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Ever wondered what I look like after pulling an all-nighter? I’m not sure why you would, but through the magic of built-in laptop cameras and my own hazy logic this morning you’re going to get it anyway.

Current stimulants: coffee, panic, a bowl of port wine jelly, three short bursts of sleep (45 minutes or less). If you need me, I’ll the guy who thinks he’s a hummingbird.

Stop what you’re doing, right now, and go back up your computer. Not just saving your on a zip drive, but actually backing your files up and keeping them somewhere far away from your PC.

I usually say this once a year in October to commemorate the computer crash of 06 that complete wiped out about seven years of work, including a bunch of stories and the PhD thesis I’d been working. Like most people, I thought I was safe because everything was backed up on my zip drive. Unfortunately, said zip drive was plugged into my computer at the time, so the power surge that wiped my PC out took the back-ups with me.

It was, needless to say, a very bad day. I cried for a while. Eventually I started throwing things.

This warning comes early this year because I just lost my second PC in three years. It just went “nope, done with this,” and stopped working while I was in the middle of typing. Fortunately, I learned my lesson last time, so all I lost with this crash was the work I’d done from the last few hours and a bunch of computer game save files that don’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. At most, if it’d taken the zip disk with it, I would’ve lost about a weeks worth of stuff. While this is stressful – I was trying to hit a deadline for Gen Con Oz this afternoon – it isn’t the catastrophic loss the last PC death.

I figure a goodly portion of my friends list are writers. For the love of god, people, back up your files. Your computer isn’t as permanent as you think, and it truly sucks to be sitting there going “but, but, but” when the techie man tells you there’s nothing left.

As a side note – I’m broke and can’t afford to pay said techie-type people to tell me why the latest PC died and it’s well out of waranty. If there’s anyone local who’se got the know-how to poke at the parts and tell me why it’s gone, let me know and I’ll offer a) gratitude, b) um, whatever form of payment we can work given my limited means.

I just thought I should mention it because, you folks, honestly, you rock my goddamn world. I say this full aware that it’s one of those phrases I overuse, but this week I mean it quite literally. My world, it is rocked. I spent part of yesterday studying my to-do list for the next couple of years – not months, like I ordinarily work, but whole damn years – and realised there is a stuff on there. Stuff with tentative release dates and upcoming deadlines and the possibility of more stuff on the end. Stuff that I don’t have to write and figure out a market for, because there are folks who are waiting for it and setting deadlines and expecting it to sell once it’s released.

There’s still a part of me that’s absolutely bewildered by the fact that there are enough of you paying attention to what I write in order to justify that. Writing’s always been a bit like that for me – consciously I know there are people I don’t know reading the stories, but somehow it never sunk in and reached the subconscious level. For years it was just me, and they were dark and unpublished times. Then it was me and the Clarion peeps, and then other writers in the Australian community I met through those folks, and then some of my other friends who don’t write (many of whom I knew for years, and knew I wrote, but remained utterly separated from anything I was doing because I was paranoid and didn’t talk much about the specifics). With the release of Horn my extended family started taking an interest, rather than nodding and saying “yes, a story in an anthology, that’s very nice.” Last year I met my first person who said “oh yeah, I’ve read your blog” and it blew my freakin’ mind. This is not to say that I didn’t know you were out there, reading, just that it never actually sunk in to the point where I thought about when sitting down to write.

And now there are folk who are willing to gamble money and effort on the fact that there are enough people out there, people I don’t know, who want to read something I haven’t actually written yet. I spent part of last night looking over the to-do list and that hit me pretty hard, eliciting a short Keanu Reeves type “whoa.”

Of course, I’ve spent the last twelve hours talking myself out of thinking that this is a big deal, making all the usual arguments about “they’re mostly novellas” and “small press” and “not a full-time writer earning a living wage yet”, but that’s primarily because I need to reduce that realisation down and make it manageable in order to keep working, otherwise my brain will jam up in panic and nothing well get done. But the realisation is still there, underneath all the word-counting and project planning and figuring out of deadlines. My approach to writing has changed in a very tiny way, because you folks started reading. And enough of you liked things like Horn enough to justify plonking down a wad of cash and buy a copy, which led to the suspicion on the publisher’s part that it’d be nice to try it again.

