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

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

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

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

Twelfth Planet Press Stocking Stuffer Sale

In celebration of the release of the Aurealis Awards shortlist, Twelfth Planet Press is having a Silly Season Sale! All through December they’re offering Shipping deals on all orders of their books that earned a spot in the short-list (that’d be Horn, the New Ceres Nights anthology, Deborah Biancotti’s Book of Endings collection, and the Sirenbeat/Roadkill double).

Right now, that means you can pick up Horn for $10. And it’s just about the right size to fit into a stocking (if, say, you knew someone who really deserved a noir tale about evil unicorns and snuff films for Christmas).

Shimmer: Clockwork Jungle Book Issue

Shimmer Magazine just released its Clockwork Junglebook theme issue, chock-full of steampunk animal fables for your reading pleasure (including mine – The Clockwork Goat and the Smokestack Magi). The website has short teasers of all the stories, links to author interviews (me included), and order details if funky steampunk is your kind of thing.

‘Course, if it were me, I’d subscribe instead of ordering the single issue. Not only is Shimmerthe magazine with the good sense to publish a whole bunch of Angela Slatter’s work in the past, but I know a bunch of fine writers whose stories they’ve got sitting in inventory for future issues. Trust me when I say you won’t regret it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s usually a point in a project where I stumble over it’s identity. Not a theme or a plot or a character conflict, but a moment where I can suddenly look at the piece and realise why I’m writing. Sometimes it’s easy - Horn got defined as as the book about unicorns for people who hate books about unicorns right from the very beginning, before I even came up with the characters. Most of the time it isn’t, and it takes a good deal of noodling around before I have moment of realisation and everything falls into place. The noodling is actually kind of painful and aimless, because even if I’ve got a plot in mind and the story is travelling okay, it always feels a bit listless without getting to know the reason for the book.

Cold Cases spent a really long time without that sense of identity. That thing that makes it a specific book I want to write, rather than just a thing I’m writing. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – I’ve completed short stories without ever having that moment, and people seemed to like them regardless – but it slows things down a lot.

Then, at some point during the Friday write-club, I wrote a scene and went “oh, that’s what this book is about.” And in the days that followed I went from having 10% of a finished draft to about 60%. Because it’s so much easier to write a book once you know it’s identity, if only because it tells you how to make narrative choices that work.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the weekend, because originally I thought it was going to be easy to write a follow-up to horn. Claw was going to be the talking cat book for people who hate talking cats, only identity is rarely that easy and it quickly became apparent that I wasn’t really excited about rehashing the identity of Horn with a different trope. I wanted to work in the world again, and use the characters, and I still wanted to have a talking cat in there somewhere, but it needed to have its own thing. The thing that made me want to write it, even if it didn’t get published, because it had it’s own reason*.

I’m still not sure I can articulate it properly, since the closest summary I’ve got is the book where I torture Miriam Aster with the possibility of happiness and that’s really just a summary of every conflict, everywhere, but it’s somewhere in that ballpark.

And at this point the draft is 60% done and I’m happy enough with what’s happening that I can finally stop freaking out about the fact that it’s got a deadline

*This is not always about the story as a whole. On the Destruction of Copenhagen by the War Machines of the Merfolk exists in my head as “the story where I make fun of the little mermaid statue.” For some reason I tend to hinge an books identity on one or two scenes, then everything else tends to grow around it and justify the scenes existence.

One of those sports that still hasn’t lost its novelty – there are two new reviews out there for the dedicated Horn-spotter. The first is available online at Specusphere – as usual, there’s a random sampling to whet your appetite:

Horn is a memorable, unique, and highly polished work.  Spanning noir, horror, fantasy and several other sub-genres, it has widespread potential appeal.  The novella is an excellent showcase of Ball’s ability as an author, and also a fine example of Twelfth Planet Press’s intriguing novella range. 

The other came out in the September issue of Locus magazine courtesy of their short-fiction reviewer Rich Horton:

New from Australia’s Twelfth Planet Press is a first rate novella chapbook, Horn, by Peter M. Ball. Miriam Aster is a freelance detective, having blown her police career with some unprofessional behavior, but she’s still called back for certain cases as a consultant. Cases, apparently, involving visitors from Faerie. This story starts with a teenager found raped and killed, evidently by a unicorn’s horn. To her regret, the case requires Aster to deal again with her former lover, an exiled Queen of Faerie, and of course Aster still loves the other woman, but knows she can’t get back with her.

