Striving for Awesomeness

12 Things

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We’re mid-way through a long weekend here in Oz. This still catches me off-guard, since I’ve spent the majority of my adult life not really paying attention to long weekends, but the acquisition of a dayjob changes your relationship to such things. And so we’ve hit Sunday and I’m mooching around the new house, grooving to a mix of the Hilltop Hoods and the Beastie Boys (RIP, MCA), just kinda…randomly getting things together.

And so, in that spirit, a random grab-bag of twelve things I felt like mentioning.

1. MOVING IS, LIKE, 90% DONE

So my flatmate bought a new home and we moved into it. Most of the last two weeks has been spent getting stuff there, unpacking it, figuring out where it will live for the foreseeable future, and generally waiting for the internet to be turned on.

You know, moving stuff.

There’s a part of me that wants to just kick back and say “yup, we’re done now,” ’cause we’ve basically moved enough that it feels like we’ve moved in and can live a functional life. The truth is there are still all those odds and ends that need to be fixed up, and the room containing my computer/files/desks is littered with boxes of files that should probably be put into the filing cabinet, just as the bedroom closet looks more like a place to store half-full boxes of clothing rather than a bedroom closet.

Although, to be fair, you should see the closet. For a single bloke who owns three pairs of jeans, three jackets, and a seemingly endless supply of t-shirts, it’s one of those spaces that feels slightly epic and impossible to fill.

2. ERNEST HEMMINGWAY

I’ve never really been big on Hemmingway as a writer. I’ve known people who adored him, but I always leant towards F. Scott. Fitzgerrald as my writer of choice for that particular era of American letters. I mean, seriously, The Great Gatsby. It has its issues as a book, just as Fitzgerald has his issues as a person, but there is something about the sheer amount that book packs into approximately 50,000 words that makes me look at 100k novels and think, really? This is our standard length? Did we miss the levels of awesome that could be achieved at half that?

But we were talking about Hemmingway, who I seem to have started reading in earnest for the first time since I was…shit, eighteen? Nineteen? A really long time. It’s the net result of watching Midnight in Paris, in which Hemmingway shows up as a character, and I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for the reflection of Hemmingway that’s thrown up as a social construct. He’s just such an unremitting bastard, capable of throwing out these moments of sparse beauty, yet so…self-loathing? Or a kind of loathing far more external than that?

In any case, I picked up a small book of writing advice that’s been curated from Hemmingway’s letters and articles, and it’s full of these moments that are both beautiful and angry. My favourite, thus far, is this:

“F. Scott Fitzgerald’s talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and he could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.” (From A Moveable Feast)

There’s a part of me that thinks, well, yes, that. There is another part of me that thinks, really, Hemmingway? Just ’cause you say it pretty, it doesn’t mean you aren’t a dick.

3. CONTRIBUTORS COPIES

These showed up my PO Box earlier this week

It’s shiny, in both the metaphorical sense and the literal sense, and the print edition is due out in Mid-June, which means this is one of those rare occasions where I’ve received contributor copies before the book goes on sale.

4. SPEAKEASY

So as part of my dayjob I curate a bunch of writing and publishing links every Friday for the Speakeasy blog. I have to admit, it’s one of my favourite parts of the dayjob, since it means the vast majority of the stuff that I’m reading on the internet anyway now becomes part of my working day. And since I figure there are probably a couple of writer-types reading this who may be interested, I figured I’d point the way in case you’re inclined to check it out.

5. PLANNING

One of the random things I’m doing this week? Putting together a new writing plan.

Someone asked me the question “how many stories do you submit a year” at work on Friday. It freaked me out a little, ’cause once upon a time there would have been a pretty steady answer to that, and now there is not. I’ve been living without a writing plan for months now (and, effectively, since life went kaboom back in November of 2010). I have grown weary of the uncertainty, and I figure I’m staying in place for the next twelve months, so I’m going to spend a few hours this evening putting together a plan that’ll allow me to…well, get stuff done.

The problem with writing plans is…well, me. I over-estimate my own abilities a lot, particularly after I’ve let writing lie fallow for a stretch, and it often results in plans where I’m trying to do all the things all the time. This barely worked when I was a marginally employed writer-type with a wealth of free time. It’ll surely fall apart now that I’m regularly employed and trying to fit writing around the edges of things.