And that rocks my goddamn world. I know I said it in my last post, and at the beginning again, but I feel the urge to say it again (and will probably keep saying it in the future): Thanks for reading, you crazy crazy people. You’re all goddamn awesome.

This is not the blog post you were meant to be reading today.

Not that you’d know this if I hadn’t told you, but there it is. The blog post I had planned for today was inspired by a question Karen Miller asked earlier this week (“isn’t it time the boys of the Science Fiction grew up”) and put forward a bunch of thoughts about why they wouldn’t, because not growing up is kinda integral to the contemporary cultural narrative of geekdom and folks seem to be unwilling to change it in any significant way. You’ll probably still get that post, sooner or later, since I’ve half-drafted it in my head and it’s still kicking around and gathering arguments, but I just don’t have the energy to unleash snark and ranting on the world today.

‘Cause this week, really, it’s been rather awesome. How awesome, I hear you ask? This awesome:

• I had two three short stories accepted in the space of four five days. This, as you might expect, is the kind of start that makes my week awesome.
• I had a project pitched for 2012 that I can’t talk about; I pitched an idea back that may well see me talk about it much earlier than that; nothing set in stone yet and we’re still hammering out the finer details, but overall, this is looking pretty cool.
• Completely trashed the current draft of Clawafter having a chat with Twelfth Planet Press about how to proceed with a series of Aster book. This is my call, incidently, not something they asked for., and on the whole I’m happier with the book Claw will turn into (currently using the working title Cold Cases) than the version of Claw I’ve got. Not that the current version of Claw is a bad book (once you get past the drafting issues), it’s just that there’s a more sensible way to approach the series and make sure I get to write all the stories I wanted to write in Aster’s world, and the current version doesn’t fit the structure well enough to stick around. Oddly, this feels like the most awesome thing I’ve done in the entire week
• Speaking of Aster, the latest out of Twelfth Planet suggests that Horn sales have been rather good. As in “we’re down to the last box of books” kind of good (and hopefully that’s sufficiently ambiguous that I won’t get in trouble for saying it in public). This kinda flabbergasts me in its awesomeness, both because it confirms that there will be as a second Aster novella and because I had many paranoid nightmares about releasing a book no-one wanted to read. I feel I should say a heartydanke schoen to all the peeps, reviewers, and readers who have recommended a little noir/urban fantasy about rogue unicorns and pornography to friends and family, then convinced them to spend their hard-earned money on it. You folks rock.

1) Chris Green Distills the Clarion Wisdom

I went to Clarion South with Chris two and a half years ago. He’s a smart man, very interested in things, and on something of a roll of late as far as publications and sales go. Over the last week Chris started distilling some of the major lessons we learned during the workshop into a series of very short, controlled blog posts. Given his terse nature, these are short and easy to digest, and they’re basically the high points of the workshop in collected form (and since he doesn’t believing in tagging posts, I’ll send you straight to the first entry and let you follow along from there).

2) Philip Pullman on How to Write a Book

This amuses me in its accuracy.

3) Reviewage andPimpage

- My comrade-in-writing Ben Francisco - and the first man to tell me “this should be a novella” – engages in some Horn Pimpage on my behalf
- The Fix diggs my story Clockwork, Patchwork, and Ravens which appeared in Apex Magazine back in May
- The Internet Review of Science Fiction describes On the Destruction of Copenhage… as “mundane surrealism.”

4) Rewriting as an Animated Giff

A very short-but-interesting post from Elizabeth Bear on the re-writing process, showing the evolution of a paragraph through multiple layers of revision.

5) My Projects

Man, the last week has been all about the new projects. I started the new novel draft, started revision of another project, started preparing for the next draft of Claw, agreed to do some work for Gen Con Australia, and tentatively agreed to take on another project I cannot yet talk about. I also ticked another entry off the 80-point-plan of awesome, making my year 3.75% awesome. If you see me looking wild-eyed this week, it’s not because I’m stressed – I’m just learning to cope with an opportunity-rich environment again

6) Oh, hell, let’s cap it off with a youtube clip

Because I’m far to fascinated by this film-clip at the moment.

