That’s next hour’s problem, though. Right now there is coffee and bloggery and answering some emails. Possibly some toast while I try to work out whether the toaster is really broken, or just bitching about the cold. It feels like that kind of afternoon.

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Every now and then I come across people who really, really like the idea of creativity. It drives me crazy. Otherwise ordinary conversations are derailed by statements like “writing? Wow, it must be nice to be so creative” or “I’m a writer and creativity is one of my strengths,” mostly because I then froth at the mouth and stomp around until someone gives me a cup of tea and tells me to have a lie down.

Creativity is one of the most ill-defined words in our culture, with a myriad of different meanings that all rely on understanding the context in which it’s used. And unlike other context-driven words – like, say, love – you can never be entirely sure which context people are using when they deploy creativity. It’s too bound up in myths about muses and inspiration and the idea that somehow creativity is automatically a transcendent thing.

Near as I can tell, creativity is just training yourself to see the connections between things sooner than other people. Or doing it naturally, in an “inspiration” driven rush, and never questioning how it is you just did what you did.

Everything after that is process, actually sitting down and making things, and once you’re at that point there’s very little creativity can do to help you.

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Toast with ginger marmalade for breakfast, confirming that the toaster is either on its last legs or simply unable to cope with winter. Even turned up to its highest setting, the best it seems to manage is “lightly browned”.

It seems to be the month for appliances going wrong around these parts. My mobile phone is starting to develop some of those hiccups that occur when you’ve owned a mobile phone for a a while. Not enough to be unusable, but enough to be occasionally annoying.

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Here is a thing I’ve discovered this week: the version of Claw in my head no longer resembles the (unfinished) draft version of Claw I was writing before my dad’s illness last year.

This isn’t a huge surprise. The news of my dad’s heart attack basically hit like a depth charge to the subconscious, blowing apart the various stories and projects under construction, and it’s only recently that I’ve had the brain-space to go back and start trying to fit things together. But the opening scene for Claw that I wrote this week looks more like one of the closing scenes I’d planned for the first draft, a couple of sub-plots have been dropped away, and the book seems to be drifting towards the darker side again.

Still not sure whether it has a happy ending or not. I’m not even sure if the new beginning is right, but it feels more like the beginning of the book than the older one did.

And it’s becoming a fun book to write again, which is a good sign because, for a while there, I thought it was unlikely I’d ever find Aster stories fun to write again. At some point tomorrow I’m going to get to the first corpse in the book, and I’m unexpected excited about figuring out how to put the scene together.

I do, however, have several pages of notes I put together in preparation for the panel I didn’t make it too, and since I’m a waste-not, want-not kind of guy, I figured I’d torture the rest of you with a more formalized write-up of the argument I would have made. Turns out I had rather a lot of material once I started writing things up, so it’s probably going to happen in three or four posts over the next couple of days. Consider yourselves warned.

Emotion, Attachment, and Video Games
Part One: The Confession of a Computer Game Tragic

I live in fear of computer games. I am, at my core, one of those gamers – the kind who lacks the self-control to say ‘now is the time to walk away.’ Once the game is started, I have about half an hour to turn it off and get back to my real life; beyond that, I’ve committed. I want to figure out how to win, or how it ends, or even what the next cut scene might be, and then it’s three days later and I haven’t slept and I’ve burned through the bulk of my sick leave in an attempt to try and stop the dark spawn from taking over Ferelden. The game itself doesn’t seem to matter – I can spend three days trying to figure out how to beat an online flash game like Dice Wars or take my promotion to the top in my favourite wrestling sim just as easily as I’ll get sucked into high-profile, gaming wonders with state-of-the-art CGI and thousands upon thousands hours spent in development.

My only defence against this obsessive impulse seems to be refusing to play in the first place, so for the last seven or eight years I’ve refused to let computer games into my house. Mostly this is pretty easy, because I control the technology around me. My computers are low-budget machines, utterly incapable of running state of the art games; I’ve refused to own a gaming consol since I picked up an original NES system at an op-shop in my twenties and lost six weeks to beating the original Super Mario Brothers games; my despair when I upgraded my mobile phone and it came with computer games was considerable, but I found the resolve to delete the ones I liked and now play the ones I don’t when stuck in an airport.

