Completely satisfying days at the keyboard come along so rarely that I celebrate them when they happen. My default state is…anger, I guess. Desperation. An incessant need to do more. Doing *enough* is a foreign concept. There is never enough, really, just nights where I feel like I’ve reached the outer borders.

This morning I’ve been plugging dates into calendars, marking off deadlines. I’m plugging in things I’d like to go do, writers festivals and gaming conventions and catch-ups with friends, many of which have been floating around my subconscious for months without me ever plugging them into a calendar and figuring out whether I can actually go to them, or I just think I can. I’ve been at it for an hour now, and I’m still nowhere near done.

I’m looking askance at things like, say, the Queensland Poetry Festival, trying to figure how much time I can spend there without utterly blowing the next Flotsam deadline (some, but less than I’d hoped), or whether I can afford to duck off to a second convention this year (nope), or indeed at any point inside the next year (maybe).

I’m looking at the things that need to be fit into the deadline calendar. Projects that…well, projects that I want to start. And projects that I want done. And projects that need to be done, but haven’t actually had to fit in for a while now.

There’s something enormously satisfying about the calendar. It’ll remain satisfying until it all goes wrong.

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 kind of thing happened a couple of dozen times before I made the connection. I no longer walked, and thus I was no longer a walker. Being surprised that walking now took considerable effort was kind of idiotic.

I write five thousand words over the weekend. I was utterly exhausted when I finally hit the end of the story on Sunday night. This isn’t the first time this has happened, but it seems it’s this time where I’ve finally made the connection. Two and a half thousand words a day used to be an average, not something to strive for.

So I’m no longer a guy who writes a lot either. Which shouldn’t been a surprise, because there’s been many excuses not to write over the last year, and I’ve taken almost all of them, but it still came as a surprise.

Writing a lot, incidentally, means far more to me than walking ever did.

So it appears my creative muscles have atrophied considerably. If you need me, I’ll be over here, having a startling revelation that shocks me to the core of my sense of self. After that I’ll be planning the writing equivalent of going to the gym.

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According to SF Signal my short story, Say Zucchini, and Mean It, should be sent out to DailySF subscribers  on May 17th. I mention this because subscription is free and gets you all sorts of interesting stories sent to you via email every weekday, which seems a far better way of procrastinating at work than spending yet another hour on facebook.

I’m also pretty sure that Say Zucchini, and Mean It will be my last non-Flotsam story for a while. There’s nothing else waiting to be published, nothing else doing the rounds of submission, and I’m not writing any new short fiction until Flotsam is done with.

And, sure, every time I said something like this in the past, I immediately go into a mad panic and write a bunch of stories to try and correct the situation, but it’s entirely possible that this time I mean it. I have a dayjob now. More than one. I can eat without selling short fiction, and so it’s entirely possible I’m slowing down

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Lest this be entirely bogged down in mournful observation, allow me to say this: we played our weekly session of Deadlands early this weekend, and it was awesome. I make no secret of the fact that I adore my Deadland’s peeps and the campaign we’re currently playing has been a cracker, so much so that it’s successfully transitioned the regular Sunday night game into Deadland’s night rather than C’thulhu night when I put it into my calendar.

Finally, after many months, we hit the scenes I’d identified as the mid-point of the campaign, which is probably best identified as “Aliens in the Old West, if the Xenomorphs wore cow skins as a disguise.”

Afterwards we feasted on roasted pork, courtesy of our hosts.

And really, when your weekend includes good company and good food and a horror-western filled with cattle mutilation, life is pretty good.

The last few days have settled into a comfortable kind of routine – I get home from the dayjob, I don’t turn on the internet, I read a book until five o’clock or so, then I eat dinner and force myself to write 1000 words before I go to sleep. My brain’s resisting the latter – last night I wrote the first five hundred words with ease, then scrambled for the last four hundred or so for hours before admitting defeat and collapsing into bed.

Tonight there is teaching, which means I’ll have to forgo the reading, and the 1000 words will be an even bigger challenge. It needs to be done, because at this point 1000 words a day is pretty much the line between me and wholesale insanity, and I’d prefer not to be going into guilt-induced craziness as the year progresses. I am far too fond of drama, after all, and I really need to get over that.

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In my spare time, at the dayjob, I’m trying to figure out how to sculpt a horse out of paperclips. Not a terribly good horse, for I’m not that artistically inclined, but something that’s satisfyingly horse-like. I’m currently struggling with the tail.

So if anyone knows any good sculpting-horses-out-of-paperclip type tips, I’d be happy to learn them.

And now that I typed that, man, I really miss working from home. At least there my time-filling exercises were things like cleaning the bathroom or baking cupcakes.

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I did make chili last night, and it was quite good. Unfortunately, I left out the bacon. Fortunately, this means I’ll be eating bacon and eggs for lunch today, which is one of those side-effects that make me happy.

