Category: Works in Progress

Works in Progress

Knock Knock: an interactive serial (Part 3)

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Knock Knock: A Sci-Fi Serial

This is part three of my occasional sci-fi serial about a science team dealing with an alien intruder on their romote research bate. After each installment, readers get a week to make a choice that will inform what happens next. You can read the first two installments on the series page. When last we left our intrepid heroes, one of them had snapped and elected to threaten the intruder with a gun. I asked the readers to vote on how things played out, and this is how things broke down. With 50% of the readership choosing the path of peace, we rejoin Captain Finn and the crew of Remote Research Station Denki as they try to calm things down. KNOCK KNOCK (A Serial With Reader Interaction) Part Three: Breaking Protocol Finn broke eight kinds of protocol and turned his back on the intruder. “Luce, I need you to put the gun down,” they said. “Tse’s hurting, but she’s in one

Works in Progress

Knock Knock: an interactive sci fi serial (Part 2)

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Knock Knock: A Sci-Fi Serial

Part two of my sci-fi serial where readers get to choose what happens next. When we encountered the three-person team manning Remote Research Station Denki back in part 1, they were surprised by a mysterious knock on the door…and no details appearing on any scans. Readers go to vote on how they responded, and I’ve included the results below! Two readers had very specific suggestions (one bloodthirsty, one polite), but overwhelmingly, the response was opening the door and letting the visitor in. With that, it’s time to kick off part two. KNOCK KNOCK (A Serial With Reader Interaction) Part 2: Boarding Procedures Tse raised the first tentative hand, stealing a glance at the airlock door as she did so. “Not sure how long that’ll hold,” she said. “Whatever’s out there might not be hostile, but we know a breach will mess us up.” Finn squared their jaw, masking the gut-rending surge of fear beneath a veneer of command stoicism. “Luce?”

Works in Progress

Knock Knock: an interactive sci fi serial (Part 1)

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Knock Knock: A Sci-Fi Serial

A few months back, I wrote a little vignette while experimenting with tools from Mary Robinette Kowal’s flash fiction workshop on Patreon. The end result wasn’t quite a stand-alone flash piece, and wasn’t quite a short story, but something in between—the opening scene of a longer story. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a story I was going to pursue with any real determination. In a lot of ways, I’m playing with a familiar trope, and I wrote it as a fun exercise rather than any ambition to sell it. But posting to my Patreon gave me the idea of doing a story developed in serial, writing scenes that bring things to a major decision point and giving readers the chance to vote on what happens next. Alas, voting proved hard to set up on many of my usual platforms than expected — turns out mailing out a poll to subscribers is a premium service for my newsletter provider, and cost more than

Stuff

52 Blog Posts That Never Came Into Existence

I recently opened the “unfinished drafts” section of my blog and discovered that I had 52 unfinished posts in various states of completion. Some of these resulted from dumping a quick idea using the WordPress app on my phone, little more than three of four words to be fleshed out later. Some are just a title, waiting for the post to arrive. Some are near-complete or actually complete blog posts I never got around to posting, usually because they were a) incredibly negative, b) incredibly risky, or c) written during a week with a serious anxiety flare up and being ‘out in public’ with ideas wasn’t palatable to me. I’ve logged all 52 titles here, from the evocative to the mundane, to give you a glimpse as a blog that might-have-been once upon a time. Reading them aloud makes for an oddly evocative prose poem, especially once you get to the last two entries. Untitled Short Fiction Friday: The Seventeen

Works in Progress

The Gulf Between Conception and Execution

Back in my teenage years, as a young comic book fan, I copied a quote from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and stuck it on my wall. I wasn’t a kid given to this kind of behaviour, but this fragment where Gaiman’s protagonist, Dream, describes the creation of the first Corinthian spoke to me even then: Imagine that you woke in the night and rose, and seemed to see before you another person, whom you slowly perceived to be yourself. Someone had entered in the night and placed a mirror in your sleeping place, made from black metal. You had been frightened only of your reflection. But then the reflection slowly raised one hand, while your own hand stayed still… A dark mirror… That was always the intention… But the gulf between conception and execution is wide and many things can happen along the way. Sandman #57, Neil Gaiman My admiration for this passage came in two parts. The first, unsurprisingly, lay

Works in Progress

Project Notes: Death of a Nom De Plume Cover

One of the weirder side-effects of going all-in on doing print projects with Brain Jar Press was the increased number of folks who hired me to do layout and cover design in other places. It turns out small chapbooks make for very effective business cards. I kinda put some long and hard thought into accepting these gigs. Design is very much not-my-specialty — everything I know about pulling covers and layouts together is largely the product of short courses and teaching myself things as I go — and I have a good deal of imposter syndrome about saying yes and ruining someone else’s project. At the same time, these freelance gigs typically push me to learn how to do stuff I normally wouldn’t, and I’m generally happier doing projects that push me to learn new things (and, despite having imposter syndrome, I do actually enjoy the creative challenge of cover design). Weirdly, the project I finally said yes to ended

Works in Progress

Picking Places to Exist: Writing, Publishing, & Social Media

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Scratchpad: Building Brain Jar Press

