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It seemed a good day to revisit these videos:

Way more fun than any academic discussion of the Catcher in the Rye I’ve ever had.

1. So it’s three five-day-old news by now, but Clockwork, Patchwork and Raven won the 2009 Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Short Storyand I now have a shiny glass trophy kicking around the flat. The Spokesbear demanded I photograph him with the newly acquired, but it’s remarkably hard to photograph a curved glass trophy with a bear looming over it. Instead I’ll just mention that a hardcopy of the story is available in Apex’s Descended from Darkness anthology and sales of the book go towards keeping Apex Magazine running.

The weekend itself was freaking awesome and laden with opportunities to catch up with folks I don’t get to see anywhere near enough (the redoubtable Jason Fischerand Best-Fantasy-Short-Story-Co-Winner Christopher Green among them).

2. Finally sat down and indulged my inner Charlie Kaufman fan by watching Synecdoche New York. It felt rather like someone had cut the last twenty minutes off Adaptation and left us with the confused muddle of stuff, but it also replaced Nicholas Cage with Philip Seymour Hoffman which helped keep me watching once I realised the plot-compass was set somewhere between “meander” and “Plot? Who do you think you’re talking to, buddy?” Overall it seems to be one of those big, muddled films you can primarily admire for their ambition and the quality of the parts. I’m sure it would reward me for putting the effort into puzzling out its metaphors and meanings, but at the same time it doesn’t actually inspire me to do so.

3. There’s a partial TOC for Twelfth Planet Press’ suburban fantasy anthology, Sprawl, making its way around the internets. It runs something like this:

Liz Argall – Seed Dreams (comic)
Peter Ball – One Saturday Night, With Angel
Deborah Biancotti – Never Going Home
Simon Brown – Sweep
Stephanie Campisi – How to Select a Durian at Footscray Market
Thoraiya Dyer – Yowie
Dirk Flinthart – Walker
L L Hannett – Weightless
Pete Kempshall – Signature Walk
Ben Peek – White Crocodile Jazz
Tansy Rayner Roberts – Relentless Adaptations
Barbara Robson – Neighbourhood Watch
Angela Slatter – Brisneyland by Night
Cat Sparks – All The Love in the World
Anna Tambour – Gnawer of the Moon Seeks Summit of Paradise
Kaaron Warren – Loss
Sean Williams – Parched (poem)

4. I am so totally over summer.

5. It’s lunchtime. I’m off to scrounge up some food.

Possibly a dangerous question to ask, given that I am the energizer bunny of Avatar-hate, but the movie came up at one of the regular games last week and everyone else at the table seemed to like the film (except the one person yet to see it, who isn’t likely too) and I realised that where I see stunted story that doesn’t do anything after the set-up* a bunch of other folks are seeing unmitigated awesome. 

And I continue to not get it, just as I never got the appeal of the Transformers film and the Matrix and a bunch of other things, and while I’m normally okay with that given that everyone reads a film differently it’s starting to bug me a little this time around. I find myself wondering whether the expectations of films have shifted so far into the boundary of spectacle that story ceases to be important, or if there’s been some kind of fundamental shift in the genre of film-making that I just haven’t figured out yet.

So I turn the question over to people who did like the film: what’s the appeal?

*Incidentally, there’s an interesting article on the Avatar-that-might-have-been if it’d followed the original treatment of the film. It seems to answer every major problem I have with Avatar and reads like a film I would have been gushing over if it’d actually made it to the screen (hell, if even a fragment of it made it to the screen *besides* the pretty FX)

1000 words of redraftage on Black Candy last night. It appears that the “hours per day” writing metric I’ve been used to get the Cold Cases draft in is going to be replaced by the more familiar ”wordcount needed before I can sleep” metric. I suspect my process may be seasonal – Brisbane is too damn hot in summer to do regular work-hours in my flat and I find myself drifting towards writing at night when the temperature and humidity is down. Either way, I’m back work after taking the first ten days of January off for the purposes of taking a break from writing, celebrating my mother’s birthday, and writing my somewhat over-detailed yearly plan (sixteen pages and counting) of what needs to done on the writing front.

My T0-Do List for January and February:

1) Redraft Black Candy
2) Write 3 short-stories I owe people after saying “yes” when they asked if I’d be interested in submitting
3) Write 2 short-stories to replenish the somewhat bare submission pile
4) Brainstorm the project I’m planning to draft in February or March (time permitting) – aiming for about 4 pages of notes a day.

Place your best on how long it’ll take me to go off the rails.

 Three things worth noting:

1) Tio Gilberto and the Twenty-Seven Ghosts @ Podcastle

The audio version of Ben Fransisco’s story Tio Gilberto and the Twenty-Seven Ghosts is live over at Podcast. Go forth and feast your ears upon it; you will not be sorry.

2) Fantasy Magazine Best Story of 2009 Poll

If you haven’t had the chance yet, hie yourself over to Fantasy Magazine and place a vote in their 2009 reader poll to determine the favourite story published there last year. My votes swung towards Angela Slatter’s The Chrysanthemum Bride and Lisa Hannett’s The Good Window, but as usual you can’t go wrong with the majority of the stories that Fantasy publishes.

