PeterMBall.com

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.

“So this is what the volume knob is for”

Within it’s original context this line floors me with its emotional impact, time after time. Divorced from it, it’s just a collection of words. Except for the fact that the Mountain Goats have claimed that sequence forever now, and it’ll always be one of those stray phrases that’s loaded with meaning.

These are the kinds of things I think about on a Friday afternoon.

By this time next week I’ll be all packed up and in the grip of an “oh-my-god-I-hate-flying” panic in preparation for my trip to Adelaide.

Now I’m going to wander off and enjoy my final week of television before the cable is gone forever. I expect there will be far more regular posting once I’m back from the con in two weeks.

I’m feeling a little out of sorts today, which means it’s time for another dancing monkey post. This time courtesy of deepfishy (aka JJ Irwin) over on LJ: This may veer too close to writing, but: tropes you’re drawn to in tv shows or films. (For instance, for myself I get a lot of joy out of variations on and subversions of the Defective or Exotic Detective – Life, Psych, Nero Wolfe, The Dresden Files, Foyle’s War…)

Originally I thought I was going to have trouble answering this – my inclination towards SF aside, there doesn’t always seem to be a lot of continuity to the types of shows I find myself watching. Naturally I went to TV Tropes and plugged in a few of my favourite shows to check this and quickly discovered it wasn’t the case. As such: I’m probably overly-drawn to the Bunny Ears Lawyer trope, but primarily in TV shows that stack their decks pretty heavily with examples of that type (Boston Legal, Scrubs, NCIS, Firefly). I can also be lured by specific examples of Crazy Awesome, and general eccentricity among the cast.

But, overall, I think that’s all a little misleading. I’m hard on TV, as a general rule. I demand a lot from it and I’m a cranky, unpleasant viewer. And hitting those tropes alone isn’t enough to drive me to watch a show – Six Feet Under is, by all accounts, a show full of quirk and eccentricity, but I’ve never really gotten a grip on it. CSI apparently has its share of crime-fighting bunny ears lawyer types in the same vein as NCIS, but again I’ve never managed to wrap my head around it.

A list of things that will sell me on a TV show regarldess of genre and trope:

• Fast-paced, well-written dialogue: this is still one of the biggest selling points for the Gilmore Girls, and the thing that eventually lured me to Buffy after years of mocking it.
• A consistent and engaging supporting cast, preferably built slowly and carefully (or a very strong ensemble cast, in the case of shows like How I Met Your Mother):I’ve never really jibbed with the reset-button approach to television and having the same extras/minor characters floating around gives a sense of narrative continuity.
• Fringe-dwellers, punks, goths, geeks & weirdos: basically, if you find a social group/sub-culture that doesn’t usually get positive airplay, then give it to them, I may well be yours for life (this is, incidentally, the reason I still watch NCIS despite the horrible, horrible subtext of the show)
• Do Future Imperfect SF: Firefly, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, even Dark Angel
• Do something narratively/culturaly interesting: I dig How I Met Your Mother because of the non-linear structure; similarly, I dig Boston Legal because it has a kind of subversion of traditional masculinity going on in what’s traditionally been a hyper-masculine profession.

The Dancing Monkey challenge from lauragoodin: “write a blog post about being on a Brisbane ferry. At night. And it’s raining. And you’ve spent your last money on the fare.” I suspect it’s not what Laura intended, but every time I read that request all it translates into is “please tell me what it was like being twenty-three.” It’s all the qualifiers to the original request that do it – when I was twenty-three I’d just finished my honours year in which I wrote a lot of poetry, just moved to Brisbane for the first time, and just started my PhD. Being at the tail-end of my love-affair with goth as a movement, I was prone to attaching all sorts of significance to thing that happened in moments of poverty, rain and night.

Lets not make this *all* about nostalgia though. Instead lets talk about exactly how lucky you are if you live in a city with a decent public transport system, because I’ll admit that my first few years in Brisbane was largely spent listening to people bitch about the buses, trains and ferries while resisting the urge to shake them and scream “what the fuck are you complaining about.”