Over the past few months Brain Jar Press has released a series of chapbooks and short story collections at a pretty decent clip. Both Kathleen Jennings Travelogues: Vignettes from Trains in Motion and Angela Slatter’s Red New Day and Other MicroFictions have sold in surprising numbers (and, in Kathleen’s case, really surprising numbers). We’ve brought Angela’s Winter Children and Other Chilling Tales out in paperback and ebook for the first time, and I released the second issue of the Kaleidoscope’s Children series, Unauthorized Live Recording. Meanwhile, things chug along behind the scenes. I’m gearing up to announce a big project that will run through 2021, incorporating work from a half-dozen different writers. There are individual releases all the way through the year, including a nice mix of reprint projects and original works. Which means this week is all about contracts, doing a short course on micro-business management, and figuring out the current thorny problem du jour: where do I want

Works in Progress

Process Journal: Immutable Laws of the Brain Jar

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Scratchpad: Building Brain Jar Press

Over the past few weeks I’ve been following the Observation Journal template laid out by Kathleen Jennings, pushing myself to pay attention to creative patterns and sites of attention. Structurally speaking, given my focus on Publishing rather than Writing at the moment, my right-hand pages tend to be a lot less on creative exercises and a lot more on wrapping my head around what I’m doing with Brain Jar Press. This week, I tried the Immutable Laws exercise from Mike Michalowics’z The Pumpkin Plan, which aims to break down the three core, non-negotiable beliefs at the heart of what you do as a business. Essentially, the codes you live by, and the strictures you don’t go against because it’s pulling you away from the reasons you do what you do (it is, in essence, a very you don’t want to be published kind of exercise, applied to businesses instead of writing). They’re also the three things that other people should

Works in Progress

Research Links 20200413

This entry is part [part not set] of 1 in the series Research Journal

Years ago, when I first discovered Tumblr, I’d intended to use it as a public dumping ground for research links and images I might want to use later. Resurrecting the idea here, since virtually nobody comes to blogs anymore, but the folks that do probably share my obsession with seeing how ideas manifest some five to ten years after a writer first discovers them. NEW BLUETOOTH SPEAKER WITH A WAR ROBOT AESTHETIC Gravstar unleash a new bluetooth speaker design which looks like a battle-scarred war robot from an episode of Doctor Who you haven’t got around to watching yet. Watch the accompanying video for a full sense of their commitment to the motif, and ponder what these choies say about human ideas of authenticity and aesthetics. SPORTS STADIUMS ARE REPLACING CROWDS WITH ROBOT MANNEQUINS DRESSED AS FANS As sports stadiums prepare for the resumption of play amid lockdowns, some of them are replacing the crowd experience with robotic stand-ins. Some

Works in Progress

Keith Murphy: The Original Pitch from 2010

Tomorrow the second Keith Murphy book, Frost, goes live over on Amazon. As always, I recommend pre-ordering a copy to have it delivered fresh. To celebrate the moment, I went and dug out my first pitch for a Keith Murphy serial that I sent through to the Edge of Propinquity ‘zine back in 2010, laying out the twelve stories I intended to write if they accepted. The final stories ended up very different to this pitch, especially the proposed version of Frost versus the final product. That said, there’s elements that have stayed consistent: ghostly magicians, demonic crime lords, and cults are at the heart of Exile. Frost is all about what happens when Valkyries show up, and the old bloke mentioned in Skull Monkey becomes a major part of Crusade (albeit without a skull monkey) Even the basic concept of Piledriver filtered through, as part of the novelette in These Strange & Magic Things. SERIES PITCH: FLOTSAM The Gold

Works in Progress

Milestone

Word count on my exegesis draft ticked past the minimum viable word count last night, although I’m still a few thousand words away from having a final draft. Which puts me behind the self-imposed deadline I set up back in April, but well ahead of my last attempt at writing one of these where I stalled out five thousand words in and ultimately dropped out of the RHD program rather than continue. There was a point where it felt like that was a perfectly logical choice this time, as well. My imposter syndrome is strong with theoretical writing, and the fear that I will expose myself for an idiot triggers my social anxiety something horrible. Fortunately, my beloved was there to suggest it might be time to check in with my GP and have a chat about how my mental health is going, and my GP promptly set me up with a plan to pull things back from the brink.

Works in Progress

Word Count Versus Progress in Thesis Land

I’ve been wearing my thesis hat a good deal through October, because there’s an official deadline to get an exegesis draft finished by November 30. It’s gotta be somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 words. My impulse is to aim for the middle, assuming some stuff is going in ’cause I missed it while I will pull out other things ’cause they don’t need to be there. Meanwhile my supervisor stresses that I’ve met university requirements so long as the exegesis clocks in at 20,001, and pointedly suggests that that minimum viable length will be just fine given that I’m submitting next year. My draft currently sits around 18,616 words, so I’m doing okay on the productivity front, but it’s also a stark reminder that there’s a big difference between word count and progress. It looks like I’m almost done on the surface, but the stuff that’s actually “rough draft” only makes up 11,519 words of it. The rest is all