6. I CANNOT GO NEAR MY POST OFFICE BOX

I maintain a PO Box that I use for three things: receiving subscriptions, ordering things online, and an address I can put on contracts that doesn’t change every six-to-eighteen months.

A few weeks ago, in the lead-up to the move, I realised that Shifty Silas, my new laptop, was capable of running a bunch of computer games people had recommended to me. I’m usually pretty careful about playing computer games, since I have an addictive kind of personality when it comes to narrative. If I start watching a DVD boxed set of a TV series, for example, I’ll down it in one sleep-deprived sitting rather than space it out. I want, in essence, all the story, all the time.

Also, basically, I like to win things. I mean, I really like to win things. To the extent that, if there are no victory conditions, I’ll invent them simply so I can win.

It’s…well, it’s not a pleasant side of my personality.

These two things, when combined, generally make computer games the equivalent of narrative crack and I’m usually careful to avoid them. But friends raved about Mass Effect and Mass Effect II, and my flatmate had some copies floating around, and it wasn’t like I was doing anything other packing, so I fired Shifty Silas up and played them both. In fact, I played the hell out of them. In, like, rapid succession.  even started replaying the game, this time with an external mouse, ’cause the first time around I wasn’t able to use sniper rifles.

They were exactly the kind of interactive narrative-crack I fear when it comes to computer games.

And because the designers of Mass Effect are evil, you can’t really play those two games and get the end of a story, so I’ve ordered a copy of Mass Effect III. It’s been posted and now it’s sitting in my PO Box, waiting for me to come pick it up.

And when that finally happens, when I pick it up and start playing it, well, I’m going to be good for very little else that week. And I have the self-control of a lemming that’s just been shown a cliff.

Which means I can’t pick up my mail at the moment. And I’m going to avoid it for as long as I possibly can.

7. RABBIT HOLE

If you’re a writer-type, you probably want to come do this.

Basically, the Rabbit Hole is a three-day event where a bunch of writers come together and collectively thumb their noses at, say, NaNoWriMo. Instead of being all 50,000 thousands words in a month, the word-warrior heading down the rabbit hole is chasing 30,000 words in three days. It’s run at the QWC a couple of times, but this year the event is going national as part of the Emerging Writers Festival, with teams gathering in Melbourne (where it’s hosted by Jason Nahrung), Tasmania (hosted by Rachel Edwards), Brisbane (hosted by, well, me), and online (hosted by Patrick O’Duffy).

It takes place between the 1st and the 3rd of June, and it promises to be a weekend of words and smack-talk between the four teams. I may even bring the Spokesbear as a mascot.

You can register for Team Brisbane over the QWC website.

8. SEASON THREE OF 30 ROCK

I don’t really review things, ’cause I kinda suck at it. Me and non-fiction, it’s not a thing that works well (and I’ve been reminded of this, quite explicitly, because I’ve been writing a non-fiction article for work and it’s like pulling teeth, dammit).

But I did watch the third season of 30 Rock recently. And, at one point, I may have laughed so hard that I developed tunnel vision and passed out for a few seconds.

Just saying.

9. TRASHY TUESDAY MOVIE

So about a month ago I tried to watch the 2011 Conan the Barbarian film with my flatmate. It…wasn’t good. I say this as a person who has a really, really high tolerance for bad movies, especially any kind of fantasy epic. The only way I got through it was jumping on twitter and making fun of the movie as we went, so other people shared my pain.

Halfway through the topic of Hawk the Slayer and whether or not it was worse than Conan 2011 came up.

I’d never seen it before, so my flatmate and I arranged to watch it the following Tuesday. And, since I’d tweeted the first film, I figured…well, why not? I tweeted throughout the second film, and about halfway through people started suggesting films we should watch and make fun of in the future.

And thus the tradition of the Trashy Tuesday Twitter Movie got started. It was an accident, I swear, but somewhere along the line we developed a schedule. If you’re interested in joining in, we generally kick off at 7:30 PM, Brisbane Time, on a Tuesday evening. Next week’s film is RED (Helen Mirren with a Sniper Rifle!), and on the 15th we’re watching Red Dawn. Debate about the hashtag usually starts earlier on a Tuesday, and the results can be found on my twitter feed @petermball

And yes, this is basically what I do when I’m avoiding posting here. I’m sorry blog, but Twitter is my new love.

