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And by this time tomorrow I’ll be happily ensconced in our Melbourne digs, surrounded by a bunch of my writerly peeps. This promises to be awesome – hail to the peeps.

My publisher’s twitter stream also informs me that they’ll be bringing the last of their Horn stocks to Worldcon. I have no idea how many books this may be, but should they run out of stock at the con it means the second print run has completely sold through. This is pretty good news, unless you happen to be at worldcon, in which case I may find myself clutching people by the lapels and asking “do *you* own a copy of Horn yet? Do ya? You should totally buy one!” in a slightly manic voice.

I shall try to retrain myself, really I shall, but I make no promises. I was barely able to contain myself when the goal was “convince lots of people to buy copies of Bleed, for it is new and shiny and avialble for the first time at Worldcon”. While I’m usually pretty good at restraining my default level of writerly craziness in public, something may well come loose in my head when I finally see both books sitting next to each other in the dealer’s room.

See you in Melbourne, should you be coming along.

And last night there was Write-club with the inimitable Angela Slatter and Ben Francisco, whereupon many words were written and we ate our body-weight in sugar. I was also mocked (albeit politely and deservedly) for my insane approach to rewriting, for I have real trouble letting go of a scene when I know that *something is dire and wrong*.

Victory was mine, however, for after five weeks of hammering my head against the brick wall I finally found the problem with the opening chapters of Black Candy. It’s involved much deleting and rewriting, but I suspect that this will be the final rewrite I do before launching into the (much easier to write) middle of the book.

In other news, I suspect updates will be scarce for the next two weeks (’cause, like, Worldcon, yo!). See everyone on the other side and all.

And rejection 16 for the year arrived in my inbox this morning, which means there’s an outside chance that I may hit 20 rejections before the end of August.  I like those numbers, . They mean things are starting to pick a bit on the writing front, especially since eleven of this year’s rejections have arrived in the last three months.

And, honestly, I was going to do a longer post on rejection and laziness and how nice it is to have the regular stream of people saying “no, not for us,” amid the occasional “yes, we like, we’ll take it”, but I’ve already wasted my hour of blogging time thinking of the right way to say it. Suffice to say that I love my rejections – they make me want to get back on the computer and belt out a new story – and now I have to go and write a bunch of words on the novel *without deleting old words as I go*. This has been a challenge of late.
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Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 8
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30
Rejections in 2010: 16/100
Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August)

- There’s a bit of this going on this morning, for I’ve had my second short story acceptance for the year. Details to  come once I’ve signed contracts and such, but it looks like this one might see publication sooner rather than later.

- If you’re not following the Drive-By Interviewsover at Angela Slatter’s blog, well, you really should.

- Ditto The Coode Street Podcastfeaturing Jonothan Stahan and Gary K. Wolfe. There’s something immeasurably pleasurable about getting to hear two very knowledgeable people talk about the history of SF, publishing, reviewing, and (perhaps most importantly) the BOOKS YOU DON’T NEED TO READ in order to understand out field. After listening to one of their earlier episodes, I feel myself utterly absolved of having to finish the rather dire Princess of Mars.

- And, hell, lets throw out the rather fine fortnightly podcast from the Galactic Suburbia crew, for I’m a fan of that too.

- Also, if you’re interested in scoring a free copy of the rather fine zombie novella, After the World: Gravesend, you might try the zombie haiku contest that author Jason Fischer is running at the moment. Entries close this Thursday.

- Right, okay, so I’ve got the pimp hat firmly on at the moment. What can I say – the internet is full of peeps doing interesting things of late.

And so I have hit the point where I need to tackle that debacle that is my writing desk, which has been looking like this since I got back from my cat-sitting adventure:

The irony of this is that I rarely spend much time writing at said desk, even when it is cleared off. I can chug along quite happily for weeks, writing in bed and on the couch and at the computer set up on the computer desk. Cleaning off the desk is a mindset thing more than anything else – having the dedicated space where I can retreat where’s there’s no internet or television or, well, sleeping to be done is a large part of doing more than the bare minimum of writing.
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Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 4
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30
Rejections in 2010: 15/100
Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August)

So I followed my week of almost dying of cat allergies with a week of being mildly inconvenienced by a cold, which would have been fine were it not one of those strains of the common cold that makes your eyes blurry and sore every time you looked at a computer screen. Not being able to look at a computer screen is a fairly dire state of affairs in my world, especially when electronic proofs start appearing (one can type with one’s eyes closed, after all, but one cannot correct what one cannot read).

