Pimp

The Writer in a Silly Hat

PETERMBALL Journal , , , , , , ,

I was given a particularly silly hat for Christmas, and the first thing my mother said was oh god, it’ll be up on his blog by tomorrow morning. My mother is a wise woman, but she failed to take into account the delays inevitably caused by moving house and cleaning and the other minutia of the last few weeks. Not that she’s wrong about me posting a picture here, just the time frame:

Best. Present. Ever.

The hat came about because my sister buggered off to Nepal a few months back, planning on walking to the base camp of Everest, and asked if there was anything I wanted. Usually when my sister goes places I shrug and mumble something non-committal and end up with a motley array of t-shirts when she returns, but Tibet proved to be a special case. “You know what?” I said, “I’d really dig a sherpa hat.”

The fact that she found one with its own woolly Mohawk is really just a bonus, even if she spent the entire trip with people asking her if she actually liked her brother. Now I just need winter to roll around so everyone shall know me by my resplendent blue-green headware of awesomeness. 

Until Winter, I shall content myself with writing and admiring said headware on the noggin of the Spokesbear.

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I am, officially, relocated to a new domicile and deadline free.

The new place features somewhat tighter quarters than I’m used to, what with cramming pretty much everything I own into the one room. I’m somewhat amazed that *exactly the same bookcase* appears in the background of webcam shots despite the relocation, because apparently it’s that bookcase’s destiny to be set up opposite my computer in every place I live.

It’s also, coincidently enough, a brand new year. I don’t do resolutions and such, but I do have some plans for 2012. Not big plans, admittedly, but there’s a fairly well-sketched plan of things I’d like to write and things I’d like to read and a single credo – no damn deadlines for the first six months – dominating my approach. The first thing I’m working on are a handful of stories – mostly so I can kick the writer-brain into shape again – after which I’m disappearing back into novella land for a while.

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I caught up with the inimitable Angela Slatter at a friends birthday party recently, and she mentioned that the Lair of the Doctor’s Brain project she’d been working on with her co-brain, L.L. Hannett, was ready to launch. I’ve been eagerly waiting for this series to hit the blogosphere for months now and it doesn’t disappoint – they’ve started big with an interview with China Miéville and a series of illustrations from Kathleen Jennings.

I’m also pretty sure that every aspiring writer in the known universe has linked to this by now, but I’m nothing if I’m not a joiner: Chuck Wendig’s 25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing (Right Fucking Now) is pretty damn spiffy. And, you know, full of smart advice in amid the swearing, as is so often the case with Wendig’s work.

And since I’m feeling a bit grumpy that the Dresden Dolls are touring and I’m not going to their Brisbane concert tomorrow night, I’ll going to link to their cover of War Pigs and say, well, fuck, go listen. It’s pretty damn rare that I actually want to go to concerts these days, what with the crowds and the young people and the drinks you have to take out a mortgage to afford, but dammit, I really wanted to go to this one and that clip is one of the reasons why.

-sigh-

Ah well, I should probably be writing things anyway.

Things I wrote doing stuff out in the world

PETERMBALL News & Upcoming Events

I’ve been meaning to drop past and blog a few things for the last couple of days, but my times largely been taking up by packing and writing and desperately trying to reach the pre-moving deadlines, and so most of this is old news to anyone following me on twitter or facebook.

In any case, my story Dying Young from Eclipse 4 has been selected to be part of Gardner Dozois’ Years Best Science Fiction athology due out next year, which means I can go scratch another thing off the big ol’ list of places I’d like to get published but rarely talk about. There’s a full ToC over on SF Signal, and it looks like a very cool book to be included in.

I should also mention that my story, The Girl in the Next Room is Crying Again, is online over at Daily Science Fiction so that those who don’t want to subscribe can go check it out.

And with that I’m going back to the words and the packing. One of the stories that absolutely must be done before I move is finally done, which means I’ve got about thousand words between me and finishing everything I’ve got due by the end of the year.

Mostly About Things I’ve Read Online

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , , ,

I met Laura Goodin several years ago at a writers workshop. She was forthrightly American in many ways, despite being expatriated to Australia for several years now, and we frequently found ourselves coming from stories at very different angles. Despite her handicap as a non-native Australian, she wrote one of the finest SF cricket stories I’ve ever had the privilege of reading. Since then she’s been busy doing a series of impressive things – writing plays and opera’s, for example, and enrolling in PhD programs. She’s also published a story over on daily science fiction titled The Bicycle Rebellion and it’s rather sad in a sweet kind of way, and it’s perhaps one of the more intriguing stories I’ve seen from Laura over the years (which, considering her knack of publishing SF stories about Demon-pigs in BBQs and Futurism gone mad in magazines that don’t generally publish science fiction, is saying something).

I first met Angela Slatter about…well, six weeks or so before I met Laura Goodin…but after years of blogging about Write Club I’m assuming I don’t need to provide a great deal of context for Angela. She’s awesome, she writes remarkable things, and among the remarkable things she’s written is the latest editorial for the Weird Fiction Review. And if you were sitting around, wondering what to do with your holidays, you could do a lot worse than checking out said editorial, As the Weird Turns, and using it as a suggest reading list for the next month.

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There’s ten days until I move house. There’s still several rooms that need to be packed. I also have two deadlines between now and then. I suspect I’m going to keep mentioning this out loud, since it’ll remind me that I should probably go write the things I need to write in order to meet said deadlines.

It’ll also remind me to never again schedule deadlines and the relocation of everything I own in the same month. Especially when that month is December.

There is no cheer or good humour in me today. I’ve spent most of my time sporting this facial expression:

I Hate Everything