But I digress: we were speaking of the Cure. Albums on vinyl, which I prized as talismans to hold up against the banality of the city I lived in. Other Cure albums I owned on tape:  Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me; Pornography; Disintegration.  These weren’t a talisman against anything really, just a part of my music collection, for I came to CDs late in life and still bought cassettes long after my friends had given up on them.

Like so much music I used to enjoy, I stopped listening to them once I acquired a car with a CD player and ceased owning a record player.

I didn’t think I’d miss them, to be honest. It wasn’t like I didn’t own Cure CDs at all. I told myself  I could make do with best of collections that captured the singles for a time, and reacquire the albums later – but somehow fifteen years slipped past and I still owned a handful of best-of collections that made up the bulk of my Cure listening. And, as a result, the Cure slipped out of the list of bands I listened to a lot, because good as any collection of singles may be, it’s still not the same experience as listening to a full album. A good album is a complete experience and you do great violence to it when you simply select the best songs and put them in consecutive order.

Then, last week, I was in a CD store (they still exist – who knew?) and I discovered you could buy boxed sets of five cure albums and I figured, well, why not. I paid thirty bucks and walked home with a box containing Three Imaginary Boys, Seventeen Seconds, Faith, Pornography, and The Top. It’s taken me a week to finally get around to listening to them, since I knew I wanted to do each the entire way through, in order, rather than pecking at the album piecemeal or putting them on random.

I’d forgotten The Cure did a cover of Foxy Lady, way back in 1979. I’d forgotten how much I used to love All Cats are Grey. I’d forgotten Fire in Cairo altogether, which is horribly unfortunate given that’s its a pretty awesome song, and I’d forgotten the way Three Imaginary Boys moves from the off-kilter rhythm of Fire in Cairo to the distorted guitar of It’s Not You in a way that changes the way I engage with both songs.

It feels good to have those songs back in my collection. And yet, at the same time, I’m sitting here with the knowledge that music stores are on their way out, that the CD is a dying format and it will eventually be replaced entirely by electronic downloads. And with it will go the idea of formatting an album as a complete experience, because really, what’s the point when people can cherry pick the songs they want?

I’m going to miss the music store and its ability to stumble over something that I’m not really looking for. I’m going to miss liner notes and cover art too, internal booklets full of lyrics that will eventually decode the mysteries of a singer’s distorted voice, the mystery of trying to figure out who the people being thanked might be.

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I’m drinking beer and it makes my teeth hurt. This would be a problem except for two things: I have extraordinarily bad teeth these days, having spent seven years not going to the dentist for financial reasons, and it’s extraordinarily tasty beer blended from five malts and containing all sorts of chocolaty, coffee-like flavours. I can put up with a little tooth pain in exchange for that, especially since it’s fleeting and I can confidently drink with the knowledge that it’s not a cavity of some kind (I hit the dentists regularly now – its a perk of paid employment).

I’m also trying to pick a story to read at the dayjob tomorrow, when we retreat for planning and bonding type activities. It feels slightly odd to be taking writing to work to read to co-workers, like the dayjob and the evening job are in the process of bleeding into one another, but I guess that’s kind of inevitable when you work for a writer’s centre and the vast majority of your coworkers are also writers.

On the plus side, the lunch conversations are infinately more interesting than my last job, where people would discuss football and lawn bowls. Not that I have anything against either activity, but it’s not like I have any interest in them either.

And so I’m kind of futzing around, not really picking anything, ’cause readings are a little weird at the best of times and some of the obvious choices are a little weird for me to read aloud since they have a female protagonist speaking in the first person. Which means I’m reading a short story, or part of one, and I’m not entirely sure which is the best choice.

It’s a good way to cap off a very good week.

It’s an out-of-order way of going about it, but one of the best bits was the release of this years Locus Recommended Reading List which included Dying Young in the novelette category and Memories of Chalice among the recommended short stories. I’m particularly happy about the latter, to be honest, since I spent years circling around that particular story before it finally came together and got accepted by Electric Velocipede. The list also includes a bunch of talented Australian writers (Jason Nahrung’s blog post seems to be the best round-up of Australians on the list) and a bunch of people I know (congratulations, particularly, to Thoraiya Dyer and Tansy Raynor Roberts and probably some others that I’m missing in my sleep-addled state).

