Recent Reading

Posts of a Random Sleep-Zombie

PETERMBALL Journal , , , , , , ,

Very random attack of insomnia last night, especially since there wasn’t any of the usual triggers that set off my sleeplessness. In the old days I used to welcome such things, since I could just wander off and do other things and sleep in the day afterwards, but I am now a working man with a dayjob that starts in the wee hours, and insomnia has become a thing that I no longer care fore.

Things I should post about today, and would do so in more detail were I not yawning:

– Jason Fischer’s short story collection, Everything is a Graveyard, scheduled for release by Ticonderoga Publications in October 2013. The collection’s slated to revolve around Jason’s post-apocalyptic and zombie-themed work, which is the kind of news that makes me extremely happy, if only because it’d be damn handy to have all those stories in the one place.

– The May issue of the Edge of Propinquity is up, including Sabbath, the fifth story in the Flotsam series. I suspect I’ll do a “what I’ve learnt from six months of Flotsam” post sometime in July, whereupon I’ll try and nail down exactly why writing a serial short story series on a monthly deadline is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and this story may well be the poster-child for both why it’s hard and why it’s been worthwhile.

– Un Lun Dun, which has slowly re-insinuated itself into my readerly affections after the hiccup I mentioned yesterday and become, more or less, the kind of book I was hoping it would become when I started reading it a few months ago. Really, you should read it, especially if you’re unlikely to get as caught up in the concept of the binja as I did.

– Getting the dates wrong on my Daily SF story in yesterday’s post, since it’s coming out on the seventeenth rather than the sixteenth. So, yes, sometime tonight there will be a new story in the world, and it will be my last non-Flotsam story in a while.

– Something else, I’m sure, although I can’t really remember it. Oh, wait, I know: starting a new draft of Claw, the third Miriam Aster novella, that throws out a large chunk of what I’d written in the period known as last-year-before-my-life-exploded and substitutes something, well, good instead. I found myself unexpected scribbling notes for this last night, and suddenly the beginnings of an entire scene fell out of my head, and I looked at it for a long time and thought, “okay, sure, we’re going with this.”

Longing, Essays, Wordcounts, and Dancing to PJ Harvey

PETERMBALL Journal, Works in Progress , , ,

This morning I got up and, lacking sufficient motivation to get ready for the dayjob, put PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me on the stereo so I could dance around the house to the track 50′ Queenie while still in my pajamas.

There are certainly worse ways to start your day, even if it does mean you’re five minutes late for work and the chaos that entails. Here’s hoping your day started just as well (and if it didn’t, I can recommend dancing to PJ Harvey to start your day tomorrow).

#

I mentioned this on twitter when I first read it, but I’m posting a link here because its just that good. If you have any interest at all in fantasy, writing, fairy tales, or just general awesomeness, please go take a look at Catherine Valente’s Confessions of a Fairytale Addict over on Tor.com.

There are many writers of fiction who double as excellent writers of essays, and Valente is easily one of the best I’ve come across in recent years. In a fair and just world someone would probably go and pay her to write a book of essays, which would be smart and cutting and ultimately brilliant, but since we live in a capitalist culture where essays are an undervalued form we take what we can get.

#

So yesterday there was writing. A thousand words on Flotsam 6, a thousand words on a short story, and some writing of new scenes for Black Candy since I’ve officially given up on rewriting the bastard book and just started redrafting it from the beginning so I can make it story shaped without doing my head in.

By ten o’clock I’d done my 2,500 words for the day and stopped, since I’m trying to get out of the binge-writing habit and back into something that resembles a work ethic. Being done by ten o’clock is slightly odd, since it meant there was still an hour to go before I usually collapsed into bed, half-dressed and fretting about not being done.

So I had a cup of tea and read for a bit, working my way a little deeper into Charles de Lint’s Dreams Underfoot, and then I went to sleep.

#

I’ve typed the title of the de Lint collection three times today, and every time I’ve typed it Dreams Underfood, which is weird because I’m not entirely sure why my subconscious is latching onto that particular mistake and repeating it over and over.

