Random Acts of Literary Vandalism

February has become the month we do not talk about, so I won’t. Embrace the mystery. What I will point out, somewhat belatedly, is the impressive scale of the recent Australian SF Snapshot which collected 90 or so interviews from members of the Australian Spec Fic scene (my interview would be over yonder).

Now I’m going to go clean the house, answer two weeks of e-mail, and do my best to rejoin the rest of the human race by some point late this evening.

Being a single bloke who lives alone, I have a certain blindspot when it comes to shopping. Actually, I have several, but the one I speak of here primarily kicks in when browsing through the area marked “fruit and vegetables.”  I have my staples – there’s usually a spanish onion or two in the house, plus some potato and sweet potato if I’m splashing out- but I generally stick with a few vegetables and rarely touch the fruit at all. If ever there were a guy who steps forth to challenge the statement that “man cannot live on curry and pizza alone,” it’d probably be me.

I’ve mostly arrived at this situation through habit, laziness, and the tendency towards belt-tightening when one lives alone and doesn’t get to share around the general costs of living. I’m also aware that it’s not a good state of affairs, especially since I’m taking the easy route of take-away food far more often than I used too (which, yes, contradicts the belt-tightening logic above, but the other part of living alone is *keeping yourself sane* so it pays not to examine my logic too deeply). So last week I contacted one of those organic famer-direct delivery services the internet has on offer, and this afternoon a nice chap has delivered the first box of randomly-assorted in-season fruit and veg to my door.

It’s a veritable cornacopia of tastiness. I know, because I’ve already devoured the first of the nectarines. This is not the bit where the future is awesome.

No, the bit where the future is awesome came after about thirty minutes of searching for the doobie-do that connects my digital camera to my computer and failing. “Woe,” said I, “for now there will be no visuals to accompany the blog post.”

“Hey dumbarse,” said the spokesbear, “you dear realise that your new computer came with a SDHC drive that’ll fit the data thingy from your camera, right?”

And lo, he was correct, and the future corrected my problem before I even realised such things were possible. Freaking awesome. *This* is why it’s good to be a luddite sometimes.

Also, I finished rebuilding a story that’s been sitting around in parts for the last three months, waiting for me to revise it and fix it and sent it out in the world. Productivity FTW!

Also, I have peaches. They are delicious. The fruit half of that box is so not lasting the weekend.

And since today is Friday, and I’m certain of this because I’ve double-checked this time, I’ll be heading off to celebrate the launch of the Tangled Bank anthology where a bunch of fine authors (including Chris Green and Ben Francisco) have been rocking Darwinian Evolution, SF-Short-Story Style.

Current Project: Getting Back to Basics
Number of Stories Submitted in February: 0 of 8
Rejections Accrued in 2010: 0
Consecutive Productive Writing Days: 1
Days without chocolate: 9
Today the Spokesbear is: OM-NOM-NOM-NOM.

It turns out that spending two-to-three weeks writing by hand just wasn’t on the list of things I was willing to do. Fortunately this roughly coincided with the realisation that I could pick up a very cheap desktop (to replace the machine that died last September) and write it off as a business expense. It’s not as ideal as no computer problems at all – I’ve spent the last two days uploading the various programs and back-up files onto the new machine rather than working – but it has fringe benefits (hello, photoshop. I’ve missed you).

It’s a stinking hot, evil day outside my office so I’ve retreated into the air-conditioning with a pile of Primus CD and a large vat of coffee. The coffee because my sleep patterns are shot right now (going to bed at eleven, getting to sleep around 4 am). The Primus because I watched a lot of Robot Chicken in a row and it’s Les Claypool themesong reminded me that, yes, godsfuckit, they really were one of my favourite bands.

Current Project: Getting Back to Basics
Number of Stories Submitted in February: 0 of 8
Rejections Accrued in 2010: 0
Consecutive Productive Writing Days: 0
Days without coke and other soft-drinks: 0 <- Yes: FAIL
Days without chocolate: 3
Today the Spokesbear is: wishing I’d stop tooling around with the new computer and *get to goddamn work*

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.

It’s been a rough week thus far (yes, all two days of it) and I’m in a covety kind of mood. I can’t help it, honest. Coveting things is one of those survival tactics that kick in when I’m otherwise unsure of what’s going on in the foreseeable future. And I figured I’d share some of the coveting. A tiny big of it, anyway. It will distract me until my jelly is ready to come out of the fridge and do it’s comfort-foody magic.