But there’s a rogue unicorn loose, and maybe worse in the form of people willing to use a rogue unicorn for very nasty purposes indeed … All the traditional hardboiled attitude, mixed effectively with adark look a Faerie. Strong stuff indeed.

Should probably go do some work on the second novella now, so I return you to your regularly scheduled bloggery…

1) Two Reasons Angela Slatter is awesome

The latest Clarkwesworld magazine has an interview with eight Emerging SF authors, including the insightful and rather startlingly talented Angela Slatter. She says some smart stuff, as do the rest of the interviewees, and it’s well worth a read. If, however, you like you’re writing advice in a more direct and focused form, I really suggest heading over to Angela’s website and read through her advice on editing. Actually, I’d advocate printing out the entire post and keeping it handy next time you’re proofing something. I’ve been lucky enough to have stuff edited/proofed by Angela before and I can say with certainty that she knows of what she speaks here.

2) Interesting Writing Advice from Across the Interwebs

Still on the writing front, I’d also recommend going and taking a listen to Mary Robinette Kowal’s guest-spot on the Writing Excuses podcast. It crams four really useful pieces of advice to fiction writers (based on puppetry, interestingly enough) into the space of fifteen minutes. I transcribed them and put them in the folder where my draft of Black Candy is waiting for me to start rewriting, just as a reminder that I need to think very clearly when I start replacing all my habitual non-verbal tags that get scattered through dialogue.

3) Help Needed/Gen Con Australia

Do you know someone who loves fantasy and SF authors and roleplaying games who doesn’t suffer from stage fright and will be in Brisbane between the 18th and the 20th of September? If so, get them to drop me an e-mail at peter.ball@genconoz.com because I’m in need of some volunteers who’d be willing to MC some panels at this year’s Gen Con Australia. This is your basic call for interested folks – e-mail me for more details.

Yes, I realise this is an odd way to go about it, but I’m short on time and the usual pool of folks I’d ask has gotten shallow in recent years, and I figure most of you who are reading this are SF and Fantasy fans who might know some folks. Given that we’ve had to do this fast and there were set-backs due to the computer-crash*, I’m going to go with odd-but-direct rather than time-consuming-but-standard. :)

*after all my gloating about my back-up plans, it was discovered that I’d failed to back-up the outlook files for the account used in this exercise.

4) Horn Spotting

Horn got a nice write-up from Narelle Harris on her blog. As always, there’s the excerpt:

Horn is a novella, a fast read at 80 pages – a short, sharp uppercut of a book. Parts of it are hard and ugly, as they need to be for this kind of story, but it’s also a ripping yarn. It may leave you desperate for whisky and a cigarette, but you’ll finish it knowing you’ve fought the good fight.

As usual, I’ll mention that copies of Horn are still available from Twelth Planet Press (Not *many* copies, sure, which still blows my mind, but there are still some there if you’re so inclined…)

And now I need to go figure out what’s happening with the sequel. And figure out something to cook for write-club tonight. And get some gen-connery organised. ‘Tis a busy day in the office for me, which is as it should be really.

I just thought I should mention it because, you folks, honestly, you rock my goddamn world. I say this full aware that it’s one of those phrases I overuse, but this week I mean it quite literally. My world, it is rocked. I spent part of yesterday studying my to-do list for the next couple of years – not months, like I ordinarily work, but whole damn years – and realised there is a stuff on there. Stuff with tentative release dates and upcoming deadlines and the possibility of more stuff on the end. Stuff that I don’t have to write and figure out a market for, because there are folks who are waiting for it and setting deadlines and expecting it to sell once it’s released.

There’s still a part of me that’s absolutely bewildered by the fact that there are enough of you paying attention to what I write in order to justify that. Writing’s always been a bit like that for me – consciously I know there are people I don’t know reading the stories, but somehow it never sunk in and reached the subconscious level. For years it was just me, and they were dark and unpublished times. Then it was me and the Clarion peeps, and then other writers in the Australian community I met through those folks, and then some of my other friends who don’t write (many of whom I knew for years, and knew I wrote, but remained utterly separated from anything I was doing because I was paranoid and didn’t talk much about the specifics). With the release of Horn my extended family started taking an interest, rather than nodding and saying “yes, a story in an anthology, that’s very nice.” Last year I met my first person who said “oh yeah, I’ve read your blog” and it blew my freakin’ mind. This is not to say that I didn’t know you were out there, reading, just that it never actually sunk in to the point where I thought about when sitting down to write.