I find myself suddenly tempted to write about the existence of a magical, dreamlike land that exists at the bottom of the pantry, waging wars with the goblins who live in the nightmares that occur when eating cheese too close to bedtime.

Or, you know, not. There are some ideas that aren’t quite worth pursuing.

#

I find myself, inexplicably, missing a number of people I used to know. It’s happened a few times this week, and it’s quite bothersome, because I’m not terribly good at keeping up with the people I currently know, let alone the friends who have gradually drifted away over the years. I imagine things would have been easier if something like Skype existed ten years ago, but I suppose we had email back then, and that doesn’t seemed to have helped.

I suspect this will result in stories. It usually does, for some reason. Stories are the way things get worked out in my head.

What I’d like it to result in is a whirlwind trip to Melbourne, say, or Adelaide, and places even further afield, with lots of surprise visits and bottles of wine and interesting arguments, but at the moment the logistics for a whirlwind trip to the grocery store is really more my speed.

One day I will remedy this, really I will, but today I will content myself with spicy tomato soup and a nice thick slice of crusty bread and some quality time with Fritz the laptop where I get today’s 2,500 words written.

 

Six Thoughts Upon Reading The Maltese Falcon

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption , , , , ,

I started reading The Maltese Falcon yesterday, which is one of those books I’ve been meaning to read forever without getting around to it. I lay the blame entirely on the film, which is awesome and fulfilling in a way that the other big hardboiled-to-noir adaptation* never really manages, and thus makes it easier to excuse the act of reading in favour of another round of Bogart playing Sam Spade.

In any case, after starting to read I had some thoughts. Six of them, to be exact:

1) The more I read hardboiled fiction the more I’m aware of the way it infiltrates our culture, seeping in through other media when we’re not looking. It’s a genre that lends itself to the intertextual, to endless moments of “so that’s where that came from” as you go back and find primary sources. I knew the tropes of noir film long before I came across it’s classic stories, largely because I’d inherited the narrative beats through cartoons that riffed on them, and because they’d been deployment in films like Bladerunner and the early fiction of William Gibson.

2) Noir is a genre of spiritual exhaustion, a kind of precursor to the sense emotionally bankrupt doom that started seeping into the big L literature I was reading in my undergraduate days. Its heroes exist in liminal space – not quite on the straight-and-narrow, not quite down among the criminals – but they’re guided by a kind of self-developed morality and nobility that exists beneath the layer of cynicism (See Sam Spades’ closing monologue in The Maltese Falcon, or the recurring motif of chess and knighthood in Raymond Chandler’s fiction). It’s a desperate morality, sure; tattered and unreliable, but it’s there.

3) Given the two points above, someone has presumably written a book or thesis on postmodernism and the hardboiled detective story. If that’s true, I wish to read it. Also, apropos of nothing, I want someone to write a paper on the influences of Dashiel Hammett’s Sam Spade on the Sparhawk character in David Edding’s Elenium books.

4) Hardboiled fiction written in the third person is weird.

5) The Maltese Falcon may be a classic of the genre, but I’ll throw my weight behind The Thin Man as the best hardboiled story Hammett wrote over the course of his life. Despite my affection for the endless pragmatism of Spade and his emotional engagement with the world, there’s something utterly charming about having two primarily characters who are already married, enjoy one-another’s company, and verbally spar over the course of the book.

6) One of these days I really need to find an Angry Nerd Book Club where I can go be angry, nerdy, and have these types of conversations with other people. I miss talking about books with other people, I think, especially in environments where others understand why people who say “why can’t you just enjoy it instead of picking holes” should be stoned to death with remaindered copies of the Da Vinci Code.

*that’d be The Big Sleep incidentally, which is awesome right up until a point about halfway through, after which it’s just a mess.

________________________________________________
Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 3
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 10/30
Rejections in 2010: 21/100
Claw Word Count (Finish Date: 15th November)
 <– A slightly false metric for the last twenty-four hours, since I’ve hit the point where I can port in scenes from the discarded draft fo the story.