Everyone I’ve ever met is adamant that the public transport system in their home city is the worst available, but I think I can mount a safe argument for the Gold Coast (aka the city that I spent most of my teenage years growing up in) has one the worst of the lot. Part of it is an infrastructure problem – the Gold Coast bus service is privatized and the city expands faster than pretty-much everywhere else in Queensland. Part of it is cultural – the Gold Coast is a tourist city with a lot of beaches. But the basic gist of the Gold Coast public transport system is this – if you don’t want to travel along the highway that rarely strays further than a block and a half from the shoreline, you’re screwed. In order to catch a bus to uni as an undergraduate (a 30 minute drive), I used to have to hike out to the highway (about twenty-five minutes) and catch three transfers at various tourist malls in order to travel along what was, more or less, a straight line (about two hours, maybe longer if the drivers were feeling fickle or you missed a service). All this was, of course, essentially impossible if I had classes that started before nine (a surprisingly common occurrence, given that I was in an arts degree). Add in the Gold Coast’s tendency towards continuous roadworks and the once-a-year insistence on spending a month setting up an Indy Car race track in the heart of the tourist district (which *every* bus in the city passed through) and you start to get a pretty good idea why I look at buses, even Brisbane buses which are comparatively well-run, with a look of disdain and horror.

So when I was twenty-three, broke, and moved to Brisbane where there were options such as trains and ferries, lets just say I went a little crazy with the options. Hence it’s nearly impossible for me to separate the ferry from that particular age. Between twenty-three and twenty-four I spent a lot of time on the trains and ferries, often purchasing tickets with fistful’s of spare change that was scavenged from desk drawers and couch cushions. By the time I was twenty-five I’d fallen out of the habit – I started working back on the Gold Coast regularly and many of the fellow Brisbanites with whom I car-pooled stopped, so I was basically driving everywhere instead. It’s only within the last year or two that I’ve really started working to break that habit and make a concerted effort to use the trains again.

(Yes, I realise there really isn’t much to this, but truthfully I’m a much bigger fan of Brisbane’s train system than I am the Ferry system. I think people tend to fixate on one form of transport in particular depending on where they live, and I’ve primarily lived in Brisbane suburbs where the train is your best choice for getting anywhere you need to go).

I sat down this morning and thought “Right, post something that has nothing to do with writing, you’re about due.”

But you know what? I’m being a little writing obsessive this week. Can’t be helped; I’m in the midst of the first prolonged stretch of writing I’ve had in a long while and I’m still far to excited about that to think of something else to talk about on my own.

So consider me a dancing monkey waiting for someone to crank the hurdy-gurdy (aka give me a topic and I’ll attempt to say something meaningful for your amusement. Otherwise I predict the remainder of the week will consist of me showing up with some variation of “look, I’m writing stuff, and it’s an awesome feeling” as my theme…)

I have two moderately hard-and-fast rules when it comes picking movies: no musicals, and no spoofs. I’ve developed these rules after years of being a miserable git who complains about things, and they’re usually followed for the safety of everyone involved. I’m just not geared to enjoy either of those genres, so it’s safer to avoid them.

Last Friday, while visiting the local video store, I broke said rules three times. The first to pick up Cabaret and The Producers, the second to pick up Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

To their credit, none of those films was the worst thing I watched this week (that was a film called Blue State, which made me profoundly irritated and left me wondering if a film that was theoretically about being part of the American left was perhaps funded by conservatives gleefully trying to make lefties look idiotic and redundant); yet all three reminded me that I really shouldn’t watch Musicals or Spoofs. Walk Hard actually managed to be funny for about six consecutive minutes, largely due to cameo’s by people playing the Beatles; Cabaret was actually pretty watchable, but I’d happily have traded most of the plot for a story revolving around the MC at the club who proved more engaging than any of the leads; and The Producers just isn’t my thing – the sole moment I actually developed an interest in the film was when the crazy German was on-screen and a breif re-wind of the DVD in order to work out whether I had, in fact, just seen John Barrowman as a dancing Nazi (I had).

I am in two minds today. One part of me notes the general exhaustion that follows the Monday-of-Doom (aka the day I teach seven straight hours of classes, pacing like a maniac the entire time) and says “Seriously, man, just post something and worry about content tomorrow.” The other part of me looks at the long string of blog posts about nothing in particular and thinks it’s probably worth holding off until I’ve got something worthwhile to say.