And now there are folk who are willing to gamble money and effort on the fact that there are enough people out there, people I don’t know, who want to read something I haven’t actually written yet. I spent part of last night looking over the to-do list and that hit me pretty hard, eliciting a short Keanu Reeves type “whoa.”

Of course, I’ve spent the last twelve hours talking myself out of thinking that this is a big deal, making all the usual arguments about “they’re mostly novellas” and “small press” and “not a full-time writer earning a living wage yet”, but that’s primarily because I need to reduce that realisation down and make it manageable in order to keep working, otherwise my brain will jam up in panic and nothing well get done. But the realisation is still there, underneath all the word-counting and project planning and figuring out of deadlines. My approach to writing has changed in a very tiny way, because you folks started reading. And enough of you liked things like Horn enough to justify plonking down a wad of cash and buy a copy, which led to the suspicion on the publisher’s part that it’d be nice to try it again.

And that rocks my goddamn world. I know I said it in my last post, and at the beginning again, but I feel the urge to say it again (and will probably keep saying it in the future): Thanks for reading, you crazy crazy people. You’re all goddamn awesome.

This is not the blog post you were meant to be reading today.

Not that you’d know this if I hadn’t told you, but there it is. The blog post I had planned for today was inspired by a question Karen Miller asked earlier this week (“isn’t it time the boys of the Science Fiction grew up”) and put forward a bunch of thoughts about why they wouldn’t, because not growing up is kinda integral to the contemporary cultural narrative of geekdom and folks seem to be unwilling to change it in any significant way. You’ll probably still get that post, sooner or later, since I’ve half-drafted it in my head and it’s still kicking around and gathering arguments, but I just don’t have the energy to unleash snark and ranting on the world today.

‘Cause this week, really, it’s been rather awesome. How awesome, I hear you ask? This awesome:

• I had two three short stories accepted in the space of four five days. This, as you might expect, is the kind of start that makes my week awesome.
• I had a project pitched for 2012 that I can’t talk about; I pitched an idea back that may well see me talk about it much earlier than that; nothing set in stone yet and we’re still hammering out the finer details, but overall, this is looking pretty cool.
• Completely trashed the current draft of Clawafter having a chat with Twelfth Planet Press about how to proceed with a series of Aster book. This is my call, incidently, not something they asked for., and on the whole I’m happier with the book Claw will turn into (currently using the working title Cold Cases) than the version of Claw I’ve got. Not that the current version of Claw is a bad book (once you get past the drafting issues), it’s just that there’s a more sensible way to approach the series and make sure I get to write all the stories I wanted to write in Aster’s world, and the current version doesn’t fit the structure well enough to stick around. Oddly, this feels like the most awesome thing I’ve done in the entire week
• Speaking of Aster, the latest out of Twelfth Planet suggests that Horn sales have been rather good. As in “we’re down to the last box of books” kind of good (and hopefully that’s sufficiently ambiguous that I won’t get in trouble for saying it in public). This kinda flabbergasts me in its awesomeness, both because it confirms that there will be as a second Aster novella and because I had many paranoid nightmares about releasing a book no-one wanted to read. I feel I should say a heartydanke schoen to all the peeps, reviewers, and readers who have recommended a little noir/urban fantasy about rogue unicorns and pornography to friends and family, then convinced them to spend their hard-earned money on it. You folks rock.

On one level, it really doesn’t take much to make me a happy man. This morning happiness is achieved via high volume and the Kaiser Chiefs singing Sha-na-na-na-na during the chorus of every song on their first album. Once that hits a certain point on the decibel meter I’m all glee and shiny rainbows. Which is just as well, because otherwise I’d be writing blog posts about the various ways revising Claw is kicking my arse this week. Although I think that’s probably a good thing, in the end, since it large kicks my arse in the same way Horndid – I have a bunch of scenes I’m pretty happy with, plus a bunch of characters and a plot, but they refuse to come together in a way that’s meaningful just yet.

It occurred to me a while ago that this approach is something I’ve inherited from many, many years of playing roleplaying games. The way I plan a game session is exactly the same – pick five or six set-piecescenes that offer a cool setting, or character, or monster, and then find a way to link them together in terms of plot or dungeon complex. The difference there is that the linkage is largely a matter of genre convention; as a general rule, you can trust the players to follow the expected path as long as they know the genre you’re referencing. When writing fiction the approach is a little less satisfying, because finding new ways to get to the same destinations is kind of essential to the process.