On the plus side, I was apparently shortlisted for some Ditmar awards while I was away, which is kind of cool. Plus there’s a seemingly endless parade of friends on the short-list as well, which is always a good thing.
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Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 2
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30
Rejections in 2010: 14/100
Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August)

Yesterday I sat down with the Spokesbear, a bunch of e-mail, my copy of Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife, and a notepad to construct my to-do list for the rest of the year. It’s a habit I fell into a few years back (well, sans the Booklife part, but I suspect I’ll be rereading it often in July’s to come); those who’ve been following the blog for a while might remember the 80-Point-Plant for Awesomeness that resulted from last year’s state-of-the-union style gutcheck. Usually I’m pretty quiet about the results, but after reviewing my issues with last years list I’m going to go public with the writing portion of the process this year. It’s somewhat long. Sorry about that. If you want to skip it, I promise there will be more cat-sitting stories tomorrow.

Some thoughts on the list before we kick off:
     – There’s a large amount of background work that goes into the decision of  what to do with the next six months, much of which focuses on what I want from writing and particularly mistakes or poorly executed goals I put together over the last year. The original version of this post saw a rather extensive catalogue of the thinking, but I cut it back in the interests of not making this any longer than it needs to be. If you’re really interested in getting up-close and personal with the darker goal-setting patches of my psyche, I can do so in comments or a future blog-post.
     – One of the things I’m putting more effort into over the next six months is running some form of publically accountable metric to keep me on-track. Most of the time it’s going to be limited to an footer at the base of regular blog posts, but once a month I’ll post the full to-do list with updates and things crossed off the list.
     – The assumptive wordcount-per-day needed to achieve the following is about 4,000 words. This was picked because it’s achievable, but just outside what I usually manage when I’m focused on writing. Part of the goal over the next six months is to rebuild the routine I’ve let slide of late.
     – The two most identifiable problems I’ve suffered from over the last twelve months have been succumbing fear of failure and a tendency to focus on “what comes next” rather than working towards specific goals that feed into the wants and desires that keep me writing.

The To-Do List for the Remainder of 2010
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Part One: Novel Projects

1) Finish Black Candy
A hardboiled detective novel set in a futuristic Brisbane where the spirits of the dead form a hazy cloud in the sky, the military government utilizes vast ghost-generators to produce electricity, and the hero partakes of the latest party drug that rewrites the user’s gender and DNA. I’m currently trying to reconcile the ending I’ve written with the world-building that precedes it, and I’m pretty sure one of them needs to be massively changed in order to make things work.

Cool Stuff: Corpses floating in med-tanks; scary men named Rabbit; coffee; really big generators; its the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine; more noir; more hardboiled; a main character who actually likes his job.

Current Status: 12,020 words into the current draft (effectively going to be a 1st draft given the scattered I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing approach of the previous draft).

Goal for August 31st : Finish the first draft (90,000 words). That’s 2000 words a day, on average, plus a whole lot of plot-fixin’ that needs to be done. In theory that’s eminently doable, especially with large chunks of wordcount being reworked from the previous draft.

2) Finish Claw/Fey Fatale (Miriam Aster Novella 3)
The original version of this was written when I thought of the Aster series as a “monster of the week” detective concept rather than something with a definite arc and end point (hence the discarding of said draft back in August of ’09). There’s a lot of that version that can be salvaged – I don’t see the core concept changing – but I’ll need to do a lot of reworking and add in a B-plot arc to give it series continuity.

Cool Stuff: twisting the knife in the perpetual agony that is Aster’s love life; talking cats; a sorcerer working out the back of a Chinese take-away; the return of Anya; monsters made of kitten foetus and love.

Current Status: Re-reading the previous draft to figure out what can be salvaged.
Goal for August 31st: Put some thought into the new plotline.
Deadline: TBA after talking with Alisa at TPP

3) Draft Ghoul Moon (aka the Swashbuckley-Wahoo!-Lovecraftian-Ghoul novel)
In Brief: Swashbuckling fantasy set in an eldritch city hidden beyond space and time, where a mortal hero is teamed up with a half-immortal ghoul sorcerer to determine who is killing off the immortal nobility. I signed up for the QWC’s Year of the Novel course with Trent Jamieson back in January under the assumption that Bleed was almost done (ha!) and Black Candy would be easy to revise (double ha!). There have been dribs and drabs of work getting done around other projects, primarily in response to writing exercises in classes, but it’s starting to hit the point where it’s a hindrance not to have it more substantially developed.

