1. DENNIS FUCKIN’ LEHANE

One of my favourite book stores is Brisbane’s Pulp Fiction, a speciality-store focused exclusively on Fantasy, SF, and Mystery/Crime fiction. When I first started patronising the store I stuck to the fantasy/SF side of things, revelling in the ability to pick up fiction from small presses and mid-list authors I wouldn’t ordinarily be able to track down. All that changed about…jeez, I don’t know, but a while back…and these days I tend to pick up a few things from the crime side of things. I’m a fan of the hardboiled mystery, after all, and I’m developing a growing affection of the cosy murder mystery, and there a depths of awesome in those genres I’m still to find.

But last week I picked up a copy of Denis Lehane’s A Drink Before the War and…well, holy shit, I kinda dig this book. There are certain writers who have the ability to engender trust in a reader, simply be deploying an opening paragraph that makes you think, well, yeah, this writer gets it, and Lehane is one of those. There’s a control there, an ability to deploy language in a certain way, that I knew from the opening paragraph how much I’d enjoy what follows (and, lo, I enjoyed what followed exactly as much as I expected).

I went back on Friday and picked up the second book featuring the same characters. I inhaled the damn thing in one manic night of reading, staying up until the wee hours when I should have been getting some sleep prior to going to the dayjob.

2. LL FUCKIN’ HANNET

It’s always nice when friends who do good work are recognised for, well, being fuckin’ aces at the things that they do well. Case in point: this year’s Aurealis Awards were given out over the weekend and while I’d offer congratulations to all the winners, I was really happy to hear that the immensely talented LL Hannett had walked away with the gong for both Best Collection (for Bluegrass Symphony) and co-winner of Best Horror Story (for The Short Go: a Future in Eight Seconds).

Congratulations, also, to Thoraiya Dyer for picking up the Best Fantasy Story nod for Fruit of the Pipal Tree (yes, she totally deserves her own entry as Thoraiya fuckin’ Dyer, but I’m not yet sure we know each other well enough for such familiarity not to be seen as offensive).

3. RED FUCKIN’ DAWN

Last night’s Trashy Tuesday Movie. Watchable, enjoyable, and utterly terrible. #Wolverines

Next week I’m watching Doom. Actually, next week I’m watching the *extended directors cut* of Doom. Because someone, somewhere, though it was a film that needed to be longer and my flatmate is the kind of person who pays money for such things.

I’m already afraid.

4. AMANDA FUCKIN’ PALMER

‘Cause, really, if you’re going to make a list of people and things with the word fuckin’ inserted in the middle of their names, it’s a fairly natural fuckin’ progression.

Also because I wrote a post for QWC’s blog about her recent kickstarter, John Scalzi’s commentary on it, and what that means for writers. I wouldn’t ordinarily bounce people from this blog to that one, but one of the curses of working on three different blogs every week is that occasionally there’s a conversation on one that you really wish could involve readers from another. Also, the QWC blog is shiny and new, so I figure it can’t hurt to send anyone interested in that direction.

5. AND ONE FINAL NOTE, WITHOUT SWEARING, REGARDING CONTINUUM

If there’s anyone whose heading along to the Continuum Nat-Con in June that may be interested in half a hotel room, drop me a line. It turns out the room that I’ve got has two queen beds, and many of the usual suspects I’d split a room with either aren’t coming along or already live in Melbourne. I’m not opposed to having the room to myself and all, but if the opportunity is there to split costs…

I’ve offered some advice about Writing and Tracking Your Rights over on LL Hannetts blog as part of her Tuesday Therapy series.

I am, for someone who once made a career of dispensing writing advice in the tertiary sector, remarkably squeamish about the process. I either want to impart everything or nothing, since the wrong piece of advice delivered at the wrong time can be fatal to a developing creative process. I still suffer crippling moments of doubt induced by something I read in Samuel Delany’s About Writing four years ago. It’s not bad advice – it’s remarkably good – but I heard it at the wrong time and I can’t let it go and its incompatible enough to my practice to be a problem.

I’m also aware that the vast majority of my writing advice isn’t mine, since teaching writing means you accumulate advice like a bowerbird, lining your nest with the wisdom of better writers until they become part of your habitat. Any advice that I give is probably ripping off someone smarter than me, and it’d inevitably result in me spending hours revisiting folders full of print-outs until I figured out who.

Copyright, though. Rights are something I get passionate about.

I don’t mean this in a piracy kind of way – I have my issues with electronic piracy but they’re somewhat marginal compared to the bone-headed things writers will do when signing contracts. Hell, it’s nothing compared to some of the boneheaded things in contracts I’ve signed over the course of my writing career, and I tend to pay attention more than most.

I talk about it in more detail over on Lisa’s blog, but the basic gist of most writing advice should be this: be smart, do your homework, think long-term, and treat your writing like a business. It’s possible to do a lot in writing with very little technical training or awareness of how writing works, but the business part is one of those things that should be universal.

I’ve sold a few short stories over the course of my (relatively) short writing career; in that times I’ve asked for contracts to be changed a couple of times because there was something, usually e-rights related, that bothered me. Publishers have occasionally been surprised by that, but they’ve always been remarkably open to discussing the agreement I was about to sign and changing it to address my concerns.

It surprises me that more people don’t do that. Worse, it makes me a little sad.