10. I’M NOT SURE I LIKE HAVING A SMART PHONE

Actually, that’s not true. I acquired my first smart-phone at the beginning of the year, and it’s instantly become one of my favourite things ever. It’s the promise that SF always offered me – a miniature computer that I can carry around in my pocket and access nearly everywhere. It lets me carry around my email and a collection of books to read and all that stuff.

What I dislike is the way it’s changed my relationship to the internet.

Over the past four months I’ve watched my engagement with things become increasingly passive, largely because I spend the vast majority of my non-dayjob internet surfing on the phone rather than the computer.

I receive my email on the phone, but I dislike the keyboard I’m forced to use there so I don’t respond until I’m sitting at a computer. I can read blogs and my RSS feed, but I don’t comment or come here to write things unless I’m sitting at a keyboard. I can check facebook and twitter, but…well, actually, facebook and twitter are the places where the phone really shines, so it’s not like either of those have suffered.

Basically, I put a lot of things off until I’m sitting at a keyboard, and that never seems to happen ’cause I can check things on my phone.

I’m trying to figure out how to combat this problem, since it really doesn’t sit right with me. Half the reason I love the internet is that it allows me to engage with things, and I’m not really a huge fan of any medium where passivity is the primary mode of engagement.

11. THE AVENGERS

Last week, in the midst of moving, I took an evening off and went to see The Avengers with a bunch of my co-workers. I freakin’ feared this movie so hard, since I’m a) a huge comic nerd,  b) not a fan of anything Joss Whedon has done that involves armies of villains, c) generally irate about films and not inclined to like them, and d) a huge fan of the Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Hero TV series which delivered everything I want in an Avengers comic in cartoon form instead.

In short, I wanted this to be teh awesomes and figured it wouldn’t quite get there. I certainly didn’t think it’d live up to the cartoon.

What I got was teh awesomes. I may have made high-pitches squealing noises of joy in the theatre.

If I had to deliver a review, I can do it in three words: FUCK YEAH, AVENGERS!

12. NINJAS!

They’re everywhere. You just haven’t noticed them yet.

The Lady of Situations and Moby Dick

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A book, a book, a spokesbear, a bed

I’m always a bit ish-ish about recommending books to people. Giving books to people is fine – there are few things I enjoy more than randomly giving friends books they might enjoy – but asking people to trust my taste and spend their hard-earned money on something is…ish-ish.

This doesn’t mean I don’t do it.

And after slinging stones in their direction last month about some writer’s guidelines I thought I’d take a moment to recommend a few of  Ticonderoga Publications publications, especially since they’re running a sale that takes  10% off pre-orders and 20% off direct orders of their existing fiction until the February. The former, for instance, would include Bluegrass Symphony by L.L. Hannett in both Hardcover and Softcover, while the latter would include Angela Slatter’s The Girl With No Hands and Other Stories, and ordering work from either of these fine writers would be a worthwhile use of your hard-earned discretionary cash.

I’d also point out that aspiring writers could do worse than ordering a copy of Stephen Dedman’s The Lady of Situations, which is the book I reach for when I contemplate short story collections and how they should be put together. The writer David Jauss once put together an essay, Standing Stones, on the various ways short story collections become a unified whole, a brilliant read in and of itself, and every single thing he identified is at work in The Lady of Situations; the hand-offs from one story and the next are beautifully coherent without being obvious, there are liaisons between the stories in the form of words and image being reworked from different angles, there are contrasts and mirrors and occasionally there are motifs rise to the surface without becoming heavy-handed. Stephen Dedman as a short story writer is brilliant – the story From Whom All Blessings Flow alone is testament to that – but the collection as a whole…

Well, as a whole, it’s something to aspire too. Reading Dedman’s collection with Jauss essay (available in the collection Alone with All That Could Happen) may have been one of the most educational things I ever did as a writer. If you’ve got the cash to purchase both and you’re interested in the short story collection as a form, I highly recommend it.

