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1) A Hundredth Name, Chris Green (Abyss and Apex)

Click the link, you know you want too. No? Okay, let me convince you then. You should go read Chris Green’s story at Abyss and Apex because the man is freakin’ talented and understands things like brevity and leaving empty spaces for the story to breathe. I’ve critted Chris a bunch of times and it’s a bloody hard thing to do, because he crams more story into two thousand words than there should actually be allowed and he fits the damn things together so tight that pulling one segment out causes the whole damn thing to unravel in your hands.

You should read his story because he’s one of the few people I know who manages to give the impression of being genuinely, fearlessly interested in everything and somehow manages to filter that down into his fiction, even though his bailiwick seems to be horror rather than any of the forms of SF where being fearlessly interested in everything would be a useful trait in an author (not a slight on horror authors, but you guys need to understand fear and I’m not sure Chris does). You should read it because he can usually nail one image that makes you cringe, or cry, or wince with pain, and yet there’s still something beautiful in the stories he writes. You should read him because he’s one of my favourite-writers-who-doesn’t-get-published-enough (a distinction he shares with Ben Francisco), primarily because he seems to spend too much time at his day job and not enough time producing fiction. And despite this, he seems to believe that every time he gets published it’s a fluke, despite the fact that it isn’t.

You should also read it because Chris owns cooler footwear than you ever will. Yes, you included, even though I’m sure your shoes are fairly damn cool. I’ve seen Chris step out in boots that’d make a gothic shoe fetishist cry with envy. Come to think of it, his beard is cooler than yours too. And he owns a t-shirt featuring my favourite Buffy quote ever.

2) The City and the City, China Mieville

While I’d certainly recommend reading this as a blood good read, this isn’t meant to be a review (for that I’d send you over to MacLaren North’s fine write-up over on ASIF) and I’m not going to avoid spoilers. I’m not going to intentionally spoil the book either, but I’m primarily going to talk about the book based on the decisions that interested me as a writer and that’ll probably slip over into spoiler territory pretty quickly.

China Mieville’s always had a knack of creating interesting settings, but if you’re a writer then The City and The City is one of those books that’s worth pulling apart and figuring out because it takes that extra half-step beyond “interesting setting” and into the realm of “fuck, how’d he do that.” In fact, lets call it a case study is awesomeness on the setting front for its ability to make a theoretically impossible setting seem possible and logical.

The central conceit of novel’s setting is that there are two European cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, that overlap one another while remaining entirely separate in the minds of their inhabitants. Tensions between the two cities are strained, at best, and crossing from one to the other is handled via heavily patrolled borders. There’s nothing particularly mind-breaking in that set-up, at least when you start the book, but as the narrative progresses we realise that parts of the city occupy the physical space. Characters sitting in Beszel simply choose not to see residents of Ul Qoma, a fire taking place down the street is ignored because it belongs in the “wrong” city, and an upmarket Ul Qoma suburbs occupy the same physical locations as Beszel slums. In short, the separation is cultural rather than physical, ingrained by years of practice by the citizens of both cities, and various terms that are dropped early in the book -  crosshatched streets, or breaching – take on different shades of meaning as the setting comes into focus.

This is the kind of setting that fantasy fans probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid at if it was being explained away using magic (and would probably see me and Karen Miller on a panel having a brisk discussion about whether it’s fantasy, slipstream, or magic realism). This isn’t. There’s no hint of magic in The City and The City, because with the exception of the setting it plays it like a straight police procedural and the separation between the two cities is largely a matter of cultural conditioning and clever writing on Mieville’s part.

Which is why this book fascinates me as a reader – what starts as a patently absurd concept ends up slipping into the story as a natural, plausible setting. And because I’m a writer and a genre geek, my natural inclination when faced with a setting like this is to start pulling the novel apart and trying to figure out why it works (excluding, of course, the obvious explanation of “Mieville’s freakin’ smart and a very good writer”). At the moment I’ve got a rough bundle of thoughts floating around, so I figured I’d throw a few of them out there and see if anyone whose read the novel agrees

My first thought is that a lot of the effect has to do with with setting the book in an Eastern European city, irrespective of whether it’s made up or not. The opening chapter reads like a straight police procedural and has plenty of slang terms thrown around that aren’t related to the split-city conceit, so seeding concepts that are important later in the book slides in naturally alongside explanations of Fuluna (think Jane Doe) and Feld (a local drug). Combine the learning-curve expected when coming up to speed on the ‘exitic’ setting with the split-city conceit means we’re constantly giving Mieville narrative space, and by the time we realise what’s going on we’re too caught-up in the book to give a damn. In the earliest moments when our protagonist is caught in the interstitial space between the two cities, noticing a woman he shouldn’t have, it’s a slippage that’s treated like an embarrassing faux-pass that gets even less explanation than the drug of choice of the local teens.

