Stuff

In this post, I swear a lot for no apparent reason

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

I’m sitting here on a Sunday trying to remember what I was going to blog about. There was plan a while back – perhaps even a written one – but I’m afflicted with a curse that causes me to forget anything remotely plan-like the moment I sit down at a keyboard. Fortunately, I have a back-up plan: 4 Random Things where I place Fuckin’ in the centre of the entry title.

1. DENNIS FUCKIN’ LEHANE

One of my favourite book stores is Brisbane’s Pulp Fiction, a speciality-store focused exclusively on Fantasy, SF, and Mystery/Crime fiction. When I first started patronising the store I stuck to the fantasy/SF side of things, revelling in the ability to pick up fiction from small presses and mid-list authors I wouldn’t ordinarily be able to track down. All that changed about…jeez, I don’t know, but a while back…and these days I tend to pick up a few things from the crime side of things. I’m a fan of the hardboiled mystery, after all, and I’m developing a growing affection of the cosy murder mystery, and there a depths of awesome in those genres I’m still to find.

But last week I picked up a copy of Denis Lehane’s A Drink Before the War and…well, holy shit, I kinda dig this book. There are certain writers who have the ability to engender trust in a reader, simply be deploying an opening paragraph that makes you think, well, yeah, this writer gets it, and Lehane is one of those. There’s a control there, an ability to deploy language in a certain way, that I knew from the opening paragraph how much I’d enjoy what follows (and, lo, I enjoyed what followed exactly as much as I expected).

I went back on Friday and picked up the second book featuring the same characters. I inhaled the damn thing in one manic night of reading, staying up until the wee hours when I should have been getting some sleep prior to going to the dayjob.

2. LL FUCKIN’ HANNET

It’s always nice when friends who do good work are recognised for, well, being fuckin’ aces at the things that they do well. Case in point: this year’s Aurealis Awards were given out over the weekend and while I’d offer congratulations to all the winners, I was really happy to hear that the immensely talented LL Hannett had walked away with the gong for both Best Collection (for Bluegrass Symphony) and co-winner of Best Horror Story (for The Short Go: a Future in Eight Seconds).

Congratulations, also, to Thoraiya Dyer for picking up the Best Fantasy Story nod for Fruit of the Pipal Tree (yes, she totally deserves her own entry as Thoraiya fuckin’ Dyer, but I’m not yet sure we know each other well enough for such familiarity not to be seen as offensive).

3. RED FUCKIN’ DAWN

Last night’s Trashy Tuesday Movie. Watchable, enjoyable, and utterly terrible. #Wolverines

Next week I’m watching Doom. Actually, next week I’m watching the *extended directors cut* of Doom. Because someone, somewhere, though it was a film that needed to be longer and my flatmate is the kind of person who pays money for such things.

I’m already afraid.

4. AMANDA FUCKIN’ PALMER

‘Cause, really, if you’re going to make a list of people and things with the word fuckin’ inserted in the middle of their names, it’s a fairly natural fuckin’ progression.

Also because I wrote a post for QWC’s blog about her recent kickstarter, John Scalzi’s commentary on it, and what that means for writers. I wouldn’t ordinarily bounce people from this blog to that one, but one of the curses of working on three different blogs every week is that occasionally there’s a conversation on one that you really wish could involve readers from another. Also, the QWC blog is shiny and new, so I figure it can’t hurt to send anyone interested in that direction.

5. AND ONE FINAL NOTE, WITHOUT SWEARING, REGARDING CONTINUUM

If there’s anyone whose heading along to the Continuum Nat-Con in June that may be interested in half a hotel room, drop me a line. It turns out the room that I’ve got has two queen beds, and many of the usual suspects I’d split a room with either aren’t coming along or already live in Melbourne. I’m not opposed to having the room to myself and all, but if the opportunity is there to split costs…

Project Du Jour: Untitled Victorian Planetary Romance, Pt 1

PETERMBALL Works in Progress ,

I’m kinda psyched about my current writing project, but I think it needs a far sexier working title than the one it’s got right now. There’s something about the Untitled Victorian Planetary Romance, Pt 1, that doesn’t feel like an adequate representation of the book.