It’s been a long while since I charted the progress of a creative project on the blog, and I’ll admit that I was a little gun-shy about talking this one up. For starters, the project is largely being done simply to prove to myself that it can be done, that I can actually put together sixty-thousand words of coherent narrative in first draft form over five weeks of writing. Once upon a time the only question would have been the coherent narrative part of the equation, but me and writing haven’t gotten along for the better part of the last eighteen months. Life kept offering me excuses and I kept taking them, and slowly it became necessary to embrace a project that proved all my assumptions wrong. I wanted to make myself write outside the comfort zone, both in terms of the word-count expected and the genres I’m working with and the time-frames I’m giving myself to get things done.

This is probably the most public project I’ll have worked on since writing the first draft of Bleed a while back, only the intended audience for the finished project is considerably smaller. When it’s finally done it’ll be a gift for three of my closest friends, and if it makes them happy it’ll have done its job. This means that there are people who know the concept and the background of the story and the characters, people with an investment in it being good (or, at least, readable). It also means that occasionally one of those friends will poke me and say, so, that thing you were writing, and I’d really like that to stop, which is why it’s the project of choice for the five-week project.

On the other hand working on this project has made me incredibly happy and I find myself wanting to talk about it. There were points last week where I danced, or bounced, or generally woke up happy, and I got a chance to remember what it was like to write something and keep writing it until it starts making sense and your enthusiasm for the work starts to carry you along. As I gradually worked out what fit where in the plot there were scenes and references and narrative beats that started to appear out of the murky ether, and they serve as particularly tempting candy-bars to keep me motivated.

And so I figured I’d throw out a couple of the things that I’m really enjoying about this draft, before I stick the word-counter on the end and get back to writing.

1. GENRE MASH UPS

I’m a big fan of cross-breeding genres, which I’m sure comes as a shock to pretty much everyone reading this. More importantly, I figure any long-form work you write is largely a chance to engage in a conversation with a genre, and things generally don’t feel right until I figure out who or what I’m having a conversation with.

I knew going into this project that there was going to be a pretty healthy slice of Steampunk involved, and in the log term its going to involve my ongoing attempts to try and unravel the appeal of the John Carter novels and their casually imperialist outlook on the world. Short term, though, particularly as it relates to the book I’m writing now, it’s all about playing with the format of the Agatha Christie murder mystery. The reference points scribbled out in my notebook are Murder on the Orient Express, except the express is a damaged sky-ship on its way to Mars, which means it gets to be a bit of a disaster story as well.

2. BIG CAST, BIG SCENES

I’m committing one of the cardinal sins of being a writer and a gamer with this project – I’m nabbing a bunch of characters who were once PCs in my friend Chris’s campaign and using them as the basis for the protagonist and her associates in the novel. The plot? That’s nabbed from a game too, although things are going to play out in a very different way from the introductory session Chris ran way back when we started. It’s entirely possible I’ll write something that’s essentially 60,000 words of dreck that’s uninteresting to anyone but me and my gamer buddied, but I’m kinda confident that I’ll be able to transform it into something narratively satisfying.

On the other hand the choice of genre means I get to play with a way larger cast than you’d expect given the word-count. One of the impressive things about Christie’s novels is her ability to introduce wide range of characters in a very general way, particularly when doing something like the dining-car scene in Orient Express. It’s one of those techniques that I’ve never really seen done in other books (the sole other author I’m familiar with whose tried it is Elizabeth Bear in her brilliant Christie-homage New Amsterdam). Figuring out how to do the introduction of 13+ characters in a single scene is the kind of narrative challenge I haven’t come across before, and I’m looking forward to the opportunity of developing them alongside the protagonist and her allies.

About a third of the words produced in this thing thus far are me putting together one-paragraph intros and trying to figure out how to weave them together, and it’s been interesting to watch the way it affects my perception of the protagonist.

3. PARLOR SCENE

Like the dining-car scene mentioned above, I realised there’s inevitably going to be a big parlor scene at the end of this story where the murderer is revealed. Not something I’ve ever done before, not by a long shot, but the thought of it is already filling my inner genre-wonk with glee.

4. BANTER

One of my favorite things about these characters is the banter. One of the other notes I’ve made regarding the project is “The Thin Man, Nick and Nora,” which is basically a reference to the Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled masterpiece where two married characters get to engage in entertaining banter and genuinely like another throughout the book. They are an utterly solid couple who respects one another and doesn’t need to have their relationship in jeopardy in order to create narrative tension, and it’s one of those neat combinations that I wish would appear in fiction more often instead of feeding our obsession with relationships that are in the process of starting or ending.

Happy Married People. You’d think they were the goddamn kryptonite of narrative.

Of course, I haven’t got two married characters in Untitled Victorian Planetary Romance, Pt 1, but that core of having two characters who like and respect one another and engage in banter? That’s there. As is the idea of writing a series where there’s a single female protagonist whose presented as the equal of her male peer, with an ongoing relationship throughout the series is based on mutual respect, enjoying one another’s company, but coupled with an utter lack of romantic interest or involvement in one another. It’s not something I’d ordinarily do, so I’m curious to see if I can.

5. DINOSAURS

Not in this book, admittedly, but I’m creating a kind of series bible should I enjoy this project enough to come back to it, and I already know how dinosaurs are going to fit into this universe.