What flummoxes me about the book is the way it borrows a trait from fantasy – moving between ‘worlds’ as a demarcation of important plot-points – and yet manages to avoid coming off like a fantastic setting or book. While you could probably make an argumentfor Slipstream in association with The City and The City it does a remarkably good job of playing it straight as a police procedural despite the quirks in its backdrop. While there are plenty of non-SF narratives that have used this kind of narrative relocation as a means of dividing up a story at similar points, it seems like an obvious tip-over given Mieville’s past novels (all fantasy) and the improbability of his setting. Especially since the solution to the novel’s murder revolves more and more around the split between the cities and what may lie between them.

Another possibility may come form Mieville’s decision to shine of light on its absurdities before they come important, bringing in the American parents of the murdered girl at the centre of the novel’s mystery to interact with the protagonist and comment on the conceit before the genre boundaries are stretched to breaking point. This choice, cleverly, allows for the reinforcement of the cultural aspect of the separation given the tendency towards parts of the English speaking world to be somewhat…clueless and insensitive…when it comes to other cultures. We are, in essence, shamed into accepting the conceit of the setting before we can reject it…

And I might leave it there, for the moment, because this is already getting out of control, but it’s probably the starting point I’ll use when I go back and re-read the book with an eye towards identifying how it bloody-well works.  I suspect there will be another post on this, sooner or later.

So here’s something I realised during my week off: I’m tired of not being awesome.

Lets forestall the inevitable reassurances that tend to follow when you post stuff like that – I’m aware that I am, occasionally, capable of awesome (although it is very un-Australian to admit it, and it is said here with a modicum of irony). There have been the occasional flashes of external validation that remind me of this, plus there’s the posse of folks who make up my friends list. I mean, lets face it: Jason Fischer? Awesome; Angela Slatter? Awesome; My Call of Cthulhu peeps? Awesome; the various folks who have published my fiction? Yep, they’re awesome too. They may have their occasional moments of self-doubt in this regard, since recognising awesomeness in others is easier than recognising your own internal awesomeness, but as a blanket rule I think they all score big points on the awesomometer. As are many other folks (my DnD peeps, my family, etc) who aren’t readily linkable online. I figure that if you can find a collection of awesome folks who are willing to stay in contact and help you out, then there has to be the potential for latent awesomeness in you somewhere to justify that.

So I’m not denying the fact that I’ve done some big things in the last couple of years. Things worth being proud of. Things I can look back on and say “that, that was awesome.”

Basically, what I’m saying here is that my life is occasionally awesome. There are things that I’m good at, but they’re the kind of things that lots of people are good at. I want to achieve more than good. I want total awesome, slathered with awesome-sauce, with a side order of awesome fries. I want to be able to end the year and think “wow, that was a bloody good year” rather than “yeah, some good stuff happened, but the last year primarily sucked.”  I want to kick back after finishing my yearly goal-check next July and say “I fuckin’ rock” with total confidence. I kinda managed that this year – my primary goal was getting my writing back on track and finishing a novel draft, both of which I managed – but lots of other things fell by the wayside. It seems like things have been falling by the wayside for years now, primarily because they’ve been dubbed too hard, too scary, or simply too expensive to achieve without putting in some hard work.

Call it a contact high from a week of productivity porn, but I’m pretty sick of those three excuses floating around in my world.

So this year I’m setting them aside. Between now and June 30th, 2010, I’m going to strive for awesomeness. And to keep me on track, I’ve created victory conditions – an 80-point list of goals that I can mark off as they’re achieved. Some of it is a sensible and reasonable continuation of stuff I’m already doing (redraft and polish Black Candy, get some novellas written, get a whole bunch of stories written), some of it is about rebuilding parts of my life that have slipped by the wayside (pretty much any goal that isn’t writing based), and some are about rebuilding my life so it resembles the life I’d like to be living (reading 104 books in the coming year, getting myself down to a healthier weight). It may be a purely personal metric, but I figure that if I can achieve a high proportion of the things on said list (I’m aiming for 90%) then my year will have been pretty damn awesome.