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As we amble towards my thirty-fourth birthday, I’m slowly discovering things I should no longer do.

Order prawns on a pizza, for example.

Stay up all night working on a story when I need to go to work at 8 AM the next day.

Guess which of these I did last night, and exactly how much I’m paying for it today? It would be nice to say I regret nothing, but mostly I regret the pizza.

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Over on twitter Tansy Rayner Roberts noted that the current explosion of Australian SF podcasts doesn’t actually include a podcast that interviews Australian writers, and the general consensus seems to be that everyone thinks this is a very good idea, but no-one really has the time to do it. Or they have the time, but lack the technical know-how.

It’s a good enough idea that I expect someone will break eventually. Had I an adequate microphone for the task of recording, a fiendish partner in crime, and the free time to edit audio files into listenable form, it probably would have been me.

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I’ve started reading the unabridged Moby Dick, mostly because of Jeff Smith’s Bone comics. It’s not the book I was expecting it to be, but mostly in a good way. Mostly, when I pick up copies of Moby Dick, I read the chapter on the Whiteness of the Whale and read it aloud for the pleasure of reading it aloud and then put it away again.

I blame Bone for my tendency to do all these things, right down to the choice of chapter, for it’s mentioned (in the introduction, I think) of the same collected volume that contains the Great Cow Race, which is really the volume of Bone you want to own if you’re only going to own the one, if only so you can figure out why comic book people laugh at the phrase stupid, stupid rat creatures. And occasionally giggle at quiche.

Moby Dick is a stranger book than you’re expecting, if you’ve never picked it up before. It’s also intimidatingly large, should you find yourself pressed for reading time. I like it, though. It’s the product of a time when the concept of the novel wasn’t quite so formed, and it’s a massive  tangle of words, but it’s intriguing in its bizarreness.

The Writing To-Do list for 2010

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Yesterday I sat down with the Spokesbear, a bunch of e-mail, my copy of Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife, and a notepad to construct my to-do list for the rest of the year. It’s a habit I fell into a few years back (well, sans the Booklife part, but I suspect I’ll be rereading it often in July’s to come); those who’ve been following the blog for a while might remember the 80-Point-Plant for Awesomeness that resulted from last year’s state-of-the-union style gutcheck. Usually I’m pretty quiet about the results, but after reviewing my issues with last years list I’m going to go public with the writing portion of the process this year. It’s somewhat long. Sorry about that. If you want to skip it, I promise there will be more cat-sitting stories tomorrow.

Some thoughts on the list before we kick off:
     – There’s a large amount of background work that goes into the decision of  what to do with the next six months, much of which focuses on what I want from writing and particularly mistakes or poorly executed goals I put together over the last year. The original version of this post saw a rather extensive catalogue of the thinking, but I cut it back in the interests of not making this any longer than it needs to be. If you’re really interested in getting up-close and personal with the darker goal-setting patches of my psyche, I can do so in comments or a future blog-post.
     – One of the things I’m putting more effort into over the next six months is running some form of publically accountable metric to keep me on-track. Most of the time it’s going to be limited to an footer at the base of regular blog posts, but once a month I’ll post the full to-do list with updates and things crossed off the list.
     – The assumptive wordcount-per-day needed to achieve the following is about 4,000 words. This was picked because it’s achievable, but just outside what I usually manage when I’m focused on writing. Part of the goal over the next six months is to rebuild the routine I’ve let slide of late.
     – The two most identifiable problems I’ve suffered from over the last twelve months have been succumbing fear of failure and a tendency to focus on “what comes next” rather than working towards specific goals that feed into the wants and desires that keep me writing.

The To-Do List for the Remainder of 2010
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Part One: Novel Projects

1) Finish Black Candy
A hardboiled detective novel set in a futuristic Brisbane where the spirits of the dead form a hazy cloud in the sky, the military government utilizes vast ghost-generators to produce electricity, and the hero partakes of the latest party drug that rewrites the user’s gender and DNA. I’m currently trying to reconcile the ending I’ve written with the world-building that precedes it, and I’m pretty sure one of them needs to be massively changed in order to make things work.

