PeterMBall.com

The 2009 Aurealis Awards short-list was released over the weekend and it contained a whole mess of good news – Horn secured a berth in the short-list of both the Fantasy and the Horror novel categories, and I made the Science Fiction Short Story list twice with both Clockwork, Pathwork and Ravens and To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer’s Lament. There’s even more good news on the short-lists in the form of nominations for peeps such as Chris Green* (for both SF, Horror & Fantasy short story), Angela Slatter (Fantasy short story) and Twelfth Planet Press (a seemingly unending parade for various projects – I think every book they released this year is up for something).

‘Course, most of the folks who read this blog have already heard this news from other sources (I was having a slack weekend, internet-wise), so I figure I’d just make a note, say “awesome” and off my congratulations to the other finalists – it’s a shiny list of folks to be sharing a short-list with and I’m looking forward to the Awards weekend when Brisvegas gets flooded with writer-folks.

*The best part about this is, of course, the possibility that Chris way actually come to Brisbane for the ceremony and give us a chance to catch up in person – somehow I keep missing him when I pass through Melbourne.

For those who may be wondering, allow me to clarify what exactly it is you’re looking at in the accompanying photograph. That, my dear peeps, is a photograph of victory in action. Or a pile of 205 books that are ready to leave my house forever and never return, thus clearing shelf-space and giving me tacit permission to buy new books should I ever find myself in possession of discretionary cash ever gain.

The problem, at this point, is that I have no idea how I’m going to get many of these books out of the house. Some I suspect will be claimed by friends (particularly the gaming material and fantasy books) and I expect the rest will go to charity of some kind, although the logistics of carting a box of this size to a salvo bit could be a bit of a problem.

Still, the cull is done, and when I originally wrote “get rid of 200 books” on my to-do list I seriously thought it was the thing least likely to get done. Getting rid of books is hard work for me, but I kinda found a rhythm for it at the end.

Between this and the submission of the Cold Cases draft, I’ve now completed 11.25% of the 80-point-plan for an Awesome year I wrote back in July, meaning my year has finally stepped into double-digits. I bring this up because I suspect the plan is going to be due for a quick revision over the next couple of weeks, since there are some points on it that are now more-or-less impossible* (relying, as they did, on having the computer that died in September rather than my laptop) or irrelevant (focused on options that have been cut off for various reasons).

*technically, this doesn’t make them impossible so much as really difficult and more time consuming, but given their primary role in the plan that’s effectively renders them null.

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

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

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

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

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.

Think about writing for a moment. Not the let me tell you a story kind of writing I usually talk about here, but handwriting; the physical act of picking up a pencil and writing a sentence. Think about how automatic it’s become, how long it’s been since you’ve had to pay attention to the way your hand moves or the little tics in the muscle that allow you to scribe an L instead of a T. How many little things are happening without your knowledge, or the way the physical sensation of holding a pen stops registering because the act of writing is all just an automatic reflex now. Hold onto that thought, ‘cause we’re going to come back to it.

Over the weekend I started one of my long-term projects in the name of the 80-point-plan – reading an anthology of literary theory essays with an aim towards filling in my patchy awareness of the field. My goal is to read an essay a week, trying to figure out what I can learn from the history of literary criticism that’ll help me write better. The anthology’s a big book with a lot of essays, making this the only project on my plan that I’m actually expecting to take longer than the year (success is achieved if I maintain the one-a-week pace). This week’s essay was Art as Technique by Victor Shklovsky, an essay writen in 1916 about the way perception becomes automated and the role art and literature plays in breaking us out of that mindset. I have to admit that I fell pretty hard for the ideas in this, because a lot of jibes really well with my existing understandings of writing technique.

This is where we’re going to get back to handwriting. It’s Shklovsky’s example, though I’ve fleshed it out a little when writing up above, and it’s a good way in to what he’s talking about when he uses phrases like the ‘automatism of perception’ in the quote I’ve snagged below. We have this process called writing, and we have a name for it, and as a result of that things become simplified and reduced. The sensations become an act, the act becomes a word, the words meaning becomes reflexive in the same way the act does – you don’t think about the definition anymore, just register its presence and move on. Essentially the experience is subsumed by long expose, registered as a kind of outline of what handwriting is.