Cool Stuff: faction warfare; fencing; The Duke of Viscera and the Viscount of Entrails; people swinging on chandeliers while wearing fancy hats; things fluttering behind the curtain of darkness just outside the city walls; an entire city that stands apart from the rest of the universe by devouring moons one after the other.

Current Status: neglected and causing guilt. I hereby give myself permission to neglect this book without guilt until Black Candy and Claw are done, after which it can occupy my full attention.
Deadline: End of Year

The other long projects that, baring other circumstances, I’d really like to get done in the next three years:

- Fracture/The Glorious Death of Doc Mosaic (pulp hero serial killer police procedural; possibly in space; Status: Moderately detailed plan put together on the flight to and from Adelaide last year)

- Hello Kitty Gasmask Girl (sequel to Black Candy; Status: 2000 words of intro and a rough list of ideas and cool things to insert)

- Slow Fall (Bored Oscar Wilde-esque character engages in escapades on a decadent generation ship slowly falling into a black hole. Status: Poked occasionally while I’m waiting for the concept to settle into place)

- Red Rain (Zombie Noir detective novel. Status: Waiting for me to get the noir out of my system so I can be sure I really want to write it)

- The Shoe Store Suicides (Mosaic narrative about shoe stores, the people who commit suicides in front of them, and the employee who objects to their choices; Status: Big list of ideas, no writing as yet)

- Crow Boy War (Downside Novel I abandoned in 2008 due to not knowing what I was doing. Status: About 40,000 words of draft, some of which may be salvageable)

- Gothic: A Love Story (YA urban fantasy novel with Gothic overtones; Status: 7500 words plus planning)

- Miriam Aster Novellas 4-6 (second series of books follow-ups to Horn/Bleed/Claw should we want to keep producing them; Status: Rough plan pitched to TPP)

- The Last Great House of Isla Tortuga (Expanding the short story which appeared in Dreaming Again; Status: In need of research regarding Piracy and life at sea in the time period)

- Masked Wrestlers of Mars (A Barsoom-esque tribute to Mexican Wrestling Films; Status: Opening image, plus a rough plan developing)
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Part Two: Short Fiction Submissions

Submission Status: There are currently 7 submissions out there, although one has been out for over a year and is old enough that it should be trunked anyway so we’re going to call it six instead. Of those 6 stories there’s only one that’s old enough to have seen most of the markets I regularly submit too. This is a slightly better situation than I thought I was in – it appears I have been getting my butt into gear after all those blog posts where I was freaking out about not doing enough short fiction – but it needs to be better. My personal comfort zone in terms of the number of finished stories out and submitted lies between 15 and 20 active submissions, which means there needs to be fifteen to twenty stories given my reluctance to simultaneously submit (even to markets who are open to such things).

I have a fairly large folder full of stories in various states of completion, so I’ve gone through and nominated fifteeen of them as “2010″ projects that will need to be finished by the end of the year. They’ve largely been picked because they focus on things I want to get better at (third person POV, writing particular genres), or because they’ll get me used to revisiting worlds I plan to revisit in novel form one day, or because they’re sufficiently different to the types of stories I’ve been writing in terms of themes or voice that they’ll help refresh my palate of writing tools. All title are working titles and subject to being replaced. Stories marked with an asterisk can be swapped out of the list for another idea as long as the reasoning isn’t “whim” or “I’d like to write that story more.”

The Short Story To-Do List

The Moloch Alley Stories
After I put together the Clockwork Goat and the Smokestack Magi for the Shimmer Clockwork Jungle Book I ended up brainstorming a bunch of things I wanted to do with the voice and world of the story.

     – The Gallows Magus and the Queen of the Winter Seas (Empire hires a magical assassin to kill the mermaid he fell in love with as youth. Hilarity ensues. Status: Partially drafted before hitting plot problems)
     – The Sabres of Moloch Alley* (Mostly this is just a title and a rough idea about the protagonists; Status: Unwritten)
     – The Legions of the Red Sand (An attempt at secondary-world fantasy using the Australian outback as the basis of the setting, with French Foreign Legion influences. Status: Unwritten, but plenty of pre-planning and the voice is more-or-less settled upon)

Downside Stories
I’ve been meaning to write more stories set in the world of Clockwork, Patchwork and Raven for two years now, but I’ve always set them aside because they never synced up with the impulse that made the first story fun to write (basically: what happens when you put a fairytale hero in a cyberpunkish setting). They’re starting to hit now-or-never status in terms of whether they’ll get done, so they’re on the list.