And so, in approximate order, the six things about America* that I tend to covet:

1) Home-delivered Chinese food that comes in neat folded cardboard boxes.

Oh little paper boxes full of wontons, cashew and noodle, how I dearly covet thee. In the fifteen years I’ve actually been eating Chinese food (I started late in life, after some bad experiences in my childhood) I have always been disappointed by the plastic containers in which Chinese take-away is served.

To say nothing of my disappointment upon discovering so few Chinese restaurants will deliver in my homeland; Pizza, I can order in, and a good Indian curry if I pick the right suburb. Thai food, maybe, should I be very lucky; heck, in recent months I’ve even had the option of home-delivered schnitzel, though the cost of delivery is prohibitive (and unlikely to be taken up on, were it not for the novelty of the experience). Home delivered Chinese food? Never seen it. And even if I had, there would plastic containers and the disappointed wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I have heard, of late, that the folded boxes are on their way out, a conceit retained in movies and TV shows because they’re far more aesthetically pleasing than plastic tubs. If this is true, I shall be a sad panda. Should I ever actually make it over to America to visit the various friends I don’t get to see often enough, you can bet that my default response to the question of “what do you want for dinner” will inevitably be “Chinese” in the hopes of eating from said cartons. And this is in spite of the fact that Chinese food and my digestive tract rarely get along.

2) Constitutionally protected right to free speech.

Because say what you will about the bits of your constitution and its many amendments that seem outright crazy (yes, constitutional right to bear arms folks, I’m looking at you), this one is just plain cool. That you have folks who recognise how awesome it is to have this and fight to keep it from getting stomped into the mud is likewise very cool.

Those of us stuck in Australia don’t actually have this right, though it’s a fact that catches most people by surprise. It would depress me less if we used it to silence the vocal-but-utterly-moronic segments of our populace, but unfortunately we tend to celebrate them and offering them a spot on Dancing with the Stars.

3) Doctor Pepper

They tried to launch it in Australia, they really did, but many of my countrymen just didn’t seem the glory in a fizzy drink that tasted, primarily, like cough syrup. I suspect it’s because they never got around to putting bourbon in it, but that’s just me.

I would also be covetous of the fact that you have Jolt, but there are enough hardcore geeks in Australia to ensure you can usually find it lingering in the back of some non-franchised twenty-four hour convenience store somewhere. Six weeks ago I would have coveted your Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, but it appears there’s now a supplier importing them to my local store, and that fucking rocks.

I don’t, however, covet your tendency to use high-fructose corn syrup in such drinks. That shit is just wrong. And it makes your cola taste funny.

4) Stamps

Not for any aesthetic or monetary value, just for practical reasons. I need to send self-addressed stamped envelopes to America pretty regularly, so coveting stamps is just a business decision and will remain so until the SF magazine industry is run entirely via internet submissions.

This would be higher on the list, but I’m fortunate enough to be well-stocked in American postage for the moment. I’m just, you know, coveting on the principle that I’ll need them eventually.

5) Southern Gothic…

…because kudzu, ghosts, vampires, and melodrama warm my heart. And because Australian Gothic involves too much red dust, dry heat, and empty landscapes to be much fun. And because kudzu is a fun word to say out loud.

6) Population Density

Yes, I know this isn’t universal, but you guys have a lot of people. Even your small cities are big enough to dwarf most of the urban areas in Australia. I’m sure it comes with its own problems, but with population density comes interesting pockets of subculture and more people who are likely to be interested in whatever weird-ass thing you’re interested.

As a guy who tends to like weird-ass things and frequently finds himself with limited options for talking about them locally, population density is one of those traits that looks particularly promising.

*disregarding the various awesome American peeps who’d I’d gladly steal from you, the fact that America tends to be the  biggest market for English language fiction in the world, and the fact that it’s the hub for SF industry. ‘Cause those go without saying.

Gen Con Australia kicks off on Thursday. It ends on Sunday afternoon. I’ll be working there, so drop past and say high if you’re around.

That said, I have a mountain of work to get done in preperation and I’m behind *again* (courtesy of computer trouble again – word stopped working on the laptop. That’s two sets of computer problems in a month. I wasn’t at all manly about it, and if if this keeps up I think I’ll be writing the next novella on google-docs using my mobile phone).