Yet despite my best effort, technology creeps forward. Computers die and get replaced, and suddenly all those games I would have played a few years back if the technology had been up to it are available to me. And occasionally I’ll slip. I’ll break out the copy of Blood Bowl, which I justified as an online game that has a set time-limit to prevent me from going overboard, or I’ll fire up my favourite wrestling sim, which is by nature unbeatable and therefore unlikely to set off my need to achieve.

These are, of course, convenient lies I tell myself because I can’t quite kick the computer game habit, but at least I’ve grown familiar with the cycle of playing both games over the last few years. After a day, maybe two, I’ll realise that my promise that I’m just firing it up for an hour or so is shot and pull myself to a halt.

It would be easier if my friends gave up gaming as well, but they don’t. People will rave at me about their new favourites from time to time, rattling off the cool features, and I’ll find myself tempted. Very occasionally I’ll break and ask to borrow their copy, and I now thank the digital gods that most people now have Steam accounts and aren’t in a position to loan me their actual discs. With the delivery of games via disc becoming outmoded, I am safer from computer games than ever before.

Except when the games are cool enough that people really want to make sure they never lose their copy to hard-drive failure or power surges. Apparently there are still some games worth picking up, old school-like, and thus remain available for being left out. Which is how, six months ago, I found myself playing Dragon Age: Origins. Before I began, I was told three things: play it all the way through, once; play all the introductory stories; be prepared to spend the majority of your time talking to people in the camping site.

While I never managed to reach the end of the game – it’s crack-like qualities were sufficient that after the first week of playing I gave the discs back and asked that it never be leant to me again, for fear I’d stop writing altogether – I did play several of the introductions and the camp proved to be the most fascinating part of the game-play. I also know how it ends – my frustration with the gameplay interrupting the narrative led me to checking out walkthroughs and cheat-sheets, which ultimately led to me shrugging and realising that I was less interested in the game as a game once I knew all the alternative storylines.

This is not the first time this has happened. Many years ago, back before I realised me and computer games didn’t really mix, I started playing Starcraft. My interest in the game ended the moment a friend said “you know, I have this DVD full of cut scenes”, whereupon I promptly watched the story without the game and went on with my life.

Here’s the brutal truth of my relationship with computer games: I’m interested in their narratives, but can’t engage with the narrative because of the game play. As soon as you establish conditions of victory or submission, I’m hardwired to try and win. This, more than anything else, kills my interest in the game the moment it becomes apparent that victory will take days or weeks to achieve.

Computer games aren’t stories, and in this respect their attempts to manipulate emotions always feels like a bit of a cheat.

To be continued…

This is my alternative to curling up on the floor of my bedroom and having a temper tantrum, ’cause really the closest I’m getting to articulating my mood these days is the ability to randomly shout “Hate! Hate! Hate!” at the top of my lungs. There are very few things in my life that aren’t filling me with loathing at the moment, from my less-interesting dayjob (which puts Fight Club into all kinds of interesting new perspectives for me) to my more interesting dayjob (which I hate, primarily, because it’s kinda awesome and not my primary dayjob, which just makes the other dayjob even worse) to my neighbor (seriously, *turn down your fucking stereo at 4 AM*) to myself (which, really, is a let me count the ways kind of thing).

None of this is particularly new – anger has probably been my default state since I was thirteen or fourteen – but I usually have a better grip on it than I do right now. I can cobble together a mask that more or less resembles a civilized human being and go out and function in civilized society. Normally I can swallow anger and work at it rationally, figuring out solutions, or I can vent at the things that are making me less than pleased through the medium of fiction. Or I’ll catch up with friends and rant at them until the anger burns itself out and I’ve overused the words fuck, at which point I’m more clear-headed and able to behave myself a little better.

The anger’s rarely directed at specific people, except for myself, since it’s really just a general pissed-offness at the world. I’d actually be more worried if I woke up and I wasn’t pissed off about something, because the world is a terminally unfair place and I continue to exist in it, which means I’m going to keep finding things that make me angry.