     – Never Fall in Love With a Dead Girl (Started writing this a while back as the Soldier Boy & Dead Girl Molly. It’s still looking for a plot; Status: Partially drafted)
     – Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Crow Boy (Follow-up to Clockwork, Patchwork, Ravens written from Rose’s POV; Status: Opening drafted)
     – Number One Crush* (Heist story using one of the Downside gangs as the victims. Status: Untouched and in need of a title that doesn’t reference a Garbage song)

Ghoul Moon Stories
These occupy the bottom of the list because they’ve had the least thought put into them. The goal is twofold: explore the setting I’m planning on using for the Ghoul Moon novel above, and figure out how to write sword-and-sorcery.

     – The Street of a Thousand Spices*
     – The Six Deaths that plagued Festival of Carrion*
     – The Duel You Cannot Win*

Stories utterly unconnected to novel projects

     – The Unicorns of Suffragette 3 (There are unicorns on a space station. The Goblin King objects to this. Status: About a thousand words and growing)
     – The Exodus (A small outback town in quarantined after a glowing pillar of light starts calling people into it. Status: Partially drafted, but needs a point beyond the initial concept)
     – The Birthday Party (Luck as a trade good. Status: Partially drafted)
     - Untitled Egypian Mummy Story (A guy finds out the girl he’s dating was possessed by the spirit of an Egyptian mummy fifteen years ago. Status: About 1200 words in)
     – Trainspotting* (A bunch of people are called upon to haunt the ghost of the last train after the lines are shut down. Status: Partially drafted, but in danger of becoming a rehash of old themes. Also needs a better title)
     - Pickets, Memories, and Tethers (Ghost story that’s been kicking around my files since Clarion. Status: Mostly done)

Current Partial Story Drafts Sitting in the Future Projects sub-folder: 73 and change (I’m not counting the files that consist of fifty first line exercises or titles in search of a story)

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Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 1
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30
Rejections in 2010: 12/100
Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August)

Act One: Yesterday’s Short Story Idea

Peter sits at Fritz the Laptop, planning his writing time for the day.

WIP: Oooo, I haz a title.
Peter: Go away, I’m meant to be working on my novel right now.
WIP: “The Unicorns of Suffragette Three”
Peter: …
Peter: No. I will not be lured. Aroynt.
WIP: (sing-song and tempting) I have an op-en-ing par-a-graaaaaph.
Peter: You do not.
WIP: Yes, actually, I do. Look it’s this. (Whispers in ear)
Peter: …
WIP: See?
Peter: I hate you.
WIP: You really don’t.
Peter: …
Peter: Fine. Lets talk.
WIP: Good.
Peter: So…
WIP: I wish to be long.
Peter: How long? I mean, crap, I don’t have time to write something long right now. You can have five thousand words, I think. I’d really like it if you’d fit into five thousand words. Six at the outside.
WIP: I want more.
Peter: How much more?
WIP: I want…ten thousand.
Peter: Eight.
WIP: Twelve.
Peter: You don’t grasp how this negotiation thing works, do you?
WIP: “Unicorns, unicorns, tra-la-la”
Peter: …
Peter: Right. Ten thousand. But if you suck, I’ll make you pay. Oh yes, I’ll make you pay.

Act Two: Black Candy

Peter is drinking coffee. The project he’s meant to be working on barges into the room, causing Fritz the Laptop  to shriek in terror.

BC: Dude, come on.
Peter: Sorry.
BC: You said you’d finish me.
Peter: I’m trying, but you’re problematic.
BC: You knew that when you agreed to this.
Peter: You’re a skeleton with the wrong bits of meat attached.
BC: Slacker.
Peter: I hate you.
BC: Yeah? Well I hate you too.
Peter: …
Peter: I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.  
BC: I’m not asking for much. Just two thousand words a day. Most of those are already written, remember?
Peter: Dude, I hate to say it, but your seventy-thousand words of first act.
BC: Ouch. Cold dude, very cold.

Interlude, with cat

The Cat: Feed me!
Peter feeds the cat
The Cat: Feed me!
Peter feeds the cat
The Cat: Feed Me!
Peter feeds the cat.
Peter: Somehow this “just give him more food if he wants it” theory hasn’t worked the way I was lead to believe.
The Cat: Says you. Our current paradigm is the awesomes.
Peter: Please go away. I need to work.
The Cat: I savage your toe!
Peter: You would bug me less if I’d seen some sign of the chickens today.

