I’ve not been writing well for much of this week. This is understandable, given the circumstances (dying relatives, grieving, comforting the grieving, and going in search of an affordable jacket to wear to the funeral) but it’s also kinda frustrating given that I constantly open the Black Candy draft and think “so damn close – why aren’t you done yet.” Tonight was write-club though, the one thing that keeps me productive during even the worst weeks. And I had a big ol’ night of writing, pounding out about seven thousand words during the four or five hour period that almost makes up for my somewhat sluggish pace the rest of the week. To whit, a Black Candy draft update:
Part of me is feeling very pleased with myself. The other part of me is thinking “So Damn Close. Why Aren’t You Done Yet!”
Four scenes to go. And that’s probably on course for an extra 8,000 words. Then I can begin the revision process whereupon the 80,000 words will start making sense.
It’s Friday night. If you too are at home, wondering how you’re going to fill in your Friday evening without a working television, I’ll make two short story recommendations:
Between them these two stories have clockwork sideshows, minotaur phallus, dirigibles and Led Zepplin’s Immigrant Song. And really, does your evening need anything more than that?
When I was fifteen a friend gave me a tape featuring a fair mix of punk bands, including three Misfits tracks (Astro Zombies, I Turned Into a Martian, and something else I can’t remember). I ran the hell out of those three songs, but unfortunately the tape came sans info about who did what so it was about six years before I realised who the Misfits actually were.
This time as part of a three book review on Mondyboy’s blog covering a trio of Twelfth Planet releases – Horn, Dirk Flithart’s Angel Rising, and the New CeresNights anthology (featuring work by a whole bunch of worthy peeps including Dirk and Angela Slatter).
I’m officially locking myself away and doing minimalist blog posts until I’m done with the current Black Candy draft and the various trips to the hopital (and at the risk of being inappropriate I really hope the later resolves itself first – given the absence of euthanasia legislation in Australia we’re basically watching a family member dehydrate and starve to death, and frankly that’s bullshit).
I recommend going over to Angela Slatter’s blog and reading this entry on Write-Club. It should provide context for how I managed to achieve this in the space of two months*:
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, as evidenced by the fact that I may actually be capable of finishing a novel draft for the first time in about a decade. Angela Slatter (the other half of write-club) has already finished her novel draft, done a fair chunk of a novella she’s co-writing, and started the revisions on her novel. Angela has more detail. Go forth and read.
I’m quietly confident that I’ll get the novel done sometime during this week’s Write-Club on Friday, despite the fact that I know there’s some interruptions coming during the week. I really, really want to get this draft over with so I can go back and start fixing things, making stuff awesome, and generally playing with stuff now the structure is in place.
*I’m actually kinda shocked that it’s only been two months since I started the draft, but I went back and checked the Black Candy notes on the blog and the first entry shows up on April 30th. I’ve been keeping a list of things that surprised me about writing at this length (such as, say, not knowing how to structure a chapter) that I’ll probably blog once I finished the first draft.
2) Apex Publishing are offering pre-orders on Descended from Darkness, the anthology that brings together a years worth of stories (including my story Clockwork, Patchwork, and Ravens) from Apex Magazine.
3) Last night there was write-club, and I wrote up a storm on the Black Candy draft between chatting with Angela Slatter and exchanging texts with Jason Fischeras he had his own write-a-thon in Adelaide. Then, because my sleep patterns are horribly messed up and 1 am seems like a really appropriate time to be doing things, I came home and wrote even more. Net result was about six and a half thousand words:
I suspect that many lads of a certain age who read this journal will have just had a sudden moment of “oh, yeah, I remember then,” before wandering off to youtube one of their other videos. I say this because I spent about two years with Transvision Vamp’s first album on the tape-deck of my car in my mid-twenties and every male friend who got a lift would hear the opening bars of I Want Your Love and get an immediate flash-back to their adolescence.
And yet once you get past the gratuitous objectification of Wendy James, there still something fascinating about Transvision Vamp. I have a moderate fascination with Andy Warhol and his relationship to celebrity that was heavily reflected in the band’s first album (Pop Art, which included a song about Warhol’s death). I’m intrigued by the number of former punk musicians who ended up playing pop-rock in the background (including former members of the X-Ray Specs and the Partisans). I’m freakin’ amazed that James’ post-Vamp solo-album was written by Elvis Costello, and moderately bummed that I never actually tracked it down in a record store. I’ve spent years trying to work out whether they were a punk band who got coopted or an experiment in controlled branding that used capitalism against itself, and I’ve never realy come up with an answer.
I really do need to go find a copy of Pop Art on CD though.
Today is a little chaotic, so I give you the following post in four-point structure.
1) More Horn-spotting over on Jeff VanderMeer’s blog today, this time in the form of a Horn review.
2) My parents have currently made it from Turkey to Singapore, currently scheduled to land in Brisbane sometime tonight. Went over and saw my sister this morning, whose generally closer to my extended family than I am and pretty exhausted after spending much of the evening at the hospital. She’s not sure whether my uncle will hold on until my parents get back, but she managed to contact my mother via phone during one of his moments of lucidity last night.
4) Against all odds I managed to fight through the lethargy and waiting to get something done yesterday, even if it wasn’t quite the baseline 2k words I look for if I’m going to call a day “productive.” To whit, the current Black Candy draft stands at:
So it appears my primary activity today has been waiting and that three thousand words is beyond ambitious. Got the news that my uncle was hospitalised not long after this morning’s post, alongside a request from my sister that we get in contact with my parents and bring them home from their overseas holidays on the chance they’d get back here before the inevitable happens. On one hand that’s all pretty easy – this wasn’t entirely unexpected and it’s mostly a matter of e-mail, SMS, and some websearching for the phone numbers of hotels – but on the other hand there’s a lot of waiting around for news so we can move onto the next step.
I’m not terribly good at waiting. Nor at knowing what’s appropriate during the period where all you do is wait. At this point I’ve basically rattled around my flat for six hours, and I think I’m hitting the point where I either need to do something of go stir-crazy. Writing may well be it.
So last night, in a fit of mild insomnia, I busted out a bunch of words and managed to make Yesterday a productive day. Then I engaged in the sport that girliejones has dubbed Horn-spotting. Then my internets went wonky, so I went back to bed. Anyway, for the record:
I’m tempted to try and hit 50k today, although given that it’s almost lunchtime and I’m yet to write anything (and the house needs cleaning prior to an inspection tomorrow) that may be a tad too ambitious.