Part of this is going to involve rethinking the way I blog, since I’ve strayed a long way from my goals when I originally migrated over to my personal website rather than simply livejournaling. In fact, it’s turned into the one thing I’d promised myself it wouldn’t turn into – a place where I log wordcounts and engage in random acts of self-promotion. Part of this comes down from thinking about the blogging process the wrong way, getting caught up in the goal of blogging for its own sake. I’m still not entirely sure how it’ll change, although I’ll be aiming to post both more regularly and less often.

Not that I tan, of course, despite spending my teenage years on the Gold Coast and undergoing the mandatory time at the beach. Tanning and me don’t mix – my primary pigmentation is basically red, so I keep having conversations with doctors about how easily I’ll burn and how prone I am to little things like Skin Cancer. I could go on, but my skin isn’t really the point of this post. *sigh* Let me start again…

I am, at this point, about two weeks behind on e-mail, phone-calls, text messages, facebook updates, blog reading, and social engagements of all kinds. The first week of this was unintentional – just the usual slippage that comes from trying to get too much done at the same time – but around Tuesday of last week I declared a unilateral retreat from from the world in order to spend the second week reading, mainlining ibuprofen, and living on soup to avoid further irritating an inflamed nerve in my gum. Think of it as about 45% convalescence and 55% much-needed recharge time and you’ll have the math down about right.

I’m generally pretty down on non-productive periods, but I have to admit that I feel pretty good about this one. It let me actually finish reading books (btw – read The City and The City – it’s freakin’ awesome stuff), get some perspective on why I was rushing certain projects that didn’t need it, and generally sort out how to move forward.  Of course, this may have a lot to do with the sheer amount of productivity-porn I immersed myself in over the last week, but that’s how it goes sometimes

Hmm. Rambling again. Back to the point – if you’re waiting for a response of some kind, it’ll probably happen in the next couple of days as I finish saddling the horse and climb back on. In some cases it’ll also be accompanied by profuse apologies and such.

Doubling up this week: One of these amuses me, and the other is pure awesome. I shall leave it to you to determine which is which.

So the erstwhile editor of Twelfth Planet Press, Girliejones, has dubbed this month Female Appreciation Month in response to the all-around sausagefest that was the Triple J Hottest One Hundred of all Time*. Being a fan of female musicians in various genres, my immediate thought was “sure, I’ll be in that” and I went and pulled about thirty-odd albums out of my collection to serve as my listening for the coming month. All involve either female singers or female songwriters.

Being the utter High Fidelity loving nerd that I am, I’m trying to resist the urge to blog at you about the absolute awesome of every single album on this list with top-five lists and random gushing. I may well break at some point. Until then, you’ll probably see a theme running through the Friday Youtubery posts. And I should be rocking out with a month full of XX chromosomal goodness.

*This list, incidentally, has completely cured me of this lingering desire I’ve developed to get a radio for the house. Not simply because of the overwhelming majority of men, which I’ve come to expect from such things, but for the general trends the list shows. I mean, I know he’s recently dead and all, but when you’re voting two Michael Jackson songs into the 100 best songs ever of an national alternative and youth radio network, you are all fucking dead to me. Hell, you were all dead to me the moment Elton John appeared on the list. Billie Jean I could probably live with, even if I appreciate far more when being covered, but seriously – Thriller? Tiny Fucking Dancer? WTF, people? I know I’m in danger of turning into a cranky old man and all, but seriously: Dead To Me. All of You.

My brain went on strike about forty-five minutes after I finished the novel draft last week, and it’s still picketing against any notion of returning to work. I do keep trying to explain, quite reasonably, that I don’t need the entire brain back – just the bit that does the re-writing, and maybe the bit that writes the short stories would like to pitch in again? Heck, at this point I’d settle for the bit that writes haiku, and I’m so not a haiku kind of guy.

It is Friday, right? I mean, I thought it was Thursday, maybe even Wednesday, but the computer tells me it’s Friday and generally it’s smarter than I am. Obviously I am very confused today, so we have Tapes and Tapes doing Cowbell. Because for months I heard it on Triple J and couldn’t work out how they were getting the bass sound they were getting in the song, and it was driving me nuts. And then I saw the clip and, aw, obviously, indie-rock with tuba. Awesome.

First draft is done (making it the first novel draft I’ve finished in, what, a decade? Maybe longer?).

I’m off to vegetate to the Dresden Dolls and eat my body-weight in celebratory chocolate. Tomorrow I start work on the Claw redraft I’ve been putting off for far too long…

Just passing through, what with the novel draft being perilously close to being done, but I thought I’d mention a little story called On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War-Machines of the Merfolk that went online at Strange Horizons. Not for any particular reason, mind you, I just thought I’d mention it’s there.

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.