Yesterday I had a phone call from my father which started along the lines of “yes, well, I can see how PJ Harvey would wake you up in the morning.” Apparently he googles bands when I mention them on my blog, just to get some idea of what I’m listening too.

So, for my dad and anyone else following my music taste online, I’m going to recommend *not* googling Peaches while at work. I mean, you can if you want, but I’m taking no responsibility when you find yourself singing Fuck the Pain Away beneath your breath while other people are in earshot.

Should you not wish to take my warning, I recommend Youtube. The clip for the song is awesome.

#

Every time I hear someone banging on about sexism being erradicated and feminism no longer being necessary, my first impulse is to turn and start ranting about billboards. I mean, being white and male and loaded with middle class privilige, I’m hardly the most astute feminist commentator around, and even I walk past billboards going “seriously, dude, WTF?”

Yesterday I came across one of the worst offenders I’ve seen in a long time. I was doing deliveries out in the southern suburbs of Brisbane, stuck at an intersection, and from a distance spotted something that looked like a billboard where the only thing that was visible from a distance were the silhouettes of three women who were in the oddly-contorted “sexy” poses I’ve come to associate with the billboards for one of Brisbane’s most over-promoted strip clubs.

Turned out it was a billboard for a local hardware store. The ad text, nigh invisible from the original distance, made it 100% obvious that the sexualised poses weren’t accidental. It read, basically, “can’t imagine these three together? We can.”

Twenty four hours later I’m still bothered by the billboard’s existence. I sincerely hope it’s losing them business, if only so people will one day stop saying “sex sells” when talking about advertising things that have nothing to do with sex (unless, of course, this is a sex shop for those with a hardware fetish, but somehow I doubt it).

#

I wrote a bunch of emails yesterday, largely just saying hello to a bunch of people I haven’t seen in a while. Most of them were people I knew pre-email and aren’t really email type people, but I figured there wasn’t much to lose and tried it anyway.

Afterwards I sat down and wrote. About a twelve hundred words on a story titled Waiting for the Steamer on the Docks of V—, which will probably not be the final title, but amuses me for the moment because I like it when older stories use an initial and an em-dash instead of an actual name, even if I’ve never precisely understood why it happens. I’m somewhat fond of this story, already, and I have not been fond of any story I’ve written in its nascent form for quite some time. Because of this, I shall engage in WIP excerptery:

Patrick chooses the café where we eat breakfast. We walk up a narrow flight of stairs and sit on a terrace balcony, looking down the long street filled with cyclists and porters and beggars clustered around the alleyways. The café has glass tabletops that are damp with morning condensation, the droplets of water still touched with the brown of the river. There are streaks of dirt on the red tile floor. The café was recommended by a friend of Patrick’s back in Brisbane. I wonder if we too will recommend it once the distance of hindsight banishes the horror of eating there.

Afterwards I wrote a beginning to Flotsam 6 which actually felt like a beginning, rather than an action sequence which didn’t quite fit, and then some more tinkering on Black Candy, whereupon I realised that one of my many beginnings would actually make a fine end to the first act if one of the random-characters-who-never-actually-appears-again becomes one of the important-characters-who-doesn’t-appear-enough. Once again I am the victim of novel-flail.

Honestly, I really would like to write books for a living, if I could but figure out how to write books instead of stories. I shall get there, I’m sure, but it takes so very long and there are so many foolish mistakes.

It wasn’t quite a full day’s quota of writing, but it was in the zone that I’m happy with between 2,000 and 2,500 words total, and I didn’t feel too guilty about packing Fritz the Laptop away and going to bed a little early.

I suspect there will be very little writing tonight. There are classes, and there are proofs to proof, and I don’t finish the classes until late. At some point in there I should make myself chili, for I shopped and bought real food, and it requires cooking.

#

There was something else I was going to mention, but I appear to have forgotten it.

#

I’m preparing to disappear into a writing bunker for the next few months, squirreling myself away behind a barricade of unread books and manuscript drafts with naught but Fritz the Laptop and the Spokesbear for company.