Cool Stuff: Corpses floating in med-tanks; scary men named Rabbit; coffee; really big generators; its the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine; more noir; more hardboiled; a main character who actually likes his job.

Current Status: 12,020 words into the current draft (effectively going to be a 1st draft given the scattered I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing approach of the previous draft).

Goal for August 31st : Finish the first draft (90,000 words). That’s 2000 words a day, on average, plus a whole lot of plot-fixin’ that needs to be done. In theory that’s eminently doable, especially with large chunks of wordcount being reworked from the previous draft.

2) Finish Claw/Fey Fatale (Miriam Aster Novella 3)
The original version of this was written when I thought of the Aster series as a “monster of the week” detective concept rather than something with a definite arc and end point (hence the discarding of said draft back in August of ’09). There’s a lot of that version that can be salvaged – I don’t see the core concept changing – but I’ll need to do a lot of reworking and add in a B-plot arc to give it series continuity.

Cool Stuff: twisting the knife in the perpetual agony that is Aster’s love life; talking cats; a sorcerer working out the back of a Chinese take-away; the return of Anya; monsters made of kitten foetus and love.

Current Status: Re-reading the previous draft to figure out what can be salvaged.
Goal for August 31st: Put some thought into the new plotline.
Deadline: TBA after talking with Alisa at TPP

3) Draft Ghoul Moon (aka the Swashbuckley-Wahoo!-Lovecraftian-Ghoul novel)
In Brief: Swashbuckling fantasy set in an eldritch city hidden beyond space and time, where a mortal hero is teamed up with a half-immortal ghoul sorcerer to determine who is killing off the immortal nobility. I signed up for the QWC’s Year of the Novel course with Trent Jamieson back in January under the assumption that Bleed was almost done (ha!) and Black Candy would be easy to revise (double ha!). There have been dribs and drabs of work getting done around other projects, primarily in response to writing exercises in classes, but it’s starting to hit the point where it’s a hindrance not to have it more substantially developed.

Cool Stuff: faction warfare; fencing; The Duke of Viscera and the Viscount of Entrails; people swinging on chandeliers while wearing fancy hats; things fluttering behind the curtain of darkness just outside the city walls; an entire city that stands apart from the rest of the universe by devouring moons one after the other.

Current Status: neglected and causing guilt. I hereby give myself permission to neglect this book without guilt until Black Candy and Claw are done, after which it can occupy my full attention.
Deadline: End of Year

The other long projects that, baring other circumstances, I’d really like to get done in the next three years:

– Fracture/The Glorious Death of Doc Mosaic (pulp hero serial killer police procedural; possibly in space; Status: Moderately detailed plan put together on the flight to and from Adelaide last year)

– Hello Kitty Gasmask Girl (sequel to Black Candy; Status: 2000 words of intro and a rough list of ideas and cool things to insert)

– Slow Fall (Bored Oscar Wilde-esque character engages in escapades on a decadent generation ship slowly falling into a black hole. Status: Poked occasionally while I’m waiting for the concept to settle into place)

– Red Rain (Zombie Noir detective novel. Status: Waiting for me to get the noir out of my system so I can be sure I really want to write it)

– The Shoe Store Suicides (Mosaic narrative about shoe stores, the people who commit suicides in front of them, and the employee who objects to their choices; Status: Big list of ideas, no writing as yet)

– Crow Boy War (Downside Novel I abandoned in 2008 due to not knowing what I was doing. Status: About 40,000 words of draft, some of which may be salvageable)

– Gothic: A Love Story (YA urban fantasy novel with Gothic overtones; Status: 7500 words plus planning)

– Miriam Aster Novellas 4-6 (second series of books follow-ups to Horn/Bleed/Claw should we want to keep producing them; Status: Rough plan pitched to TPP)

– The Last Great House of Isla Tortuga (Expanding the short story which appeared in Dreaming Again; Status: In need of research regarding Piracy and life at sea in the time period)

– Masked Wrestlers of Mars (A Barsoom-esque tribute to Mexican Wrestling Films; Status: Opening image, plus a rough plan developing)
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Part Two: Short Fiction Submissions

Submission Status: There are currently 7 submissions out there, although one has been out for over a year and is old enough that it should be trunked anyway so we’re going to call it six instead. Of those 6 stories there’s only one that’s old enough to have seen most of the markets I regularly submit too. This is a slightly better situation than I thought I was in – it appears I have been getting my butt into gear after all those blog posts where I was freaking out about not doing enough short fiction – but it needs to be better. My personal comfort zone in terms of the number of finished stories out and submitted lies between 15 and 20 active submissions, which means there needs to be fifteen to twenty stories given my reluctance to simultaneously submit (even to markets who are open to such things).