Given that I thought “shit, I look old today” when I caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror a few minutes back, I think  the first impulse is going to win. I am, however, going to go away and start putting together a more meaningful post for later

It’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting here listening to Chibo Matto and Regina Spektor, trying not to regret last night’s culinary adventure. This is what I ate:

Actually before I start, it’s probably worth pointing out that I have this obsession with bad fast-food from places that do their best to try and replicate the fast-food experience of a McDonalds but just don’t quite get it. Show me someone’s random idea to try and revolutionise the franchise fast-food industry or a local take-away doing something odd and I’m there with a couple of bucks in my pocket and a desire to see their worst. It’s a sickness, I know, but it’s mine and I’ve come to grips with it. It’s like those people you know who are obsessed with bad movies and love them for their flaws – I’m obsessed with bad fast-food and love it despite the stomach pains and added kilograms that result. Call it a desire to savour the culinarily camp. 

Which brings us, then, to Snitzl - a fast-food restaurant I discovered while driving home yesterday built around the theme of doing very bad things to the chicken schnitzel. How bad, you ask? Well, alongside such traditional meals as the schnitzel with gravy and cheese or the schnitzel with salsa, they also offer such delicacies as the Thai Schnitzel (Schnitzel with coconut curry sauce, Thai vegetables, cheese and sweet chilli sauce), the Swag Schnitzel (BBW sauce, bacon, fried onions, cheese), and the Chine-eze (mixed vegetables with sweet & sour sauce, plus pineapple and the inevitable cheese). I’ll leave it to your imagination as to which I was eating above (suffice to say, it bore only a vague resemblance to what I was expecting).

There’s more, of course – pick a nationality and they’re adopting their cuisine to schnitzel form, plus the inevitable variants on the meal deal, happy meal, and seniors meal. The best part was, of course, discovering that they home-delivered – you could get schnitzel abominations delivered to *to your door* if you were sufficiently interested. As dodgy fast-food places go, it was a veritable cornucopia of awesomeness; they had the flashy logo on the outside, all polished up and well-lit to suggest their legitimacy; they had the weird and wonderful mix of gimmick foods; and they had the lingo down as you walked in. Someone had put thought into the appearance and marketing of this. Sadly, however, it ended there – once you actually got inside it looked much like your local fish-and-chippery and thus the temptations of their exotic schnitzel variations was something to be met with suspicion rather than joy.

I’d like to say this ended well, but that goes against the spirit of trying such places out. Mostly you go to them to revel in the complete cognitive dissonance of seeing the basics of marketing and the capitalist impulse go awry, and in that respect Snitz doesn’t disappoint. I mean, I can now have a schnitzel covered in satay sauce, carrot, onion, coriander and cheese delivered to my house (dubbed the Indo D’Lite, though I’ll lay even money on the fact that it’s neither) and that’s worth more than little things like taste. In fact, wereit not for the Styrofoam containers used away, I could almost come to like the place. Compared with previous experiences, it’s actually okay. I’ve definitely had worse – South East Queenslanders who were out late on a Saturday night a lot in the 90’s may remember the short-lived 24-hour Brodies chain, which remains the lower echelon of such places I’ve experienced (and in recent years I delighted to discover that one still existed out in Warwick, and I immediately ate there upon discovering its existence).

Tonight, though, is devoted to recovering to yesterdays experience - I’ll steam myself a chicken breast with ginger and a handful of vegetables and eat like a sensible person. And I’ll dream of the upcoming trip to Adelaide in June, upon which I will be convincing Jason to take me in search of a Pea Floater.

• Off to the Gold Coast again today, in order to learn how to be a PhD student. One might think that after so many years I’d have worked out how by now, but one would be mistaken (said without snark – there’s been a gear-shift in the process recently, and I’m the kind of driver who grinds gears until someone points out the various ways that’s a bad idea).
• Finally made it to the post-office during work hours yesterday, which meant I could pick up some of the packages of awesomeness waiting for me (a copy of Couch, courtesy of Ben Francisco, and copies of both Cory Doctrow’s Overclocked and a collection of Hugo award winners courtesy of Jason Fischer – thanks to both of you, for they were awesome things to discover).
• Reason my thesis leaves me a funk #29: I haven’t actually finished and submitted a *new* story (as opposed to resubmitting something that’s already been out) since November of last year.
• Fortunately I have a half-dozen stories that have gone through multiple drafts and critiques just waiting for me to have the time to work on them. I feel the need to do something about that, rather powerfully. This evening I will come up with a plan, pending possible distractions following the PhD workshops (to whit, I need to mark some assignments at some point).
• If I promise wit and lucid commentary on the world tomorrow, would you think me a liar? Yes? Well, that’s very wise of you…