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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.

Okay, point the first: Twelfth Planet Press has offered up free e-copies of their 2009 projectsin the name of getting folks to read them prior to the Hugo nominations at this years Worldcon in Melbourne. That means there are free copies of Horn up for grabs. Make of this what you will. (I should also mention that the inimitable Robert Hoge has started a campaign to get Australian’s nominated to the Hugo ballot, and he’s compiling a small list of recommendations for people who might be interested; the real action is over in the facebook group where everyone’s pitching in names).

And so, point the second: February is the month where I combat The Fear again.

It’s a stupid thing, The Fear, all the more stupid because it commonly manifests itself when things seem to be going right. People start accepting stories and asking for submissions and nominating me for awards and suddenly this little voice in the back of my head starts saying “you don’t deserve this” and “you’re going to fuck it up” and the next thing I know I’m sitting on top of a dozen half-finished stories and binging on coke and junk-food because it’s so much easier to not finish things than to start sending them out and face the fact that maybe, just maybe, this time people will realise I suck. Nothing unusual about any of that, really. I’ve never talked to anyone who wants to write who hasn’t experienced The Fear at some point or another. It’s just part of the process, and if it wasn’t for the fact that The Fear creeps up on me in stealth-mode and messes with my head it wouldn’t actually be a big deal at all.

My way past the fear is pretty simple: I start submitting stuff. Lots of it. Writing and submitting stories is actually habit-forming, and The Fear stops being a factor after you get into the routine. It doesn’t go away, but I get to stop capitalizing it. And, as with most things, I can distract myself by focusing on numbers. Make eight submission in February. Accrue 100 rejections this year*. Make sure I write 1500 words a day. Forgo the coke and chocolate which is salving my psychological wounds as I wallow in self-indulgent panic about never getting published again.

So for February I get back to basics and focus on numbers again.

Current Project: Getting Back to Basics
Number of Stories Submitted in February: 0 of 8
Rejections Accrued in 2010: 0
Consecutive Productive Writing Days: 0
Days without coke and other soft-drinks: 0
Days without chocolate: 0
Today the Spokesbear is: Sighing and giving me meaningful looks as he gets all passive-aggressive about the fact that I *should be working* right now if I mean to make any of this happen.

*A goal picked up from my friend Chris Green, based off the theory that you can’t control the acceptances but you can send a bunch of stuff out.

Things I’m going to do this week:

1) Write a short story
2) Re-establish my writing routines after letting them fall by the wayside during the march towards the deadline
3) Write some blog posts that don’t involve the word “novella”
4) Work out a series of goals for December that are flexible enough to suddenly transition into “fixing Cold Cases” when needed

Things I am not going to do this week:

1) Write five thousand words a day in a desperate binge to complete NaNoWriMo with a 50k manuscript.

I thought about this one for a long time over the weekend, because in the back of my head there’s the awareness that five thousand words a day isn’t beyond the realms of possibility. Up until Sunday evening I really thought it was going to happen – what was another week of being a work-obsesses shut-in after three weeks of working on Cold Cases – but in the end common sense won out.

The salve to the wailing, angry writer-child within that stomps his foot over failing a wordcount goal is this: My regular routine will still get the 50k draft written by mid-December, but it’ll also allow me to stock up a few short stories along the way and leave me a complete burn-out at the end of the process.

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.

It’s weird – the business side of writing always creeps up on me and mugs me while I’m not looking. And it’s not because I never thought I’d need to paying attention to this stuff, just that I always thought the process would move a little slower than it does.

Over the last couple of months I’ve had to set up two new spreadsheets in my writing folder. The first, originally set up a few months, is your basic quarterly profit-and-loss data – what’s coming in, what I’m spending, etc. I’d been avoiding doing this for a long while, but the realities of my working situation (heading into a year of long-term unemployment, albeit broken up by some short-term and part-time contracts) have made it necessary if I wish to continue paying rent and avoid some unpleasant conversations with the local social security office. 