My plan is to read things and write things and emerge only for food, dayjobbery, roleplaying games and the occasional offer of coffee when the absence of real conversation becomes to much. Beyond that I shall practice the exquisite art of saying no to things. Preferably before people finish their invitations, lest I be tempted into whatever coolness they’re offering. I shall leave aside any plans for my career or thoughts of branding and professionalism in writing or pondering whether I should be doing the ebook thing (which I would, if I wrote faster, but I don’t at the moment), and I shall write. Like a demon. For ninety days.

And I shall do this because it’s fun, and everything else will take care of itself.

#

One of the most intriguing things about living in the future, such as we do, is that there are now writers who I love and admire that have been maintaining weblogs for a decade or more. And while it’s very easy to start thinking of the internet as a place where things happen now now now, it’s actually remarkably useful to go back and look through several years worth of journal entries or blog posts, noting the changes in style and the shift from being a writer who sells short stories to Asimov’s or Strange Horizons, into a writer who strides across the publishing world like a colossus.

Writers grow up in public now, the vagaries of their careers charted and commented on and posted for the world to see. And that stuff sticks around, for years at a time. It’s the sort of thing you only used to get by, say, reading a collected edition of a writer’s letters, or the occasional writer’s diary.

I say again, as I often do, fuck the flying cars. They may be the flashy side of the future, but the ease with which we can access the history of other people’s thoughts is a far more subtle and impressive feat.

#

One of the more interesting threads running through the comments on yesterday’s post, both here and over on Facebook, was this attitude that sitcoms are inherently limited and/or required to suck by virtue of the genre conventions they operate under.

To which I respond, no, fuck that, genres are as limited as we want them to be, pleas take your they-cater-to-the-masses-and-therefore-must-suck class-oriented modernist bullshit to someone else’s discussion. ‘Cause, you know, that kind of attitude is the reason we get bad science fiction, bad romance, bad action-adventure films, and pretty much everything else. You reap what you sow, in that respect, and unless you’re willing to ask for more it’s unlikely you’ll ever get it.

I no more accept the inevitable suckiness of sit-coms than I do the argument that Avatar needed to be a three-hour exercise in narrative tedium; it sucked because stupid choices were made, not because of some inherent fault of the  genre.

Take, for example, How I Met Your Mother. It’s not a show that’s without faults – I’d direct you to Cat Valente’s excellent take-down of the shows central preimse – but for a considerable period of time it managed to be funny and geeky and not treat it’s audience like idiots. I can point you to precisely the moment it became a show I looked forward to, rather than this thing I happened to watch, which is right about the point in the second season where they closed an episode with Marshal slapping Barney well after the  Slap Bet episode where the joke was set-up. It was simple and beautifully done. Slap. “That’s two.” Done. No references to the Slap Bet to set things up, no flash-backs to the previous episode, just the show writers  trusting you to remember something that happened earlier in the seasons and get the joke.

Nothing appeals to me more than writers assuming I’m not an idiot. It’s the thing that, say, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie got wrong, because ever time they made that kind of reference the writer’s were sitting next to you, nudging you in the ribs, going “hey, we mentioned Phineas Fog, from Around the World in Eighty Days, get it? Get it? We’re being metatextual here.”

Metatext doesn’t work when you say you’re being metatextual. It just annoys the fuck out of people. In this respect, I can point to them moment when I realised How I Met Your Mother stopped being a show I really looked forward to, and became just another show I watch when it’s on. It’s called the second Slapsgiving episode (If they do a third Slapsgiving, the show will join the ranks of shows officially be dead to me, and I will be happy with the two enjoyable season, one okay season, and one sub-par season I’ve seenthus far).

There’s a sliding scale on all these things. I find Big Bang Theory‘s underlying narratives abhorent, for example, but I’ll still watch it because it’s doing something mildly more interesting with the same core theme than, say, Everybody Loves Raymond or Two and a Half Men.

There are also different kinds of audiences – not everyone enjoys metatext as much as I do, nor do they sit there chanting interrogate your fucking theme, you fuckers when shows get particularly annoying. I have no problems with shows pitching to a particular audience, but I reserve the right to get annoyed when they start pandering to them.