“After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of it and we know about it, but we do not see it – hence we cannot say anything significant about it. Art removes objects from the automatism of perception…”

This is where the essay gets really interesting. For Shklovsky art and literature is kind of like Louis CK’s stand-up bit about modern technology– it takes something you’ve reduced to an outline through long exposure and brings back the vitality of the experience by looking at it anew (though Shklovsky places the importance on the moment, rather than the effect). Being a Russian Formalist writing in 1916 he uses Tolstoy as his example quite a bit, pointing out the way Tolstoy describes actions/activities as if seeing then for the first time rather than bundling them up in words like, say, flogging. Or war (and every writer, ever, is now sitting there thinking show, don’t tell, duh). Breaking open the word and describing the action isn’t the only way this achieved, although it’s the most apropos example given that I tend to come at things as a prose writer. Poetry, for example, prompts this defamiliarization through its syntax and imagery perceived from a new point of view. Visual art has its own techniques based on perspective (There are, inevitably, other ways of achieving this that aren’t marked here as well).

“The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the awfulness of an object: the object is not important.”

The core of the argument in this essay intrigued me on a couple of levels. I’m reminded of the way I tend to read fantasy books with seemingly incomprehensible names, drifting over the letters of Driz’zt Do’Urden and Blibdoolpoolp in favour of registering them as a shape used to designate a particular character (Heck, there’s a book I keep meaning to blog about, Anouchka Grose Forester’s Calling For You, which has a character who spends much of the novel being represented by a squiggly line rather than an actual name). It reminds me of why I wanted to write Hornand take on the idea of virgins and unicorns, reconstructing a genre trope that’d seemed to have been hollowed out by long familiarity. It reminds me of all sort of hot-button arguments, the stuff around things like gender and race, where people get anxious about the way their understanding of sexism or racism is detonated just as they think they’re getting their head wrapped around the issues. More importantly, I fell hard for Shklovsky’s argument because he absolutely nails why some of the books and films I love with a fierce and consuming passion are so important to me (or were, at least, when I first saw them)  – their ability to unpick an idea and give me a new angle on it. While I’d probably disagree that this is the only way to make art (one doesn’t get a pleasantly plump figure like mine without understanding the value of comfort food), it certainly hones in on the real difference between stories that energise versus stories that comfort.

One of the more interesting aspects of this essay is its tacit acknowledgement that this process is rarely comfortable, and when it’s done right it should be confronting. When I first started writing this entry I tried to convert Schklovsky’s handwriting analogy into typing, but it proved to be a big mistake. Once I started writing about the action of typing, I lost the ability to write easily – typos abounded, my wpm slowed, and I became self-conscious off what my fingers were doing and the sensation of my fingertips hitting the keys (and the fact that I need to clip a few nails after I’m done).

There’s something revelatory in this essay for me as a writer because it really hones in on why ideas like show, don’t tell and make it new are such oft-quoted advice for new writers. It’s not telling me something I don’t already know on some level, but it’s pulling the sheet down and telling me why they work. I’m a “why do they work” kind of guy. Showing the details of a thing rather than using the familiar word for its process forces us to re-examine it, disrupting the automated perception that renders a word powerless – re-examining the experience of sailing, for example, rather than scooping them together under the singular verb. Make it new was originally applied to poetry, but for me it’s always seemed like a call to attack ideas on the thematic level – defamiliarizing larger ideas within our culture. An automated perception is often powerless and vague, regardless of where it happens, but even breaking open the idea of a word like hand-writing or aeroplane can reveal something powerful about the commonplace experiences of our daily lives.

Note: There’s going to be someone with a serious understanding of the Russian Formalists who will be utterly appalled at my reading of this essay, and that’s probably fair enough. If I’m way off-base with the reading feel free to let me know – I’m filtering all this through a fairly crude awareness of the classics and a tendency to cherry-pick ideas that make sense to me as a writer, so there’s pretty good odds I’ve missed a point in favour of seeing what I want to see. After all, I’m not a subtle guy – and when it comes to nonfiction I’m all blunt force trauma and thumbs

Also, if you made it this far down the post, allow me to reward you with links to two more of Chris Green’s stories that have gone live since I posted about his story last week – you can track down A Crazy Kind of Love over at Nossa Morte and Reservations at Expanded Horizons. That’s three stories worth of free Chris Green awesomness in the space of a week – always a good thing. It seems that sometimes the universe does listen when you ask nicely for stuff.

1) A Hundredth Name, Chris Green (Abyss and Apex)

Click the link, you know you want too. No? Okay, let me convince you then. You should go read Chris Green’s story at Abyss and Apex because the man is freakin’ talented and understands things like brevity and leaving empty spaces for the story to breathe. I’ve critted Chris a bunch of times and it’s a bloody hard thing to do, because he crams more story into two thousand words than there should actually be allowed and he fits the damn things together so tight that pulling one segment out causes the whole damn thing to unravel in your hands.