‘Cause every Victorian-era protagonist needs to fight a dinosaur somewhere along the way.

Also, the process of putting together a series bible is kinda interesting. I wish I’d thought to do one for the Aster books.

6. SPLIT POV

My writing default is first person, and it’s actually remarkably rare for me to break out of that. I did it last year when I wrote the Flotsam series for Edge of Propinquity – indeed, having a regular deadline where I wrote in third person was one of the main reasons I did EoP – but what quickly became apparent was my inability to take advantage of the POV in that format. I didn’t have the time to really figure out how third person worked, and by the time I did it was nearly impossible to bring in a secondary POV character without it seeming…odd.

That isn’t going to be a problem with the current project. It’s starting with two POV characters, and I’m reserving the right to add more as the story goes on. The ability to swap between characters heads is proving to be way more fun than I thought it would be, and I’m starting to wish that the somewhat removed perspective Third Person requires came to me a little more naturally. It is, after all, remarkably useful.

7. WEIRD SCIENCE

One of the joys of having a Victorian-era mad professor available as a character in a world where space-flight to Mars and beyond is already possible? Every goddamn crazy thing I can think of is theoretically possible within the universe. Things already referenced: shrink rays; teleport arrays; time-travel; the Eiffle tower.

If I ever actually finish this and make it available for public consumption, then dollars to donuts it’s going to get lumped in with Steampunk simply due to the levels of mad-science. And you know what? I’m totally okay with that.

Official Weekly Goal Setting: 16,000 words by next Monday night. Totally doable, right?

I’m going to share a secret: I actually like the taste of instant coffee. There are days when I prefer it to the real thing, especially since ordering the real thing can be a hit-and-miss affair that results in me drinking a horrible concoction created from burnt coffee grounds, urine, and the spiteful hate of people who kick puppies. Instant coffee is never great, but at the same time, it’s never really a disappointment either. It embraces the law of averages and settles for a long, slow arc of mediocrity and met expectations.

This is not to say that I’m indiscriminate. There are some brands of instant than are better than others, and I’ll shy away from the worst offenders who seem to have taken the burnt-coffee-ground-urine-and-puppy-kicking-spite combination as their own particular flavour of choice.

So yeah, me and instant coffee, we’re tight. In fact, I’m enjoying a cup right now as I type this, and it’s pretty damn good.

2. HOW SENTENCES WORK

My non-fiction book of the week has been Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence and How To Read One. It’s kinda weird reading this sort of book in your thirties, long after formal education in the art of grammar is over with, and it makes me wonder exactly how I manage to avoid learning so much about the process of actually crafting a sentence for so long. I mean, sure, I kinda figured stuff out given that a large portion of what I do every day is putting one word after the other, but Fish has a tendency to articulate sentence structure in a far more elegant way.

There’s a part of me that seriously wishes I’d read the following before I spent seven years trying to explain the passive voice to university undergraduates:

It is important to understand that the relationships that form the sinew and relays of sentences are limited. There is the person or thing performing the action, there is the action being performed, and there is the recipient or object of the action. That’s the basic logical structure of many sentences: X does Y to Z. (Sentences can also come without objects, as in “Joe walks.”) “Simon bought the car.” “The government raised taxes.” “The corporation gives bonuses.” “Heat parches lawns.” The instances are infinite, although the form remains the same (this is a key point, and I shall return to it): doer, doing, done to.

Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence and How To Read One, p. 18

I mean, boom, just like that, an entirely elegant rule of thumb for constructing a sentence that’s far better than any explanation I’ve ever given.

Every time I read books like this, I realise exactly how much of a slacker I am as a writer – content to coast along, trusting on instinct, rather than learning how to use tools properly (then I remind myself I spent far more time on the larger-structure stuff, and on understanding the way genres work and get interpreted, and I don’t feel so bad about the fact that  they unleashed on my students and let me stumble my way through basic rules of grammar).

Incidentally, my latest run of non-fiction reading has been heavily influenced by this post over on Brain Pickings. I provide this link with two caveats: 1) I spent far less money on books before I added brain pickings to my RSS feed (which, given how much I spend on books, is really saying something), and 2) Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art is not a book on that list that I’d recommend. The articulation of Resistance is useful, I suppose, but there’s a real lack of meaningful advice for getting past it.

3. THE “OH, HELL NO” SCALE

I mentioned the Trashy Tuesday Movie thing I do over on twitter earlier this week, right? Well, I’m still trying to figure out a way of archiving the individual live-tweets of the movies we watch – of anyone can recommend a tool that’ll arrange #hashtags in order, please do so – but until that happens I figured I’d share a few thoughts on the movies we’ve watched thus far and where they fall on the “Oh, hell no” scale that I use for trashy movies.

Best of the bunch we’ve watched thus far: RED. It’s smart, it’s well-cast (Helen Mirren! SNIPER RIFLE!), and it’s about as non-trashy a movie as you can get while still being vaguely acceptable Trashy Movie Tuesday fodder. Plus I kinda like Bruce Willis as a protagonist, considering he’s been in some of the best trashy action movies (Die Hard), SF movies (Fifth Element), and Christmas movies (Die Hard again) of all time. Unfortunately it seems that entertaining, competently made movies that are actually good are pretty bad fodder for the live-tweeting process, so we’ll never be able to watch one again.

