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And so I have hit the point where I need to tackle that debacle that is my writing desk, which has been looking like this since I got back from my cat-sitting adventure:

The irony of this is that I rarely spend much time writing at said desk, even when it is cleared off. I can chug along quite happily for weeks, writing in bed and on the couch and at the computer set up on the computer desk. Cleaning off the desk is a mindset thing more than anything else – having the dedicated space where I can retreat where’s there’s no internet or television or, well, sleeping to be done is a large part of doing more than the bare minimum of writing.
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Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 4
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30
Rejections in 2010: 15/100
Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August)

This morning I woke up in the pre-dawn hours to hie myself over to the airport and pick up the globetrotting pair of friends whose house I’ve been living at for the last month. They’re now safely ensconced in their house and I am, officially, FREE OF THE DAMN CAT. Unfortunate news for those of you who’ve enjoyed the cat-posts for the last few weeks, but not a moment too soon for me – I ran out of antihistamines five days ago and decided against restocking under the hopes that I may have acclimatised to the cats presence. Turns out I hadn’t, so much of the last week was spent flaked out on the couch with a running nose, eyes so red you’d think they were bleeding, and a severe headache that defied the raw power of codeine.

Some things that happened while I was away

1. I was the victim of a Drive-Byover on Angela Slatter’s blog.

2. I stopped writing (this gets rectified today). I did edit, though. The first chapter of the novel almost looks like a first chapter now.

3. Jason Fischer built himself a website and announced the opening of submissions for the “SF Horror” issue of Midnight Echo he’s co-editing with David Conyers.

4. The Cat found itself a supply of wet paint to roll in. I’m really, really happy this idiot feline isn’t my problem anymore.

5. Someone pointed out that the Scott Pilgrim movie is going to hit Australia in less than two weeks, and I geeked out like a very geeky thing indeed.

And now I’m off to unpack my house-sitting replies, rock out to Placebo CD’s,  and then get some work done.
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Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 0
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30
Rejections in 2010: 14/100
Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August)

Yesterday I sat down with the Spokesbear, a bunch of e-mail, my copy of Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife, and a notepad to construct my to-do list for the rest of the year. It’s a habit I fell into a few years back (well, sans the Booklife part, but I suspect I’ll be rereading it often in July’s to come); those who’ve been following the blog for a while might remember the 80-Point-Plant for Awesomeness that resulted from last year’s state-of-the-union style gutcheck. Usually I’m pretty quiet about the results, but after reviewing my issues with last years list I’m going to go public with the writing portion of the process this year. It’s somewhat long. Sorry about that. If you want to skip it, I promise there will be more cat-sitting stories tomorrow.

Some thoughts on the list before we kick off:
     – There’s a large amount of background work that goes into the decision of  what to do with the next six months, much of which focuses on what I want from writing and particularly mistakes or poorly executed goals I put together over the last year. The original version of this post saw a rather extensive catalogue of the thinking, but I cut it back in the interests of not making this any longer than it needs to be. If you’re really interested in getting up-close and personal with the darker goal-setting patches of my psyche, I can do so in comments or a future blog-post.
     – One of the things I’m putting more effort into over the next six months is running some form of publically accountable metric to keep me on-track. Most of the time it’s going to be limited to an footer at the base of regular blog posts, but once a month I’ll post the full to-do list with updates and things crossed off the list.
     – The assumptive wordcount-per-day needed to achieve the following is about 4,000 words. This was picked because it’s achievable, but just outside what I usually manage when I’m focused on writing. Part of the goal over the next six months is to rebuild the routine I’ve let slide of late.
     – The two most identifiable problems I’ve suffered from over the last twelve months have been succumbing fear of failure and a tendency to focus on “what comes next” rather than working towards specific goals that feed into the wants and desires that keep me writing.

The To-Do List for the Remainder of 2010
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Part One: Novel Projects

1) Finish Black Candy
A hardboiled detective novel set in a futuristic Brisbane where the spirits of the dead form a hazy cloud in the sky, the military government utilizes vast ghost-generators to produce electricity, and the hero partakes of the latest party drug that rewrites the user’s gender and DNA. I’m currently trying to reconcile the ending I’ve written with the world-building that precedes it, and I’m pretty sure one of them needs to be massively changed in order to make things work.

Cool Stuff: Corpses floating in med-tanks; scary men named Rabbit; coffee; really big generators; its the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine; more noir; more hardboiled; a main character who actually likes his job.

Current Status: 12,020 words into the current draft (effectively going to be a 1st draft given the scattered I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing approach of the previous draft).

