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I spend a lot of time walking across this bridge these days:

Twice a day, four days a week, in fact. It’s on the path between the train station and work, and avoiding it means traversing a somewhat less pleasant bridge that qualifies as the long way around, so its really a no-brainer to take the Kurilpa Bridge even before I made my startling discovery that the bridge had secret, magical, powers of plot development. In seven of the last eight mornings where I’ve walked across the bridge, I’ve reached the other end with a new scene in my head, typically one that will fix a story I’ve been working on for a while, or advance a novel I plan on writing in a way I’m not really expecting. It’s magical and kind of awesome and usually results in my tapping frantic notes into my phone at the far end so I can email them home when I actually have writing time.

On the eighth morning I crossed the bridge it was raining, and I learned a very different lesson: you do not walk across the Kulilpa Bridge while its raining. There’s no cover and the wind encourages the rain to hit the bridge in a rather horizontal fashion, and you’ll spend the enter walk wailing “The umbrella does nothing” in your best McBain impression. And afterwards you’ll spend the day at work in wet socks and wet pants, and your toes will shrivel into raisins.

It’s distracting to try and work while your toes are shrivelling into raisins.

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Every year I forget what January is really like.

Not the sweltering heat of the month when you’re in Brisbane – that I remember all to well, and I thank god that my new dwelling isn’t an asbestos sweat-box with an interior temperature averaging ten degrees higher than usual for the city. No, what I forget is the little things that come up and eat away at one’s time. January is the month of Birthdays in my neck of the woods, full to the brim of people I know and like getting older and wishing to celebrate the fact, and it’s rivalled only by October in my yearly calendar as the month where finding time is a struggle.

Except January is worse because I always think it’ll be an opportunity to *catch up* after the chaos of the Holidays, except it never is. February is the catch-up month, January is perpetually full.

Tags: Adventures on the Kurilpa Bridge, January is a deadly month

I was given a particularly silly hat for Christmas, and the first thing my mother said was oh god, it’ll be up on his blog by tomorrow morning. My mother is a wise woman, but she failed to take into account the delays inevitably caused by moving house and cleaning and the other minutia of the last few weeks. Not that she’s wrong about me posting a picture here, just the time frame:

Best. Present. Ever.

The hat came about because my sister buggered off to Nepal a few months back, planning on walking to the base camp of Everest, and asked if there was anything I wanted. Usually when my sister goes places I shrug and mumble something non-committal and end up with a motley array of t-shirts when she returns, but Tibet proved to be a special case. “You know what?” I said, “I’d really dig a sherpa hat.”

The fact that she found one with its own woolly Mohawk is really just a bonus, even if she spent the entire trip with people asking her if she actually liked her brother. Now I just need winter to roll around so everyone shall know me by my resplendent blue-green headware of awesomeness. 

Until Winter, I shall content myself with writing and admiring said headware on the noggin of the Spokesbear.

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I am, officially, relocated to a new domicile and deadline free.

The new place features somewhat tighter quarters than I’m used to, what with cramming pretty much everything I own into the one room. I’m somewhat amazed that *exactly the same bookcase* appears in the background of webcam shots despite the relocation, because apparently it’s that bookcase’s destiny to be set up opposite my computer in every place I live.

It’s also, coincidently enough, a brand new year. I don’t do resolutions and such, but I do have some plans for 2012. Not big plans, admittedly, but there’s a fairly well-sketched plan of things I’d like to write and things I’d like to read and a single credo – no damn deadlines for the first six months – dominating my approach. The first thing I’m working on are a handful of stories – mostly so I can kick the writer-brain into shape again – after which I’m disappearing back into novella land for a while.

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I caught up with the inimitable Angela Slatter at a friends birthday party recently, and she mentioned that the Lair of the Doctor’s Brain project she’d been working on with her co-brain, L.L. Hannett, was ready to launch. I’ve been eagerly waiting for this series to hit the blogosphere for months now and it doesn’t disappoint - they’ve started big with an interview with China Miéville and a series of illustrations from Kathleen Jennings.

