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1) Whip It

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a blog post-reviewy thing about Whip It for about two weeks now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just not going to happen. Not because I think it’s a bad film – it’s utterly charming in its ability to recognise that something can be simultaneously camp as hell and the most important thing in the whole damn world – but because it fits into the same space as contemporary art where I find my critical vocabulary isn’t really up to the task of expressing what I’m thinking about after seeing the film.

 My short, haphazard take on the film goes something like this: it’s endearing. Specifically, the kind of awkward-coming-of-age endearing you find in Taylor Swift film-clip, only Whip Itcome without the puritanical undercurrent that usually causes me to froth at the mouth when encountering Swift’s oeuvre (and thus, Whip It comes closer to having actual substance). The film actually reminds me, very strongly, of Bring It On (another film that didn’t seem like something I’d like that somehow turned out to be highly entertaining) and I kinda wish it existed in a world where Bring It On didn’t because there’s far to many parallels there. The sound-track is phenomenal in its eclecticism, but gets bonus points for including both the Ramones and Yens Leckman.  The most irritating thing about the film is Drew Barrymore’s characters, but only because it’s exactly the same character she played in the Charlie’s Angel’s films with a tendency to act stoned on top. Plus it has Ari Graynor in a minor role (Graynor seems to have become the new incarnation of the cinematic past-time once dubbed “Breckin-Meyer-Spotting”)

It’s also a goddamn spectacular film to watch from a writing point of view because there’s not a damn subplot in the whole thing that doesn’t get a resolution in the end. Admittedly this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but there’s something powerful about knowing that if a film introduces conflict it will provide resolution to it, even if said conflict is just a five-second scene between the protagonist and a minor character in the opening minutes of the story. While Whip It telegraphs a lot of punches on the macro-level (I doubt anyone can’t pick the father’s final scene in the film a full hour before it happens), it gets a pass on this because the resolution of the really minor conflicts are also dragged back into the main plot and made meaningful.  It’s a neat trick, and one I’m gleefully lifting given that I’m in the midst of writing the second draft of Black Candy and dealing with a dozen or so minor characters who walk onstage and do very little after their first appearance.

Seriously, though, you can probably ignore all that and go with this instead: my friend Chris and I are the kind of snarky, mid-to-late-thirties blokes who are continiously dissapointed by films and prone to venting our dissapointment in Waldorf-and-Statler type critiques. As a general rule, it’s a bad idea to go and see film you think you’ll like when either of us are around.

Both of us hit the end of Whip It and said “Yeah, I need to own a copy of this.”

 2) Minimally Acceptable Levels of Productivity

 So I set myself the goal or writing 14,000 words words last week. I didn’t succeed. In fact, I struck a point significantly below success:

On the plus side, it means I’ve hit the minimum accepted levels of productivity for seven straight days now (aka if Peter doesn’t write a thousand words a day he ceases to feel like a human being and makes life miserable for everyone) and actually started to live like a real human being again. There are even parts of my house that are clean, and food that isn’t ordered from the Domino’s website.

That largely means the weekly goal achieved what it needed to achieve, right in time for the rewrites of Cold Cases to land in my inbox.

My attempt to roll out the productivity and conquer The Fear hit a road-block yesterday – what seemed to be a minor computer problem (power jack coming loose from the laptop casing) has rolled out into a terrifying ordeal which will culminate in the absence of a computer in the house for 5-to-1o working days while the problem’s corrected. The computer goes in this morning, so…well, basically I’m quietly screwed after that. No word-processor, no e-mail, no basic tools of research. I can work with a pad and pen, but these are only good for the drafting rather than the actual finishing and submitting of work. This…complicates…that whole submit lots of things in February plan.

Meanwhile, in more positive parts of internetland, the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2009 has just been released. Horn got recommended in the novella section and my Strange Horizon’s story On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War-Machines of the Merfolk is mentioned in the Short Story listing.

My mind, it is blown by this turn of events.

(Congrats also to Lisa Hannetand Paul Haines and a bunch of Twelfth Planet Press projects and a bunch of other friends I’ve probably missed, but I’m skim-reading everything right now due to the dwindling battery power).

Data Point the First: There’s about seven days left of Twelfth Planet Press’s Silly Season Stocking Stuffer Sale, whereby Australians can pick up a copy of my novella Horn with free shipping (and everyone else in the world gets a massively discounted postage). Given Horn’s cover price of $10, that’s a pretty sweet deal.