You should read his story because he’s one of the few people I know who manages to give the impression of being genuinely, fearlessly interested in everything and somehow manages to filter that down into his fiction, even though his bailiwick seems to be horror rather than any of the forms of SF where being fearlessly interested in everything would be a useful trait in an author (not a slight on horror authors, but you guys need to understand fear and I’m not sure Chris does). You should read it because he can usually nail one image that makes you cringe, or cry, or wince with pain, and yet there’s still something beautiful in the stories he writes. You should read him because he’s one of my favourite-writers-who-doesn’t-get-published-enough (a distinction he shares with Ben Francisco), primarily because he seems to spend too much time at his day job and not enough time producing fiction. And despite this, he seems to believe that every time he gets published it’s a fluke, despite the fact that it isn’t.

You should also read it because Chris owns cooler footwear than you ever will. Yes, you included, even though I’m sure your shoes are fairly damn cool. I’ve seen Chris step out in boots that’d make a gothic shoe fetishist cry with envy. Come to think of it, his beard is cooler than yours too. And he owns a t-shirt featuring my favourite Buffy quote ever.

2) The City and the City, China Mieville

While I’d certainly recommend reading this as a blood good read, this isn’t meant to be a review (for that I’d send you over to MacLaren North’s fine write-up over on ASIF) and I’m not going to avoid spoilers. I’m not going to intentionally spoil the book either, but I’m primarily going to talk about the book based on the decisions that interested me as a writer and that’ll probably slip over into spoiler territory pretty quickly.

China Mieville’s always had a knack of creating interesting settings, but if you’re a writer then The City and The City is one of those books that’s worth pulling apart and figuring out because it takes that extra half-step beyond “interesting setting” and into the realm of “fuck, how’d he do that.” In fact, lets call it a case study is awesomeness on the setting front for its ability to make a theoretically impossible setting seem possible and logical.

The central conceit of novel’s setting is that there are two European cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, that overlap one another while remaining entirely separate in the minds of their inhabitants. Tensions between the two cities are strained, at best, and crossing from one to the other is handled via heavily patrolled borders. There’s nothing particularly mind-breaking in that set-up, at least when you start the book, but as the narrative progresses we realise that parts of the city occupy the physical space. Characters sitting in Beszel simply choose not to see residents of Ul Qoma, a fire taking place down the street is ignored because it belongs in the “wrong” city, and an upmarket Ul Qoma suburbs occupy the same physical locations as Beszel slums. In short, the separation is cultural rather than physical, ingrained by years of practice by the citizens of both cities, and various terms that are dropped early in the book -  crosshatched streets, or breaching – take on different shades of meaning as the setting comes into focus.

This is the kind of setting that fantasy fans probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid at if it was being explained away using magic (and would probably see me and Karen Miller on a panel having a brisk discussion about whether it’s fantasy, slipstream, or magic realism). This isn’t. There’s no hint of magic in The City and The City, because with the exception of the setting it plays it like a straight police procedural and the separation between the two cities is largely a matter of cultural conditioning and clever writing on Mieville’s part.

Which is why this book fascinates me as a reader – what starts as a patently absurd concept ends up slipping into the story as a natural, plausible setting. And because I’m a writer and a genre geek, my natural inclination when faced with a setting like this is to start pulling the novel apart and trying to figure out why it works (excluding, of course, the obvious explanation of “Mieville’s freakin’ smart and a very good writer”). At the moment I’ve got a rough bundle of thoughts floating around, so I figured I’d throw a few of them out there and see if anyone whose read the novel agrees

My first thought is that a lot of the effect has to do with with setting the book in an Eastern European city, irrespective of whether it’s made up or not. The opening chapter reads like a straight police procedural and has plenty of slang terms thrown around that aren’t related to the split-city conceit, so seeding concepts that are important later in the book slides in naturally alongside explanations of Fuluna (think Jane Doe) and Feld (a local drug). Combine the learning-curve expected when coming up to speed on the ‘exitic’ setting with the split-city conceit means we’re constantly giving Mieville narrative space, and by the time we realise what’s going on we’re too caught-up in the book to give a damn. In the earliest moments when our protagonist is caught in the interstitial space between the two cities, noticing a woman he shouldn’t have, it’s a slippage that’s treated like an embarrassing faux-pass that gets even less explanation than the drug of choice of the local teens.

