Tag: Stuff

Works in Progress

Novella Diary, Claw, Day One

So I’m setting out to write the third novella in the Miriam Aster trilogy this month. It’s been one of those projects that’s been sitting on my to-do list for far too long, and I’d largely blocked out the month of May in order to get it done when I sat down to plan out my year of writing. As my writing projects go, this one is fairly significant: approximately 30,000 words of narrative while dealing with two novellas worth of back-story and a whole heap of reader expectations that need to be met. This is at odds with my natural impulses when writing fiction – 8,000 words tends to be my comfort zone, and the only time I’ve ever revisited a setting is when I wrote Bleed as the sequel to Horn back in 2009. So I figured I’d try live-blogging the writing process, both to keep myself honest and ’cause I spend so much time writing about process

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

KPIs and Writing Data

So I have KPIs at the day-job this year, a neat little grid of goals that serve as the line between “doing my job well” and “not quite meeting expectations.” This is something of a first for me – for most of my life I’ve done contract work or found my way into jobs that were…well, lets say insufficiently defined for the purposes of generating things like key performance indicators. I’ve spent most of my life listening to friends talk about their office jobs and KPIs were part of that arcane language that floated around, reminding me of how little my work-life resembled theirs. I used to envy that KPI talk. Lots of my friends weren’t fond of the meetings, or found them a waste of time, but for someone who is, at their core, a moderately competitive person, they mean something important. They mean the day-job can be won. There is a line to reach and once I have

Journal

If you need me today, I’ll be (quietly) freaking the fuck out

7:20 on a Thursday morning and I’m set up in the cafe at the State Library, killing time before I head upstairs to go and kick the dayjob into gear. It’s a dreary kind of morning with drizzling rain and grey skies and people clutching at umbrellas, although some people choose to job bare-chested through it all and some people forgot their umbrellas. I know you can’t actually see the rain in the photograph, but trust me, it’s there. A gentlemen who just walked past who is the very definition of dapper. I have no idea who he is, but he’s easily on the far side of fifty and he’s totally rocking his chosen look. I haven’t had much sleep. There’s nothing particular unusual about this. Not having much sleep is something of my natural state, although this time around the sleep debt is entirely intentional. I went to bed after midnight last night, I woke up around 5:00, which

Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

Sri Lankan Love Cake FTW

So the QWC Bake-off is over and I’m pleased to report that my shameless pandering to the internet has succeeded in securing me first place in the fund-raising. Net result: I get myself a hat of awesome and you guys get the recipe for kick-ass Sri Lankan Love Cake *and* my inevitable humiliation via the medium of dance and the internet (Assuming, of course, the chap who gets to decide the music for said dance actually makes up his mind at some point. At the moment he’s wavering between having me dance to All the Single Ladies and having me do the opening cheer sequence from Bring It On). I should really point out that the real winner here is Pancreatic Cancer Research, on account of the fact that our bake-off raised over $1,400 in a two-week period. Near as we can tell, you guys are responsible for a good $630 of that number, give or take a few donations that didn’t

Journal

Night of the Wolverine

ONE Wednesday morning. The office – home, not dayjob – is humid and muggy. In the coming months it’ll be muggy as hell, which is probably the queue I need to go buy a fan in order to get through summer. Although, knowing me, I’ll just open a window and go, geez, the office is muggy as hell today. This will usually be followed by the phrase fuck you, Brisbane. ‘Cause, really, there’s no need for this. TWO Meetings at the day-job yesterday. Good meetings, for me, at least. In 2013 I’ll be working at the day-job three days a week and keeping the other four to use for MY OWN NEFARIOUS PURPOSES. Which means, you know, writing. If you do not believe that writing counts as a NEFARIOUS PURPOSE, you obviously don’t live inside my head. This is, however, a case of getting what I wanted without necessarily being a case of getting what I planned for. I dislike living without

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Four Years On

This is what my author bio used to look like, circa early 2007: Peter is a perpetual student and occasional writer. He lives in Brisbane with a fiancé, two cats and a never-ending thesis. I had reason to look up the story it was attached to over the weekend – a flash piece that was among the first pieces of fiction I unleashed upon the world – and it was a profoundly weird experience. I mean, that was from February-March in 2007, which means it’s a little under six years ago, and pretty much everything in that bio was irrelivant by the time I launched this blog a few later. These days, the only things that remain in any way accurate is my name and the fact I live in Brisbane. I’ve been kinda worrying at that thought for the last couple of days, putting it into perspective. It all feels like stuff that happened to someone else. I mean,

