Tag: Flotsam

News & Upcoming Events

Crusade

It’s official: Crusade has been released into the world, doing the thing that newly released books do. Which seems to be convincing people it’s time to get around to reading Frost, now that the trilogy is complete. It’s available for sale and I encourage you to buy it (but then, I would, wouldn’t I?): Amazon US | Amazon Australia | Barnes and Noble | Direct from the Publisher. I’m a slow writer. People don’t often believe me when I say that, since it’s coupled with my tendency to do things like try and write 600,000 words in the space of twelve months, but it’s true, nevertheless. Case in point: Flotsam started back in the year 2000, round about the time I was looking for an idea to pursue when I applied to do a PhD after finishing my Honours. I’d just written a thesis about poetry and poetics, which is an excellent way of figuring out you don’t want to be a poet, and I’d spent about a year immersed in

News & Upcoming Events

Counting Down the Days Until Crusade

We’re two or three days away from the launch of Crusade, the third book in the Flotsam novella series. The following appeared on the Apocalypse Ink blog a few days back, along with the launch date and blurb: Damn, I like that cover. I’d be talking about this being the end of Flotsam and my time with Keith Murphy for a stretch, but I’ve got at least one more short-story to finish before the end of July, along with a handful of other deadlines which keep crowded together in my head, reminding me that they’re due very soon and perhaps I should be working on this other idea a little more, given it’s deadline is also very close. Work is another whole passel of deadlines coming due, thought fortunately they’re not all on my end. We’ve formally put out the call for people interested in being part of the GenreCon program in October, with the July 31 the deadline for expressions

News & Upcoming Events

The Last Great House of Isla Tortuga at Far-Fetched Fables

Occasionally you check the internet and remember things you’ve forgotten about. Case in point: The June 14 edition of the Far-Fetched Fables podcast featured Matthew Fredrickson doing a reading of one of my first short stories, The Last Great House of Isla Tortoga, which first appeared in Jack Dann’s most excellent 2008 anthology, Dreaming Again, which was my second-ever short-story sale and the first I ever made in SF. So I’m a bit late to the party on this one, for various reasons, but I recommend going and taking a look. Not just ’cause Matthew does an excellent job on my bit, but because there’s a similarly excellent reading of Donald V. S. Duncan’s The Green Square. It’s nice, listening to other people read to you, sometimes. A bit weird when it’s your own words, and they don’t sound the way they do in your head, but that’s what comes of letting stories out into the world. Other people read them and make them their

News & Upcoming Events

Two Announcements and Some Miscellany

ANNOUNCEMENT ONE: FROST I’m a few days behind on this one, but I have a new book out in the world and it is a sexy, sexy beast. I mean, take a look. It’s book two of the Flotsam trilogy, which kicked off with the release of Exile a few moths back, and will end with the release of Crusade next year. It contains demons, occult hit men, and a bloodthirsty Valkryie. It brings Ragnarok to the Gold Coast and engages in a moderate amount of property damage. It’s available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and direct from the fine folks at Apocalypse Ink. ANNOUNCEMENT TWO: GENRECON Meanwhile, over at the day job, we got to announce this badboy: We’re officially strapping in for a third GenreCon and I am fuckin’ psyched. We’re currently doing my favourite bit – finalizing the guest list so I can start deploying names when I come back to work in January – but even with half our guest

Works in Progress

Streaking: 7 Days In

I’ve written a minimum of 1,402 words every day for the last seven days. There’s nothing special about that. I’ve done it plenty of times before. But I’m noting it, in this instance, because one of my goals for 2014 is to put together a writing streak. This is predicated on the Seinfeld approach to productivity, where you get a calender and built up a chain of X’s marking the days where you’ve achieved a certain goal. After a while, the Xs accumulate, and the desire to keep from breaking the chain becomes part of your motivation to keep working. I’m actually using my calendar to track two different streaks. The first half of the cross gets put in when I clear five hundred words for the day – a kind of minimum viable productivity level that’ll keep me in touch with project du jour – while the second half is put in when I clear the 1,600 words I need

Works in Progress

Rain & Writing & Too Much Pizza, Man

It’s been raining in Brisbane for the last few days, but it appears that the rain has finally given up and sunlight is starting to peek through again. This makes me rather melancholy; I was rather enjoying the rain and the cold snap and watching the bands of grey cloud overhead while taking my afternoon stroll around the block. The best part about the rain has been walking the path alongside our local drainage ditch, where the grass is the kind of green I’d forgotten grass could be and the drainage ditch actually does an impressive job of seeming like a stream. # So I wrote a few things last night. Mostly the fifth installment of the Flotsam series, which was overdue and then overdue again on the date I said I’d have it sent through after emailing the editor and letting her know it’d be overdue. Afterwards I did a couple of hundred words on some new things. Flotsam