Of course, my favourite thing about any recommended reading list is seeing what isn’t included rather than what is. I always tend to go through them mentally filling in gaps, or reaching out for things that I think should be on there, but are mysteriously excluded for obscure reasons like being published two years ago, instead of last year, which really goes to show how slowly I read things these days. At the moment my personal recommended reading list from last year would consist of three things: Go read Six Months, Three Days at Tor.com, which was my favourite story of last year; track down a copy of Will Mackintosh’s Soft Apocalypses; and then beg/borrow/steal yourself a copy of Two Worlds and In Between, ’cause there are still far too few people reading Caitlin Kiernan and that makes me sad.

This list would probably change on the morrow. It’d definitely have changed by this time in 2013, simply because I’ll have caught up on more of my 2011 reading by then.

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I also meant to blog a little more extensively about the return of Write Club with the inimitable Angela Slatter. For the last couple of months Write Club has been a casualty of the holiday season. moving, and changing day-job schedules, resulting in a long gap since our last stint. We’ve also relocated to the State Library on account of the fact that Angela Slatter and I live on different ends of the city these days and neither of our domiciles are particularly suited to prolonged writing stints in the middle of the day during the Brisbane summer.

Let me just say this clearly as I can: dear god, I’m glad write club is back. The wordcount is handy, sure, but the real advantage of Write Club is the way it helps format my week and keep me on track.

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I’m going to note that I’ve paused in the writing of the above at least four times: once to stare blankly at the screen for ten minutes, once to go get lunch, and once when Astro Zombies and Skulls were played back-to-back on the MP3 playlist and I was forced to stop and appreciate them, and once to watch an entire season of 30 Rock in rapid succession. I am easily distracted yesterday today.

And now I’m off to shower and go see a Luc Besson film at GoMa. It shall be a mighty kind of day.

Fortunately, there isn’t, so I’ll continue on as a vaguely normal person on the morrow, but you know how it goes. I’ve had a day catching up with a former version of myself, the one that used to gad about looking like this:

For the most part I don’t miss being twenty all that much, but every now and then it’s nice to remember that twenty-two-year-old Peter got a few things right, even among all the enormous cock-ups that I managed to achieve between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. And part of me still wonders when, exactly, I migrated away from the feather boa as a standard look and became a jeans and t-shirt kind of guy for whom a Hawaiian shirt counted as dressing up.

In some ways twenty-two year old me would be so happy about where I’ve ended up, but sartorially, he’d be so very disappointed.

In any case, I read a bunch of stuff and listened to a bunch of albums and ordered a bunch of CDs because the internet made it too damn hard to download mp3 versions of the albums I wanted, and now I’m here, trying to conquer my hesitation to blog, because these days my blogging impulses are all daily minutia or nothing. Every now and then, when the blog lies fallow, I get to thinking about the various ways I’d like to make it over and turn it into one of those valuable tools for writerly promotion that people bang on about, but if I’m honest that’s never going to happen. I can blog with a plan elsewhere, and probably will since work requires it this year, but around these parts the rule is simple: the things I want to share with the world are the things I want to share with the world, and I should probably stop feeling bad about that. 

I also plan on abusing the fuck out of italics, but what else is new?

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When I moved prior to Christmas, I moved three large boxes full to the brim with partially-full notebooks and A4 writing pads, and after getting them to my new abode I sat and looked at them and said “Peter, you do not need to buy any new notebooks at all next year. Just use the ones you have.”

It was a good plan, and one I stuck to for all of twenty-six days. Then I wandered into my local shopping centre and noticed that one of my favourite styles of notepad were being sold for less than half-price, so I immediately picked up a half-dozen in a range of colours.  Then, since I’d already broken my pledge to stay notebook free, I immediately went and bought a new notebook to take to work.