Goal for August 31st : Finish the first draft (90,000 words). That’s 2000 words a day, on average, plus a whole lot of plot-fixin’ that needs to be done. In theory that’s eminently doable, especially with large chunks of wordcount being reworked from the previous draft.

2) Finish Claw/Fey Fatale (Miriam Aster Novella 3)
The original version of this was written when I thought of the Aster series as a “monster of the week” detective concept rather than something with a definite arc and end point (hence the discarding of said draft back in August of ’09). There’s a lot of that version that can be salvaged – I don’t see the core concept changing – but I’ll need to do a lot of reworking and add in a B-plot arc to give it series continuity.

Cool Stuff: twisting the knife in the perpetual agony that is Aster’s love life; talking cats; a sorcerer working out the back of a Chinese take-away; the return of Anya; monsters made of kitten foetus and love.

Current Status: Re-reading the previous draft to figure out what can be salvaged.
Goal for August 31st: Put some thought into the new plotline.
Deadline: TBA after talking with Alisa at TPP

3) Draft Ghoul Moon (aka the Swashbuckley-Wahoo!-Lovecraftian-Ghoul novel)
In Brief: Swashbuckling fantasy set in an eldritch city hidden beyond space and time, where a mortal hero is teamed up with a half-immortal ghoul sorcerer to determine who is killing off the immortal nobility. I signed up for the QWC’s Year of the Novel course with Trent Jamieson back in January under the assumption that Bleed was almost done (ha!) and Black Candy would be easy to revise (double ha!). There have been dribs and drabs of work getting done around other projects, primarily in response to writing exercises in classes, but it’s starting to hit the point where it’s a hindrance not to have it more substantially developed.

Cool Stuff: faction warfare; fencing; The Duke of Viscera and the Viscount of Entrails; people swinging on chandeliers while wearing fancy hats; things fluttering behind the curtain of darkness just outside the city walls; an entire city that stands apart from the rest of the universe by devouring moons one after the other.

Current Status: neglected and causing guilt. I hereby give myself permission to neglect this book without guilt until Black Candy and Claw are done, after which it can occupy my full attention.
Deadline: End of Year

The other long projects that, baring other circumstances, I’d really like to get done in the next three years:

- Fracture/The Glorious Death of Doc Mosaic (pulp hero serial killer police procedural; possibly in space; Status: Moderately detailed plan put together on the flight to and from Adelaide last year)

- Hello Kitty Gasmask Girl (sequel to Black Candy; Status: 2000 words of intro and a rough list of ideas and cool things to insert)

- Slow Fall (Bored Oscar Wilde-esque character engages in escapades on a decadent generation ship slowly falling into a black hole. Status: Poked occasionally while I’m waiting for the concept to settle into place)

- Red Rain (Zombie Noir detective novel. Status: Waiting for me to get the noir out of my system so I can be sure I really want to write it)

- The Shoe Store Suicides (Mosaic narrative about shoe stores, the people who commit suicides in front of them, and the employee who objects to their choices; Status: Big list of ideas, no writing as yet)

- Crow Boy War (Downside Novel I abandoned in 2008 due to not knowing what I was doing. Status: About 40,000 words of draft, some of which may be salvageable)

- Gothic: A Love Story (YA urban fantasy novel with Gothic overtones; Status: 7500 words plus planning)

- Miriam Aster Novellas 4-6 (second series of books follow-ups to Horn/Bleed/Claw should we want to keep producing them; Status: Rough plan pitched to TPP)

- The Last Great House of Isla Tortuga (Expanding the short story which appeared in Dreaming Again; Status: In need of research regarding Piracy and life at sea in the time period)

- Masked Wrestlers of Mars (A Barsoom-esque tribute to Mexican Wrestling Films; Status: Opening image, plus a rough plan developing)
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Part Two: Short Fiction Submissions

Submission Status: There are currently 7 submissions out there, although one has been out for over a year and is old enough that it should be trunked anyway so we’re going to call it six instead. Of those 6 stories there’s only one that’s old enough to have seen most of the markets I regularly submit too. This is a slightly better situation than I thought I was in – it appears I have been getting my butt into gear after all those blog posts where I was freaking out about not doing enough short fiction – but it needs to be better. My personal comfort zone in terms of the number of finished stories out and submitted lies between 15 and 20 active submissions, which means there needs to be fifteen to twenty stories given my reluctance to simultaneously submit (even to markets who are open to such things).