There are no good sitcoms. Sitcoms are inherently limited by their format. These aren’t arguments, they’re an admission of defeat. They’re willing acknowledging that we expect so little from our entertainment that the only real response is to shrug and kill off a few more braincells in the hopes that one day we’ll see movies the same way whatever those mythical test-audiences who kill anything smart do.

I’d ask you to stop being part of the fucking problem and start engaging. Acknowledge the problems with individual narratives, individual shows, individual characters, instead of writing off entire genres. Find smart people who love the genre and ask their recommendations (this, coincidently, is how I found romance writer Georgette Heyer, who is mindblowingly fucking awesome).

Quality is not mediated by genre, nor is the ability to create smart and interesting narrative. The *willingness* to pitch smart narrative, sure, but that’s the writer’s choice when faced with the audience, just as it’s mine to watch and say hey, man, this shit isn’t on, in the hopes that if enough people say it loudly enough, one day things will change.

To argue otherwise is to mire you in the kind of close-mindedness you’re trying to rail again when you condemn the genre as a whole.

It’s also a who willing to play to deeply entrenched cultural myths about geeks and women, which makes me less happy, and in some points outright angry.

The default narrative of the show is generally one that posits all geeks are children looking for a mother figure and the bulk of the female characters with any depth are either caring mother-replacements (Penny, Leonard’s girlfriend from season two, Shelton’s actual mother) or emasculating shrews (Leonard’s mother, Raj’s mother, Howard’s mother – are you seeing a theme here? – Leslie Winkle, and ironically, Shelton’s mother due to her ability to countermand Shelton’s self-built idea of masculinity based around intellect).

The remaining female characters that appear in the series are generally there to be gratuitously objectified and competed for by the male cast, thus serving as a means of proving their masculinity and “growing up” (see Shelton’s sister and Penny’s friend from Nebraska) or non-idealized sexual partners who are characterized by their non-threatening naivety (Howard’s girlfriend Bernadette in season three).

The core cast of Male characters don’t actually fare much better: they’re infantilized by their interests, by their inability to get women (problematic, in and of itself), by their heights, by their familial relationships, but their inability to do their jobs correctly (Leonard’s research is derivative, Raj’s hypothesis is disproved, Howard fucks up every engineering prospect he comes up with), by their lack of knowledge about non-geek popular culture (I mean, really, geeks tend to know radiohead is a band). They’ve been neatly cut off from any traditional notions of the masculine, which would be fine if 90% of the show’s narrative wasn’t focused on three of the four trying to prove their masculinity through having sex while the fourth is determined to prove it through constantly being right.

Essentially the show strives to create a contemporary tribe of Lost Boys adopting a Wendy as a mother figure, except that only works in the case of Sheldon who actually is a childish innocent because the others all have deeply fucked up relationships with women (Which is not to say Sheldon doesn’t, but at least his relationship with women isn’t defined by sex).

We won’t even speak of the Howard-and-Raj-Are-a-dysfunctional-gay-couple thing they’ve started playing with. It was unpleasant-but-tolerable when it was a joke being played out in the episodes featuring Leonard’s mother, it was less tolerable when it became a recurring part of the narrative.

Yes, there are individual episodes where they seem to get it right. I breathed an audible sigh of relief the first time they introduced Stuart the comic shop guy, who spent his first few appearance being self-assured enough to flirt with Penny even if he exhibited signs of nervousness about the actual date. “He runs a successful small business,” Leonard opines, “he’s a talented artist. Not all geeks are like Captain Sweatpants over there.”

And I was like, “man, finally, it’s about fucking time.”

Of course, Stuart serves his narrative purpose, getting Penny together with Leonard, and the next time he appears he’s a lonely and isolated man who obsesses over Penny and  shares his Friday night meals with a stray cat.

And really, fuck that shit. All of it.

The show is largely redeemed by solid casting, the episodes where the writing is genuinely smart and interested in laughing with the geeks rather than at them, and very occasionally by the presence of guest stars from the cast of Roseanne (lets face it, any television show that puts Laurie Metcalf back on television gets something of a pass).

