Tag: Striving for Awesomeness

Works in Progress

12 Things

We’re mid-way through a long weekend here in Oz. This still catches me off-guard, since I’ve spent the majority of my adult life not really paying attention to long weekends, but the acquisition of a dayjob changes your relationship to such things. And so we’ve hit Sunday and I’m mooching around the new house, grooving to a mix of the Hilltop Hoods and the Beastie Boys (RIP, MCA), just kinda…randomly getting things together. And so, in that spirit, a random grab-bag of twelve things I felt like mentioning. 1. MOVING IS, LIKE, 90% DONE So my flatmate bought a new home and we moved into it. Most of the last two weeks has been spent getting stuff there, unpacking it, figuring out where it will live for the foreseeable future, and generally waiting for the internet to be turned on. You know, moving stuff. There’s a part of me that wants to just kick back and say “yup, we’re done

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

The Lady of Situations and Moby Dick

I’m always a bit ish-ish about recommending books to people. Giving books to people is fine – there are few things I enjoy more than randomly giving friends books they might enjoy – but asking people to trust my taste and spend their hard-earned money on something is…ish-ish. This doesn’t mean I don’t do it. And after slinging stones in their direction last month about some writer’s guidelines I thought I’d take a moment to recommend a few of  Ticonderoga Publications publications, especially since they’re running a sale that takes  10% off pre-orders and 20% off direct orders of their existing fiction until the February. The former, for instance, would include Bluegrass Symphony by L.L. Hannett in both Hardcover and Softcover, while the latter would include Angela Slatter’s The Girl With No Hands and Other Stories, and ordering work from either of these fine writers would be a worthwhile use of your hard-earned discretionary cash. I’d also point out that aspiring writers

Works in Progress

The Writing To-Do list for 2010

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

Works in Progress

State of Play

Last night I braved the outside world and joined Trent Jamieson and Chris Lynch to talk about SF as part of the QUT Informational Professionals Alumni Chapter’s Bookclub, which was an enormous amount of fun given the books we were discussing (the fact that I’m a nerdy bibliophile who rather enjoys chatting about books didn’t hurt, nor did the fact that Trent and Chris are lovely blokes to share a panel with). Today I started tackling May’s to-do list from hell. It’s a long list, and its terrible, and there were at least two things on there with a deadline of “May 31st”. The first of these is done (short story submission, although given the length my stories are when I’m finishing them these days they may not deserve the title short); the second of these is daunting (going through the fourth rewrite of Cold Cases in preparation for May 31st, when I hand it back to TPP). The rest of the list has a little more

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Cold Cases: Thinking Out Loud

Okay, to start with, Michael Moorcock talks about the genesis of the Dorian Hawkmoon books over at the Tor site. I mean, seriously, why are you still here? Also, Twelfth Planet Press has released the guidelines for their forthcoming Speakeasy anthology full of urban fantasy stories set in the 1920s.  I totally dig the idea of this anthology, but I’ll admit that all of my initial ideas will be bloody hard to pare down to short story lengths (unless, of course, I finally break down and write the 1920’s zombie story set in Tahiti I’ve been threatening to write for four years now, but Alisa at TPP is quite adamant in her hatred of zombies so it’s probably not the best starting point). ♦ Okay, fair warning, the following entry is rambling and scattered while I think through a specific problem related to the project du jour. If you have no real interest in writers thinking out loud, I suggest going

News & Upcoming Events

Awesome Things About 2009 (3/15): Aurealis Awards Short Listings

The 2009 Aurealis Awards short-list was released over the weekend and it contained a whole mess of good news – Horn secured a berth in the short-list of both the Fantasy and the Horror novel categories, and I made the Science Fiction Short Story list twice with both Clockwork, Pathwork and Ravens and To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer’s Lament. There’s even more good news on the short-lists in the form of nominations for peeps such as Chris Green* (for both SF, Horror & Fantasy short story), Angela Slatter (Fantasy short story) and Twelfth Planet Press (a seemingly unending parade for various projects – I think every book they released this year is up for something). ‘Course, most of the folks who read this blog have already heard this news from other sources (I was having a slack weekend, internet-wise), so I figure I’d just make a note, say “awesome” and off my congratulations to the other finalists – it’s a shiny list of folks to be

Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

205

For those who may be wondering, allow me to clarify what exactly it is you’re looking at in the accompanying photograph. That, my dear peeps, is a photograph of victory in action. Or a pile of 205 books that are ready to leave my house forever and never return, thus clearing shelf-space and giving me tacit permission to buy new books should I ever find myself in possession of discretionary cash ever gain. The problem, at this point, is that I have no idea how I’m going to get many of these books out of the house. Some I suspect will be claimed by friends (particularly the gaming material and fantasy books) and I expect the rest will go to charity of some kind, although the logistics of carting a box of this size to a salvo bit could be a bit of a problem. Still, the cull is done, and when I originally wrote “get rid of 200 books”

News & Upcoming Events

This week has been deemed 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

Journal

Links, Reviews and Dancing

I’ve been all words, words, words this week, resulting in big long posts both here and elsewhere, so today I’m aiming for short and brief. Lots of getting in, doing the pimpery, and getting out. And this time it’s not all about me, just like, two thirds about me. You know how it is. Cool Stuff: The Outlandish Voices Podcast A project set up by Laura E. Goodin, a friend from Clarion and fellow believer in the power of the middle initial, to deliver readings by Illawarra’s established and emerging science fiction, horror, and fantasy authors. Laura is one of those folks whose not content to be contained as far as her creative ambitions, so she’s managing this while simultaneously picking up momentum as a short story writer and playwright (with, I suspect, a host of novels getting written as well). I get tired just reading her blog and trying to keep up with her various projects, especially given her propensity for making them

Big Thoughts

Random Thoughts While Reading Theory: Technique of Art

Think about writing for a moment. Not the let me tell you a story kind of writing I usually talk about here, but handwriting; the physical act of picking up a pencil and writing a sentence. Think about how automatic it’s become, how long it’s been since you’ve had to pay attention to the way your hand moves or the little tics in the muscle that allow you to scribe an L instead of a T. How many little things are happening without your knowledge, or the way the physical sensation of holding a pen stops registering because the act of writing is all just an automatic reflex now. Hold onto that thought, ‘cause we’re going to come back to it. Over the weekend I started one of my long-term projects in the name of the 80-point-plan – reading an anthology of literary theory essays with an aim towards filling in my patchy awareness of the field. My goal is

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Two Things Worth Reading

1) A Hundredth Name, Chris Green (Abyss and Apex; Subscription Required to Access Archives) Click the link, you know you want too. No? Okay, let me convince you then. You should go read Chris Green’s story at Abyss and Apex because the man is freakin’ talented and understands things like brevity and leaving empty spaces for the story to breathe. I’ve critted Chris a bunch of times and it’s a bloody hard thing to do, because he crams more story into two thousand words than there should actually be allowed and he fits the damn things together so tight that pulling one segment out causes the whole damn thing to unravel in your hands. You should read his story because he’s one of the few people I know who manages to give the impression of being genuinely, fearlessly interested in everything and somehow manages to filter that down into his fiction, even though his bailiwick seems to be horror rather than any

Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Awesome Sauce: The Victory Conditions

So here’s something I realised during my week off: I’m tired of not being awesome. Lets forestall the inevitable reassurances that tend to follow when you post stuff like that – I’m aware that I am, occasionally, capable of awesome (although it is very un-Australian to admit it, and it is said here with a modicum of irony). There have been the occasional flashes of external validation that remind me of this, plus there’s the posse of folks who make up my friends list. I mean, lets face it: Jason Fischer? Awesome; Angela Slatter? Awesome; My Call of Cthulhu peeps? Awesome; the various folks who have published my fiction? Yep, they’re awesome too. They may have their occasional moments of self-doubt in this regard, since recognising awesomeness in others is easier than recognising your own internal awesomeness, but as a blanket rule I think they all score big points on the awesomometer. As are many other folks (my DnD peeps, my family, etc) who