alain de Botton talk that I saw on (I think) TED some time last year.

The gist of Botton’s talk went something like this: the idea of living in a meritocracy is actually kind of terrifying, because if you’re being rewarded for your hard work and achievements, what does that mean when you fail? The shadowy side of a merit-driven culture is that those people on the bottom have only got themselves to blame.

I gather the ideas are explored in further depth in his book , which I’m probably going to unearth from my to-read pile now that I’ve been reminded of its existence.

It’s never really been a secret that these kinds of issues were going to become a problem, culturally speaking. Graying populations, massive changes in the marketplace, the class divides growing wider and wider – this things have been occurring for the better part of my lifetime and the solutions proposed have been stop-gap at best.

For all that SF have moved away from its tropes, these kinds of issues suggest it’s still a cyberpunk kind of future we’re facing.

Lost at Uni & Sad News about Clarion South

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , ,

Yesterday I taught my first tutorial at the University of Queensland. Quite fortunately, no-one threw things, and I started to remember all the things I actually quite like about teaching and talking to aspiring writers.

I’d never really been to UQ before this. I visited once or twice about fifteen years ago, back when I was trying to work out where I was going to go to university and UQ was my more-or-less second choice due to the lack of an actual undergraduate writing program and my parents informing me that I’d spend my first year living in an all-boys Christian college. I went back once again for a friend’s art show, but that only required me to find a building very close to the car park, right on the outskirts on the campus. Apart from that, it was unfamiliar territory.

Turns out it’s quite big, and they’re very fond of stonework. Also, when printed, the campus maps have very titchy numbers that are hard to read after dark.

I made it to the initial meeting okay, whereupon I met with the other tutors and lecturers, and I got to follow them to the lecture theater, and then I could more or less follow a cloud of students to the class. It wasn’t until after the first class, when I said man, I’ve only got an hour between the end of the dayjob and tomorrow’s tute, I should probably figure out where it is now to save time that things became a problem.

I checked my map. I figured out where I was. I traced the path with my finger, using those landmarks I knew to figure out where to turn. It all looked very simple, so I set out full of confidence and  energy.

An our later I was lost and taking wrong turns, keeping a wary eye out for roaming minotaurs, while the skies merrily opened up and dumped rain on the campus.

Eventually I found my way out, drove home, ate take-out food, and wrote five hundred words before crashing into a comatose slumber.

I have to find the same tutorial room again today. If you don’t hear from me over the weekend, assume I’m wandering the campus , subsisting on vending machine chocolate. Or that the minotaur finally caught up with me, ’cause I’m pretty sure they’ve got one.

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Today the word went out that Clarion South was on indefinite hold, largely due to the loss of an affordable venue that could hold a motley crew of seventeen aspiring SF writers for six straight weeks. The full story has been posted on the Clarion South website and the vast majority of the Australian speculative fiction email lists, should you be interested in the details.

To say this is a loss to Australian SF is something of an understatement.

I count Clarion South as one of the single most useful things I ever did as a writer, largely because it’s relatively easy to find resources that will tell you how to write better, but significantly harder to find places that will give you good advice on how to be a writer.

Which is not to say that Clarion South won’t make you better at writing – it will – but for me the true value of the experience came from being exposed to six writers, all of them either neo-pro or pro, and finding out how they approached their careers.

And it came from being around seventeen other writers who were determined to move their career forwards, writing every day and cheering each other on, many of whom I’m still chatting with every week and cheering on as best I can in my own grumpy way.

For someone who’d been tucked away in the academic system up to that point, working in creative programs, it was the kind of revelation I needed to get me working and moving forwards.

Chris Lynch has recently posted a list of publications and other achievements my Clarion South year has achieved in the last four years, and it includes over 170 short stories, plays, poems, novellas, award nominations, and other entries. Which, when you consider that 3 of the seventeen attendees don’t have entries for various reasons, averages out at a whole bunch of work being put together and submitted.

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.