But beneath it all is a series of narrative assumptions I find deeply, deeply uncomfortable, and it seems to be getting worse rather than better. Sooner or later they will hit the point where the stupid outweighs the smart, and then I’ll be forced to stop watching lest I throw things at the television.

#

Friday night I went to check my PO Box and discovered a cheque I forgot was coming, which was kinda nice, then got home to the news of the Japanese earthquake and Pacific Ocean tsunami’s, which was less nice and kinda put a downer on the evening overall. There’s news on the latter everywhere at the moment, so I won’t repeat what’s readily available. There is, as always, Red Cross donations that can be made to help those affected.

Later, after absorbing the news via twitter, I paid far to much for the least appealing take-away Butter Chicken of my life, but ate it anyway ’cause, well, it was butter chicken. Then the news of the explosions in the nuclear reactor started filtering in.

I don’t watch television anymore, nor to I read newspapers, so world news and I have a very strange relationship. Information tends to flow in through the communication in online mediums – twitter, facebook, blogs, etc – which means simultaneously seem better and worse than they appear to be depicted in traditional media. There are portions of my friends list that are all lo, the nuclear Apocalypse is upon us, and there are those linking to things like this post over at Genki English.

I expect that if I were watching traditional media, I’d be a nervous wreck right now. At this point, I’m just watching the internet and waiting further developments.

A masculine tone will be favoured but not sought exclusively (i.e. avoid becoming bogged down with intricate descriptions and fancy window dressing in your world building; save your word count for a solid scene – or 2 or 3 – of conflict, action, aggression, etc). (see the addendum below)

I mean, yeah, seriously, what the fuck?

Setting aside the fact that anyone’s daft enough to phrase their preferences like this in an online world where x-fail has become part of the dialogue and there’s a new generation of readers (and writers) sensitive to gender issues, I actually found this kind of disappointing because it runs up against one of the things I really like about Ticonderoga – they’re a left-leaning press whose anthologies have tackled issues such as work choices/industrial relations reform and the cultural identity of immigration. They’re the press that published short fiction collections for  Angela Slatter and Kaaron Warren – two writers I’d argue do intricate description and fancy window dressing that will fucking blow you away as a reader rather than bogging down – and they’re setting up to publish a bunch of other writers who do the same in the coming year (see the forthcoming collection by LL Hannett, for example). If you’d ask me to find three words that described Ticonderoga, progressive would have been high on the list. So would awesome.

To see them resorting to some pretty blatant gender stereotyping in their writer’s guidelines is rather disappointing and incongruous. It’s like going out for a drink with the head of your local Greenpeace chapter and hearing them start going off about all those damn women coming in and taking over the workplace.

I get what they’re trying to say here, I really do, but the phrasing of it terrible and contains all sorts of implied value judgements (compare the implied frippery of the “intricate descriptions” and “fancy window dressings” that will get your story “bogged down” to the “solid action scene”). It hearkens back to the bad old days of literature when men were men and wrote terse, masculine,  Hemmingway-esque fiction of worth and women were safely quarantined to the flowery world of romance . It even nails the implied passivity of the feminine writing as a contrast to the active, aggressive nature of the masculine. It may not be intentional, but they’ve slipped into a nice comfortable misogyny with very little effort there, and devalued a whole bunch of work that don’t fit into the narrow guidelines set out. This is not a statement that says “please send me action-oriented horror stories”, it’s a statement that falls into the old trap of saying “girly writing sucks, boy writing rocks.”

And I say, heartily, FUCK THAT SHIT.

You want your submissions to consist of terse, action-oriented horror stories full of aggression? Then how about this – take away the word “masculine” and say “we’re looking for terse, aggressive, action-oriented horror stories.” There’s no real need to gender the distinction, nor to hang shit on the opposite side of the gender dichotomy you’re setting up.

So, in summary: I like Ticonderoga, I own a bunch of the books they publish and would love to own more if finances stretched that far, but these writer’s guidelines make me fucking sad (and, lets be honest, look like a gender-fail flamewar in its nascent form).