I love a good cover version, especially when the artist finds a new spin. You could say it feeds directly into my own impulses to mash genres together and see what results, but musicians tend to be somewhat cooler in their experimentation. To whit, 6 cover versions I think everyone should listen to at least once:

1) Drive, the Paradise Motel

There’s a strong possibility that the pang of pure melancholy I feel when I hear the opening guitar notes to the Paradise Motel’s Flight Pathsalbum is a pure Pavlovian response to one of those albums that served as a soundtrack for three or four straight years of my life, and the real centrepiece of the album is the cover of the Car’s Drive. The Paradise Motel take what was a minor pop hit, slow it the fuck down, and imbue it with the kind of sorrow that’d have a small passel of emo kids huddled in a corner wondering why one needs guitars and black hair in order to appear miserable. No youtube clip for this one, but if you listen real carefully you can hear in the soundtrack of the He Died With a Felafel in His Hand movie (speaking of which, why don’t I own a copy of that film yet? Seriously?) or get lucky if you spend enough time poking around Last FM.

2) Crazy in Love, Antony and the Johnstons

There is some crazy kind of power in taking hideously poppy songs and slowing them down, discovering the sadness in them. The Paradise Motel does it above, the oft-mentioned Mad World cover from Donnie Darko does it as well, but none of it takes something quite as crazy as Beyonce and achieves the same affect as Antony on the Johnstons.

3) Pierre, The Dresden Dolls

I’m a sucker for the Dresden Dolls and they have a wide variety of very mighty covers out there, including Black Sabbath (War Pigs) and (Pretty In Pink), but their live DVD made me a huge fan of this Carol King cover. Largely, for once, thanks to the awesomeness that is Brian Viglione. Much as I love the Amanda-Fucking-Palmer solo stuff,  I find myself missing the male half of the Dresden Dolls more and more. I think it’s the facial expression that make this song.

4) I was Only Nineteen, The Herd

Somewhere along the line I became a Herd fan, and they’d become the band I’ve seen more often than any other. I’m not sure when that happened. I’m pretty sure this one will be lost on people who aren’t Australian and therefore missed the Red Gum original, and I know plenty of people who are all “ooo, sacrilege” that a hip-hop group has covered what is essentially one of the best-known Aussie protest songs, but when you see this being performed it starts making total sense that it needed to be covered and the Herd needed to do it. 

5) Flame Trees, Sarah Blasco

Let me make something clear: I don’t like Cold Chisel. Not ironically, not unironically, not even a little. I have sung along to Khe Sanh only once in my lifetime (this is, in the eyes of many people I know, as un-Australian as you can get), and that was when I saw someone doing it as a cover. It’s not that Cold Chisel can’t write an okay song (Don Walker teamed with Tex Perkin’s is a musical combination that’s truly droolworthy), it’s just that Jimmy Barnes’ voice gives me the shits. Then Sarah Blasco comes along and does a nice, gentle cover of Flame Trees and I’m hooked.

6) Straight Outta Compton, Nina Gordon

A few years back Tori Amos put together a covers album called Strange Little Girls, built up around the concept of singing songs traditionally associated with men and seeing what happened when a woman sang it. It’s an impressive album, one of my favorites, but I think Nina Gordon’s cover of NWA’s Straight Outta Compton takes the cake when it comes to recontextualizing songs by the gender of the performer.

Honorable Mentions: Smells Like Teen Spirit, Tori Amos (good, but slipped out of contention due to much repetition and too many Tori Amos covers); Come As You Are, The Charlie Hunter Trio (Someone, somewhere, is spinning in their grave); Crazy Mary, Pearl Jam (woulda made the list, but so close to the original Victoria Williams Song); Ziggy Stardust, Bauhaus (see above, plus one day a bunch of goths will argue about who is sexier while performing this song – Bowie or Peter Murphy – and it will result in the end of the world); Love Will Tear Us Apart, Nouvelle Vague ( actually, they should be on the list above, but I ended up listing their entire catalogue of covers and couldn’t pick a favourite); actually, even now I need two spots for Nouvelle Vague, cause Too Drunk to Fuck has to be on the lists somewhere (really, French women channeling Jello Biafra to bossa nova? Sign me up – it’s the stuff of awesome).

Feel free to feed my cover-version addiction and tell me what I missed

On one level, it really doesn’t take much to make me a happy man. This morning happiness is achieved via high volume and the Kaiser Chiefs singing Sha-na-na-na-na during the chorus of every song on their first album. Once that hits a certain point on the decibel meter I’m all glee and shiny rainbows. Which is just as well, because otherwise I’d be writing blog posts about the various ways revising Claw is kicking my arse this week. Although I think that’s probably a good thing, in the end, since it large kicks my arse in the same way Horndid – I have a bunch of scenes I’m pretty happy with, plus a bunch of characters and a plot, but they refuse to come together in a way that’s meaningful just yet.