Guilty Pleasures: Hawk the Slayer and Red Sonja. In no sane universe can you call either of these movie’s good, but if you’re a fan of fantasy cinema and willing to appreciate their more absurd elements and scenery-chewing actors they’re both kind of brilliant.

Red Sonja has the barely articulate Brigitte Nielsen acting opposite a barely articulate Arnold Schwarzenegger, and they’re both blown off the screen by Ernie Reyes Jr in his most irritating kid-ninja role ever. It also includes a couple of narrative choices that come outta left field, like an evil world-destroying artifact that’s powered by light and destroyed after it’s plunged into darkness.

Hawk the Slayer…fuck, I don’t know how to describe it. It’s a terrible movie, from the bad dialogue to the western-inspired stare-downs before every fight scene to the fact that there are interminable scenes where characters do nothing by ride horses through the forest (which seems, near as I can tell, to be cinema short-hand for you’re watching a fantasy film). And yet, it’s kinda watchable, primarily because Jack Palance is chewing scenery like no-ones business as the primary bad guy and the writers have adopted one simple rule – if Jack’s on the screen, some motherfucker is going to die.

Bad Film with the Kernel of a Good Idea: Wing Commander. Also known as the finest submarine movie to ever be set in space. I adore this film for the way it cleverly disguises the debt it owes to Das Boot by casting Jürgen Prochnow and making him the second-in-charge, but it would have been far better if they’d cast Matthew Lillard in the lead instead of Freddie Prinz Jr. The real appeal of Wing Commander, though, lies in watching it as an SF writer – there’s this brilliant idea in the pilgrim sub-plot that should really have gotten more screen-time, rather than being put there in order to pull off an egregious deus ex machina, and there’s a part of me that really wants to grab the film and rewrite it to give that idea the story it should have had.

Oh, Fuck No, Never Again: Conan the Barbarian, the 2011 edition. Slow, barely coherent, and blatantly riding on the coattails of the first Conan film with Schwartzenegger. Thus far, this is the only film we’ve watched that I’d hesitate before revisiting.

And finally, just when we thought that would be the lowest rating ever, we discovered the rating of…

Seriously, Zack Snyder, I’m going to carve out your spleen for making this shit: Suckerpunch. It takes a special kind of talent to take a film about hot chicks with swords fighting zombie nazis and making it UTTERLY FUCKING DULL, and Zack Snyder must pay dearly for possessing it. Friends do not let friends watch this film, and my hostility towards it is only matched by my hostility towards Avatar – another film I should have liked given the genre and concept, but can’t because it reaches epic levels of cinematic and narrative incompetence. Snyder is now added to the short-list of people I think should be kept away from film for the good of the genre, alongside Michael Bay.

Next Tuesday we’re watching the epically bad/awesome/jingoistic Red Dawn. If you’d care to join us, hit Twitter around 7:30 PM Brisbane time and look for the hastag #Wolverines.

4. SHEROS

A project started by my friend Meg, explained over one her blog.

Have you noticed a greater-than-average serve of women-baiting and women-hating in the media of late? My Facebook and Twitter feeds are clogged with examples.

And in the face of it, there are so many amazing women demonstrating grace, strength and intellect.

So I’ve decided to start collecting and celebrating them. You’ll find a new page at mamaguilt now: Sheroes. Please let me know a woman who is rocking your world, and why. We want to see pictures, read links, and understand why this woman is inspiring you, so please use the contact form on the Sheroes page to let me know – I’ll share it, and acknowledge your contribution.

In some of her non-writer guises Meg is the Manager of the Australian Writer’s Marketplace and the convenor of the Brisbane chapter of Sisters in Crime and a fabulously awesome person, so if you’ve got someone who deserves to be recognised I encourage you to send something her way.

5. THE FIFTH ENTRY IS A LIE

In truth, much of this entry is. Not in terms of the content – that’s all true – but from this point out the idea of me actually being behind the keyboard and dashing blog entries out is entirely illusory. For once in my life, I’ve actually managed to plan ahead. I’ve put together a schedule and focused on getting shit done. In short, I wrote this on Monday afternoon after pounding out a couple of other blog entries.

Such are the perils of getting organised and thinking about things.

Assuming this doesn’t all fall apart at the first hurdle, this should become the norm. Part of me recoils against the idea of writing these things in advance, but the reality of having a dayjob is that there are days when I have the spare time to write blog posts and there are days when I do not. If the alternative to pre-writing posts is not writing anything all, I’m going with pre-writing, especially since I then get to use the surplus brainpower on writing fiction.

I’m trying not to let it bug me. I pretend its like baking a cake prior to people arriving, or throwing some iced vovo’s into your weekly shopping just in case you have someone around. It’s something you do so you can focus your attention on the people who show up, rather than fretting about having something to eat when they arrive.

And one of the reasons I’m embracing the random-thoughts approach is so I can build the bulk of a post early, and add something mid-week if I feel it should be mentioned.

6. PROJECT DU JOUR: “Untitled Victorian Planetary Romance, Pt 1″ 

I’m going to say it: this project scares the bejesus out of me. It’s everything that I usually try to avoid: a third-person narrative; a research-intensive setting; multiple POV; and written with an expressed audience of three in mind. It’s also, hopefully, the first of a bunch of projects I’m going to do with the character and the setting, although it’s going to take me a couple of months to figure out how to make that work.

