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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 leeway when it comes to getting things done, but it’s still extensive and needs some time focused on it. To that end, I’m experimenting with kitchen timers.

Now I’ve used kitchen timers a lot in in the past, but usually as a short-term “I’m going to spend the next fifteen minutes/half-hour/hour writing” kind of measure. This week I’m going to be pushing that out a little – at the beginning of the day I put nine hours on the counter and set it counting down, pausing it every time I stepped away from the computer or stopped working on jobs attached to the to-do list. The goal is to ensure I spend a solid days work in on the writing-and-productive-activities* front, which is something I tend to be bad at unless I’m in a regular routine, and eventually clock up a sixty-hour writing week.

Of course, there are flaws to this plan. I mean, I started today around 11 am and I’ve still got four and a half hours left to clock up before I go to sleep, but I figure I’ll get better at it as the week goes on.

*translate “productive activities” as “find paid work,” since I really do need to find a job in the very near future.

I’ve been at it for six hours today, and I’m about halfway through the second chapter of the novella. I’m okay with that. The first half of the second chapter was actually the hard bit, given the amount of damage I’ve been doing to the plot. The second half is mostly rewriting a scene to fit it into a new location, which should be relatively easy to do.

All in all, I’m digging the deathmarch as a way of getting this done. I always forget how happy I am when focusing on a story like this. It starts off feeling like a drag, this whole sense of OMG-there-is-so-much-to-do, but once I’m underway it all settles into a comfortable routine and things get done. I like it when things get done. I like it even more when I can spend two hours on the couch, staring into space while I try to figure out how I get between two points in the narrative, and it’ll actually feel like work thanks to the compacted nature of the deathmarch.

Now I’m going to rock out to a medley of bad eighties hair metal (probably starting with Pour Some Sugar On Me) for twenty minutes before diving back in and knocking off the rest of the second chapter.

About ten hours ago I parked myself in front of the laptop and started rewriting Cold Cases. I came up for air a few times, primarily to check e-mail and eat cake, but otherwise I’ve had a pretty consistent day at the keyboard working on the novella. I’ve made a terrible mess of the story. Possibly seven or eight terrible messes, given the plethora of drafts littering my computer. This is the way rewriting goes in my neck of the woods. I fiddle with things. I break them and see what’s wrong. I look at a scene and wonder what the hell I was thinking, then hammer away at it until it starts to look a little better.

Also, rewrote the first chapter. Like, heavy rewriting of the first chapter. And for the first time, I actually like the way it ends.

The 2010 rejection count has hit 2. That means there’s just 98 rejections to go

1) Whip It

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a blog post-reviewy thing about Whip It for about two weeks now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just not going to happen. Not because I think it’s a bad film – it’s utterly charming in its ability to recognise that something can be simultaneously camp as hell and the most important thing in the whole damn world – but because it fits into the same space as contemporary art where I find my critical vocabulary isn’t really up to the task of expressing what I’m thinking about after seeing the film.

 My short, haphazard take on the film goes something like this: it’s endearing. Specifically, the kind of awkward-coming-of-age endearing you find in Taylor Swift film-clip, only Whip Itcome without the puritanical undercurrent that usually causes me to froth at the mouth when encountering Swift’s oeuvre (and thus, Whip It comes closer to having actual substance). The film actually reminds me, very strongly, of Bring It On (another film that didn’t seem like something I’d like that somehow turned out to be highly entertaining) and I kinda wish it existed in a world where Bring It On didn’t because there’s far to many parallels there. The sound-track is phenomenal in its eclecticism, but gets bonus points for including both the Ramones and Yens Leckman.  The most irritating thing about the film is Drew Barrymore’s characters, but only because it’s exactly the same character she played in the Charlie’s Angel’s films with a tendency to act stoned on top. Plus it has Ari Graynor in a minor role (Graynor seems to have become the new incarnation of the cinematic past-time once dubbed “Breckin-Meyer-Spotting”)