It’s been a long while since I charted the progress of a creative project on the blog, and I’ll admit that I was a little gun-shy about talking this one up. For starters, the project is largely being done simply to prove to myself that it can be done, that I can actually put together sixty-thousand words of coherent narrative in first draft form over five weeks of writing. Once upon a time the only question would have been the coherent narrative part of the equation, but me and writing haven’t gotten along for the better part of the last eighteen months. Life kept offering me excuses and I kept taking them, and slowly it became necessary to embrace a project that proved all my assumptions wrong. I wanted to make myself write outside the comfort zone, both in terms of the word-count expected and the genres I’m working with and the time-frames I’m giving myself to get things done.

This is probably the most public project I’ll have worked on since writing the first draft of Bleed a while back, only the intended audience for the finished project is considerably smaller. When it’s finally done it’ll be a gift for three of my closest friends, and if it makes them happy it’ll have done its job. This means that there are people who know the concept and the background of the story and the characters, people with an investment in it being good (or, at least, readable). It also means that occasionally one of those friends will poke me and say, so, that thing you were writing, and I’d really like that to stop, which is why it’s the project of choice for the five-week project.

On the other hand working on this project has made me incredibly happy and I find myself wanting to talk about it. There were points last week where I danced, or bounced, or generally woke up happy, and I got a chance to remember what it was like to write something and keep writing it until it starts making sense and your enthusiasm for the work starts to carry you along. As I gradually worked out what fit where in the plot there were scenes and references and narrative beats that started to appear out of the murky ether, and they serve as particularly tempting candy-bars to keep me motivated.

And so I figured I’d throw out a couple of the things that I’m really enjoying about this draft, before I stick the word-counter on the end and get back to writing.

1. GENRE MASH UPS

I’m a big fan of cross-breeding genres, which I’m sure comes as a shock to pretty much everyone reading this. More importantly, I figure any long-form work you write is largely a chance to engage in a conversation with a genre, and things generally don’t feel right until I figure out who or what I’m having a conversation with.

I knew going into this project that there was going to be a pretty healthy slice of Steampunk involved, and in the log term its going to involve my ongoing attempts to try and unravel the appeal of the John Carter novels and their casually imperialist outlook on the world. Short term, though, particularly as it relates to the book I’m writing now, it’s all about playing with the format of the Agatha Christie murder mystery. The reference points scribbled out in my notebook are Murder on the Orient Express, except the express is a damaged sky-ship on its way to Mars, which means it gets to be a bit of a disaster story as well.

2. BIG CAST, BIG SCENES

I’m committing one of the cardinal sins of being a writer and a gamer with this project – I’m nabbing a bunch of characters who were once PCs in my friend Chris’s campaign and using them as the basis for the protagonist and her associates in the novel. The plot? That’s nabbed from a game too, although things are going to play out in a very different way from the introductory session Chris ran way back when we started. It’s entirely possible I’ll write something that’s essentially 60,000 words of dreck that’s uninteresting to anyone but me and my gamer buddied, but I’m kinda confident that I’ll be able to transform it into something narratively satisfying.

On the other hand the choice of genre means I get to play with a way larger cast than you’d expect given the word-count. One of the impressive things about Christie’s novels is her ability to introduce wide range of characters in a very general way, particularly when doing something like the dining-car scene in Orient Express. It’s one of those techniques that I’ve never really seen done in other books (the sole other author I’m familiar with whose tried it is Elizabeth Bear in her brilliant Christie-homage New Amsterdam). Figuring out how to do the introduction of 13+ characters in a single scene is the kind of narrative challenge I haven’t come across before, and I’m looking forward to the opportunity of developing them alongside the protagonist and her allies.

About a third of the words produced in this thing thus far are me putting together one-paragraph intros and trying to figure out how to weave them together, and it’s been interesting to watch the way it affects my perception of the protagonist.

3. PARLOR SCENE

Like the dining-car scene mentioned above, I realised there’s inevitably going to be a big parlor scene at the end of this story where the murderer is revealed. Not something I’ve ever done before, not by a long shot, but the thought of it is already filling my inner genre-wonk with glee.