What flummoxes me about the book is the way it borrows a trait from fantasy – moving between ‘worlds’ as a demarcation of important plot-points – and yet manages to avoid coming off like a fantastic setting or book. While you could probably make an argumentfor Slipstream in association with The City and The City it does a remarkably good job of playing it straight as a police procedural despite the quirks in its backdrop. While there are plenty of non-SF narratives that have used this kind of narrative relocation as a means of dividing up a story at similar points, it seems like an obvious tip-over given Mieville’s past novels (all fantasy) and the improbability of his setting. Especially since the solution to the novel’s murder revolves more and more around the split between the cities and what may lie between them.

Another possibility may come form Mieville’s decision to shine of light on its absurdities before they come important, bringing in the American parents of the murdered girl at the centre of the novel’s mystery to interact with the protagonist and comment on the conceit before the genre boundaries are stretched to breaking point. This choice, cleverly, allows for the reinforcement of the cultural aspect of the separation given the tendency towards parts of the English speaking world to be somewhat…clueless and insensitive…when it comes to other cultures. We are, in essence, shamed into accepting the conceit of the setting before we can reject it…

And I might leave it there, for the moment, because this is already getting out of control, but it’s probably the starting point I’ll use when I go back and re-read the book with an eye towards identifying how it bloody-well works.  I suspect there will be another post on this, sooner or later.

So here’s something I realised during my week off: I’m tired of not being awesome.

Lets forestall the inevitable reassurances that tend to follow when you post stuff like that – I’m aware that I am, occasionally, capable of awesome (although it is very un-Australian to admit it, and it is said here with a modicum of irony). There have been the occasional flashes of external validation that remind me of this, plus there’s the posse of folks who make up my friends list. I mean, lets face it: Jason Fischer? Awesome; Angela Slatter? Awesome; My Call of Cthulhu peeps? Awesome; the various folks who have published my fiction? Yep, they’re awesome too. They may have their occasional moments of self-doubt in this regard, since recognising awesomeness in others is easier than recognising your own internal awesomeness, but as a blanket rule I think they all score big points on the awesomometer. As are many other folks (my DnD peeps, my family, etc) who aren’t readily linkable online. I figure that if you can find a collection of awesome folks who are willing to stay in contact and help you out, then there has to be the potential for latent awesomeness in you somewhere to justify that.

So I’m not denying the fact that I’ve done some big things in the last couple of years. Things worth being proud of. Things I can look back on and say “that, that was awesome.”

Basically, what I’m saying here is that my life is occasionally awesome. There are things that I’m good at, but they’re the kind of things that lots of people are good at. I want to achieve more than good. I want total awesome, slathered with awesome-sauce, with a side order of awesome fries. I want to be able to end the year and think “wow, that was a bloody good year” rather than “yeah, some good stuff happened, but the last year primarily sucked.”  I want to kick back after finishing my yearly goal-check next July and say “I fuckin’ rock” with total confidence. I kinda managed that this year – my primary goal was getting my writing back on track and finishing a novel draft, both of which I managed – but lots of other things fell by the wayside. It seems like things have been falling by the wayside for years now, primarily because they’ve been dubbed too hard, too scary, or simply too expensive to achieve without putting in some hard work.

Call it a contact high from a week of productivity porn, but I’m pretty sick of those three excuses floating around in my world.

So this year I’m setting them aside. Between now and June 30th, 2010, I’m going to strive for awesomeness. And to keep me on track, I’ve created victory conditions – an 80-point list of goals that I can mark off as they’re achieved. Some of it is a sensible and reasonable continuation of stuff I’m already doing (redraft and polish Black Candy, get some novellas written, get a whole bunch of stories written), some of it is about rebuilding parts of my life that have slipped by the wayside (pretty much any goal that isn’t writing based), and some are about rebuilding my life so it resembles the life I’d like to be living (reading 104 books in the coming year, getting myself down to a healthier weight). It may be a purely personal metric, but I figure that if I can achieve a high proportion of the things on said list (I’m aiming for 90%) then my year will have been pretty damn awesome.

Part of this is going to involve rethinking the way I blog, since I’ve strayed a long way from my goals when I originally migrated over to my personal website rather than simply livejournaling. In fact, it’s turned into the one thing I’d promised myself it wouldn’t turn into – a place where I log wordcounts and engage in random acts of self-promotion. Part of this comes down from thinking about the blogging process the wrong way, getting caught up in the goal of blogging for its own sake. I’m still not entirely sure how it’ll change, although I’ll be aiming to post both more regularly and less often.