Addendum 1(25/1/11): So it looks like Ticonderoga has taken down the guidelines and made steps towards addressing the concerns above, to which I can only say bravo. This is the step of the Ticonderoga I know and love, and gives me hope that the problems were a one-off thing that are destined to be quickly corrected.

Some has not.

I got home from work and read that there’s a major arterial road that’s potentially ready to slide into the river, which is something that seems oddly surreal. I’ve got friends who are only just making it home after leaving their houses. My sister has absconded to the Gold Coast for the weekend because it seems like it’ll take that long for power to be returned to her home (She was gearing up for a birthday part this weekend, fifty or so people coming over for champagne. Not surprisingly, that’s been postponed and a small mountain of party food and drink has been dumped due to the lack of refrigeration). There are people only four or so blocks from me who are just getting power back this afternoon.

 All of this made sense when the floods were happening, but somehow it’s harder to process when I’m getting up and going to work and trying to get two thousand written every day. Coping with extraordinary things in extraordinary circumstances is much easier than coping with extraordinary things in an ordinary setting. 

Since I’m not sure what else to do, I’m going to head off and write. Or possibly answer emails. Or deliver a baleful glare at the storm clouds rolling in, which seem to be adding insult to injury.

It’s 8:36 in the morning. It’s raining. I’m barefoot and wearing my oversized winter writing coat and listening to old Cure songs. There’s a list of five things I want to accomplish today sitting beside the keyboard. The first thing on the list is the production of words for Claw. The second thing on the list is the revision of words for Black Candy. If you read yesterday’s post, you may be seeing a theme.

Right now I’m missing coffee. Not the caffeine or the taste of it, just the comforting way it used to fit into my routine on mornings like this, it’s ability to be the thing that happens next when I reach a certain point in a blog post and get stuck and need a few minutes to think. I miss the way coffee marked time, gave me a thing to do without doing anything. Tea doesn’t have this quality. Tea is a moment of thought, a decision that’s made and a process that’s undergone. And there’s no measuring required for tea, no judgement about how much or how little to add to the mug. It’s drop a teabag and add the hot the water and away you go, back to wordmines with a poor coffee substitute.

Yes, I know tea doesn’t have to be this way. I’ve made tea from loose leaves before. It’s not the same; the weight is different – physically and metaphorically – as are the textures and the smells. And the making of coffee is complex enough to be engaging, yet automated enough that it doesn’t need to be thought about; easily done, able to leave the mind free to ponder.

This was not meant to be a morning when I blogged about coffee or the giving up of it. I’m not sure how we ended up here. My original thought was write about the writing process; or, write something vaguely amusing; or, for the love of god, I don’t care, just as long as you’re not whinging about stuff. They may even have been in that order, or have arrived all at once. Some morning’s its hard to be sure.

Today the blog is not a place governed by the fun-writer-mind, the part of me that writes to entertain and perform-without-performing. That part of my brain is off solving other problems: how do I handle the next scene transition in Claw, for example; or should I finally finish that blog post about story structure and Hellboy II and the fact that it should have been an utterly devastating movie were it not for some stupid choices; or, when am I going to learn how to write in third person and do that second-world fantasy series I’ve always longed to write?

For the most part, that fun-writer-brain is interested in fun and cool stuff and explosions. The one you get today is the same hungry-writer-brain that goes searching for profundity despite the belief there’s no such thing, the one that occasionally seeps out in stories where the extraordinary is greeted with a shrug and a desire to get on with life. The part of me that first encountered post-modernism and the collapse of grand narratives and the death of meaning and said, yes, sure, that makes perfect sense, then chose to believe in art and poetry and the redemptive power of ordinary moments. Hungry-writer-brain is hungry for meaning, despite the fact that he doesn’t believe in it. Hungry-writer-brain is very bad at endings, for endings imply meaning and for all that he’s hungry for meaning he still struggles to believe in it.