4. BANTER

One of my favorite things about these characters is the banter. One of the other notes I’ve made regarding the project is “The Thin Man, Nick and Nora,” which is basically a reference to the Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled masterpiece where two married characters get to engage in entertaining banter and genuinely like another throughout the book. They are an utterly solid couple who respects one another and doesn’t need to have their relationship in jeopardy in order to create narrative tension, and it’s one of those neat combinations that I wish would appear in fiction more often instead of feeding our obsession with relationships that are in the process of starting or ending.

Happy Married People. You’d think they were the goddamn kryptonite of narrative.

Of course, I haven’t got two married characters in Untitled Victorian Planetary Romance, Pt 1, but that core of having two characters who like and respect one another and engage in banter? That’s there. As is the idea of writing a series where there’s a single female protagonist whose presented as the equal of her male peer, with an ongoing relationship throughout the series is based on mutual respect, enjoying one another’s company, but coupled with an utter lack of romantic interest or involvement in one another. It’s not something I’d ordinarily do, so I’m curious to see if I can.

5. DINOSAURS

Not in this book, admittedly, but I’m creating a kind of series bible should I enjoy this project enough to come back to it, and I already know how dinosaurs are going to fit into this universe.

‘Cause every Victorian-era protagonist needs to fight a dinosaur somewhere along the way.

Also, the process of putting together a series bible is kinda interesting. I wish I’d thought to do one for the Aster books.

6. SPLIT POV

My writing default is first person, and it’s actually remarkably rare for me to break out of that. I did it last year when I wrote the Flotsam series for Edge of Propinquity – indeed, having a regular deadline where I wrote in third person was one of the main reasons I did EoP – but what quickly became apparent was my inability to take advantage of the POV in that format. I didn’t have the time to really figure out how third person worked, and by the time I did it was nearly impossible to bring in a secondary POV character without it seeming…odd.

That isn’t going to be a problem with the current project. It’s starting with two POV characters, and I’m reserving the right to add more as the story goes on. The ability to swap between characters heads is proving to be way more fun than I thought it would be, and I’m starting to wish that the somewhat removed perspective Third Person requires came to me a little more naturally. It is, after all, remarkably useful.

7. WEIRD SCIENCE

One of the joys of having a Victorian-era mad professor available as a character in a world where space-flight to Mars and beyond is already possible? Every goddamn crazy thing I can think of is theoretically possible within the universe. Things already referenced: shrink rays; teleport arrays; time-travel; the Eiffle tower.

If I ever actually finish this and make it available for public consumption, then dollars to donuts it’s going to get lumped in with Steampunk simply due to the levels of mad-science. And you know what? I’m totally okay with that.

Official Weekly Goal Setting: 16,000 words by next Monday night. Totally doable, right?

6 Eclectic Thoughts

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

1. MY SECRET SHAME

I’m going to share a secret: I actually like the taste of instant coffee. There are days when I prefer it to the real thing, especially since ordering the real thing can be a hit-and-miss affair that results in me drinking a horrible concoction created from burnt coffee grounds, urine, and the spiteful hate of people who kick puppies. Instant coffee is never great, but at the same time, it’s never really a disappointment either. It embraces the law of averages and settles for a long, slow arc of mediocrity and met expectations.

This is not to say that I’m indiscriminate. There are some brands of instant than are better than others, and I’ll shy away from the worst offenders who seem to have taken the burnt-coffee-ground-urine-and-puppy-kicking-spite combination as their own particular flavour of choice.

So yeah, me and instant coffee, we’re tight. In fact, I’m enjoying a cup right now as I type this, and it’s pretty damn good.

2. HOW SENTENCES WORK

My non-fiction book of the week has been Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence and How To Read One. It’s kinda weird reading this sort of book in your thirties, long after formal education in the art of grammar is over with, and it makes me wonder exactly how I manage to avoid learning so much about the process of actually crafting a sentence for so long. I mean, sure, I kinda figured stuff out given that a large portion of what I do every day is putting one word after the other, but Fish has a tendency to articulate sentence structure in a far more elegant way.

There’s a part of me that seriously wishes I’d read the following before I spent seven years trying to explain the passive voice to university undergraduates:

It is important to understand that the relationships that form the sinew and relays of sentences are limited. There is the person or thing performing the action, there is the action being performed, and there is the recipient or object of the action. That’s the basic logical structure of many sentences: X does Y to Z. (Sentences can also come without objects, as in “Joe walks.”) “Simon bought the car.” “The government raised taxes.” “The corporation gives bonuses.” “Heat parches lawns.” The instances are infinite, although the form remains the same (this is a key point, and I shall return to it): doer, doing, done to.

Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence and How To Read One, p. 18

I mean, boom, just like that, an entirely elegant rule of thumb for constructing a sentence that’s far better than any explanation I’ve ever given.

Every time I read books like this, I realise exactly how much of a slacker I am as a writer – content to coast along, trusting on instinct, rather than learning how to use tools properly (then I remind myself I spent far more time on the larger-structure stuff, and on understanding the way genres work and get interpreted, and I don’t feel so bad about the fact that  they unleashed on my students and let me stumble my way through basic rules of grammar).

Incidentally, my latest run of non-fiction reading has been heavily influenced by this post over on Brain Pickings. I provide this link with two caveats: 1) I spent far less money on books before I added brain pickings to my RSS feed (which, given how much I spend on books, is really saying something), and 2) Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art is not a book on that list that I’d recommend. The articulation of Resistance is useful, I suppose, but there’s a real lack of meaningful advice for getting past it.

3. THE “OH, HELL NO” SCALE

I mentioned the Trashy Tuesday Movie thing I do over on twitter earlier this week, right? Well, I’m still trying to figure out a way of archiving the individual live-tweets of the movies we watch – of anyone can recommend a tool that’ll arrange #hashtags in order, please do so – but until that happens I figured I’d share a few thoughts on the movies we’ve watched thus far and where they fall on the “Oh, hell no” scale that I use for trashy movies.

Best of the bunch we’ve watched thus far: RED. It’s smart, it’s well-cast (Helen Mirren! SNIPER RIFLE!), and it’s about as non-trashy a movie as you can get while still being vaguely acceptable Trashy Movie Tuesday fodder. Plus I kinda like Bruce Willis as a protagonist, considering he’s been in some of the best trashy action movies (Die Hard), SF movies (Fifth Element), and Christmas movies (Die Hard again) of all time. Unfortunately it seems that entertaining, competently made movies that are actually good are pretty bad fodder for the live-tweeting process, so we’ll never be able to watch one again.

Guilty Pleasures: Hawk the Slayer and Red Sonja. In no sane universe can you call either of these movie’s good, but if you’re a fan of fantasy cinema and willing to appreciate their more absurd elements and scenery-chewing actors they’re both kind of brilliant.

Red Sonja has the barely articulate Brigitte Nielsen acting opposite a barely articulate Arnold Schwarzenegger, and they’re both blown off the screen by Ernie Reyes Jr in his most irritating kid-ninja role ever. It also includes a couple of narrative choices that come outta left field, like an evil world-destroying artifact that’s powered by light and destroyed after it’s plunged into darkness.

Hawk the Slayer…fuck, I don’t know how to describe it. It’s a terrible movie, from the bad dialogue to the western-inspired stare-downs before every fight scene to the fact that there are interminable scenes where characters do nothing by ride horses through the forest (which seems, near as I can tell, to be cinema short-hand for you’re watching a fantasy film). And yet, it’s kinda watchable, primarily because Jack Palance is chewing scenery like no-ones business as the primary bad guy and the writers have adopted one simple rule – if Jack’s on the screen, some motherfucker is going to die.

Bad Film with the Kernel of a Good Idea: Wing Commander. Also known as the finest submarine movie to ever be set in space. I adore this film for the way it cleverly disguises the debt it owes to Das Boot by casting Jürgen Prochnow and making him the second-in-charge, but it would have been far better if they’d cast Matthew Lillard in the lead instead of Freddie Prinz Jr. The real appeal of Wing Commander, though, lies in watching it as an SF writer – there’s this brilliant idea in the pilgrim sub-plot that should really have gotten more screen-time, rather than being put there in order to pull off an egregious deus ex machina, and there’s a part of me that really wants to grab the film and rewrite it to give that idea the story it should have had.

Oh, Fuck No, Never Again: Conan the Barbarian, the 2011 edition. Slow, barely coherent, and blatantly riding on the coattails of the first Conan film with Schwartzenegger. Thus far, this is the only film we’ve watched that I’d hesitate before revisiting.