So I’ll see you all next Wednesday, folks, cause I’m kicking off the radio silence right about…now.

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.

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.

I’ve been all words, words, words this week, resulting in big long posts both here and elsewhere, so today I’m aiming for short and brief. Lots of getting in, doing the pimpery, and getting out. And this time it’s not *all* about me, just like, two thirds about me. You know how it is.

Cool Stuff: The Outlandish Voices Podcast
A project set up by Laura E. Goodin, a friend from Clarion and fellow believer in the power of the middle initial, to deliver readings by Illawarra’s established and emerging science fiction, horror, and fantasy authors. Laura is one of those folks whose not content to be contained as far as her creative ambitions, so she’s managing this while simultaneously picking up momentum as a short story writer and playwright (with, I suspect, a host of novels getting written as well). I get tired just reading her blog and trying to keep up with her various projects, especially given her propensity for making them all work.  The first three installments of Outlandish Voices (featuring readings by the Rob Hood, Cat Sparks, and Richard Harland, a trio of writers with some pretty damn impressive credentials) are online now and there’s more to come.

The Stuff of Glee: Horn Reviews
Two reviews hit the world in recent weeks. One from Genrereviews, which (quite-rightly) says some awesome things about the cover art before kicking on to the discuss the story. My favorite bits, excerpted:

In a lot of ways, Horn sticks pretty close to what have become the standards of urban fantasy. … On the other hand… dude, the underaged victim has been raped to death by a unicorn in a nasty snuff film.

I spent awhile trying to figure out how to review this one, because the dark elements are so unexpected it spun my head around. It’s not the sort of thing I could recommend to anyone, but odds are good if you read “unicorn” and “rape” in the same sentence and instead of having your brain explode, you thought “wow, that sounds really interesting and original,” this is probably something you should be looking deeper into, because a premise like this one isn’t something you’re going to come across again.

The other review was in the Courier Mail courtesy of Jason Nahrung two weeks ago (I was slow on the uptake that weekend) and doesn’t seem to have migrated online yet, but there’s a good selection of excerpts over on Girliejones’ blog. And to borrow a phrase from my redoubtable publisher: Copies of Horn are available from Twelfth Planet Press, Pulp Fiction in Brisbane,  and Fantastic Planet in Perth.

Updates: Awesome

So here’s the thing about my plans to awesomeifymy year – I’m kinda hesitant to blog about it, in specifics or in general, because I’m assuming it’s very uninteresting to watch from the outside and lots of it will come off like bad self-help book cliches when I try to pin the process down and put it into words. And none of it is big, life-changing stuff – I’m not trying to reach Kathmandu or walk around Australia for charity. I’m just trying to put together the life I want to live as best I can, and that largely comes down to pretty basic stuff (write more, read more, spend more time with friends). The list is mostly about reconfiguring mental processes, reminding me to compartmentalise bad stuff until I can do something about it, and prompting me to *do more* rather than endlessly fritter away time on the internet. It’s about doing things that scare me a little, which is why the Spokesbear finally made it onto the site (if you look at the bio, you’ll notice I’ve been threatening to post pictures of the bear since I started petermball.com – it just took nine months or so to work myself up to it).

This week I’ve read a lot. And I’ve danced around the house a lot too. This, by me, is awesome. I got interested in stuff again – discussions, books, music, ideas – rather than falling back on the stuff I already know. Somewhere along the line, probably during the PhD and the “comfort food” binging after my life went kablooie (twice) over the last few years, I fell into a heavy groove of repetition – the same bands, the same books, the same jobs. New stuff went in, but slowl, and often it’d just become part of the groove again. I’d see new films, for example, but only if they seemed like they’d produce a similar *feel* to something I’ve already seen.

So this week I read new books. I listened to albums I haven’t heard in over five years. If I hadn’t signed up for a media fast over August (no TV or film), I would have gone and rented a bunch of films that looked like they weren’t my cup of tea. I tried to be interested in stuff again, even if it wasn’t my thing. And here’s the interesting side-effect of that: I think, for the first time in ages, I can actually look at my week and say “yeah, I did *enough*.” For someone who never feels like I’m doing enough to be productive, that’s fairly huge.