The second spreadsheet, and the most recent to be created, is designed to keep track of what rights are where for stories that have already been published – something that I was first told was worthwhile about two years ago, but never really seemed necessary until a few days ago (reprints, after all, were things that happened to other people). This was one of those things I figured I could get away with not doing for much longer than this – after all, I could just go check contracts when the questions came up – but what I thought was a stray question about the rights of a particular story quickly got followed by a couple of others and after I spent a week not-replying to an e-mail because I was in the midst of reorganising the files…

Yeah, well. Yet another moment where I realise that I’m slowly drifting away from being the guy who just writes and submits stories and started becoming a guy whose running a slightly wonky, badly administrated and marginally profitable small business.

Stop what you’re doing, right now, and go back up your computer. Not just saving your on a zip drive, but actually backing your files up and keeping them somewhere far away from your PC.

I usually say this once a year in October to commemorate the computer crash of 06 that complete wiped out about seven years of work, including a bunch of stories and the PhD thesis I’d been working. Like most people, I thought I was safe because everything was backed up on my zip drive. Unfortunately, said zip drive was plugged into my computer at the time, so the power surge that wiped my PC out took the back-ups with me.

It was, needless to say, a very bad day. I cried for a while. Eventually I started throwing things.

This warning comes early this year because I just lost my second PC in three years. It just went “nope, done with this,” and stopped working while I was in the middle of typing. Fortunately, I learned my lesson last time, so all I lost with this crash was the work I’d done from the last few hours and a bunch of computer game save files that don’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. At most, if it’d taken the zip disk with it, I would’ve lost about a weeks worth of stuff. While this is stressful – I was trying to hit a deadline for Gen Con Oz this afternoon – it isn’t the catastrophic loss the last PC death.

I figure a goodly portion of my friends list are writers. For the love of god, people, back up your files. Your computer isn’t as permanent as you think, and it truly sucks to be sitting there going “but, but, but” when the techie man tells you there’s nothing left.

As a side note – I’m broke and can’t afford to pay said techie-type people to tell me why the latest PC died and it’s well out of waranty. If there’s anyone local who’se got the know-how to poke at the parts and tell me why it’s gone, let me know and I’ll offer a) gratitude, b) um, whatever form of payment we can work given my limited means.

I’ve been all words, words, words this week, resulting in big long posts both here and elsewhere, so today I’m aiming for short and brief. Lots of getting in, doing the pimpery, and getting out. And this time it’s not *all* about me, just like, two thirds about me. You know how it is.

Cool Stuff: The Outlandish Voices Podcast
A project set up by Laura E. Goodin, a friend from Clarion and fellow believer in the power of the middle initial, to deliver readings by Illawarra’s established and emerging science fiction, horror, and fantasy authors. Laura is one of those folks whose not content to be contained as far as her creative ambitions, so she’s managing this while simultaneously picking up momentum as a short story writer and playwright (with, I suspect, a host of novels getting written as well). I get tired just reading her blog and trying to keep up with her various projects, especially given her propensity for making them all work.  The first three installments of Outlandish Voices (featuring readings by the Rob Hood, Cat Sparks, and Richard Harland, a trio of writers with some pretty damn impressive credentials) are online now and there’s more to come.

The Stuff of Glee: Horn Reviews
Two reviews hit the world in recent weeks. One from Genrereviews, which (quite-rightly) says some awesome things about the cover art before kicking on to the discuss the story. My favorite bits, excerpted:

In a lot of ways, Horn sticks pretty close to what have become the standards of urban fantasy. … On the other hand… dude, the underaged victim has been raped to death by a unicorn in a nasty snuff film.

I spent awhile trying to figure out how to review this one, because the dark elements are so unexpected it spun my head around. It’s not the sort of thing I could recommend to anyone, but odds are good if you read “unicorn” and “rape” in the same sentence and instead of having your brain explode, you thought “wow, that sounds really interesting and original,” this is probably something you should be looking deeper into, because a premise like this one isn’t something you’re going to come across again.