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I’m listening to the Prodigy a lot this week, which is kinda weird. It’s been years since I last plot-danced to Voodoo People. We’re talkin’ the fricken’ nineties.

I would imbed the video, but apparently that doesn’t work for this site anymore (which means, I suppose, there’s a redesign in the works somewhere in the future). I guess you’ll just have to make do do-do do doo, do do-do do-do sounds yourself, then whisper the words magic-people-voodoo-people yourself to get the right effect. Or you can follow a link.

I wasn’t going to spam you with dodgy phone-camera records of the Great Bookshelf Reorganisation of 2011, but I got a phone-call from my dad and at some point he asked for an update, and I like my dad enough that I’m going to oblige him.

The photograph above contains the first seven shelves of the reorganisation – top left is the brag shelf, the first two on the right are the selected nonfiction shelves, and the rest are just books by writers that remind me why I wanted to be a writer in the first place. The vast majority of books on those shelves were written by about a dozen authors, and in a year I’ll have to reorganise the whole thing because many of them are still releasing books.

I’m still not entirely sure what to do with the bottom shelves, though. I tend to fill bookcases based on a theme, but bottom shelves ruin that by being the place where no-one (well, me) goes looking for things. It’s usually where I hide folders and old RPG  books and other stuff that doesn’t get used terribly often.

That isn’t going to work this time around.

I suspect the bottom right will  be given over to art-books and comics and really big hardcovers, although I’m not entirely sure I have enough of them to make an entire shelve work because it’s a deceptively large amount of space that’s also very narrow. The bottom left may remain a haven for folders, should I figure out a way to keep them looking neat.

Tonight I start work on the noir and pulp bookshelf, then figure out where I’m planning on putting the rapidly growing pile of YA novels and short story anthologies in my collection.

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Last night there was write-club with Angela Slatter, who is normally there, and Kathleen Jennings, who is one of the new write-club recruits that we keep forgetting to talk about. As befits the write-club tradition ate chilli and drank coffee and put  a dent in the chocolate supply while nattering about writing.

Not a large dent, since more people means more chocolate, and the uneaten candy will now sit around the house tempting me until the next write club.

Somewhere amid all that we admired Kathleen’s home-made paper doll that can be eaten by butterflies (she’s giving away prints to those who donate to the various natural disaster recover funds), Angela found her books sitting next to my Kim Newman collection on the bookshelves and was summarily pleased by the location, and we sat down and wrote a couple of thousand words apiece.

All in all, it was a pleasant kind of evening, and a short story that’s been plaguing me for the last month finally snapped into focus and became writable.

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There’s a fascinating and brilliant interview with China Miéville over at the BLDGBlog that covers the use of cities in his work and the way inhabiting a space changes it. There’s something endlessly fascinating about the intensity with which Miéville approaches things like this; the way he thinks about genre and narrative, drawing inspiration from academic theory without being bogged down with it, is phenomenal. If he’d been around back when I was an undergraduate, it’s entirely possible I would have paid more attention in University.

Several things have changed since then. For starters there’s no chance that Claw will be out by Swancon, largely because the recent mess of dayjob and parents having heart surgery meant I just wasn’t able to meet the original deadline*. On the other hand, Swancon still has a chance to catch up with peeps and Ellen Datlow as a guest, and my recent acquisition of a day job means there’s the possibility of being able to afford to go without crippling myself financially for the next three years.

I spent most of the week running numbers, just making sure that it was possible, and what it came down to is this: I can afford the flights, I can afford the membership, and I can probably afford to eat while I’m in Perth. What I’m struggling with is the attempt to find accommodation that’s within my budget and still close to the con site. Which means, should I commit to going, I’ll need to find someone to split a room with.

Which brings us to you, dear peeps – if there’s  anyone going to Swancon in April who’se looking to split a hotel room for four nights , could you maybe give me a shout?

*something I still feel bad about, for all that Alisa was understanding when I e-mailed. For all that “my dad just had a heart-attack/open heart surgery” is a reasonable excuse, I’ve learned my lesson – the possibility of an unexpected emergency need to be factored into how I meet deadlines from now on. Especially since 2011 has a *lot* more deadlines than I’m used to. For there are always going to be emergencies, and I dislike the feeling of not getting things done on time.

I keep reminding myself that the size fo the goals isn’t important at the moment, it’s the routine I’m chasing. Figuring out ways to get things done, finding an hour or so to write when I need it, getting used to putting words on the page again. I suspect that none of the three thousand words I wrote yesterday are going to be used, but the frustration of the story failing to come together eventually served as the catalyst for figuring out what the story may well be about.

* this would be the second.
** upgraded from one coffee a day because drinking coffee at work is a necessary evil – I work downstairs and the rest of the staff are upstairs with the coffee alcove, so it gives me a legitimate excuse to see my workmates and let them know I’m off for the day.

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)

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)

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)

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.