Write Club

Bookshelves, Write Club, and Interesting Things Said About Cities

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I wasn’t going to spam you with dodgy phone-camera records of the Great Bookshelf Reorganisation of 2011, but I got a phone-call from my dad and at some point he asked for an update, and I like my dad enough that I’m going to oblige him.

The photograph above contains the first seven shelves of the reorganisation – top left is the brag shelf, the first two on the right are the selected nonfiction shelves, and the rest are just books by writers that remind me why I wanted to be a writer in the first place. The vast majority of books on those shelves were written by about a dozen authors, and in a year I’ll have to reorganise the whole thing because many of them are still releasing books.

I’m still not entirely sure what to do with the bottom shelves, though. I tend to fill bookcases based on a theme, but bottom shelves ruin that by being the place where no-one (well, me) goes looking for things. It’s usually where I hide folders and old RPG  books and other stuff that doesn’t get used terribly often.

That isn’t going to work this time around.

I suspect the bottom right will  be given over to art-books and comics and really big hardcovers, although I’m not entirely sure I have enough of them to make an entire shelve work because it’s a deceptively large amount of space that’s also very narrow. The bottom left may remain a haven for folders, should I figure out a way to keep them looking neat.

Tonight I start work on the noir and pulp bookshelf, then figure out where I’m planning on putting the rapidly growing pile of YA novels and short story anthologies in my collection.

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Last night there was write-club with Angela Slatter, who is normally there, and Kathleen Jennings, who is one of the new write-club recruits that we keep forgetting to talk about. As befits the write-club tradition ate chilli and drank coffee and put  a dent in the chocolate supply while nattering about writing.

Not a large dent, since more people means more chocolate, and the uneaten candy will now sit around the house tempting me until the next write club.

Somewhere amid all that we admired Kathleen’s home-made paper doll that can be eaten by butterflies (she’s giving away prints to those who donate to the various natural disaster recover funds), Angela found her books sitting next to my Kim Newman collection on the bookshelves and was summarily pleased by the location, and we sat down and wrote a couple of thousand words apiece.

All in all, it was a pleasant kind of evening, and a short story that’s been plaguing me for the last month finally snapped into focus and became writable.

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There’s a fascinating and brilliant interview with China Miéville over at the BLDGBlog that covers the use of cities in his work and the way inhabiting a space changes it. There’s something endlessly fascinating about the intensity with which Miéville approaches things like this; the way he thinks about genre and narrative, drawing inspiration from academic theory without being bogged down with it, is phenomenal. If he’d been around back when I was an undergraduate, it’s entirely possible I would have paid more attention in University.

Day Planner

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Today I am:

a) writing
b) making plans
c) washing up
d) buggering off early to play DnD

Last night there was write-club, whereupon I wrote about fifteen hundred words on my next Flotsam story, then sat up into the wee hours forcing myself to write 250 words on the novel project for 2011 (which is currently called Tarnished Silver Swords, but once existed under the working title of the weird lovecrafty-ghoul-swashbuckley-wahoo-novel; neither of these is workable as a final title).

I thank Trent Jamieson for the reminder to do the latter, courtesy of his recent blogpost aboutgetting stuff done despite being a procrastinating slacker (which is not to say that Trent is a procrastinating slacker, just that I am and his advice came at the right point to remedy that).

There has been too much not-writing in my life this January. I have another five days to rectify that.

Awesome Things About 2009 (6/15): Write Club

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I keep saying it, I know, but write club is awesome (For those wondering what the hell I’m talking about, I recommend this post and this post on Angela Slatter’s blog*). Turns out it’s a remarkably popular idea too – I’ve had a couple of conversations where people wondered how Write Club worked, and it seems Angela gets asked about it as well, so I figured I’d share my** thoughts on why write club works for those who may be curious.

Reason 1) Angela Slatter is Fricken’  Awesome
Granted, I say this quite a bit on this blog as well, but it doesn’t diminish the fact that it’s true. Even if you ignore the fact that she’s a superb writer whose keen critical eye has stopped me from looking like a goose a couple of times this year, and the fact that she’s generous with both her time and connections, she’s one of the people I enjoy catching up with once a week.  If you’re going to hang out and write regularly, I suspect it’s handy to actually like and respect the person you’re hanging around with.

Reason 2) Low Numbers
The more people present, the more likely you are to find someone looking for a distraction at the same time you are. When there’s two of you, you’re only likely to simultaneously hit a break-point in the writing about once or twice in a four-hour period, and even then it’s easier to have a quick chat about the problem you’re pondering and make a fresh cup of coffee before going back to work.

I suspect you could probably get around this with larger numbers where the sheer clatter of hammering keys would become pressure to get working again, but that’s only a theory based on seeing photographs of nanowrimo get-togethers.

Reason 3) Chocolate and Good Food**
Seriously, don’t try write club without the chocolate.

Reason 4) Long-Term Projects
It’s telling that both Angela and I were working on novels when the first write-club happened, and that we’re generally better about keeping to a weekly schedule when there’s long-term projects on the cards. Partially this is because there’s two people trying to puzzle out similar problems when you get stuck, and partially because writing individual short stories would have more break-points where you look for distraction due to shorter scenes and quicker finish-times.

I also think Write Club is at its best when it’s keeping me in contact with a long-term project I’d otherwise let laspe when things get hard. There were a few times this year where Friday Nights were the only time I’d work on a draft, but it kept me in contact with the work and saved it from getting burried beneath a mountain of angst and apathy.

Reason 5) Synchronous Goals
Lets not be coy about this one: I want to be a full-time writer. Angela wants to be a full-time writer. Both of us seem to work towards the same kind of milestones in terms of making that happen. For all that the social aspect of Write Club is fun, we’re there to work. We both churn out words away from write-club, every week, and odds are we’d be writing even if write club didn’t ever happen. In no way, shape or form do either of us regard writing as a hobby and we’re generally the type of folks that’ll argue gently prod friends in productive directions if given the opportunity.

Mindset matters, I think, if something like Write Club is going to work. The world spends lots of time telling you that writing is a bad idea, that you can’t possibly make it as a writer, so agreeing that this is bullshit and having similar ideas of what it means to be a professional ensures write club reinforces your process rather than detracts from it.

The other advantage lies in being able to reinforce the habits that work and learn from the skills the other person’s got (Angela is far smarter than I in matters of the writing business, strategy and networking, for example, so there’s always something to be learned from her in these matters. Buggered if I know what I bring to the table, except maybe a dogged belief that neither of us is going to fail. And possibly access to Kim Newman short story collections).

* The short version, for the click-link adverse, is that Write Club is an agreement between two writers to sit in a lounge-room once a week and write. It also involves coffee, chocolate, short bursts of writer-angst, and screaming “write” at the top of your lungs whenever the other person looks like they’re slipping into dangerous levels of procrastination. The process works remarkably well

**Angela, of course, may well disagree with all of the above.

***I’ll admit that I’m probably letting the side down one at the moment. Not that I can’t cook, but I tend to make a lot of stuff Angela can’t eat.