Hungry-writer-brain doesn’t get let out much, for obvious reasons. He’s not fun, after all, and he’s inclined to moping, and there is a third writer-brain known as business-writer-brain who acknowledges that he’s not the best face to present to the world online.

Business-writer-brain says this post should probably be written. It could have a snappy title about three-writing-selves and talk about process and the way all three brains work together. ‘Cause they do, and that’s important, and I fully acknowledge that there’s no one reason to write and only satisfying one of the impulses is a fast way to make myself miserable.

But you know what? It’s Hungry-writer-brain’s morning this morning, so you’re getting what you get.

The short-answer goes something like this: I recently availed myself to the counselling service the Australian social-security system offers to the long-term unemployed, during which we spoke of many things. The Fear was among them, as was my frustration at my inability to put a consistent writing routine together due to increasing anxiety about bills, rent, insomnia, the inability to find consistent employment, and assorted other issues I generally don’t blog about ’cause they aren’t much fun. Actually articulating these things was a weird experience for me, since my usual approach is to ignore them as best I can and get on with things, but since that approach has been less and less effective over the last three years I was willing to try something new.

Somewhere along the line we got into the topic of my coffee consumption, and the fact that drinking a cup of coffee is generally my response to stress, boredom, anxiety, being around other people, and those moments in the writing process where you aren’t really sure what happens next. We talked about the various merits and flaws of that much caffeine consumption – some of which I knew (too much coffee in short succession actually makes you tired, but stops you from getting good REM sleep) and some of which I didn’t (it’s entirely possible that the consumption of three cups of coffee before breakfast were having an adverse affect on my concentration). Afterwards I did the math on how much coffee I’m generally drinking a day, and even I was willing to admit it was probably a few cups too many. And since limiting myself to two or three cups a day was only going to give me the space to slowly rationalise my way upwards, I’m sticking with one cup a day and calling it done.

Cthulhu knows how long this will last – I am, after all, a geek and if there’s one thing I know about hanging out with other geeks its that coffee is omnipresent – but the plan is to stay on one coffee a day until the end of October and revisit things.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to stare at the coffee machine and pine for a while. ‘Cause while I seem to be okay with cutting back physically, I really miss the routine of making the next cup…

* basically, for the next ten days, I’ll be running at speeds that make me envy people on dial-up for their swift and decisive internet access. This means that certain things can still be accessed and used (gmail, the back-end of the website, livejournal on days when people don’t post big images), some things are pretty patchy in terms of access (facebook), and some things just outright don’t work (twitter, hotmail).**

** Or I can just do the sensible thing and upgrade my account, get a boat-load more bandwidth, and save $10 a month on the bill.

Also, I really miss coffee. I mean, I’ve been up three hours, and I’m already in dire need of a nap.

2) I’m finally starting to find my routine again after nearly two weeks of being knocked about by allergies and the flu. The Spokesbear is pleased, although that may have more to do with the fact that my first resposne to bad news ceases to be curling up in ball and whimpering pitiously. The Spokebear has no pity.

3) Due to the pharmaceutical-induced cold-and-flu insomnia I happened to be up late enough to see episodes of Brad Garrett’s dire post-Everybody-Loves-Raymond sitcom, ‘Til Death. And it’s truly dire, not least of which because it’s falling back on the increasingly familiar trope of portraying married men as perpetual adolescents who need to be mothered by their wives. This shit makes me mad. Throwing stuff at the TV mad angry, actually. There is a rant brewing in the back of my brain about the need for male-oriented narratives that find a response to the rise of feminism beyond “act like children”, but ranting with lingering flu-brain is not the best idea.

4) Every time I use du jour in a blog post, I keep thinking about this scene from Josie in the Pussycats and giggling. If you haven’t seen the Josie and the Pussycat’s movie, you really should. It’s awesome. And Du Jour means crash positions!

On the plus side, I was apparently shortlisted for some Ditmar awards while I was away, which is kind of cool. Plus there’s a seemingly endless parade of friends on the short-list as well, which is always a good thing.
________________________________________________
Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 2
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 9/30
Rejections in 2010: 14/100
Black Candy Word Count (Finish Date: 31st August)