Act Three: My Poor, Neglected YoN Novel

YON: I have ghouls! And Guns! And Swords against Death!
Peter: I know, dude. I’m sorry. I want to work on you.
YON: Swashbuclkey action! Evil Cardinals!
Peter: Yes, I know. I’m sorry. Not yet.
YON: Cannibalism!
Peter: Well, technically not cannibalism. Ghouls eat human dead. They’re not the same species.
YON: …
YON: (sulk)
YON: I hate you.
Peter: Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around.
YON: Do I at least get to keep the Festival of Carrion?
Peter: Sir, I insist on it.

Act Four: My Masked Wrestlers from Mars Idea

MWFM: Hey, I’ve got an idea for an opening chapter.
Peter: Not now.
MWFM: And I think I should totally riff off of Beowulf.
Peter: Everyone riffs of Beowulf.
MWFW: But I do it with martians and moonsaults off the top rope.
Peter: Touche.
MWFW: So can we get something cooking?
Peter: We can take notes.
MWFW: I’m cool with that, dude.
Peter: God bless you sir, at least someone is.

Act Five: The Blog

Blog: You promised you were going to post something of meaning today.
Peter: Yeah, well, you get what you get.

The Blog sulks. Peter goes back to work.

This phrase has been running through my head for two days now, often borrowing David Bowie’s voice and intonation from a bit in Labyrinth where he says something very similar. It just sits there, repeated over and over, refusing to go away. This doesn’t become dangerous until I start listening to Suffragette City and pondering what happens when I mash Unicorns and the Goblin King Jared and space stations named after David Bowie songs together. It may be congealing into a story.

I thought I was done with unicorns. Alas, I am not that lucky. People are going to start thinking that me and unicorns have a thing (I swear to god we’re just good friends).

Wait, ‘scuse me a sec, I have to go chase a chicken out of the kitchen.

Peter disappears to chase a chicken away from the cat food. Chicken leaves kitchen with cries of Attica! Attica! The chickens really do get a raw deal, what with The Cat hunting them for food and my continued scrambling of their unfertilized embryos as a source of sustenance.

Right, where was I? Oh, yes, unicorns and David Bowie.

 If you need me, I’ll be over in the corner with Fritz the laptop, fighting off The Cat as we try to figure out a way to make this work.

The tenth rejection of the year came in this morning. After doing some quick research and resending the story, I went in to update my submission tracker (hint number one for writers: always update your submission tracker. Yes, right now). Then I spent about an hour making this face at the computer:

Afterwards I went and sang Creep at the top of my lungs in the shower. It helped, although I suspect the neighbours now regard my off-key crooning of the line “I wish I was special” over and over as evidence that I may, in fact, be exactly that*.

Now, to be explicitly clear, the frowny-face of doom wasn’t actually directed at my rejection (me, I love my rejections; it means I’m doing my job ). No, the frown was directed at the visual evidence that I’ve been letting things slide on the writing front for over a year, and it really was time to start picking up my game if I wanted to do little things like a) pay my phone bill, b) eat, and c) take over the world.

You see, I’d known for a while that I was somewhat slack in 2009. If you’ve followed this blog for a while, then odds are you’ll remember be bitching about it rather consistently. But the time-frames writing operates under means you can be slack for an entire year and it’ll still take six months or more for the effects to register, and there’s one thing apparent now that was easy to miss back then: 2010 is likely to be the first downward trend in every metric** I use to track how well my writing is going since 2006. In fact, given that it’s already July and I’ve only sold one story and a novella, it’s likely to be dropping to 20% of last years output.

I suspect I can improve on that a little if I gear up and go crazy for the next five months – and lord knows there’s plans to try – but right now I find myself wishing for a time machine so I can go back and slap myself silly. Much as I’d like to buy into the excuses I offered myself last year, the sheer dissatisfaction I feel right now suggests I need to eliminate them from my vocabulary. After all, 2008 was a much busier and suckier year than ’09, and even then I managed to do more and do it better.

*Considering I spent yesterday trying to answer the question “exactly how many songs to Green Day have about masturbation”, I think it’s safe to say they’ll be happy when my house-sitting stint is done.

** For those who are interested, these are in approximate order of importance: Number of submissions; number of new stories; Advancement on long-term Projects  (Novel drafts, etc); New Things Attempted; Number of sales; number of pro-level sales; amount of money earned from short fiction; interesting offers and invitations to submit; and number of words written over the course of the year.