It occurred to me a while ago that this approach is something I’ve inherited from many, many years of playing roleplaying games. The way I plan a game session is exactly the same – pick five or six set-piecescenes that offer a cool setting, or character, or monster, and then find a way to link them together in terms of plot or dungeon complex. The difference there is that the linkage is largely a matter of genre convention; as a general rule, you can trust the players to follow the expected path as long as they know the genre you’re referencing. When writing fiction the approach is a little less satisfying, because finding new ways to get to the same destinations is kind of essential to the process.

So as a result of my request for female authors one of my off-line friends decided it would be a lark to say “you know, you really *should* read Stephanie Meyers.” And after the requisite laughter that follows such a suggestion, I said “yeah, right-o” and promptly organised to borrow a copy of Twilight from my sister (who had, in turn, borrowed it from a friend, and wishes it to be quite clear that this is not her book I am borrowing; she was lured into reading it by its popularity among non-reader friends, and her response to the novel are probably even more negative than most).

To be honest, the book wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. I mean, it didn’t touch me anywhere inappropriate or threaten to eat my children or anything like that. It just kinda ambled along telling an familiar-if-unpretentious story for the first half in which Bella and Edward stay away from each other, then turned into overblown teenage angst which made me want to slap the characters as they referred to one another as heroin addictions and such, then had an inexplicable vampire-attack-chase-scene-watchamie to come to its unlikely conclusion without any real meaning ’cause, yo, the bad guy was just there to make for an ending, yeah?

Then there was prom.

I could gripe, because this is a very easy book to gripe about, but I figure there’s enough of that. And, honestly, after years of reading some of the more florid ends of the gothic romance I can even understand the appeal, especially if I were part of the target demographic. Lets just say it’s not my thing, and that I’d probably need some kind of bribery to convince me to continue with the series. Instead I’m just going to wander off and quietly contemplate how much more awesome this book could have been if it was written from the POV of, say, Billy or Tyler-who-cannot-drive-on-ice, becoming the friend and confidant of his neighbour Edward Cullen, who is in the process of going all Jay Gatsby for the new girl. ‘Cause I think Twilight by way of the Great Gatsby would have been awesome, and it would have spared me the interminable angst that made up the middle portion of the book. Plus, then, the stalkery stuff would actually be a literary homage rather than just plain creepy.

There’s always something a bit oogly-boogly about blogging your responses to fiction written by people you know (especially if you don’t necessarily know well them well), but today I’m going to bite the bullet and recommend Karen Miller’s The Innocent Mage as one of those books that folks interested in writing fantasy should really pick up and take a look at in order to understand its narrative tricks.

I’m kind of envious of writers who can write big, doorstopper-sized fantasy novels at the best of times but this one manages to go somewhere interesting in its avoidance of standard genre tropes. I mean, The Innocent Mage feels like a traditional fantasy novel – you can run through the check-list of elements needed for a big doorstopper fantasy and they’re all there: Ancient enemy from the distant past? A young lad of simple beginnings heading out into the wised world? A prophecy ordaining a great battle between good and evil? The deeds of kings, sorcerers and princes brought to the fore? Check, check, check, and check. This kind of stuff is the baseline of the doorstopper fantasy genre, and their presence no doubt contributes to The Innocent Mage’s ability to satisfy as a big doorstopper fantasy experience. And it does satisfy, very well, on that front. I’m still recovering from the sleep debt I accumulated by staying up until six in the morning reading the book.

What surprised me wasn’t what was in the book, but rather what wasn’t. Things like, say, sword-fights. Or the start of the war we’re teased with via prophecy. Or big epic overland quests to pick up macguffins and plot coupons. Hell, by the end of the first book titular Innocent Mage is not yet a mage, nor has he even had an inkling that magic and great deeds are in his future. His heroic journey, as presented in book one, is essentially one of rising from fisherman to becoming the highest rank Bureaucrat of his race within the tense, bi-racial government system set up within the country. Even the evil sorcerer and his demonic army are safely segregated from the story for about three hundred and seventy pages, making a last-minute appearance to set up for the second book in the duology (where, I suspect, the inevitable war will finally kick off).