I’m also pretty sure that every aspiring writer in the known universe has linked to this by now, but I’m nothing if I’m not a joiner: Chuck Wendig’s 25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing (Right Fucking Now) is pretty damn spiffy. And, you know, full of smart advice in amid the swearing, as is so often the case with Wendig’s work.

And since I’m feeling a bit grumpy that the Dresden Dolls are touring and I’m not going to their Brisbane concert tomorrow night, I’ll going to link to their cover of War Pigs and say, well, fuck, go listen. It’s pretty damn rare that I actually want to go to concerts these days, what with the crowds and the young people and the drinks you have to take out a mortgage to afford, but dammit, I really wanted to go to this one and that clip is one of the reasons why.

-sigh-

Ah well, I should probably be writing things anyway.

Tags: Angela Slatter, bitching about the fact that I'm old and it's hard to find people to go to gigs with these days, Dresden Dolls, LL Hannett, New Year, wearing funny headgear

One of the perils of working in a Writers Centre is the moments of downtime when your colleagues will turn to you and ask, so, what are you writing at the moment? Not a bad thing during the times when you’re actually working on things and eager to talk about it, but right now I’m kinda…not doing anything. Or rather, I’m giving myself a break after a year of deadline after deadline, accompanied by the fact that I’m still in the process of moving out of my old place (there’s a bunch of stuff still waiting to go into storage, and a whole mess of cleaning to do after Christmas is done with). So when asked during the walk to collect lunch for the office today, my response was, well, nothing really. 

Mostly what I’m doing at the moment is catching up on things. Specifically, catching up on email, which has been a little…untouched…during the process of packing and moving house. Ordinarily this isn’t a huge problem, but for some reason everyone emailed me asking for things at the same time and I was forced to send back a lot of replies that went along the lines of I’d love to, but can it wait a week until I get my living situation sorted and my internet reconnected. If I don’t sit down and clear the emails I owe people tonight then it’ll be another week until I get to them, and that’s no good to anybody.

Of course, this process would be much easier if I could track down the chords for my printer, since a lot of what I need to be doing is printing and scanning contracts. Unfortunately I’ve got no idea where it could be in the maze of unpacked boxes.

I suspect it’s hiding out with the missing keys to the filing cabinet.

My friend Chris has been running Space: 1889 for our Sunday night gaming crew for about a year now, and it seems to be the first roleplaying game that’s managed to dislodge the mindset of Sunday Night Cthulhu that dogged our weekly sessions after…well, about three straight years of Call of Cthulhu gaming. A few weeks back we kind of bullied persuaded Chris that we should do a Christmas Special, and he somewhat hesitantly agreed despite the fact that he thought we were crazy.

So we gathered and we played and there was…well, quite  a lot of Christmas references thrown around. More than you’d expect, given the vast majority of us are bah-humbug types who aren’t all that fond of the Holiday season. I won’t go into the details, since there’s nothing quite so dull as listening to an enthusiastic RPG player waxing lyrical about how awesome their game was, but we all had a blast. I bring it up because the climactic moment of the game (whereupon our mad steampunk adventurers broke the rules of time and space to deliver presents to thousands of Martian orphans) hinged upon the singing of The Little Drummer Boy.

Which immediately led me to Bing Crosby and David Bowie singing a Christmas duet. Truly one of the weirdest video clips I’ve ever seen

Sadly, we’re running out of time on our Sunday night gaming. Half the group is moving to Melbourne in March, and despite the fact that we’re going to try moving the game online, it’ll inevitably miss some of the things that have made Sunday nights a tradition – gathering together every Sunday, sharing dinner and a metric buttload of junk-food, catching up on one-another’s weeks. While I doubt I’ll get the chance to miss the people thanks to the wonders of modern technology, adapting to the change in the weekly social ritual we’ve built up is going to be tricky.

I’ve been meaning to drop past and blog a few things for the last couple of days, but my times largely been taking up by packing and writing and desperately trying to reach the pre-moving deadlines, and so most of this is old news to anyone following me on twitter or facebook.

In any case, my story Dying Young from Eclipse 4 has been selected to be part of Gardner Dozois’ Years Best Science Fiction athology due out next year, which means I can go scratch another thing off the big ol’ list of places I’d like to get published but rarely talk about. There’s a full ToC over on SF Signal, and it looks like a very cool book to be included in.