My goal for the coming week is to get the first act drafted. That’s approximately 16,000 words of fiction that needs to be written of the coming seven days – doable, even with my day-job schedule, but it’s enough that I’ll have to push myself. And while I’m not going to post daily, I figured I’d post a word-meter every week so the folks I’m writing this for can see exactly how much progress I’m making:

 That was meant to start at zero, but I may have gotten a little…over-enthusiastic…and started writing it early. On the plus side, it’s let me spot a couple of weaknesses in my process – the first thousands are fairly easy to get down, the second thousand require a little effort; Tuesday’s and Thursdays are the days that I’m most resistant to writing something, largely cause I have stuff on; planning has it’s place, but it *is not wordcount* and I’m going to remain unsatisfied by days when I plan but do not write.

Peter:

Spokesbear: No.

Peter:  But I —

Spokesbear: No.

Peter: Listen—

Spokesbear: No, we’re not doing this.

Peter: Not doing what?

Spokesbear: This thing we’re you’re all excited to be blogging and working again, so you show up writing a post about social media and blogging in which you ramble on about nothing.

Peter: I wasn’t going to ramble about nothing.

Spokesbear: Sure you were. “So I’ve been thinking about…” is your own private code for “I have something to say that I don’t want to say and so I’m going to circle the point for two thousand words.” I’m INSIDE YOUR HEAD man, I know these things.

Peter:  (small voice) But I’ve already written the blog posts.

Spokesbear: No-one cares.

Peter: They might.

Spokesbear: Alright, they might. I don’t fucking care though, how’s that?

Peter: YOUR NOT THE BOSS OF ME, BEAR

Spokesbear: …

Peter: Right, sorry. You’re totally the boss of me.

Spokesbear: Damn straight.

Peter: You’re sure I can’t talk about Social Media and Platform building.

Spokesbear: Very.

Peter: Even if—

Spokesbear: Especially if.

Peter: …

Spokesbear: Oh, stop that. You’re not a teddy bear. You can’t give e a pleading look and rely on being cute.

Peter: …

Spokesbear: Seriously, come on.

Peter: …

Spokesbear: This is going to be a thing now, right?

Peter: Maybe.

Spokesbear: Okay, a short post. But no fucking rambling, okay? You want to do this, we’re going to kick it old-school, I wand a goddamn thesis statement before you’re allowed anywhere near the computer.

Peter: (speaking fast) The adoption of some kind of performative public persona is an inevitable result of having an online presence devoted to building platform.

Spokesbear: See, now that’s just obvious. Why in hell would anyone care?

Peter: Because I’ve been mainlining a metric buttload of books and advice about blogging and social media lately because it’s becoming a big part of my dayjob, and I’m struck by how much of it is simultaneously built around the core advice of owning your niche and being utterly authentic online.  I can’t help but thinking that these two things are mutually exclusive – human beings are crazily complex and any attempt to own a niche must, of necessity, require the adoption of a persona that gives the illusion of being genuine.

Spokesbear: So all online bloggers are frauds?

Peter: Not quite what I meant. I have no problem with the adoption of persona – we do it every day. I exclude parts of myself at a dayjob that are inappropriate for the situation. That doesn’t mean I’m being fraudulent, although it can – I felt quite the fraud at my old dayjob, where there was a serious case of WTF am I doing here, as opposed to my current dayjob where I’m…

Spokesbear: More or less yourself?

Peter: Yeah.

Spokesbear: And that doesn’t disprove the argument you were just making?

Peter: No, of course not.

Spokesbear: Care to explain how?

Peter: SHUT UP, IS WHY.

Spokesbear: …

Peter: I’m going to pay for that, aren’t I?

Spokesbear: You’re going to pay for this entire conversation eventually.

Peter: Look, mostly this has been bugging me because I’ve been thinking about this blog and how I use it.

Spokesbear: You’re always thinking about this blog. What else is new.

Peter: Nothing, really. I just keep reading all this advice and thinking, but I don’t really want a niche. And it’s not because niches are bad…look, can I actually post a part of my original post? I promise it doesn’t whine or anything?”

Spokesbear: Fine.

Most of the advice I’ve found regarding blogs revolves around finding a niche and working it. In this respect it’s been interesting reading for work purposes, and there are plenty of writers  who absolutely blitz this in terms of building personal platforms on the internet. Chuck Wendig’s blog is a brilliant example – his advice on writing is so consistently entertaining and useful that I’ve pretty much bought all his ebooks the day they came out.

My friend Angela Slatter does a similar thing, albeit in a different fashion, with Drive-By Interviews and the new Lair of the Evil Drs Brain series (and the other half of the Drs Brain, LL Hannet, is no slouch on the blogging thing either). The niche she’s embraced may not be as deeply carved as Wendig’s, but its there and it allows her the space to talk about other things when she wants too. Ditto Tansy Raynor Roberts, whose author blog is a thing of fannish beauty that’s led me to more cool TV shows, movies, and fiction than any other I’ve read.

If you want to see the entire process in its most natural, community-building glory, start reading Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.

I get the theory behind the way the internet and social media works, I really do, and I can look at these sites and identify why they work and what I like about them. Indeed, I envy them in some way, but I’m pretty sure that replicating their approach, even in my own inimitable and “authentic” fashion would drive me slightly bonkers.