I have a fairly large folder full of stories in various states of completion, so I’ve gone through and nominated fifteeen of them as “2010″ projects that will need to be finished by the end of the year. They’ve largely been picked because they focus on things I want to get better at (third person POV, writing particular genres), or because they’ll get me used to revisiting worlds I plan to revisit in novel form one day, or because they’re sufficiently different to the types of stories I’ve been writing in terms of themes or voice that they’ll help refresh my palate of writing tools. All title are working titles and subject to being replaced. Stories marked with an asterisk can be swapped out of the list for another idea as long as the reasoning isn’t “whim” or “I’d like to write that story more.”

The Short Story To-Do List

The Moloch Alley Stories
After I put together the Clockwork Goat and the Smokestack Magi for the Shimmer Clockwork Jungle Book I ended up brainstorming a bunch of things I wanted to do with the voice and world of the story.

     – The Gallows Magus and the Queen of the Winter Seas (Empire hires a magical assassin to kill the mermaid he fell in love with as youth. Hilarity ensues. Status: Partially drafted before hitting plot problems)
     – The Sabres of Moloch Alley* (Mostly this is just a title and a rough idea about the protagonists; Status: Unwritten)
     – The Legions of the Red Sand (An attempt at secondary-world fantasy using the Australian outback as the basis of the setting, with French Foreign Legion influences. Status: Unwritten, but plenty of pre-planning and the voice is more-or-less settled upon)

Downside Stories
I’ve been meaning to write more stories set in the world of Clockwork, Patchwork and Raven for two years now, but I’ve always set them aside because they never synced up with the impulse that made the first story fun to write (basically: what happens when you put a fairytale hero in a cyberpunkish setting). They’re starting to hit now-or-never status in terms of whether they’ll get done, so they’re on the list.

     – Never Fall in Love With a Dead Girl (Started writing this a while back as the Soldier Boy & Dead Girl Molly. It’s still looking for a plot; Status: Partially drafted)
     – Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Crow Boy (Follow-up to Clockwork, Patchwork, Ravens written from Rose’s POV; Status: Opening drafted)
     – Number One Crush* (Heist story using one of the Downside gangs as the victims. Status: Untouched and in need of a title that doesn’t reference a Garbage song)

Ghoul Moon Stories
These occupy the bottom of the list because they’ve had the least thought put into them. The goal is twofold: explore the setting I’m planning on using for the Ghoul Moon novel above, and figure out how to write sword-and-sorcery.

     – The Street of a Thousand Spices*
     – The Six Deaths that plagued Festival of Carrion*
     – The Duel You Cannot Win*

Stories utterly unconnected to novel projects

     – The Unicorns of Suffragette 3 (There are unicorns on a space station. The Goblin King objects to this. Status: About a thousand words and growing)
     – The Exodus (A small outback town in quarantined after a glowing pillar of light starts calling people into it. Status: Partially drafted, but needs a point beyond the initial concept)
     – The Birthday Party (Luck as a trade good. Status: Partially drafted)
     - Untitled Egypian Mummy Story (A guy finds out the girl he’s dating was possessed by the spirit of an Egyptian mummy fifteen years ago. Status: About 1200 words in)
     – Trainspotting* (A bunch of people are called upon to haunt the ghost of the last train after the lines are shut down. Status: Partially drafted, but in danger of becoming a rehash of old themes. Also needs a better title)
     - Pickets, Memories, and Tethers (Ghost story that’s been kicking around my files since Clarion. Status: Mostly done)

Current Partial Story Drafts Sitting in the Future Projects sub-folder: 73 and change (I’m not counting the files that consist of fifty first line exercises or titles in search of a story)

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Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 1
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30
Rejections in 2010: 12/100
Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August)

Today I wish to blog about oh-so-many things, but my brain is tired and poor Fritz the laptop isn’t handling the internets well at the moment, for he is updating Windows right now and the internet in the house-sitting house is capped at slow speeds, and poor Fritz is weak in the RAM and lumped with the worlds worst operating system to boot. Were I smart I’d go work with pen and paper for a while, but being in possession of a penlike object could prove fatal for The Cat* when he attempts to jump on me.

And so I dance to David Bowie, and I update the blog, and I remind Fritz that I still love him for all his deficiencies because he has given me that most priceless of gifts: the ability to write on the couch, and in bed, and in other people’s houses where the computers are new and scary and save word files in odd formats that never open when I get home.

And Fritz is okay with that, as long as I protect him from the Cat. And together we sing the chorus to Life on Mars? while I brainstorm story ideas. 