I should also mention that my story, The Girl in the Next Room is Crying Again, is online over at Daily Science Fiction so that those who don’t want to subscribe can go check it out.

And with that I’m going back to the words and the packing. One of the stories that absolutely must be done before I move is finally done, which means I’ve got about thousand words between me and finishing everything I’ve got due by the end of the year.

Still packing. Still writing. Still having a rather stressful week at the dayjob, courtesy of unruly technology that insists on not-working even after months of people trying to address the not-working issues. Suspect that I’m going to go into work tomorrow and be told there’s nothing we can do to fix the issue, which promises to be the kind of adventure people have in mind when they curse you to live in interesting times. This despite working late tonight in order to try and rectify things, or at least get the news now so I won’t fret about it for the next thirteen hours.

On the plus side, today’s email brought the news of a potential reprint sale that means I may be able to cross yet another goal off my not-so-secret-list-of-writing-goals-I-have-no-control-over-and-therefore-don’t-talk-about - news, as always, once contracts are signed and things are official – and I’ve been quietly filling out the forms that will officially mean I no longer live in my flat, and there copies of books I’d pre-ordered in the post and new books to be pre-ordered so they can arrive in the midst of next year and the dayjob contained one of those conversations you get to have, very occasionaly, with someone who really loves the short story as much as you do.

So I guess, overall, it washes out as a win.

Or, as the Spokesbear puts it, SNUFFLES FOR EVERYONE!

Anyway, it’s, er, eight o’clockish about now. I figure I’ve got another four hours of writing ahead of me before I collapse from mild exhaustion. Tim to go back to the story du jour and see what’s what.

Wish me luck.

Tags: Spokesbear

I met Laura Goodin several years ago at a writers workshop. She was forthrightly American in many ways, despite being expatriated to Australia for several years now, and we frequently found ourselves coming from stories at very different angles. Despite her handicap as a non-native Australian, she wrote one of the finest SF cricket stories I’ve ever had the privilege of reading. Since then she’s been busy doing a series of impressive things – writing plays and opera’s, for example, and enrolling in PhD programs. She’s also published a story over on daily science fiction titled The Bicycle Rebellion and it’s rather sad in a sweet kind of way, and it’s perhaps one of the more intriguing stories I’ve seen from Laura over the years (which, considering her knack of publishing SF stories about Demon-pigs in BBQs and Futurism gone mad in magazines that don’t generally publish science fiction, is saying something).

I first met Angela Slatter about…well, six weeks or so before I met Laura Goodin…but after years of blogging about Write Club I’m assuming I don’t need to provide a great deal of context for Angela. She’s awesome, she writes remarkable things, and among the remarkable things she’s written is the latest editorial for the Weird Fiction Review. And if you were sitting around, wondering what to do with your holidays, you could do a lot worse than checking out said editorial, As the Weird Turns, and using it as a suggest reading list for the next month.

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There’s ten days until I move house. There’s still several rooms that need to be packed. I also have two deadlines between now and then. I suspect I’m going to keep mentioning this out loud, since it’ll remind me that I should probably go write the things I need to write in order to meet said deadlines.

It’ll also remind me to never again schedule deadlines and the relocation of everything I own in the same month. Especially when that month is December.

There is no cheer or good humour in me today. I’ve spent most of my time sporting this facial expression:

Tags: Angela Slatter, Laura Goodin, Making Funny Faces at a Webcam, Recommendations

I’m spending some quality time with the keyboard tonight, chasing the elusive end of the Flotsam story-sequence. I keep scribbling notes in the margins about things I’d like to mention when I eventually do the Flotsam recap, given the somewhat usual space the entire thing occupied in my process, but that’s most just keep the hamster wheel inside my head spinning while it comes up with the bit that comes next.

It’s remarkably tempting to just type Rock’s Fall, Everyone Dies, but somehow that doesn’t seem an adequate conclusion for Keith and co (Public Service Announcement: the link in the sentence prior to this leads you to TV Tropes. God knows I just lost 45 minutes tooling around following links. You Have Been Warned).