Data Point the Second: As of about six minutes ago, there were only 9 copies of Horn left in Twelfth Planet’s inventory.

Data Point the Third: The free shipping on Horn is a total “while stocks last” kind of deal (and there are plenty of other awesome books included in the sale.

Now I’m not mentioning this to suggest you should go buy a copy of the book right away. Nope, not at all. This is the silly season after all, and folks are generally watching their budgets in order to ensure maximum goodwill and festive cheer for those they love.

I’m not even saying “get it now or forever lose the chance,” since it sounds like we’ll be doing a reprint at some point in the future.

I’m certainly not say that Horn does make a kinda neat Stocking Stuffer for those friends who might be inclined to like a story about unicorns written specifically for people who hate unicorns. ‘Cause some people just don’t dig unicorn squick, and I’m okay with that.

What I might be saying – just maybe - that it’d be pretty damn neat for yours truly if those last nine copies went to a good home between now and Christmas.

‘Cause there’s not many things you can say to those extended family members you see twice a year when they ask “how’s the writing going” that actually sounds impressive, particularly when you write more short stories than anything else. But maybe, I don’t know, just maybe, “the book sold out a few days ago” will do the trick

When I started chatting to the spokesbear about putting a list of 15 awesome things about 2009 together, the first stipulation Fudge came up with was “do not treat every individual publication as its own awesome thing, because that will be cheating.”

“What about Horn,” I said. “Surely it deserves a spot on its own?”

And at that the spokesbear pondered and said: “Well, yes, there’s Horn. That was pretty awesome. I suppose that’s okay as an entry on its own.”

Which is just as well, because the overall experience of seeing Horn released has easily been the most Awesome thing that happened this year. Seeing the finished book for the first time was awesome. Seeing it get its first few reviews was awsome, especially given its tendency to pop up in places like the Courier Mail, Locus and Jeff VanderMeer’s blog. Getting the news that “BTW, Horn’s made a profit” was awesome. Getting asked if there were more Miriam Aster stories and if I’d be interested in writing them…well, you get the picture.

Horn turned out to be a much bigger deal than I thought it’d be, and I’m still kinda awed by the fact that people are still buying it and e-mailing me about it (heck, there’s a part of me that a little surprised I haven’t been lynched for doing bad things to unicorns).

And to leave off, since it’s traditional: Copies of Horn are still available at Twelfth Planet Press (or from Smashwords if you’d prefer an electronic version)

If you haven’t dropped by the Twelfth Planet Press livejournal today, odds are you’ve missed this:

Book Announcement: Sequel to Horn, due out April 2010 Twelfth Planet Press is proud to announce the acquisition of the sequel to Horn from Peter M Ball. Under the working title of Cold Cases, Miriam Aster works to solve an old file but her painful past refuses to stay buried. Book 2 in the Aster Series will be launched at Swancon, in April 2010.

So it’s all official-like: the follow-up to Horn is on its way and sometime in the New Year I’m going to have to get cracking on Novella 3 in the series.

And lo, I have finished the long march from empty page to submitted manuscript and a copy of Cold Casesis now winging its way to the publishers via the miracle of the internets. And well-timed it is, all things considered, since it gives me a few free moments to take part in the QWC Blog Tour of Queensland and answer some quick questions from the fine folks at the Queensland Writer’s Centre

Where do your words come from?

I borrow most of them from the dictionary. For some reason this whole writing lark works better when other people recognise the words you’re using and understand what they mean. Of course, my dictionary’s kind of old, so it’s missing words like D’oh andjiggy. Those I borrow from television shows and trust readers keep up.

Where did you grow up and where do you live now?

My parents were teachers, so I spent my childhood moving. We basically went between northern Queensland and the Darling Downs before finally settling on the Gold Coast when I was thirteen and stayed put for a long stretch. These days I live in Brisbane, which suits me far better than the Gold Coast ever did. I suspect it’s got something to do with access bookstores.

What’s the first sentence/line of your latest work?

“The first time the Black Dog showed up I was five.”
 - From Black Dog: A Biography in the Interfictions 2 anthology.

What piece of writing do you wish you had written?