3) Apex Magazine’s First Annual Reader Poll

Apex Magazine is also looking for your vote on the best story they published in 2009, although I’m steering clear of recommendations given that two of the stories involved were mine.

I spent the first ten days of 2010 listening to exactly two albums: Regina Spektor’s Far and The best of Bauhaus. And when I say “album” I may mean “the following two songs replayed endlessly, with the rest of the album getting a guernsey when I eventually step away from the stereo to do other things.”

Yeah. All in all, it’s been that kind of year thus far.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I ran out of 2009 before finishing the list. Given that I’ve managed to start 2010 with a whole bunch of stuff unfinished, much of it urgent and really needing to be done, I give you the truncated version of what would have rounded out the fifteen awesome things about 2009.

10) Non-Fiction, Part One: Booklife, Jeff VanderMeer

I’ve been known to bemoan the fact that there are very few resources for writers that actually teach you the stuff you need know once you’ve got the basics of things like “plot” and “character” and “not looking like a crazy freak when submitting” under control. In many ways the learning curve for writing becomes a hodge-podge of received wisdom and scraps of knowledge gleaned from conversation, with the occasional outright question being asked of friends and contacts further along the path when need be.

From that point of view, Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife is one of the best writing guidebooks I’ve come accross in a decade. Very little in this book actually focuses on how to write, but there’s a lot of detail on how to be a writer. The chapters on how book promotion works and what VanderMeer does off his own bat are worth the cover price on their own (part of me dearly wishes it’d been released before Horn came out – it might have saved me from sounding like a rambling goose when people interviewed me). The book itself is freaking awesome, but there’s also a blog built as support for the book content.

This honestly would have been the best writing book I read all year if I hadn’t immediately followed it with…

11) Non-Fiction, Part Two: About Writing, Samuel Delany

Four words of advice for writers: go buy this book. I sure as hell wish I’d read it ten years ago – it would have saved me all sorts of grief and made my job as a creative writing tutor a hundred times easier. Delany is so frighteningly insightful and smart about a) how writing works, and b) why writing works that way, that I spent two months paralysed with fear every time I sat down to the keyboard. While most how-to-write books focus on the stuff that’ll make an okay writer into a good one, this one is focused on folks who have got the basics down and want to really fine-tune their process. Freaking. Awesome.

12) Call of Cthulhu Peeps

I’ve been playing Call of Cthulhu once a week with more-or-less the same group of people for nearly two years now. Our Sunday night games are an ingrained part of my schedule, to the point where nearly everyone in my family has finally learned that trying to call me on a Sunday evening is an exercise in futility for I will be off pretending to be a young chap in the 1920s going slowly mad as the reality of horrors from beyond space and time are revealed. As a shut-in writer-type who spends most of his time with the computer, getting out to catch up with the folks who play Cthulhu is frequently one of the high spots of my week. The fact that they’re generally awesome types and the campaign is starting to develop the kind of depth you only get by playing in the same setting with the same people for a prolonged period is something of a bonus.

13) The Gen Con Oz Guests

Towards the middle of 2009 I found myself organising the seminar program for Gen Con Oz on somewhat short notice.  In the midst of that my computer died, right in the middle of writing up the seminar program. Needless to say, it was a frantic period filled with much profanity on my my end, but it never quite hit the level of angst it should have because the various Gen Con Oz Guests (and Volunteers) were made of unmitigated awesomeness.

I urge you to seek out and buy the work of the following folks: Karen Miller, Keith Baker, Jason Bulmahn, Marianne De Pierres, Kylie Chan, Matt Farrer, David Conyers, Rowena Daniels, Steve Darlington, and Ryan Naylor.

14) Novel Draft

As in: I finished one. The first I’ve actually finished since I was twenty, which means there was a good period of thirteen-odd years where I wandered around living in fear of the novel (of course, to be fair, I also lived in fear of the short story and a variety of other forms). And once I’ve cleared the bulk of lasts weeks job off my desk this afternoon I’m going to get back to work on the redraft and finish the damn book.

15) Writing

I spent seven or eight years being a PhD student who wanted to be a writer. Somewhere in the middle of 2009 I managed to invert that – writing felt like a tangible enough activity that it kind of succeeded the thesis in terms of how I thought about my process and structuring my day.

Net result: A multitude of things went wrong this year – I spent most of it broke and angry and managed to fuck-up my thesis in a moderately mundane manner – but I wrote a lot and submitted and things seemed to keep coming togehter. Stuff got published. Stuff got reviewed. Horn came very close to selling out (last word before Christmas – four copies left). People invited me to write stuff for their projects, which is one of those experiences that still bewilders me beyond all belief.  Heck, the fact that people actually read things I write still catches me by surprise.

Given that I’d expected 2009 to be a wasteland as far as writing went (2008 sucked – we do not speak of it – and very little new work got done), this year has been awesome .

Which leads me to my resolution for 2010: Don’t fuck it up, dumb-ass.