Peter: That’s only a handful of examples, but they’re people who generally rock it when it comes to the blogging thing. And there are persona’s there – not false personas, the way there would be if I were working in my old office, but what you’re getting feels like a natural distillation of the person behind the blog that’s suited to the social context they’re creating. There’s varying degrees of formality involved, and slightly different topics, but they all seem to have carved their own territory in either a conscious or sub-conscious way. My approach to blogging seems was always “show up and chat around the water cooler.”

Spokesbear: Do people actually do that?

Peter: Do what?

Spokesbear: Chat around the water cooler. I mean, you have a day job – do you actually talk around the water cooler? Do you even have a water cooler? I’ve only ever seen it happen in sit-coms.

Peter: Dude, I’m trying to make a point here.

Spokesbear: Sure you are.

Peter: Seriously. I’m trying to say that I actually sat down and thought about this stuff, blogging and personas and…well, me…and I figured out why it bothers me in relation to this blog/

Spokesbear: Twitter is way better for the water cooler thing these days?

Peter: Sure, that, but there’s something else - when faced with blogging advice like find your passion and own your niche, I don’t think my reasons for blogging have really changed. I don’t particularly want a niche, which strikes as a somewhat tedious, and my passions…well, my passions are eclectic, and it strikes me as ingenious to pretend otherwise here. I have enormous respect for people who are passionate enough to maintain a blog on a particular topic, or smart enough to let a theme develop naturally, but it’s not for me. Even in those instances where I’ve thought up niches I’d be comfortable residing, the knowledge is lurking in the back of my mind that eventually I’d lose interest. Embracing a niche feels like reducing myself down. And I sure as hell don’t want to set myself up as an expert in anything.

Spokesbear: You took that from your original blog post, didn’t you?

Peter: Shut up, I’m reaching my point.

Spokesbear: Okay. Fine. If it’ll get this over with, I’ll bite. What niche did you finally decide you wanted?”

Peter: Sharehouse lounge room.

Spokesbear: That’s a niche?

Peter: No, it’s more a mindset. What I really want from this blog, essentially, is the equivalent of a share-house lounge room. A place where I can show up and drink a cup of coffee and hang out with whoever happens to be around. Occasionally I want to share things I find cool, and have cool things shared in return. Some days I want to have serious talks about the way writing and reading works, some days I just want to make fun of bad movies or work out what I really think about something that’s bugging me or blather about how great Sonic Youth or Raymond Chandler were in their heyday. Occasionally, when I’m bored, I want to try and peel a banana with my feet, just to see if I can. This doesn’t mean that the various advice I was reading is wrong – it just means I need to figure out ways to distill it that gets me what I want.

Spokesbear: …

Peter: What?

Spokesbear: Nothing, it’s just…I want a cup of coffee now. And I want to see if you can peel a banana with your toes.

Peter: See, that’s what I’m saying. Eclecticism. I don’t want a niche; I want ALL The NICHES

Spokesbear: In you’re head you sound like Chris Tucker in Fifth Element when you say that, right?

Peter: No.

Spokesbear: …

Peter: Yes.

Spokesbear: (Sighs) I notice you’re still not making coffee.

Peter: You want a cup?

Spokesbear: Black, two sugars. We can try the banana thing when you get back.

You must be prepared to work always without applause. When you are excited about something is when the first draft is done. But no one can see it until you have gone over it again and again until you have communicated the emotion, the sights, and the sounds to the reader, and by the time you have completed this the words, sometimes, will not make sense to you you read them, so many times have you re-read them. By the time the book comes out you will have started something else and it is all behind you and you do not want to hear about it. But you do, you read it in covers and you see all the places that now you can do nothing about. All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure, and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola, and Link Steffens. You are just as well off without these reviews. Finally, in some other place, at some other time, when you can’t work and feel like hell you will pick up the book and look in it and start to read and go on and in a little while say to your wife, “why this stuff is bloody marvelous.”

And she will say, “Darling, I always told you it was.” Or maybe she doesn’t hear you and says, “what did you say?” and you do not repeat the remark.

But if the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written and in reading over you can see this is so you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin which you have built or paid for with your work.

By-Line, Ernest Hemmingway, p. 185

I finished reading the book that curated Hemmingway’s advice on writing last night. It was interesting enough that I’m tempted to go back to primary sources, since so many of them are actually referenced, and maybe take another crack at Hemmingway in long form (which I generally didn’t like, when I was younger). In the short-term I’m going to break out my copy of Hemmingway’s short fiction, which is another matter entirely – it took me years to figure out how to read it, but once you do stories like Hills Like White Elephants become something intriguing and brilliant.

The book of advice, though? There are enough bright sparks within the covers that I could probably spend the next week posting excerpts like the above – points where Hemmingway is both cruel and sane and capable of creating something quite beautiful with words – but it’s probably easier to just point you towards the book if you’re interested.

And so, in that spirit, a random grab-bag of twelve things I felt like mentioning.

1. MOVING IS, LIKE, 90% DONE

So my flatmate bought a new home and we moved into it. Most of the last two weeks has been spent getting stuff there, unpacking it, figuring out where it will live for the foreseeable future, and generally waiting for the internet to be turned on.