I have a fairly large folder full of stories in various states of completion, so I’ve gone through and nominated fifteeen of them as “2010” projects that will need to be finished by the end of the year. They’ve largely been picked because they focus on things I want to get better at (third person POV, writing particular genres), or because they’ll get me used to revisiting worlds I plan to revisit in novel form one day, or because they’re sufficiently different to the types of stories I’ve been writing in terms of themes or voice that they’ll help refresh my palate of writing tools. All title are working titles and subject to being replaced. Stories marked with an asterisk can be swapped out of the list for another idea as long as the reasoning isn’t “whim” or “I’d like to write that story more.”

The Short Story To-Do List

The Moloch Alley Stories
After I put together the Clockwork Goat and the Smokestack Magi for the Shimmer Clockwork Jungle Book I ended up brainstorming a bunch of things I wanted to do with the voice and world of the story.

     – The Gallows Magus and the Queen of the Winter Seas (Empire hires a magical assassin to kill the mermaid he fell in love with as youth. Hilarity ensues. Status: Partially drafted before hitting plot problems)
     – The Sabres of Moloch Alley* (Mostly this is just a title and a rough idea about the protagonists; Status: Unwritten)
     – The Legions of the Red Sand (An attempt at secondary-world fantasy using the Australian outback as the basis of the setting, with French Foreign Legion influences. Status: Unwritten, but plenty of pre-planning and the voice is more-or-less settled upon)

Downside Stories
I’ve been meaning to write more stories set in the world of Clockwork, Patchwork and Raven for two years now, but I’ve always set them aside because they never synced up with the impulse that made the first story fun to write (basically: what happens when you put a fairytale hero in a cyberpunkish setting). They’re starting to hit now-or-never status in terms of whether they’ll get done, so they’re on the list.

     – Never Fall in Love With a Dead Girl (Started writing this a while back as the Soldier Boy & Dead Girl Molly. It’s still looking for a plot; Status: Partially drafted)
     – Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Crow Boy (Follow-up to Clockwork, Patchwork, Ravens written from Rose’s POV; Status: Opening drafted)
     – Number One Crush* (Heist story using one of the Downside gangs as the victims. Status: Untouched and in need of a title that doesn’t reference a Garbage song)

Ghoul Moon Stories
These occupy the bottom of the list because they’ve had the least thought put into them. The goal is twofold: explore the setting I’m planning on using for the Ghoul Moon novel above, and figure out how to write sword-and-sorcery.

     – The Street of a Thousand Spices*
     – The Six Deaths that plagued Festival of Carrion*
     – The Duel You Cannot Win*

Stories utterly unconnected to novel projects

     – The Unicorns of Suffragette 3 (There are unicorns on a space station. The Goblin King objects to this. Status: About a thousand words and growing)
     – The Exodus (A small outback town in quarantined after a glowing pillar of light starts calling people into it. Status: Partially drafted, but needs a point beyond the initial concept)
     – The Birthday Party (Luck as a trade good. Status: Partially drafted)
     – Untitled Egypian Mummy Story (A guy finds out the girl he’s dating was possessed by the spirit of an Egyptian mummy fifteen years ago. Status: About 1200 words in)
     – Trainspotting* (A bunch of people are called upon to haunt the ghost of the last train after the lines are shut down. Status: Partially drafted, but in danger of becoming a rehash of old themes. Also needs a better title)
     – Pickets, Memories, and Tethers (Ghost story that’s been kicking around my files since Clarion. Status: Mostly done)

Current Partial Story Drafts Sitting in the Future Projects sub-folder: 73 and change (I’m not counting the files that consist of fifty first line exercises or titles in search of a story)

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Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 1
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30
Rejections in 2010: 12/100
Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August)