The tenth rejection of the year came in this morning. After doing some quick research and resending the story, I went in to update my submission tracker (hint number one for writers: always update your submission tracker. Yes, right now). Then I spent about an hour making this face at the computer: Afterwards I went […]
Peter sits at the table, trying to work. He is grumpy and irritable after being woken two hours early by a deranged cat yowling at the bedroom door. The Cat jumps on the table and sits on the computer keyboard. Peter moves The Cat. Peter: What do you want, cat? The Cat: Feed me, mortal. […]
Last night, because Jason Fischer is a bad influence, I wrote out the notes for a Blaxploitation-esque story set in the 70’s version of the Miriam Aster universe. I then put it away because I realised there’s absolutely no way of writing it without being horribly offensive or utterly driven by pastiche. Such are the dangers […]
Today I’m having a running conversation with my brain where I say “time to work now, buddy” and the brain says “dude, you’ve taken industrial strength antihistamines, why don’t you just sod off and let me sleep, yeah?” Fortunately I once spent three or four years living with a girlfriend who had cats, so I […]
I’ve been writing a sequel to Horn, one way or another, since February 6 of 2009. I suspect I’d started even earlier than that with ideas scribbled down in notebooks and such, but Feb 6 is the first time it migrated to a computer file that’s usually the start of my writing process. Since then […]
Last night I braved the outside world and joined Trent Jamieson and Chris Lynch to talk about SF as part of the QUT Informational Professionals Alumni Chapter’s Bookclub, which was an enormous amount of fun given the books we were discussing (the fact that I’m a nerdy bibliophile who rather enjoys chatting about books didn’t […]
And lo, what a difference a few days makes. Today I have run out of steam on the deathmarch. My eyes hurt, my brain hurts, I’m altogether skittish about going near the keyboard. The very act of writing a blogpost seems daunting, since it’s the thing between me and getting back to work. If I […]
Man, it’s been one of those weeks. You know the ones – you make a mistake early one, a really dumb one that was easily preventable if you’d had half-a-brain, and by Friday afternoon you’re at the bottom of a tailspin from hell where the world is a single chaotic mess and you get deep […]
Okay, to start with, Michael Moorcock talks about the genesis of the Dorian Hawkmoon books over at the Tor site. I mean, seriously, why are you still here? Also, Twelfth Planet Press has released the guidelines for their forthcoming Speakeasy anthology full of urban fantasy stories set in the 1920s. I totally dig the idea of […]
1) Whip It I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a blog post-reviewy thing about Whip It for about two weeks now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just not going to happen. Not because I think it’s a bad film – it’s utterly charming in its ability to recognise that something […]
My process, an overview: start a new story; write eight hundred words; start another new story; write three hundred words; think “fuck, I really do need to finish a novel”; make revision notes for Black Candy; realise Black Candy is horribly flawed and wonder if starting a new novel will be easier; write a hundred […]
So last week I started working on a story about a man with a birdcage full or sparrows instead in of a heart and the question of what happens when you swap out the sparrows for something else. It ends badly (because it’s one of my stories and they almost always end badly), and there is […]