For all that it’s got a reputation as a negative emotion, I actually think anger is important.

Anger is, after all, where writing comes from.

It’s possible this isn’t a universal thing for all writers, but I’m pretty sure it’s not just me. I vaguely remember Ray Bradbury talking about stories coming from a place of anger in his Zen and the Art of Writing collection of essays, and there’s any number of writers with overtly angry or political stances being displayed in their fiction. The artistic myth of the angry young man is almost as predominant as the artist driven crazy by the muse, and of the two I find the angry young man more palatable (at least, once man is switched out for person). At least the AYM/W is in control of his/her artistic practice, rather than sacrificing it to some unnameable entity and refusing to take responsibility for what they do.

Really, that’s all window dressing. The real reason fiction comes from a place of anger is this: all stories are revolutions.

It’s one of those ideas that’s ingrained in the very structure of the story – whether you spend a thousands words, five thousand words, an entire novel, or a three-book trilogy – you are building towards a climax. One of the best descriptions of the climax came from a film lecturerer I worked with a few years back, who described it as point where the most important moral decision of the book is made, the one that changes the character’s world forever. The good are rewarded, the evil are punished. As a writer you establish a new status quo, correcting whatever flaw in the world existed in the opening of the story, and so there’s a series of political decisions being made about what’s incorrect and what isn’t*.

And really, if you’re not angry about something, why bother going to the trouble? Whenever I’m stuck on a story, or I look back on something I’ve written and don’t really feel satsified by it, it’s invariably because the anger isn’t there. Whether it was never ther, or if I simply lost it, is occasionally unclear, but it’s certainly gone in that particular reading.

*Want an example? Lets take, say, Star Wars. For all that the original Star Wars ends with a bang at its climax, the actual destruction of the Death Star actually pales next to the two big decisions made just prior – Luke Skywalker turning off his computer, rejecting the technology (which, in Star Wars, is the tool of the Empire since they’ve got the big death machine) and embracing the spirituality of the Force, and the sudden return of the Millennium Falcon to save the day and align the morally gray Han Solo with the white hats from there forward. Destroying the Death Star is really just the reward for those decisions. Destroying the Death Star is a physical victory, but the emotional victory of these two moments

Often, when my weekends are quiet and sedate, I feel like I’m letting the side down and I find myself thinking, “man, I wish I had a crazy-busy weekend, you know?” Then the crazy-busy-weekend comes along and I go along with the flow and then Monday comes and I wake blinking like a stoned raccoon wondering why I’m so tired.

I need coffee. I need to catch up on the writing that didn’t get done. And I really do need to schedule some more crazy-busy weekends in the near future.

The weekend itself is kind of squished together, a little, in my head. Things bleed into each other.

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Okay,  I guess the first thing is that I’ve been shortlisted for some Ditmar Awards this year, in both the Short Story category for One Saturday Night, With Angle, and the novella category for Bleed.  I found this out while having Breakfast with some friends on Sunday morning, largely ’cause I’d been light on the internets over the weekend, and on the whole it was a rather pleasant surprise.

So thanks to all the people who nominated me, and congratulations to the various other people who have been shortlisted. The full Ditmar short list can be found on the Natcon Fifty website and it’s a frickin’ awesome list this year.

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On Saturday night I sat down to watch the Evening With Kevin Smith DVD for the first time, which was basically as entertaining as I’d expected it to be after catching bits and pieces on youtube. Except for this one stretch which was profoundly uncomfortable, which is largely when a young queer member of the audience brings up Chasing Amy and how it contributed to a culture that made her life difficult as a younger woman.

The response is uncomfortable to watch. This is not to say that Smith doesn’t have some good points (Does no-one ever notice that the character who says “All lesbians really need is a good, deep dicking” is the idiot who is wrong about everything throughout the movie) and some that are straight off the back of the white male privileged bingo card (my brother is gay) and at least one that explains why he at least attempted the film that’s interesting (I once had a conversation with my brother about the fact he isn’t represented in narrative, and I try to change that).