The problem, of course, is that I have too many things in my life that requires writing stuff down, and I like to keep said things in separate notebooks. Scribbled notes for stories end up in different notebooks to the stuff I write for games, and the games are further separated into different notebooks according to rules system and whether I’m running the game or playing in it. Heaven forbid a game actually end halfway through. My friend Colin started a D&D campaign a few years back that ended up falling by the wayside in an unofficial kind of way, and the half-full notebook containing my notes has been sitting on a shelf for the last three years just in case I should need it again. Even now, writing about it, I look over at the book full of warforge stats and treasure lists thinking I can probably throw it out, and yet…

And yet.

That’s always the problem with my kind of packrat mentality. I can throw out enormous numbers of things, and did prior to moving, but some things linger because every now and then I do end up going back to an old notebook and filling it completely. Or I’ll go through one and find half a story I’d largely forgotten writing, which actually serves as my favourite way of writing things since it means half the work’s already done by the time I get around to finishing something.

Twice a day, four days a week, in fact. It’s on the path between the train station and work, and avoiding it means traversing a somewhat less pleasant bridge that qualifies as the long way around, so its really a no-brainer to take the Kurilpa Bridge even before I made my startling discovery that the bridge had secret, magical, powers of plot development. In seven of the last eight mornings where I’ve walked across the bridge, I’ve reached the other end with a new scene in my head, typically one that will fix a story I’ve been working on for a while, or advance a novel I plan on writing in a way I’m not really expecting. It’s magical and kind of awesome and usually results in my tapping frantic notes into my phone at the far end so I can email them home when I actually have writing time.

On the eighth morning I crossed the bridge it was raining, and I learned a very different lesson: you do not walk across the Kulilpa Bridge while its raining. There’s no cover and the wind encourages the rain to hit the bridge in a rather horizontal fashion, and you’ll spend the enter walk wailing “The umbrella does nothing” in your best McBain impression. And afterwards you’ll spend the day at work in wet socks and wet pants, and your toes will shrivel into raisins.

It’s distracting to try and work while your toes are shrivelling into raisins.

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Every year I forget what January is really like.

Not the sweltering heat of the month when you’re in Brisbane – that I remember all to well, and I thank god that my new dwelling isn’t an asbestos sweat-box with an interior temperature averaging ten degrees higher than usual for the city. No, what I forget is the little things that come up and eat away at one’s time. January is the month of Birthdays in my neck of the woods, full to the brim of people I know and like getting older and wishing to celebrate the fact, and it’s rivalled only by October in my yearly calendar as the month where finding time is a struggle.

Except January is worse because I always think it’ll be an opportunity to *catch up* after the chaos of the Holidays, except it never is. February is the catch-up month, January is perpetually full.

Mostly what I’m doing at the moment is catching up on things. Specifically, catching up on email, which has been a little…untouched…during the process of packing and moving house. Ordinarily this isn’t a huge problem, but for some reason everyone emailed me asking for things at the same time and I was forced to send back a lot of replies that went along the lines of I’d love to, but can it wait a week until I get my living situation sorted and my internet reconnected. If I don’t sit down and clear the emails I owe people tonight then it’ll be another week until I get to them, and that’s no good to anybody.

Of course, this process would be much easier if I could track down the chords for my printer, since a lot of what I need to be doing is printing and scanning contracts. Unfortunately I’ve got no idea where it could be in the maze of unpacked boxes.

I suspect it’s hiding out with the missing keys to the filing cabinet.

In any case, my story Dying Young from Eclipse 4 has been selected to be part of Gardner Dozois’ Years Best Science Fiction athology due out next year, which means I can go scratch another thing off the big ol’ list of places I’d like to get published but rarely talk about. There’s a full ToC over on SF Signal, and it looks like a very cool book to be included in.

I should also mention that my story, The Girl in the Next Room is Crying Again, is online over at Daily Science Fiction so that those who don’t want to subscribe can go check it out.

And with that I’m going back to the words and the packing. One of the stories that absolutely must be done before I move is finally done, which means I’ve got about thousand words between me and finishing everything I’ve got due by the end of the year.