And finally, just when we thought that would be the lowest rating ever, we discovered the rating of…

Seriously, Zack Snyder, I’m going to carve out your spleen for making this shit: Suckerpunch. It takes a special kind of talent to take a film about hot chicks with swords fighting zombie nazis and making it UTTERLY FUCKING DULL, and Zack Snyder must pay dearly for possessing it. Friends do not let friends watch this film, and my hostility towards it is only matched by my hostility towards Avatar – another film I should have liked given the genre and concept, but can’t because it reaches epic levels of cinematic and narrative incompetence. Snyder is now added to the short-list of people I think should be kept away from film for the good of the genre, alongside Michael Bay.

Next Tuesday we’re watching the epically bad/awesome/jingoistic Red Dawn. If you’d care to join us, hit Twitter around 7:30 PM Brisbane time and look for the hastag #Wolverines.

4. SHEROS

A project started by my friend Meg, explained over one her blog.

Have you noticed a greater-than-average serve of women-baiting and women-hating in the media of late? My Facebook and Twitter feeds are clogged with examples.

Peanuts Cartoon image: Lucy Van Pelt boxing Linus

And in the face of it, there are so many amazing women demonstrating grace, strength and intellect.

So I’ve decided to start collecting and celebrating them. You’ll find a new page at mamaguilt now: Sheroes. Please let me know a woman who is rocking your world, and why. We want to see pictures, read links, and understand why this woman is inspiring you, so please use the contact form on the Sheroes page to let me know – I’ll share it, and acknowledge your contribution.

In some of her non-writer guises Meg is the Manager of the Australian Writer’s Marketplace and the convenor of the Brisbane chapter of Sisters in Crime and a fabulously awesome person, so if you’ve got someone who deserves to be recognised I encourage you to send something her way.

5. THE FIFTH ENTRY IS A LIE

In truth, much of this entry is. Not in terms of the content – that’s all true – but from this point out the idea of me actually being behind the keyboard and dashing blog entries out is entirely illusory. For once in my life, I’ve actually managed to plan ahead. I’ve put together a schedule and focused on getting shit done. In short, I wrote this on Monday afternoon after pounding out a couple of other blog entries.

Such are the perils of getting organised and thinking about things.

Assuming this doesn’t all fall apart at the first hurdle, this should become the norm. Part of me recoils against the idea of writing these things in advance, but the reality of having a dayjob is that there are days when I have the spare time to write blog posts and there are days when I do not. If the alternative to pre-writing posts is not writing anything all, I’m going with pre-writing, especially since I then get to use the surplus brainpower on writing fiction.

I’m trying not to let it bug me. I pretend its like baking a cake prior to people arriving, or throwing some iced vovo’s into your weekly shopping just in case you have someone around. It’s something you do so you can focus your attention on the people who show up, rather than fretting about having something to eat when they arrive.

And one of the reasons I’m embracing the random-thoughts approach is so I can build the bulk of a post early, and add something mid-week if I feel it should be mentioned.

6. PROJECT DU JOUR: “Untitled Victorian Planetary Romance, Pt 1” 

I’m going to say it: this project scares the bejesus out of me. It’s everything that I usually try to avoid: a third-person narrative; a research-intensive setting; multiple POV; and written with an expressed audience of three in mind. It’s also, hopefully, the first of a bunch of projects I’m going to do with the character and the setting, although it’s going to take me a couple of months to figure out how to make that work.

My goal for the coming week is to get the first act drafted. That’s approximately 16,000 words of fiction that needs to be written of the coming seven days – doable, even with my day-job schedule, but it’s enough that I’ll have to push myself. And while I’m not going to post daily, I figured I’d post a word-meter every week so the folks I’m writing this for can see exactly how much progress I’m making:

 That was meant to start at zero, but I may have gotten a little…over-enthusiastic…and started writing it early. On the plus side, it’s let me spot a couple of weaknesses in my process – the first thousands are fairly easy to get down, the second thousand require a little effort; Tuesday’s and Thursdays are the days that I’m most resistant to writing something, largely cause I have stuff on; planning has it’s place, but it *is not wordcount* and I’m going to remain unsatisfied by days when I plan but do not write.