But mostly  it’s just uncomfortable because there’s no real attempt to engage with the question before bulldozing through the answer. It’s one of those real I-had-good-intentions style responses that argues that good intentions excuse the faults.

And really, when you’re a geek, there are times when that does actually count as a victory, ’cause there are portions of geekdom that are scarily entrenched in their white-male-privilege and don’t want to let it go.

Which is why, a few hours later, I was really, really happy when a friend sent me the link to Bioware telling a white-straight-male to Get Over It when he complained about the possibility of female and queer relationships being given equal weight in Dragon Age 2.

There are exactly three computer games I’ve bothered to play for longer than 2 hours in the last six years: Total Extreme Wrestling, Blood Bowl Online, and the first Dragon Age. The mindset exhibited by Bioware above is one of the reasons why I got sucked into DA Origins for as long as I did. I’d talked myself out of Dragon Age 2, not because I don’t expect it to be awesome, but because it’s likely to be narrative crack that ’causes me to stop writing and lose my job.

That one response, linked to above, is probably going to change my mind.

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Okay, what else.

Saturday afternoon I did errands. I bought new jeans for the first time in about five or six years (which is one of those facts that’s readily apparent if you’ve seen the current state of my jeans, most of which have holes in them somewhere). In fact, since they were on sale, I bought a whole lot of jeans, which will cost even more to have hemmed (since I am not-so-handy with a needle and thread and thus happily pay professionals) than I did for the jeans themselves.

I bought some books at proper bookstores – Burn Bright, by Marianne de Pierres; Heist Society, by Ally Carter – then I went to my local Borders and watched the gleeful gutting of the stock by people who were all omg-the-bargins. It made me kinda sad, because I really liked my local Borders despite it’s flaws, and it made me feel sorry for the various people who worked there.

I still remember when they first opened the Borders at my preferred shopping center, and how awesome it was to be able to shop for books I actually read before picking up my weekly groceries.

I’ve already burned through Heist Society, which is just as awesome as Tansy Rayner Roberts promised it would be when she reviewed it on her blog. I would have burned through Burn Bright already, but this copy is a gift.

Sunday I went to Avid Reader and bought more books – the Collected Stories of  Gabriel Garcia Marquez (so I can read it at the same time as my dad), Motherless Brooklyn, and Yellowcake by Margo Lanagan.

There is something blissful about acquiring new fiction. Which probably explains my out of control To Be Read pile that’s taking up two bookcases at present.

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On Sunday afternoon I gamed with my Sunday Night Cthulhu group.

We’ve missed a bunch of games recently – due to illness, travel for work, celebrating the birth of one member’s son, etc – so there was something very comforting about slipping back into the Sunday Night Cthulhu routine, even though we’re not actually playing Call of Cthulhu at present.

One of the realities of being a RPG gamer in your thirties (and older) is that weekly gamers are supposed to be impossible, but at this point we’ve been gaming every Sunday for so long that it barely even registers as something as something remarkable. I can’t even remember when we started, although I’m sure it was prior to the first Gen Con Oz and a quick perusal of the blog sees things like “we kicking off the weekly Cthulu sessions after the xmas break” appearing in February of 2008.

Which means we’ve been going for about four years, I think. We’ve lost a player in that time, and recently gained a new one, but for the most part a  core group of four people has been there the entire time.

We played Cthulhu pretty much eclusivly for the first two or three years, hence the fact that Sunday is permanently branded as Cthulhu night despite the fact that we’ve slowly added more systems to the mix (Space 1889 for a while, currently Classic Deadlands which is proving to be 9 kinds of awesome).

Last night’s game, though. Man, it kinda reminds me why I enjoy gaming, you know? Undead revenants kicking the crap out of solitary gunslingers who got caught unawares; the entire team getting caught in a firefight against desperado’s who have the advantage of cover upon the ridge; a mad scientist coming to realize his blueprints are haunted because things keep changing while he’s asleep; the same mad scientist unleashing his flame-thrower for the first time, going a little crazy as he does so.

There is nothing quite so awesome as knowing I get to game with these folks every week, especially since we’re largely in agreement as to the kind of game we want to play.

