Category: Writing Advice – Craft & Process

I broke my writing streak last week. After 171 consecutive days of writing – including a five days where I held onto to streak by the skin of my teeth while on Holidays at the Adelaide Fringe Festival – it was eventually killed off on the final day of holidays by Cyclone Marcia, writing a two-day workshop, and the uncertainty of knowing whether or not we’d be able to fly home. Of course, February was a pretty rough month for writing even before I lost my thread. February always is. I’m going to finish the month well short of the 50k I need to reach my 600k goal for the year, but I’ve planned for that, and March will be a month of catching up and getting stuff finished. So what did 171 days of writing get me? More than I thought. Since I started tracking the writing streak, I’ve achieved the following: Finished Crusade (aka Flotsam #3), a novella of

I’ve always had a lot of time for Hackers – it’s one of the few #TrashyTuesdayMovies I was actually looking forward to seeing. It may be an uneven movie, but it’s one of the first major films that came out and tackled the developing paranoia about the internet that swept through the 90s, taking the fear of out of the realm of science fiction and planting it in the present day. On the list of vaguely disappointing cyberpunk movies that came out of the era , it actually nails the feel of William Gibson’s novels and short-stories far better than the genre works. It’s also hard to think of a more iconic nineties movie than Hackers. It’s one of those terrible movies that defines a generation – if you were in your late teens or early twenties in 1995, when the film came out, then there’s pretty good odds you remember this film as the thing that killed of Johnny

It started with an IM from Jenn Brozek at Apocalypse Ink: Have you ever through about adapting the Flotsam series you did for The Edge of Propinquity into novella form? It’s one of those questions you answer carefully when it comes from an editor, particularly one you’ve worked with before who has launched their own small publishing company. Sure, I said, I’ve thought about it. Why do you ask? Jenn explained her reasons for asking. We went back and forth about the details. Somewhere along the line, I signed a contract. On this level, the why behind EXILE is easy: Jenn was interested in working with me, and she offered an advance. When you’re a writer, working freelance, that’s a combo you don’t turn down. But there’s more to EXILE than opportunity and income; there always is, when you set out to write something, even if you convince yourself otherwise. So for the rest of the post I figured I’d