On the plus side, today’s email brought the news of a potential reprint sale that means I may be able to cross yet another goal off my not-so-secret-list-of-writing-goals-I-have-no-control-over-and-therefore-don’t-talk-about - news, as always, once contracts are signed and things are official – and I’ve been quietly filling out the forms that will officially mean I no longer live in my flat, and there copies of books I’d pre-ordered in the post and new books to be pre-ordered so they can arrive in the midst of next year and the dayjob contained one of those conversations you get to have, very occasionaly, with someone who really loves the short story as much as you do.

So I guess, overall, it washes out as a win.

Or, as the Spokesbear puts it, SNUFFLES FOR EVERYONE!

Anyway, it’s, er, eight o’clockish about now. I figure I’ve got another four hours of writing ahead of me before I collapse from mild exhaustion. Tim to go back to the story du jour and see what’s what.

Wish me luck.

I first met Angela Slatter about…well, six weeks or so before I met Laura Goodin…but after years of blogging about Write Club I’m assuming I don’t need to provide a great deal of context for Angela. She’s awesome, she writes remarkable things, and among the remarkable things she’s written is the latest editorial for the Weird Fiction Review. And if you were sitting around, wondering what to do with your holidays, you could do a lot worse than checking out said editorial, As the Weird Turns, and using it as a suggest reading list for the next month.

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There’s ten days until I move house. There’s still several rooms that need to be packed. I also have two deadlines between now and then. I suspect I’m going to keep mentioning this out loud, since it’ll remind me that I should probably go write the things I need to write in order to meet said deadlines.

It’ll also remind me to never again schedule deadlines and the relocation of everything I own in the same month. Especially when that month is December.

There is no cheer or good humour in me today. I’ve spent most of my time sporting this facial expression:

It’s remarkably tempting to just type Rock’s Fall, Everyone Dies, but somehow that doesn’t seem an adequate conclusion for Keith and co (Public Service Announcement: the link in the sentence prior to this leads you to TV Tropes. God knows I just lost 45 minutes tooling around following links. You Have Been Warned).

Because I’m packing and they’re around, I find myself working while wearing the dreaded paperbaghat. Basically, I’ve spent much of the evening looking like this:

And, as is traditional, I forgot to take the damn thing off when I answered the door to collect tonight’s pizza order. Such are the dangers of succumbing to the paperbaghat’s dread allure.

-FACEPALM-

Stupid paperbaghat.

The pizza guy, god bless him, didn’t say a word.

Had it been a different kind of evening I would have stopped and listened for a bit longer. I probably should have, but my mind kept drifting to other things, and I was hurrying home to pack and clean and get some writing done. And somewhere amid all that, it occurred to me that I should blog, and here we are, trying to figure out how to begin. And it occurred to me that, yes, the buskers were probably the right starting point, and here we are, writing a blog post.

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My story The Girl in the Next Room is Crying Again is scheduled to be mailed to Daily SF subscribers on the 2nd of December, so this is an opportune time to remind everyone that you can subscribe to Daily SF for free and they will mail stories directly to your in-box every weekday. Unfortunately I’m doing this too late for the bulk of you to get today’s story, The Bicycle Rebellion, but my friend Laura Goodin, but I’ll rectify this by posting a link when it comes up on the Daily SF website in a few weeks.

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My challenge for 2012 is this: figure out how to write while working a full-time job. 

A wiser man would have figured this out in 2011, what with it being a year where he had a regular deadline *every damn month*, but for various reasons I spent 2011 just drifting along with the current (or paddling manically when deadlines got too close). In a lot of ways, having regular deadlines is a refuge. You write. Things come out. You’re being *productive*, even if it’s only for a handful of days every month.

And yet, the thing that sticks in your gut is the knowledge that you could have done better. That you’re coasting because you can, these days, what with that shiny dayjob taking care of the rent and the food and the bills.

And because not-coasting means learning to do things differently, learning new skills, and that shit is hard.

Don’t get me wrong, I freakin’ love my dayjob at the moment, but I’ll be utterly bummed if it means I stop writing altogether. So 2012 is the year I buckle down and learn to do shit the hard way, ’cause the old ways of writing aren’t working no more. Which means learning how to plan, and figuring out how to be more disciplined, and learning to say no to people even though I totally have the cash to go out into the world and do things these days.