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One of the more interesting threads running through the comments on yesterday’s post, both here and over on Facebook, was this attitude that sitcoms are inherently limited and/or required to suck by virtue of the genre conventions they operate under.

To which I respond, no, fuck that, genres are as limited as we want them to be, pleas take your they-cater-to-the-masses-and-therefore-must-suck class-oriented modernist bullshit to someone else’s discussion. ‘Cause, you know, that kind of attitude is the reason we get bad science fiction, bad romance, bad action-adventure films, and pretty much everything else. You reap what you sow, in that respect, and unless you’re willing to ask for more it’s unlikely you’ll ever get it.

I no more accept the inevitable suckiness of sit-coms than I do the argument that Avatar needed to be a three-hour exercise in narrative tedium; it sucked because stupid choices were made, not because of some inherent fault of the  genre.

Take, for example, How I Met Your Mother. It’s not a show that’s without faults – I’d direct you to Cat Valente’s excellent take-down of the shows central preimse – but for a considerable period of time it managed to be funny and geeky and not treat it’s audience like idiots. I can point you to precisely the moment it became a show I looked forward to, rather than this thing I happened to watch, which is right about the point in the second season where they closed an episode with Marshal slapping Barney well after the  Slap Bet episode where the joke was set-up. It was simple and beautifully done. Slap. “That’s two.” Done. No references to the Slap Bet to set things up, no flash-backs to the previous episode, just the show writers  trusting you to remember something that happened earlier in the seasons and get the joke.

Nothing appeals to me more than writers assuming I’m not an idiot. It’s the thing that, say, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie got wrong, because ever time they made that kind of reference the writer’s were sitting next to you, nudging you in the ribs, going “hey, we mentioned Phineas Fog, from Around the World in Eighty Days, get it? Get it? We’re being metatextual here.”

Metatext doesn’t work when you say you’re being metatextual. It just annoys the fuck out of people. In this respect, I can point to them moment when I realised How I Met Your Mother stopped being a show I really looked forward to, and became just another show I watch when it’s on. It’s called the second Slapsgiving episode (If they do a third Slapsgiving, the show will join the ranks of shows officially be dead to me, and I will be happy with the two enjoyable season, one okay season, and one sub-par season I’ve seenthus far).

There’s a sliding scale on all these things. I find Big Bang Theory‘s underlying narratives abhorent, for example, but I’ll still watch it because it’s doing something mildly more interesting with the same core theme than, say, Everybody Loves Raymond or Two and a Half Men.

There are also different kinds of audiences – not everyone enjoys metatext as much as I do, nor do they sit there chanting interrogate your fucking theme, you fuckers when shows get particularly annoying. I have no problems with shows pitching to a particular audience, but I reserve the right to get annoyed when they start pandering to them.

There are no good sitcoms. Sitcoms are inherently limited by their format. These aren’t arguments, they’re an admission of defeat. They’re willing acknowledging that we expect so little from our entertainment that the only real response is to shrug and kill off a few more braincells in the hopes that one day we’ll see movies the same way whatever those mythical test-audiences who kill anything smart do.

I’d ask you to stop being part of the fucking problem and start engaging. Acknowledge the problems with individual narratives, individual shows, individual characters, instead of writing off entire genres. Find smart people who love the genre and ask their recommendations (this, coincidently, is how I found romance writer Georgette Heyer, who is mindblowingly fucking awesome).

Quality is not mediated by genre, nor is the ability to create smart and interesting narrative. The *willingness* to pitch smart narrative, sure, but that’s the writer’s choice when faced with the audience, just as it’s mine to watch and say hey, man, this shit isn’t on, in the hopes that if enough people say it loudly enough, one day things will change.

To argue otherwise is to mire you in the kind of close-mindedness you’re trying to rail again when you condemn the genre as a whole.

It’s also a who willing to play to deeply entrenched cultural myths about geeks and women, which makes me less happy, and in some points outright angry.