Oh, man, that’s a long list and it’d get a different answer depending on the day. Lets go with William Gibson’s Neuromancer or Dylan Thomas’ poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. The former blew my mind when I came across it at fourteen and I suspect there’s a little part of me that will always want to be William Gibson, while the latter expresses a sentiment that’s becoming more and more important to me as the years go by.

What are you currently working towards?

I just mailed off the manuscript for Cold Cases, the manuscript that should follow up my unicorn-noir novella Horn, so I’m looking forward to getting some short-stories written before I hear back from Twelfth Planet Press and get stuck into the edits and rewrites. After we’re done with Cold Cases I’ll be starting work on the third novella in the Miriam Aster series and revisiting a long-neglected novel draft.

Complete this sentence… The future of the book is…

Not something that really bothers me, to be honest. I try to remain aware of the conversation and experiments in the publishing industry and I’m excited about the prospect of finally being able to carry e-books around in things like an i-phone, but when you get right down to it I’m primarily interested in being able to make stuff up and share it with other people. If the books the best way to do that, I’ll go with the book. If the future says the best choice is an e-book, or even a different vehicle for story altogether like the computer game, then I figure I’ll do what I can to work with that. Stories existed before books, and so did professional storytellers. I’m not sure either will go out of style, even if the book as a paper artifact does.

This post is part of the Queensland Writers Centre blog tour, happening October to December 2009. To follow the tour, visit Queensland Writers Centre’s blog The Empty Page.

I sold a story to Weird Tales.

If you need me for the rest of the day, I’ll be over in the corner geeking out*.

*For bonus points, I discovered that I like the first half of the novella enough that I’m not actually embaressed to let people read it. It’s still flawed, yes, but not *OMGWTF am I doing, this ferking sucks” flawed. As usual, the problem seems to have been cramming in way to much backstory in one go.**

**Hell, this day keeps getting better. The Australian Government decided to ignore the shitty recomendation from the productivity commission that we remove Australian territorial copyright. I so thought Australian writers and publishers weren’t going to win that fight, for all that there were dozens of sensible reasons on our side and a handful of really daft ones on the pro-parrallel importation end.

Before I begin, let me direct you to this: Marshal Payne’s Super-Sekrit Clubhouse has a new interview with my Write Club peep Angela Slatter, which should give you a pretty good insight into why I usually use words like “awesome” and “inimitable” when discussing both her and her writing.

Angela remains one of those folks who fuses talent, hardworking dilligance and bucket-loads of smarts in her approach to writing (although she’ll refute the latter with Simpson’s referenes, giving half a chance). She speaks wisdom and her writing is good – so go read about her now, while she’s still an ‘emerging writer’, and then  you can join me in the nodding and looking smug when people start talking about how this awesome new ‘emerged’ writer in the years to come.

And if you don’t, well, I’ll mock you -with a very mocking mock - because that’s the kind of guy I am.

Okay, back to the entry. Or, to put it another way, a Cold Cases update

It appears that if you past your writing progress in the forms of Lord of the Rings references they become a lot more palatable in this newfangled world of social interactivity, so allow me to adapt from one of yesterday’s twitters/facebook updates and say this: I walk, I walk some more, there is a swampy bit, and I keep reminding myself that if I keep walking I should be hitting Mordor in the near future and tossing the deadly weight of the unending draft of doom into the volcano (and I’ll stop the metaphor there, of course, because the next step would be talking about tonight’s Write Club and I suspect any attempt to position Angela Slatter as the metaphorical Samwise Gamgee in the process would result in some form of bodily injury. Although it also reminds I should do a post about the psychology of write-club once I’m done with the novella).

In less fancy terms, the update goes something like this: rewriting continues, two more chapters got added, and I’m within striking distance of hitting the end. I don’t like the book at this point, but that’s kind of natural in the writing process. After all, I’ve just spent five days looking at it and focusing on the things that are wrong wrong wrong and nothing seems to be working. And the weight of it keeps dragging at my attention, reducing the world down to words and more words and more words, with the occasional break for food and sleep.

Every now and then I take a break and re-read a fragment of an old nanowrimo peptalk:

“The last novel I wrote (it was ANANSI BOYS, in case you were wondering) when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book and write something else instead, or perhaps I could abandon the book and take up a new life as a landscape gardener, bank-robber, short-order cook or marine biologist. And instead of sympathising or agreeing with me, or blasting me forward with a wave of enthusiasm—or even arguing with me—she simply said, suspiciously cheerfully, “Oh, you’re at that part of the book, are you?”