The other review was in the Courier Mail courtesy of Jason Nahrung two weeks ago (I was slow on the uptake that weekend) and doesn’t seem to have migrated online yet, but there’s a good selection of excerpts over on Girliejones’ blog. And to borrow a phrase from my redoubtable publisher: Copies of Horn are available from Twelfth Planet Press, Pulp Fiction in Brisbane,  and Fantastic Planet in Perth.

Updates: Awesome

So here’s the thing about my plans to awesomeifymy year – I’m kinda hesitant to blog about it, in specifics or in general, because I’m assuming it’s very uninteresting to watch from the outside and lots of it will come off like bad self-help book cliches when I try to pin the process down and put it into words. And none of it is big, life-changing stuff – I’m not trying to reach Kathmandu or walk around Australia for charity. I’m just trying to put together the life I want to live as best I can, and that largely comes down to pretty basic stuff (write more, read more, spend more time with friends). The list is mostly about reconfiguring mental processes, reminding me to compartmentalise bad stuff until I can do something about it, and prompting me to *do more* rather than endlessly fritter away time on the internet. It’s about doing things that scare me a little, which is why the Spokesbear finally made it onto the site (if you look at the bio, you’ll notice I’ve been threatening to post pictures of the bear since I started petermball.com – it just took nine months or so to work myself up to it).

This week I’ve read a lot. And I’ve danced around the house a lot too. This, by me, is awesome. I got interested in stuff again – discussions, books, music, ideas – rather than falling back on the stuff I already know. Somewhere along the line, probably during the PhD and the “comfort food” binging after my life went kablooie (twice) over the last few years, I fell into a heavy groove of repetition – the same bands, the same books, the same jobs. New stuff went in, but slowl, and often it’d just become part of the groove again. I’d see new films, for example, but only if they seemed like they’d produce a similar *feel* to something I’ve already seen.

So this week I read new books. I listened to albums I haven’t heard in over five years. If I hadn’t signed up for a media fast over August (no TV or film), I would have gone and rented a bunch of films that looked like they weren’t my cup of tea. I tried to be interested in stuff again, even if it wasn’t my thing. And here’s the interesting side-effect of that: I think, for the first time in ages, I can actually look at my week and say “yeah, I did *enough*.” For someone who never feels like I’m doing enough to be productive, that’s fairly huge.

So here’s something I realised during my week off: I’m tired of not being awesome.

Lets forestall the inevitable reassurances that tend to follow when you post stuff like that – I’m aware that I am, occasionally, capable of awesome (although it is very un-Australian to admit it, and it is said here with a modicum of irony). There have been the occasional flashes of external validation that remind me of this, plus there’s the posse of folks who make up my friends list. I mean, lets face it: Jason Fischer? Awesome; Angela Slatter? Awesome; My Call of Cthulhu peeps? Awesome; the various folks who have published my fiction? Yep, they’re awesome too. They may have their occasional moments of self-doubt in this regard, since recognising awesomeness in others is easier than recognising your own internal awesomeness, but as a blanket rule I think they all score big points on the awesomometer. As are many other folks (my DnD peeps, my family, etc) who aren’t readily linkable online. I figure that if you can find a collection of awesome folks who are willing to stay in contact and help you out, then there has to be the potential for latent awesomeness in you somewhere to justify that.

So I’m not denying the fact that I’ve done some big things in the last couple of years. Things worth being proud of. Things I can look back on and say “that, that was awesome.”