The default narrative of the show is generally one that posits all geeks are children looking for a mother figure and the bulk of the female characters with any depth are either caring mother-replacements (Penny, Leonard’s girlfriend from season two, Shelton’s actual mother) or emasculating shrews (Leonard’s mother, Raj’s mother, Howard’s mother – are you seeing a theme here? – Leslie Winkle, and ironically, Shelton’s mother due to her ability to countermand Shelton’s self-built idea of masculinity based around intellect).

The remaining female characters that appear in the series are generally there to be gratuitously objectified and competed for by the male cast, thus serving as a means of proving their masculinity and “growing up” (see Shelton’s sister and Penny’s friend from Nebraska) or non-idealized sexual partners who are characterized by their non-threatening naivety (Howard’s girlfriend Bernadette in season three).

The core cast of Male characters don’t actually fare much better: they’re infantilized by their interests, by their inability to get women (problematic, in and of itself), by their heights, by their familial relationships, but their inability to do their jobs correctly (Leonard’s research is derivative, Raj’s hypothesis is disproved, Howard fucks up every engineering prospect he comes up with), by their lack of knowledge about non-geek popular culture (I mean, really, geeks tend to know radiohead is a band). They’ve been neatly cut off from any traditional notions of the masculine, which would be fine if 90% of the show’s narrative wasn’t focused on three of the four trying to prove their masculinity through having sex while the fourth is determined to prove it through constantly being right.

Essentially the show strives to create a contemporary tribe of Lost Boys adopting a Wendy as a mother figure, except that only works in the case of Sheldon who actually is a childish innocent because the others all have deeply fucked up relationships with women (Which is not to say Sheldon doesn’t, but at least his relationship with women isn’t defined by sex).

We won’t even speak of the Howard-and-Raj-Are-a-dysfunctional-gay-couple thing they’ve started playing with. It was unpleasant-but-tolerable when it was a joke being played out in the episodes featuring Leonard’s mother, it was less tolerable when it became a recurring part of the narrative.

Yes, there are individual episodes where they seem to get it right. I breathed an audible sigh of relief the first time they introduced Stuart the comic shop guy, who spent his first few appearance being self-assured enough to flirt with Penny even if he exhibited signs of nervousness about the actual date. “He runs a successful small business,” Leonard opines, “he’s a talented artist. Not all geeks are like Captain Sweatpants over there.”

And I was like, “man, finally, it’s about fucking time.”

Of course, Stuart serves his narrative purpose, getting Penny together with Leonard, and the next time he appears he’s a lonely and isolated man who obsesses over Penny and  shares his Friday night meals with a stray cat.

And really, fuck that shit. All of it.

The show is largely redeemed by solid casting, the episodes where the writing is genuinely smart and interested in laughing with the geeks rather than at them, and very occasionally by the presence of guest stars from the cast of Roseanne (lets face it, any television show that puts Laurie Metcalf back on television gets something of a pass).

But beneath it all is a series of narrative assumptions I find deeply, deeply uncomfortable, and it seems to be getting worse rather than better. Sooner or later they will hit the point where the stupid outweighs the smart, and then I’ll be forced to stop watching lest I throw things at the television.

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Friday night I went to check my PO Box and discovered a cheque I forgot was coming, which was kinda nice, then got home to the news of the Japanese earthquake and Pacific Ocean tsunami’s, which was less nice and kinda put a downer on the evening overall. There’s news on the latter everywhere at the moment, so I won’t repeat what’s readily available. There is, as always, Red Cross donations that can be made to help those affected.

Later, after absorbing the news via twitter, I paid far to much for the least appealing take-away Butter Chicken of my life, but ate it anyway ’cause, well, it was butter chicken. Then the news of the explosions in the nuclear reactor started filtering in.

I don’t watch television anymore, nor to I read newspapers, so world news and I have a very strange relationship. Information tends to flow in through the communication in online mediums – twitter, facebook, blogs, etc – which means simultaneously seem better and worse than they appear to be depicted in traditional media. There are portions of my friends list that are all lo, the nuclear Apocalypse is upon us, and there are those linking to things like this post over at Genki English.

I expect that if I were watching traditional media, I’d be a nervous wreck right now. At this point, I’m just watching the internet and waiting further developments.