The revelation of the evil sorcerer is actually something of a let-down when it comes, because the real antagonist of the story is actually the protagonists best friend who creates conflict by continually asking the everyman analogue to become more than he is. In essence it’s Doorstopper Fantasy by way of a buddy movie, with the threads weaving together and getting you good and involved in their lives. While the background is epic, the foreground is all small-scale conflicts – interpersonal, political, and rarely physical except as a means of underpinning the former. Last week I suggested that the City and the City is one of those books worth pulling apart to figure out how it does what it does. I’m inclined to say the same thing aboutThe Innocent Mage– in terms of taking an established genre and fulfilling the expected tropes in an unexpected way it’s a brilliant read, but its ability to do that without calling attention to the fact is one of those subtle narrative tricks that I gaze upon in unabashed envy.

While there’s lots of everyman-journey stories out there in the genre (see the works of Eddings, Jordan, Tolkein and Tad Williams for starters), it’s a telling point that the stuff that usually make up the formative experiences of their champions (the journey from the familiar territory, the exposure to violence, the learning to become a hero) are neatly sidestepped or glossed over here without feeling like we’re missing something.

Let me put today in context for you: I’m laughing at puns. Otter puns. And Jason Fischer  is nowhere nearby, which is kind of strange given that about 90% of the punnery that takes place in my world can be traced back to him in some form or another. And I *never* laugh at the puns. Well, hardly ever. I just thought I should mention that, given that a few people have signed up for the blog feed following some fairly serious discussion of feminism and such in other venues last week and they should probably warned. *Sometimes* I bust out the heavy duty cultural theory that tends to burble along in the background of my consciousness, but most of the time it’s all otter jokes and pro-wrestling references. I tend to think both mindsets equally valid and interconnected, really.

On the otter hand (hee!) I’m also spending my morning thinking about the moment that came when Girliejones first announced Female Appreciation Month and I suddenly realised that I couldn’t actually pull together a months worth of books by women that I remembered well enough to point to and say “there, right there, that’s awesome.” I could get to five pretty easily, ten without breaking a sweat, but by the time I started getting into the twenties I was basically scouring my bookshelves and pulling down any of the books written by those of the female persuasion that I’d at least, basically, read. This caught me kinda off-guard, because if you’d asked me I would have said I read a lot of female writers. Instead, what I actually do is read a lot of the same women over-and-over again – I could probably fill a list of thirty books just by pulling the works of about seven different writers from my shelves and only one wouldn’t see a repeat. Sure, many of those works would be on my list of the thirty best books of all time (in fact, given one of them wrote a noir novel about Mexican masked wrestlers, they’re just an otter joke away from being the best author of all time), but that’s still a pretty limited selection of writers to choose from. Of course, this is just a microcosm of the problems with my reading habits in general over the last few years – there’s been lots of book accumulating, but comparatively little reading of stuff that seems too unfamiliar. So over the weekend I built a pile of unread books by women to go through. It’s pretty big, and about 80% of the authors are by women I haven’t read yet, but at the same time it’ll last me about two months at the rate I’m currently reading.

‘Course, at the end of that two month period, I’ll have a to-be-read bookshelf containing about 700 books written entirely by men (which is, more or less, the standard state of my to-be-read shelf these days). That’ll need some rectifying, so I figured I’d ask for recommendations - give me five books (fiction or non-fiction) written by women, and I’ll do my damndest to make it happen. Since the point of this is to diversify my reading tastes, go with whatever comes to mind – regardless of genre or whether you’d ordinarily be wary of recommending it to a guy (I’m open, for example, to reading the romance genre if a recommendation comes in).

The only short-list of names I’d avoid largely come down to the following, since I’m already pretty well read up on these writers: Kelly Link, Karen Joy Fowler, Poppy Brite, Caitlin Kiernan, Elizabeth Bear, Marianne De Pierres, and Margo Lanagan. And lets assume that the collected works of Jane Austen, Karen Miller, and the Brontes are taken care of as well, since there’s a pile of them on my bedside table at present (Late addendum to the list: Holly Black. Got a lot of her work on the to-read pile as well). Apart from that, go crazy – I’m officially removing the word “no” and “not my thing” from my responses when it comes to recommendation, so if it shows up in the comments it goes on my reading list.