I was shocked. “You mean I’ve done this before?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Not really.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “You do this every time you write a novel. But so do all my other clients.”

I didn’t even get to feel unique in my despair.

So I put down the phone and drove down to the coffee house in which I was writing the book, filled my pen and carried on writing.

One word after another.”

I suspect it’s all about tension at this point – a fight between fixing the longer structural problems “this story makes no sense” rather than the short-terms problems like “this scene has too little tension” or “why do I keep setting things inside cars” or “wait, wasn’t it daylight when I started this scene?” In short, there is much to do, and the evil writer brain wants to tackle them all in an omnivorous burst. The spokesbear tells me to go scene by scene and trust in the process.

As usual, the spokesbear is smarter than I am.

On Friday night, during the Write Club recently documented over on Angela Slatter’s website, I finished the first draft of Cold Cases. Afterwards, I looked at the messy first draft state that’s so familiar after years of first draft, and immediately started fretting. There were sixteen days until the deadline.

My usual rewriting process, particularly for something this long, winds out over the course of a year or more. I do a little rewriting, let it sit for a while, then do a little more. I tinker with scenes, do little bits here and there. I show it to a critique group, get some feedback, then show the revision to a different writer-buddy or two in order to see if it works yet.  I sort through what other people think works, what I think works, and I fine-tune. I can’t replicate that process in sixteen days, especially with a work that’s sitting at 24,000 words.

So I spent most of Saturday freaking out, reading through the manuscript and making notes, hoping I could do something to salvage the story in time. I even let myself have a brief moment of “it can’t be done, I should ask for more time.” That may even have worked, although given how tight the timeline was when I discussed the schedule with the publisher I’m pretty sure it would only have earned another two or three days at most. Since Alisa reads this blog, I shall point out that  everything is fine – it was only a momentary laspe into writerly weakness.

After that moment, I kicked my own arse and went back to work. I spent most of Sunday redrafting the story with a focused and detailed plan rather than my traditional tinkering . It’s different an alien process for me, yes, but it works and it’ll get the story done in the timeframe. At this point, meeting the deadline is more important than preserving a familiar writing process that isn’t really viable in the long term.

Because one of the things that occured me to me on Saturday night is this: deadlines are a fact of life. All going well, I’d like there to be more of them in my future. Getting out of my comfort zone and figuring out how to rewrite faster makes much more sense than blowing the deadline, especially given the fact that I’ve been telling myself I wanted to be a professional author since I was sixteen. Being a towering icon of literary genius would be nice, sure, but I’m generally more interested in getting writing to work like a career and be someone who is easy to work with than anything else (besides, given the state of my PhD, towering icon of literary genius status is certainly *not* in my future).

So Things may still go wrong, but I’m okay with turning in a book the publisher doesn’t want to publish as long as it’s still the best damn book I could make it when the submission goes in. There’s thirteen days to go before the due date and a third of the MS is rewritten already. There’s two thirds of a manuscript that needs large-scale redrafting and 24,000 words of line-editing in my future. That’s doable in thirteen days. Hell, it’s doable in less than that if I’m willing to work.

So in the words of my good friend, Jason Fischer, it’s time to unleash the Fists of Steel!

As the duly appointed taskmaster and primary source of daily conversation you’re regular blogger has on any given day, I thought I’d drop past and deliver an important warning: expect nothing of substance from Peter in the near future. He’s boring me with his “novella novella novella” and “Ooh, a short story idea” and “check it out, I’m writing *words*” like it’s something special, so I figured I’d spare us all another hamfistedattempt to say something meaningful while his brain is all muddled up with plot. Jeez, you’ve never met a guy who is so astonished by the fact that he’s actually writing when he’s supposed to be. Makes my life a misery, I tell ya, trying to keep him focused on the things he’s meant to be doing.

If you’re looking for interesting reading try this post, or this one if you’re after writing advice that’s actually useful. I promise you Peter won’t mind. At this point he’s lucky to realise that he should stop and eat lunch rather than keep typing.

Peace out, Peeps.
Your duly appointed spokesbear,

Fudge P. Fudge, esq.