It’s also a goddamn spectacular film to watch from a writing point of view because there’s not a damn subplot in the whole thing that doesn’t get a resolution in the end. Admittedly this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but there’s something powerful about knowing that if a film introduces conflict it will provide resolution to it, even if said conflict is just a five-second scene between the protagonist and a minor character in the opening minutes of the story. While Whip It telegraphs a lot of punches on the macro-level (I doubt anyone can’t pick the father’s final scene in the film a full hour before it happens), it gets a pass on this because the resolution of the really minor conflicts are also dragged back into the main plot and made meaningful.  It’s a neat trick, and one I’m gleefully lifting given that I’m in the midst of writing the second draft of Black Candy and dealing with a dozen or so minor characters who walk onstage and do very little after their first appearance.

Seriously, though, you can probably ignore all that and go with this instead: my friend Chris and I are the kind of snarky, mid-to-late-thirties blokes who are continiously dissapointed by films and prone to venting our dissapointment in Waldorf-and-Statler type critiques. As a general rule, it’s a bad idea to go and see film you think you’ll like when either of us are around.

Both of us hit the end of Whip It and said “Yeah, I need to own a copy of this.”

 2) Minimally Acceptable Levels of Productivity

 So I set myself the goal or writing 14,000 words words last week. I didn’t succeed. In fact, I struck a point significantly below success:

On the plus side, it means I’ve hit the minimum accepted levels of productivity for seven straight days now (aka if Peter doesn’t write a thousand words a day he ceases to feel like a human being and makes life miserable for everyone) and actually started to live like a real human being again. There are even parts of my house that are clean, and food that isn’t ordered from the Domino’s website.

That largely means the weekly goal achieved what it needed to achieve, right in time for the rewrites of Cold Cases to land in my inbox.

My process, an overview: start a new story; write eight hundred words; start another new story; write three hundred words; think “fuck, I really do need to finish a novel”; make revision notes for Black Candy; realise Black Candy is horribly flawed and wonder if starting a new novel will be easier; write a hundred words; hate them; write another hundred words; hate them too; pick up a finished novel and read the opening paragraph; think “the new novel I’m writing is complete pants. I’ll start a new one.”; write 100 words; delete one hundred words; work on black Candy; start a blog post about Whip It;  delete it; start a blog post about how much I hate writing; delete it; work on the second short-story I started; work on the first short-story I started; work on Black Candy; start a new novel; research boredom on Wikipedia; find the following quite comforting and accurate – Boredom has been defined by C. D. Fisher in terms of its central psychological processes: “an unpleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest in and difficulty concentrating on the current activity; start a new novel; work on Black Candy; start a new story; discover traction with the new story idea; work on it; blog about process; go back to working on the new story; realise, yes, this one, this is the one I’m ready to write.

Recorded here because it’s always like this, time and again, and I always forget and panic when it happens. Life really would be easier if I had a different process. One that involved working routinely and constantly, rather than gnawing at a dozen bits of bone until I find the one that happens to have a little leftover meat.

Now I’m going to listen to Iggy Pop for a half hour, meet my parents for long, and ponder what happens next for Dead Girl Molly and the Soldier-Boy Walther P.

It took me most of February to get there, but I finally climbed back on the submission horse and sent out short stories last night. Night quite the February I’d planned for back at the beginning, but given the distractions of dead computers, illness, parental birthdays and toothaches I’m settling for getting 25% of the way towards my submission goal and carrying the rest over to the month of March.

This week I’m getting even more basic and going for straight wordcount goals. Between now and the 7th of March I’m aiming at the following:

In other news, the most excellent peep Jason Fischer is co-editing an upcoming issue of Midnight Echo and he’s looking for cross-genre SF/Horror works.

And I’m almost out of coffee, so that’s it for me this morning.