*who I am now convinced is part rodent, for he has raided the garbage and thrown the contents across the kitchen. And he chews everything, including Fritz the Laptop and the power cord of every electronic device in the house. He seems shocked when I object to all this.

The tenth rejection of the year came in this morning. After doing some quick research and resending the story, I went in to update my submission tracker (hint number one for writers: always update your submission tracker. Yes, right now). Then I spent about an hour making this face at the computer:

Afterwards I went and sang Creep at the top of my lungs in the shower. It helped, although I suspect the neighbours now regard my off-key crooning of the line “I wish I was special” over and over as evidence that I may, in fact, be exactly that*.

Now, to be explicitly clear, the frowny-face of doom wasn’t actually directed at my rejection (me, I love my rejections; it means I’m doing my job ). No, the frown was directed at the visual evidence that I’ve been letting things slide on the writing front for over a year, and it really was time to start picking up my game if I wanted to do little things like a) pay my phone bill, b) eat, and c) take over the world.

You see, I’d known for a while that I was somewhat slack in 2009. If you’ve followed this blog for a while, then odds are you’ll remember be bitching about it rather consistently. But the time-frames writing operates under means you can be slack for an entire year and it’ll still take six months or more for the effects to register, and there’s one thing apparent now that was easy to miss back then: 2010 is likely to be the first downward trend in every metric** I use to track how well my writing is going since 2006. In fact, given that it’s already July and I’ve only sold one story and a novella, it’s likely to be dropping to 20% of last years output.

I suspect I can improve on that a little if I gear up and go crazy for the next five months – and lord knows there’s plans to try – but right now I find myself wishing for a time machine so I can go back and slap myself silly. Much as I’d like to buy into the excuses I offered myself last year, the sheer dissatisfaction I feel right now suggests I need to eliminate them from my vocabulary. After all, 2008 was a much busier and suckier year than ’09, and even then I managed to do more and do it better.

*Considering I spent yesterday trying to answer the question “exactly how many songs to Green Day have about masturbation”, I think it’s safe to say they’ll be happy when my house-sitting stint is done.

** For those who are interested, these are in approximate order of importance: Number of submissions; number of new stories; Advancement on long-term Projects  (Novel drafts, etc); New Things Attempted; Number of sales; number of pro-level sales; amount of money earned from short fiction; interesting offers and invitations to submit; and number of words written over the course of the year.

It’s entirely possible that I’ll spontaneously combust at some point today. Somehow it’s become an intersection of deadlines, doctor’s appointments, social engagements and other madness that all needs to be done *now*. Naturally, I have a plan for getting everything done. Just as naturally, it’s all going to hell the moment I hit the doctor’s surgery. While I totally dig my local surgery, they’re often overbooked and the waiting times are haphazard.

On the plus side, I seem to have moved past the nightmares where the stitches in my head split open and I bleed over my bed. Now the only thing waking me up is the stitches hurting when it gets really cold around 4 in the morning.

In other news: the yearly rejection count hit 7 today, but this is counterbalanced by having the first new story sent out in a long, long while.

At some point today I’m planning on making cupcakes, which means I have to clean the mixing bowl, which means I have to eat the salad currently sitting in the mixing bowl as it occupies a shelf of my fridge. And I frickin’ hate salad. There is no reasonable excuse for lettuce.

At some point today I’m going to continue going through the Cold Cases draft, engaging in all the chapter-by-chapter tinkering that needs to be done before I hand the manuscript over. I am still unsure of this book, but that doesn’t bother me too much. I am unsure of everything I write that’s longer than 1000 words.

At some point today I’m going to vacuum the seemingly endless carpet of shed hair that covers the floor of my house. On the plus side, that’s not going to be a problem for the next few months. There is some pretty simple math that gets done when your lazy, your hair is irritating you, and you own a set of hair clippers. I release the following photograph into the wild in order to forestall the inevitable “You’ve had a haircut” conversations that are likely to occur over the next few weeks:

At some point today I’m going to remember where I put my beanie, ’cause my head is cold without all the hair that used to insulate it.

At some point today I’m going to enter the handwritten short-story I’ve been working on when I go to bed into the computer, and I’m going to attempt to finish it.

At some point today I’m going to mention that an audio version of Clockwork, Patchwork, and Raven is being put together by the Beam Me Up podcast and part one is already live.

At some point today I’m going to watch the new episode of Doctor Who, although given the length of my to-do list this may not happen until tomorrow.

At some point today I’m going to write an author bio and mail it off. I’m also going to write 750 words on my novel, 750 words on my short story, and not freak out about how bad either of these things are at the moment.

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.