Works in Progress

I just walked up these stairs and, man, I’m buggered…

Once upon a time I didn’t own a car and I lived in a city with a laughable idea of public transport. Since I was also young and broke and generally wanted to go to places buses didn’t really go, I ended up walking everywhere and got quite good at it. It became a big part of my identity. My name was Peter and I walked places; any trek that required less than an hour or two meant I didn’t really bother with public transport. Naturally, the walking went away after I acquired my first car, even if the mental image of myself as a guy who walked didn’t. And about a year after driving everywhere I walked fifteen minutes to the shops down the street and it utterly wiped me out. I found myself huffing and puffing my way home, two liters of milk tucked under my arm, wondering what the fuck, exactly, had happened. Because I am not terribly smart, this

Works in Progress

The Return to Sanity

So, yes, I’m back, I think. At the very least, I can compose sentences without cursing, which is a good thing, and my weekend was actually pleasant in a mildly stressful kind of way. On Friday night I taught at UQ and went to my sister’s place to do washing, whereupon I was promptly fed delicious butter chicken (with bonus ham) and indulged while I ranted about my week. Afterwards we bundled into the car with a camera and a tripod and went galavanting into the night in search of the photograph of a somewhat spooky pedestrian underpass that will go with my next Flotsam story. We found one by walking through a darkened bike-path through a stretch of scrub between Griffith University and the Highway. This process was made somewhat more exciting than it could have been by the fact that we’d forgotten to bring a torch, so we lit our way with the soft glow of my sister’s

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Mmm, BBQ

S0 yesterday was pretty good day. There was a delayed birthday dinner with the family, whereupon we set out for The Smoke in New Farm and ate our own bodyweight in American-style BBQ, then we set out to see Wil Anderson at the Brisbane Comedy Festival, and then because I was full of food and happy I stayed up to listen to the latest Galactic Suburbia podcast instead of going to sleep. Somewhere in there the home internet was fixed, so I rejoined the online world, and I wrote some things. About 1 o’clock I went to bed and actually slept for five hours, which is something I rarely do since starting the dayjob and discovered that being employed is actually far more stressful and soul-destroying than being unemployed (who knew?). So yesterday was a pretty good day, against all expectations, and tonight I make chili in the hopes that it’ll redeem today in much the same way. # The

Works in Progress

A grumpy, crabby kind of blog post

Yesterday… Well, yesterday I did not run away and join the circus, but it was probably one of those days where I would have if I had viable circus-type skills and access to a travelling circus to run away with. I did not turn into the Incredible Hulk and smash things in a frenzy of anger. I did not resign from my dayjob to take up a position that would be more useful to the world at large, such as hunting werewolves or wrangling wild unicorns or, you know, going into politics. But, oh,  I was sorely tempted. Especially by the werewolf thing, which, really, goes to show how much I disliked certain aspects of yesterday, because I’m actually quite fond of werewolves. # We actually had a full cohort at write-club last night, which is the first time all four write-clubbers have been in the same place since other people started joining the inimitable Angela Slatter and I on a regular

Journal

Grr. Arg. Zzzz.

Last night, because I am classy, I ate a dinner of hot-dog franks and baked beans and melted lite cheese slices with BBQ sauce. Then I wrote and wrote and wrote and accidentally fell asleep at the keyboard, which is one of those things that hasn’t happened to me in about fifteen years, and is even less productive than it sounds ’cause you wake up and discover all the odd things you’ve edited into the story by rolling onto the laptop in your sleep. In a less sane and reasonable world, I would have woken up this morning and gone back to writing, fixing the editing mistakes. Unfortunately I live in a world where the landlord is insistent about things like rent, so I got up and went to work at the dayjob instead. I may have done all of this, up until the going to work part, in my underwear. It’s also entirely possible I did not. I’ll leave

Journal

Storms & Minotaurs & OMG, Sleep

On the evening of my dad’s sixtieth birthday we were all sitting on the thirteenth floor balcony while a storm rolled in. If we were in a movie the rapidly moving sheet of clouds would have been the special effect that signified the end of the world is nigh, so we all unearthed our mobile phones and digital cameras to take photographs. About fifteen minutes before I took the  shaky, blurred mobile photo featured in this post the view from the thirteenth floor was all clear skies and blue ocean, and it was pretty enough that even my jaded-towards-beaches approach to life acknowledged that it was a pretty good place to celebrate someone turning sixty. I gave my dad a book – the Collected Stories of Gabriel Garcia Marques, ’cause everyone should read A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings – and a CD/DVD of Leonard Cohen’s 2009 tour ’cause we were meant to go to Cohen’s show last year,