You know, moving stuff.

There’s a part of me that wants to just kick back and say “yup, we’re done now,” ’cause we’ve basically moved enough that it feels like we’ve moved in and can live a functional life. The truth is there are still all those odds and ends that need to be fixed up, and the room containing my computer/files/desks is littered with boxes of files that should probably be put into the filing cabinet, just as the bedroom closet looks more like a place to store half-full boxes of clothing rather than a bedroom closet.

Although, to be fair, you should see the closet. For a single bloke who owns three pairs of jeans, three jackets, and a seemingly endless supply of t-shirts, it’s one of those spaces that feels slightly epic and impossible to fill.

2. ERNEST HEMMINGWAY

I’ve never really been big on Hemmingway as a writer. I’ve known people who adored him, but I always leant towards F. Scott. Fitzgerrald as my writer of choice for that particular era of American letters. I mean, seriously, The Great Gatsby. It has its issues as a book, just as Fitzgerald has his issues as a person, but there is something about the sheer amount that book packs into approximately 50,000 words that makes me look at 100k novels and think, really? This is our standard length? Did we miss the levels of awesome that could be achieved at half that?

But we were talking about Hemmingway, who I seem to have started reading in earnest for the first time since I was…shit, eighteen? Nineteen? A really long time. It’s the net result of watching Midnight in Paris, in which Hemmingway shows up as a character, and I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for the reflection of Hemmingway that’s thrown up as a social construct. He’s just such an unremitting bastard, capable of throwing out these moments of sparse beauty, yet so…self-loathing? Or a kind of loathing far more external than that?

In any case, I picked up a small book of writing advice that’s been curated from Hemmingway’s letters and articles, and it’s full of these moments that are both beautiful and angry. My favourite, thus far, is this:

“F. Scott Fitzgerald’s talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and he could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.” (From A Moveable Feast)

There’s a part of me that thinks, well, yes, that. There is another part of me that thinks, really, Hemmingway? Just ’cause you say it pretty, it doesn’t mean you aren’t a dick.

3. CONTRIBUTORS COPIES

These showed up my PO Box earlier this week

It’s shiny, in both the metaphorical sense and the literal sense, and the print edition is due out in Mid-June, which means this is one of those rare occasions where I’ve received contributor copies before the book goes on sale.

4. SPEAKEASY

So as part of my dayjob I curate a bunch of writing and publishing links every Friday for the Speakeasy blog. I have to admit, it’s one of my favourite parts of the dayjob, since it means the vast majority of the stuff that I’m reading on the internet anyway now becomes part of my working day. And since I figure there are probably a couple of writer-types reading this who may be interested, I figured I’d point the way in case you’re inclined to check it out.

5. PLANNING

One of the random things I’m doing this week? Putting together a new writing plan.

Someone asked me the question “how many stories do you submit a year” at work on Friday. It freaked me out a little, ’cause once upon a time there would have been a pretty steady answer to that, and now there is not. I’ve been living without a writing plan for months now (and, effectively, since life went kaboom back in November of 2010). I have grown weary of the uncertainty, and I figure I’m staying in place for the next twelve months, so I’m going to spend a few hours this evening putting together a plan that’ll allow me to…well, get stuff done.

The problem with writing plans is…well, me. I over-estimate my own abilities a lot, particularly after I’ve let writing lie fallow for a stretch, and it often results in plans where I’m trying to do all the things all the time. This barely worked when I was a marginally employed writer-type with a wealth of free time. It’ll surely fall apart now that I’m regularly employed and trying to fit writing around the edges of things.

6. I CANNOT GO NEAR MY POST OFFICE BOX

I maintain a PO Box that I use for three things: receiving subscriptions, ordering things online, and an address I can put on contracts that doesn’t change every six-to-eighteen months.

A few weeks ago, in the lead-up to the move, I realised that Shifty Silas, my new laptop, was capable of running a bunch of computer games people had recommended to me. I’m usually pretty careful about playing computer games, since I have an addictive kind of personality when it comes to narrative. If I start watching a DVD boxed set of a TV series, for example, I’ll down it in one sleep-deprived sitting rather than space it out. I want, in essence, all the story, all the time.

Also, basically, I like to win things. I mean, I really like to win things. To the extent that, if there are no victory conditions, I’ll invent them simply so I can win.

It’s…well, it’s not a pleasant side of my personality.

These two things, when combined, generally make computer games the equivalent of narrative crack and I’m usually careful to avoid them. But friends raved about Mass Effect and Mass Effect II, and my flatmate had some copies floating around, and it wasn’t like I was doing anything other packing, so I fired Shifty Silas up and played them both. In fact, I played the hell out of them. In, like, rapid succession.  even started replaying the game, this time with an external mouse, ’cause the first time around I wasn’t able to use sniper rifles.

They were exactly the kind of interactive narrative-crack I fear when it comes to computer games.

And because the designers of Mass Effect are evil, you can’t really play those two games and get the end of a story, so I’ve ordered a copy of Mass Effect III. It’s been posted and now it’s sitting in my PO Box, waiting for me to come pick it up.

And when that finally happens, when I pick it up and start playing it, well, I’m going to be good for very little else that week. And I have the self-control of a lemming that’s just been shown a cliff.