Well, yesterday I did not run away and join the circus, but it was probably one of those days where I would have if I had viable circus-type skills and access to a travelling circus to run away with. I did not turn into the Incredible Hulk and smash things in a frenzy of anger. I did not resign from my dayjob to take up a position that would be more useful to the world at large, such as hunting werewolves or wrangling wild unicorns or, you know, going into politics.

But, oh,  I was sorely tempted.

Especially by the werewolf thing, which, really, goes to show how much I disliked certain aspects of yesterday, because I’m actually quite fond of werewolves.

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We actually had a full cohort at write-club last night, which is the first time all four write-clubbers have been in the same place since other people started joining the inimitable Angela Slatter and I on a regular basis.

As predicted, I did the sensible thing and started working on the next installment of Flotsam. We all gathered and ate and ate chocolate, and 2,311 words later, I was still starting on the next installment of Flotsam, largely because it was one of those days with there irritations of the dayjob had carried through to writing.

Finally write-club was over and everyone went home, and I was again afflicted with the not-sleeping which has become so common of late, so I dragged out a pad and a pencil and took another crack at the story, and it’s possible I came out with something that may actually be a beginning.

Then I lay in bed, still not-sleeping, and pondered how much can be considered enough to satisfy the guilt of not-writing-enough, and I still have no satisfactory answers.

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There is, most likely, another potential buyer walking through my flat this morning. I can’t be entirely sure, because the real estate agent no longer sends the appropriate documents. I just get cheerful text messages asking if there’s any chance of having a quick pop-around in the morning, which I’m not entirely sure means we’re coming and there’s nothing you can do about it or say no if you want, and we’ll respect it.

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So, yes, it’s a grumpy and crabby kind of bloggery from me today, because it’s been a grumpy and crabby kind of week.

Ordinarily, when this happens, I tell people to pat me on the head and go write until whatever isn’t working turns around and actually starts working, and for the most part they do and the grumpy goes away and I start sleeping normally again. It may take days or weeks or, in one instance, months, but eventually it works.

And, really, I guess that’s what I should probably go do.

A masculine tone will be favoured but not sought exclusively (i.e. avoid becoming bogged down with intricate descriptions and fancy window dressing in your world building; save your word count for a solid scene – or 2 or 3 – of conflict, action, aggression, etc). (see the addendum below)

I mean, yeah, seriously, what the fuck?

Setting aside the fact that anyone’s daft enough to phrase their preferences like this in an online world where x-fail has become part of the dialogue and there’s a new generation of readers (and writers) sensitive to gender issues, I actually found this kind of disappointing because it runs up against one of the things I really like about Ticonderoga – they’re a left-leaning press whose anthologies have tackled issues such as work choices/industrial relations reform and the cultural identity of immigration. They’re the press that published short fiction collections for  Angela Slatter and Kaaron Warren – two writers I’d argue do intricate description and fancy window dressing that will fucking blow you away as a reader rather than bogging down – and they’re setting up to publish a bunch of other writers who do the same in the coming year (see the forthcoming collection by LL Hannett, for example). If you’d ask me to find three words that described Ticonderoga, progressive would have been high on the list. So would awesome.

To see them resorting to some pretty blatant gender stereotyping in their writer’s guidelines is rather disappointing and incongruous. It’s like going out for a drink with the head of your local Greenpeace chapter and hearing them start going off about all those damn women coming in and taking over the workplace.

I get what they’re trying to say here, I really do, but the phrasing of it terrible and contains all sorts of implied value judgements (compare the implied frippery of the “intricate descriptions” and “fancy window dressings” that will get your story “bogged down” to the “solid action scene”). It hearkens back to the bad old days of literature when men were men and wrote terse, masculine,  Hemmingway-esque fiction of worth and women were safely quarantined to the flowery world of romance . It even nails the implied passivity of the feminine writing as a contrast to the active, aggressive nature of the masculine. It may not be intentional, but they’ve slipped into a nice comfortable misogyny with very little effort there, and devalued a whole bunch of work that don’t fit into the narrow guidelines set out. This is not a statement that says “please send me action-oriented horror stories”, it’s a statement that falls into the old trap of saying “girly writing sucks, boy writing rocks.”