Because I’m packing and they’re around, I find myself working while wearing the dreaded paperbaghat. Basically, I’ve spent much of the evening looking like this:

And, as is traditional, I forgot to take the damn thing off when I answered the door to collect tonight’s pizza order. Such are the dangers of succumbing to the paperbaghat’s dread allure.

-FACEPALM-

Stupid paperbaghat.

The pizza guy, god bless him, didn’t say a word.

I nipped off to the local shopping centre to have a haircut today. Not that you’d notice to look at me, all things considered, since in my vernacular having a haircut largely translates as choosing to look like an ill-kept hobo rather than arriving there accidentally. Fortunately, today’s hairdresser was one of the few who understood that was the goal of having a haircut, rather than attempting to try and make me look neat and tidy.

I long ago came to grips with the fact that my hair doesn’t do neat and tidy unless I’m willing to shave most of it off, but for some reason hairdressers seem to take that as a challenge.

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I’m a bit behind on things at the moment. I’m behind at the dayjob, I’m behind on the writing front, and I’m behind on the packing and cleaning plan that will allow me to vacate my flat on the 17th of December with minimal hassles and panic. I suspect there will be a point in the near future when things will calm down a bit, but those points are all in January, which isn’t really helpful when the vast majority of the things I’m behind on have deadlines in December.

‘Course, once I’m done with the December deadlines, I’m done with all the deadlines. 2011 has been a year of many, many deadlines and almost all of them were agreed to back in 2010 when I was an unemployed writer with time on his hands. Not having a deadlines is going to seem…weird as hell, actually. But I plan on celebrating it regardless. Possibly with copious amounts of scotch.

In January I get to start writing at my own pace again. I’ll be endeavouring to knock off a bunch of short stories in the first half of the year, but that’s about as ambitious as I plan on getting for a while.

Yesterday evening I was walking from work to the train-station, taking the long-cut through Southbank so I could enjoy the afternoon breeze and the Brisbane river, and I came across a pair of buskers playing a version of the Beatle’s Norwegian Wood as a duet on violin and banjo. They were kind of phenomenal, I think, considering they were utilizing a banjo, but the best part of it was the surprise of finding them there, just doing their thing, while the rest of us ambled to and fro, getting away from our dayjobs and heading into the evening.

Had it been a different kind of evening I would have stopped and listened for a bit longer. I probably should have, but my mind kept drifting to other things, and I was hurrying home to pack and clean and get some writing done. And somewhere amid all that, it occurred to me that I should blog, and here we are, trying to figure out how to begin. And it occurred to me that, yes, the buskers were probably the right starting point, and here we are, writing a blog post.

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My story The Girl in the Next Room is Crying Again is scheduled to be mailed to Daily SF subscribers on the 2nd of December, so this is an opportune time to remind everyone that you can subscribe to Daily SF for free and they will mail stories directly to your in-box every weekday. Unfortunately I’m doing this too late for the bulk of you to get today’s story, The Bicycle Rebellion, but my friend Laura Goodin, but I’ll rectify this by posting a link when it comes up on the Daily SF website in a few weeks.

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My challenge for 2012 is this: figure out how to write while working a full-time job. 

A wiser man would have figured this out in 2011, what with it being a year where he had a regular deadline *every damn month*, but for various reasons I spent 2011 just drifting along with the current (or paddling manically when deadlines got too close). In a lot of ways, having regular deadlines is a refuge. You write. Things come out. You’re being *productive*, even if it’s only for a handful of days every month.

And yet, the thing that sticks in your gut is the knowledge that you could have done better. That you’re coasting because you can, these days, what with that shiny dayjob taking care of the rent and the food and the bills.

And because not-coasting means learning to do things differently, learning new skills, and that shit is hard.

Don’t get me wrong, I freakin’ love my dayjob at the moment, but I’ll be utterly bummed if it means I stop writing altogether. So 2012 is the year I buckle down and learn to do shit the hard way, ’cause the old ways of writing aren’t working no more. Which means learning how to plan, and figuring out how to be more disciplined, and learning to say no to people even though I totally have the cash to go out into the world and do things these days.