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Scattershot

 BAKE-OFF UPDATE So, an update on the QWC Bake-Off and my quest to win the hat of awesome. The Good News: We’ve hit our $1000 target, which means that should I win the Hat of Awesome, you’ll definitely be getting HIGHLY EMBARRASSING video of me dancing to a song selected by the most generous of the supporters who chipped and vote for my Sri Lankan Love Cake in the bake-off. Currently that honour is held by my friend Craig, who was last reported using phrases like “Beyonce” and “Single Ladies” and “If you like, you should have put a ring on it.” I am, it must be said, a little nervous about what might happen next. Of course, all this OUTRIGHT HUMILIATION only occurs if I win the bake-off, and I’m currently only $70 ahead of the gratuitous stunt-baking of my workmate’s Cherbumple. Given the pace that donations have been coming in, I could be in second place by the end of the day.

News & Upcoming Events

There is No Peter Here This Week

Sorry folks, I’m off to Sydney this week to run this piece of business: which promises to be wild and crazy and just a little exhausting, but also kinda time consuming. If you’re in Sydney over the weekend and interested in genre writing, come along and say hi. If you haven’t heard from me by this time next week, odds are I’ve either been torn apart by wild genre writers or my flight home from Sydney has been delayed.

Gaming

Superhero GM Advice Borrowed from Kelly Link: Fine Tune Your Subconscious

For the most part I’ve been writing about superhero gaming while my regular game was on hiatus due to a player being in the UK, but as of last night the hiatus is over. We got together despite some jetlag and played the thirty-first session of Shock and Awesome, which involved some call-backs to the very first sessions of the campaign in addition to the events of session 30. The character’s school trip to the Museum of Natural History was interrupted when Doctor Jurassic and his three Demon Dinosaurs (velociraptors with superpowers) attacked and made off with the prize of the museum’s new exhibit – fragments of the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs several billion years ago. It was probably the most fun I’ve had running bad guys in a long while, which is a sign that the villain audit I talked about last week is doing it’s job. I don’t think I’ve got my problems with combat licked

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Things I would do if I were planning on becoming an indie publisher…

The title of this post is actually a little disingenuous: I already self-published back in 2005, when I first started self-publishing ebooks for roleplaying games, and I kept at it until 2007 or so when, for various reasons related to edition wars and the level of misogyny among gamers, writing fiction started to look more appealing. The interesting thing about the RPG field is that it went through it’s teething problems with ebooks a little earlier than the rest of the world, which means I frequently find myself frustrated when I get involved in conversations about indie publishing ’cause there’s a certain level of been-there-done-that-made-all-the-stupid-mistakes-already. I’d been around epublishing for a while before that, though, so I’m naturally interested in the ebook/indie publisher explosion that’s happened over the last couple of years. It’s only gotten worse since I started working for a forward-thinking writers centre with an electronic publishing think-tank attached to it. It also means that common phrases like I’m going to experiment with ebooks drive me

Works in Progress

Writing Notes, Saturday, August 4th

So Tuesday of last week I fired up my WiP, Wanton, and put in the dreaded numbering system I used when a story unexpectedly mutates into a novella. I didn’t want to do it – I was desperately trying to keep Wanton to novelette length – but after you hit 4,402 words of a story and you’ve only sketched out two-thirds of the first act, it’s a pretty good sign that you’re not going to be writing something that can be wrapped up in 10,000 words or less. The damn thing has chapters now, which usually means I need to back off and do some cursory planning so I have an overall structure. If you want to know what my internal monologue was like for most of Tuesday, it went something like this: Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. Damn it. When I was done with that I actually started an internal debate about whether I should shelve Wanton for

Journal

Haircut

I would be showing you a picture of my freshly-shorn scalp right now, but for the fact that instagram is being uncooperative. Instead I’ll have to link that shit and leave it up to you to be pro-active if you want to mock my new hair-do. Don’t be shy about that shit either – it’s quite a mockable haircut once you get started. The short version, for those who aren’t inclined to follow the link, is that I recently went from my long-haired grunge-kid do back to the “seriously, just pull out the clippers and shave my damn head” look that seems to bother the hell out of hairdressers when you walk in with hair longer than six inches. It’s a process I go through ever two years or so, whereupon I start growing my hair out again. Mostly I do it because my hair only works in these two states – in-between it’s a mess of kinks and spit-curls