And I say, heartily, FUCK THAT SHIT.

You want your submissions to consist of terse, action-oriented horror stories full of aggression? Then how about this – take away the word “masculine” and say “we’re looking for terse, aggressive, action-oriented horror stories.” There’s no real need to gender the distinction, nor to hang shit on the opposite side of the gender dichotomy you’re setting up.

So, in summary: I like Ticonderoga, I own a bunch of the books they publish and would love to own more if finances stretched that far, but these writer’s guidelines make me fucking sad (and, lets be honest, look like a gender-fail flamewar in its nascent form).

Addendum 1(25/1/11): So it looks like Ticonderoga has taken down the guidelines and made steps towards addressing the concerns above, to which I can only say bravo. This is the step of the Ticonderoga I know and love, and gives me hope that the problems were a one-off thing that are destined to be quickly corrected.

On one hand this makes for a nice change – this time last last year I was unemployed and dreaming of ways to pay rent – but after three months in the new day job things have evolved to the point where it’s a hindrance rather than a help.

You see, somewhere along the line I ceased being the office assistant and became the unofficial web-guy for the company. My day’s went from data-entry to content production and putting together a plan for the company to revise the website and engage with social media. I’m far from an expert on this kind of stuff – I got the job by virtue of being the sole person in the office who knows *exactly* how much I don’t know about SEO and webmarketing – so it takes up brainpower.

The net result is that I spend hours writing or thinking about writing or putting together plans for writing, then I come home and stare at the manuscripts I’m meant to be working on and my brain is full of fuzz. And since I’ve rarely had the kind of job where I show up and do this full-time, in an office, it’s getting harder and harder to stop kicking myself for being a slack-arse and not being further along on the writing career than I am.

It’s been particularly frustrating this week. Part of it is the regular January thing – it’s one of those months that’s forever filled with doom and tight finances in my world (too much spending at Christmas is followed by 5 birthdays for close family and friends in the space of a month) – and some is surely the aftermath of the floods.

But I figure that’s accounting for some of the frustration, not all of it. My own apathy makes me angry, which in turn makes me apathetic, and it’s difficult to break that cycle

I suspect it may be time to build myself another thirty point plan for the coming year.

Don’t get me wrong, I really wanted to like this movie. I mean, it has a bounty hunter who can speak to the dead and horse-mounted gatling guns in the first ten minutes, and that kind of absurdity is the kind of wrongness that I’m willing to roll with. And for the first first half-hour or so, things were looking pretty good – it wasn’t a great movie, but it was zany and weird and it had undead fucking cowboys and that kind of shit is awesome.

Then Megan Fox showed up.

A few years ago I had a friend who worked off the theory that Kate Beckinsale was the kiss of death for a film. As soon as she appeared on screen you were pretty much doomed to a cinematic experience that sucked. At best you’d get a film that achieved a kind of stylized aesthetic to try and cover for the lack of plot and continuity (see Underworld, and Van Halen), and at worst you got the kind of film that made you wish you could beat someone with a cluestick until they admitted their failings and gave you your two hours back (see Pearl Harbor).

Now Megan Fox seems to be performing the same function, ’cause I swear to god that every scene after her first appearance, even the ones she wasn’t actually in, the film made less sense and tried to cover it by shoehorning metaphors for terrorism and the atomic bomb into what was essentially an occult western. Plus evil confederate general John Malkovich did some crazy evil with a tattooed Irishman while beer leaked out the side of one-of-those-Quaid-chap’s mouth.

To my considerable dissapointment, they didn’t bring back the horse-mounted gatling guns.

They almost managed a stylized aesthetic that made me want to like the movie more than I did, but I got distracted by trying to figure out exactly how the not-really-an-atomic-bomb McGuffin worked. ‘Cause, seriously, I’m all about ignoring science in favour of awesome, even I thought that shit made no sense. I spent the last half hour of the film drinking scotch and screaming “seriously, what the fuck?” at the screen.

- sigh -

I wanted to like that film. I really did. If only they hadn’t made it so damn hard to like.