Which means I can’t pick up my mail at the moment. And I’m going to avoid it for as long as I possibly can.

7. RABBIT HOLE

If you’re a writer-type, you probably want to come do this.

Basically, the Rabbit Hole is a three-day event where a bunch of writers come together and collectively thumb their noses at, say, NaNoWriMo. Instead of being all 50,000 thousands words in a month, the word-warrior heading down the rabbit hole is chasing 30,000 words in three days. It’s run at the QWC a couple of times, but this year the event is going national as part of the Emerging Writers Festival, with teams gathering in Melbourne (where it’s hosted by Jason Nahrung), Tasmania (hosted by Rachel Edwards), Brisbane (hosted by, well, me), and online (hosted by Patrick O’Duffy).

It takes place between the 1st and the 3rd of June, and it promises to be a weekend of words and smack-talk between the four teams. I may even bring the Spokesbear as a mascot.

You can register for Team Brisbane over the QWC website.

8. SEASON THREE OF 30 ROCK

I don’t really review things, ’cause I kinda suck at it. Me and non-fiction, it’s not a thing that works well (and I’ve been reminded of this, quite explicitly, because I’ve been writing a non-fiction article for work and it’s like pulling teeth, dammit).

But I did watch the third season of 30 Rock recently. And, at one point, I may have laughed so hard that I developed tunnel vision and passed out for a few seconds.

Just saying.

9. TRASHY TUESDAY MOVIE

So about a month ago I tried to watch the 2011 Conan the Barbarian film with my flatmate. It…wasn’t good. I say this as a person who has a really, really high tolerance for bad movies, especially any kind of fantasy epic. The only way I got through it was jumping on twitter and making fun of the movie as we went, so other people shared my pain.

Halfway through the topic of Hawk the Slayer and whether or not it was worse than Conan 2011 came up.

I’d never seen it before, so my flatmate and I arranged to watch it the following Tuesday. And, since I’d tweeted the first film, I figured…well, why not? I tweeted throughout the second film, and about halfway through people started suggesting films we should watch and make fun of in the future.

And thus the tradition of the Trashy Tuesday Twitter Movie got started. It was an accident, I swear, but somewhere along the line we developed a schedule. If you’re interested in joining in, we generally kick off at 7:30 PM, Brisbane Time, on a Tuesday evening. Next week’s film is RED (Helen Mirren with a Sniper Rifle!), and on the 15th we’re watching Red Dawn. Debate about the hashtag usually starts earlier on a Tuesday, and the results can be found on my twitter feed @petermball

And yes, this is basically what I do when I’m avoiding posting here. I’m sorry blog, but Twitter is my new love.

10. I’M NOT SURE I LIKE HAVING A SMART PHONE

Actually, that’s not true. I acquired my first smart-phone at the beginning of the year, and it’s instantly become one of my favourite things ever. It’s the promise that SF always offered me – a miniature computer that I can carry around in my pocket and access nearly everywhere. It lets me carry around my email and a collection of books to read and all that stuff.

What I dislike is the way it’s changed my relationship to the internet.

Over the past four months I’ve watched my engagement with things become increasingly passive, largely because I spend the vast majority of my non-dayjob internet surfing on the phone rather than the computer.

I receive my email on the phone, but I dislike the keyboard I’m forced to use there so I don’t respond until I’m sitting at a computer. I can read blogs and my RSS feed, but I don’t comment or come here to write things unless I’m sitting at a keyboard. I can check facebook and twitter, but…well, actually, facebook and twitter are the places where the phone really shines, so it’s not like either of those have suffered.

Basically, I put a lot of things off until I’m sitting at a keyboard, and that never seems to happen ’cause I can check things on my phone.

I’m trying to figure out how to combat this problem, since it really doesn’t sit right with me. Half the reason I love the internet is that it allows me to engage with things, and I’m not really a huge fan of any medium where passivity is the primary mode of engagement.

11. THE AVENGERS

Last week, in the midst of moving, I took an evening off and went to see The Avengers with a bunch of my co-workers. I freakin’ feared this movie so hard, since I’m a) a huge comic nerd,  b) not a fan of anything Joss Whedon has done that involves armies of villains, c) generally irate about films and not inclined to like them, and d) a huge fan of the Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Hero TV series which delivered everything I want in an Avengers comic in cartoon form instead.

In short, I wanted this to be teh awesomes and figured it wouldn’t quite get there. I certainly didn’t think it’d live up to the cartoon.

What I got was teh awesomes. I may have made high-pitches squealing noises of joy in the theatre.

If I had to deliver a review, I can do it in three words: FUCK YEAH, AVENGERS!

12. NINJAS!

They’re everywhere. You just haven’t noticed them yet.

It’s an evening made doubly-cool by the fact that I didn’t move boxes of books over to the new place, which is something we’ve been doing an awful lot of this week. It’s one of those inevitable facts of moving – I have a lot of books, the flatmate has a lot of books, and it generally makes much easier if you don’t try and move them all at once.

Fortunately I’m almost done with books. Tomorrow, I figure, will be the last of them. On Saturday we rent a truck and move bookcases, and desks, and other things. Sometime next week we’ll get the internet installed and start living like normal people once more.

So yesterday we made a small announcement at my dayjob. It went a little something like this:

Source: GenreCon News Blog

Taking photographs of my shoe.

How’s your day been?