Basically, what I’m saying here is that my life is occasionally awesome. There are things that I’m good at, but they’re the kind of things that lots of people are good at. I want to achieve more than good. I want total awesome, slathered with awesome-sauce, with a side order of awesome fries. I want to be able to end the year and think “wow, that was a bloody good year” rather than “yeah, some good stuff happened, but the last year primarily sucked.”  I want to kick back after finishing my yearly goal-check next July and say “I fuckin’ rock” with total confidence. I kinda managed that this year – my primary goal was getting my writing back on track and finishing a novel draft, both of which I managed – but lots of other things fell by the wayside. It seems like things have been falling by the wayside for years now, primarily because they’ve been dubbed too hard, too scary, or simply too expensive to achieve without putting in some hard work.

Call it a contact high from a week of productivity porn, but I’m pretty sick of those three excuses floating around in my world.

So this year I’m setting them aside. Between now and June 30th, 2010, I’m going to strive for awesomeness. And to keep me on track, I’ve created victory conditions – an 80-point list of goals that I can mark off as they’re achieved. Some of it is a sensible and reasonable continuation of stuff I’m already doing (redraft and polish Black Candy, get some novellas written, get a whole bunch of stories written), some of it is about rebuilding parts of my life that have slipped by the wayside (pretty much any goal that isn’t writing based), and some are about rebuilding my life so it resembles the life I’d like to be living (reading 104 books in the coming year, getting myself down to a healthier weight). It may be a purely personal metric, but I figure that if I can achieve a high proportion of the things on said list (I’m aiming for 90%) then my year will have been pretty damn awesome.

Part of this is going to involve rethinking the way I blog, since I’ve strayed a long way from my goals when I originally migrated over to my personal website rather than simply livejournaling. In fact, it’s turned into the one thing I’d promised myself it wouldn’t turn into – a place where I log wordcounts and engage in random acts of self-promotion. Part of this comes down from thinking about the blogging process the wrong way, getting caught up in the goal of blogging for its own sake. I’m still not entirely sure how it’ll change, although I’ll be aiming to post both more regularly and less often.

Not that I tan, of course, despite spending my teenage years on the Gold Coast and undergoing the mandatory time at the beach. Tanning and me don’t mix – my primary pigmentation is basically red, so I keep having conversations with doctors about how easily I’ll burn and how prone I am to little things like Skin Cancer. I could go on, but my skin isn’t really the point of this post. *sigh* Let me start again…

I am, at this point, about two weeks behind on e-mail, phone-calls, text messages, facebook updates, blog reading, and social engagements of all kinds. The first week of this was unintentional – just the usual slippage that comes from trying to get too much done at the same time – but around Tuesday of last week I declared a unilateral retreat from from the world in order to spend the second week reading, mainlining ibuprofen, and living on soup to avoid further irritating an inflamed nerve in my gum. Think of it as about 45% convalescence and 55% much-needed recharge time and you’ll have the math down about right.

I’m generally pretty down on non-productive periods, but I have to admit that I feel pretty good about this one. It let me actually finish reading books (btw – read The City and The City – it’s freakin’ awesome stuff), get some perspective on why I was rushing certain projects that didn’t need it, and generally sort out how to move forward.  Of course, this may have a lot to do with the sheer amount of productivity-porn I immersed myself in over the last week, but that’s how it goes sometimes

Hmm. Rambling again. Back to the point – if you’re waiting for a response of some kind, it’ll probably happen in the next couple of days as I finish saddling the horse and climb back on. In some cases it’ll also be accompanied by profuse apologies and such.

It’s been an inauspicious start to my April of getting things done – slept through the alarm this morning, managed to fritter away two hours without getting started on the (very low-key) to-do list of writing and cleaning-projects needed to make the house ready for the Dungeons and Dragons game on Sunday.  Not a surprise, really – both brain and body are used to an afternoon start at the moment, working late into the evening, but I’m trying to break that habit over the coming month. Still, there is a list of six things that need doing today, and I have managed but one (and that one was basically checking a website). I will be rectifying that…well, not shortly, but sometime after 2 PM when I get back from renewing the lease on my flat, paying bills, and feeding a friend’s cats.