Twelfth Planet Press

Things that Happened While I Was Otherwise Distracted

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I’ve been distracted of late – either by trying to get the latest version of Cold Cases ready or hole-in-my-head drama depending of the day –  and I somehow managed to miss a whole heap of stuff happening around the traps.

1) The latest edition of the Terra Incognita Podcast is up, featuring me reading my story Black Dog: A Biography that came out in the Interfictions II anthology last year. Unlike most of the previous podcasts of my work this one actually involved me recording the reading myself, an experience that forced me to realise exactly how inarticulate I am in the verbal form (seriously; apparently I drop the consonants out of words and rely on vowel sounds and inflections to get things right, and we do not speak of how many times I had to restart things in order to avoid this).

2) Angela Slatter’s Brisneyland by Night is the feature story over at the Twelth Planet Podcast at the moment, which pleases me greatly for reasons that may or may not become apparent if you’ve read Horn. Brisneyland is part of the forthcoming Sprawl anthology from TPP.

3) My sister returned live and well from her trek over the Kokoda Trail yesterday. Notable primarily because my parents didn’t send me crazy with phone-calls when there was news of trouble in the area, and because she returned bearing coffee beans ready for my caffeinated consumption.

4) My doctor continues to taunt me by having me come in for appointments where he doesn’t remove my stitches, thus prolonging the wait until I can finally *wash my damn hair again*. To be fair, this is largely because he took all the stitches out last week and I immediately started bleeding like a stuck pig, but my head itches dammit and the ease-of-care was half the reason I shaved my head a few weeks back.

5) The yearly rejection counts holds steady at 7; the yearly acceptance count rises to 1; the number of stories ready to go out into the world is about to rise by 2. These statistics do not support getting to 100 rejections by the end of the year, but I’m about to dissappear and house-sit for the month of July and I plan to get a *lot* of writing done while I’m there.

My Stuff Online This Week

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Part One: Tubers in the Moonlight

Ben Payne has launched his online zine, Moonlight Tuber, and the first issue (subtitled A Handsome Laundrette, A Box of Lovers, and Two Dozen Happy Sea Cows) is completely free and available for download. Somewhere within its virtual covers, said issue contains my story, The Peanut Guy, which is the tail end of the Warhol Sleeping/Avenue D vignette that started with one of my first publications, The Normal Guy, in Antipodean SF 102 back in 2006.

The rest of the series, should you wish to track them down, appeared in Antipodean SF 107, Antipodean SF 117, Dog Versus Sandwich, Dark Recesses 8 (not available online anymore, but I’ve posted a copy here), and Dog Versus Sandwich again. Some of this is old work, and the very fact that it’s split up into various vignettes largely shows my discomfort when it comes to figuring out how prose worked prior to Clarion (these days, I’d probably write this as a single novella, albeit still fragmented in its approach). It’s also somewhat spooky tracking the changes in my bio notes as these things progressed (there’s a part of me that looks at my bio for 2006 and thinks I had a fiancee? Really?, because it seems a vaguely absurd when looking at my life four years in the future*).

 Part Two: The Twelfth Planet Press Podcast

Twelfth Planet Press has launched a podcast featuring work from upcoming releases, and they’re kicking off with my story One Saturday Night, With Angel, from their Sprawl anthology getting launched in September. It’s shiny, downloadable, and free.

*Incidentally, this isn’t intended as a slight on my former fiancee, who is still a friend and a lovely person who simply happened to be happened someone I was incompatible with when it came to extending our long-term relationship . My surprise at discovering we’d intended on trying probably goes a long way towards explaining why we broke up instead. 

Here Comes the Fear Again

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Okay, point the first: Twelfth Planet Press has offered up free e-copies of their 2009 projectsin the name of getting folks to read them prior to the Hugo nominations at this years Worldcon in Melbourne. That means there are free copies of Horn up for grabs. Make of this what you will. (I should also mention that the inimitable Robert Hoge has started a campaign to get Australian’s nominated to the Hugo ballot, and he’s compiling a small list of recommendations for people who might be interested; the real action is over in the facebook group where everyone’s pitching in names).

And so, point the second: February is the month where I combat The Fear again.

It’s a stupid thing, The Fear, all the more stupid because it commonly manifests itself when things seem to be going right. People start accepting stories and asking for submissions and nominating me for awards and suddenly this little voice in the back of my head starts saying “you don’t deserve this” and “you’re going to fuck it up” and the next thing I know I’m sitting on top of a dozen half-finished stories and binging on coke and junk-food because it’s so much easier to not finish things than to start sending them out and face the fact that maybe, just maybe, this time people will realise I suck. Nothing unusual about any of that, really. I’ve never talked to anyone who wants to write who hasn’t experienced The Fear at some point or another. It’s just part of the process, and if it wasn’t for the fact that The Fear creeps up on me in stealth-mode and messes with my head it wouldn’t actually be a big deal at all.

My way past the fear is pretty simple: I start submitting stuff. Lots of it. Writing and submitting stories is actually habit-forming, and The Fear stops being a factor after you get into the routine. It doesn’t go away, but I get to stop capitalizing it. And, as with most things, I can distract myself by focusing on numbers. Make eight submission in February. Accrue 100 rejections this year*. Make sure I write 1500 words a day. Forgo the coke and chocolate which is salving my psychological wounds as I wallow in self-indulgent panic about never getting published again.

So for February I get back to basics and focus on numbers again.

Current Project: Getting Back to Basics
Number of Stories Submitted in February: 0 of 8
Rejections Accrued in 2010: 0
Consecutive Productive Writing Days: 0
Days without coke and other soft-drinks: 0
Days without chocolate: 0
Today the Spokesbear is: Sighing and giving me meaningful looks as he gets all passive-aggressive about the fact that I *should be working* right now if I mean to make any of this happen.

*A goal picked up from my friend Chris Green, based off the theory that you can’t control the acceptances but you can send a bunch of stuff out.