So last week I started working on a story about a man with a birdcage full or sparrows instead in of a heart and the question of what happens when you swap out the sparrows for something else. It ends badly (because it’s one of my stories and they almost always end badly), and there is heartbreak (’cause, again, I’m writing it…), and last night I finally hit the end of the draft and said “oh, well, that’s done.”

It’s not a terribly good story yet, and may never be, but there is rewriting to correct that problem should I decide it has the seed of a good story in there.

The important thing is that it’s done, because that’s how The Fear is combatted – you crush it beneath the weight of endlessly finished drafts until it gives up and goes away.

And because I was the model of writerly virtue yesterday, I’m going to go collect mail this morning.

Current Project: Getting Back to Basics
Number of Stories Submitted in February: 0 of 8
Rejections Accrued in 2010: 0
Consecutive Productive Writing Days: 1
Days without coke and other soft-drinks: 3
Days without chocolate: 6
Today the Spokesbear is: getting his emo on.

I got the writing moving again over the weekend. Not full, productive workdays where I get my 1,000 words down, but enough to feel like I’m actually doing something. Today’s list of things to do consists of words: words; e-mail; tracking down groceries. I will achieve all of these. Everything else is superfluous.

This will not, of course, prevent me from wasting time on the internets.

Current Project: Getting Back to Basics
Number of Stories Submitted in February: 0 of 8
Rejections Accrued in 2010: 0
Consecutive Productive Writing Days: 0
Days without coke and other soft-drinks: 2
Days without chocolate: 5
Today the Spokesbear is: sleeping in.

Mornin’ peeps. The laptop’s on battery power* at the moment so I’m racing against time to get a blog-post written before the computer yawns and says “sleepy now, going away.”

Yesterday I wrote 381 words on a story, poked at another to see where it fell over**, cleared out 50-odd e-mails had been waiting for me to answer them since the beginning of January***, ate half a loaf of bread, took out the rubbish, pondered tactics for tonight’s Bloodbowl game****, and learned that one of my stories from last-year has been picked-up-for-a-reprint-that-I’m-not-sure-I-can-talk-about-yet-so-we’ll-leave-that-there.

Among the various e-mails was a note from Andrew C Porter that basically went along the lines of linked you on my blog, and you might want to go check out the nice things Apex Submission’s Editor Maggie Jamison said in her interview. And so I went, and nice things were said, and Andrew’s blog proved to be fun and vaguely maddening with his insistence on posting Advanced Dungeon’s and Dragon’s trivia that I half-remembered but couldn’t *not* try and answer out of some vague and misplaced sense of gamer-geek pride. Andrew’s also got interviews up with John Klima of Electric Velocipede and Rick DeCost of Absent Williow Review, and blogs quite honestly and amusingly about the whole trying-to-get-published thing.

Current Project: Getting Back to Basics
Number of Stories Submitted in February: 0 of 8
Rejections Accrued in 2010: 0
Consecutive Productive Writing Days: 0 <- Say it with me: FAIL
Days without coke and other soft-drinks: 1
Days without chocolate: 1
Today the Spokesbear is: trying not to point out that giving up chocolate is pointless if I fill the gap with half a loaf of white bread and butter, failing at it, then giving me an aggrieved “shouldn’t you be working” sigh.

*keeping the laptop on battery power while playing on the internets means I can’t waste the *entire* day hanging out here.
**The beginning, mostly
***folks should know that I am teh suxxor at e-mail when afflicted with The Fear, because every e-mail starts with the question “how can I avoid looking like an idiot.”
****I play halflings. The scattered few of you familiar with Bloodbowl can laugh at the absurdity of contemplating tactics now.

1000 words of redraftage on Black Candy last night. It appears that the “hours per day” writing metric I’ve been used to get the Cold Cases draft in is going to be replaced by the more familiar ”wordcount needed before I can sleep” metric. I suspect my process may be seasonal – Brisbane is too damn hot in summer to do regular work-hours in my flat and I find myself drifting towards writing at night when the temperature and humidity is down. Either way, I’m back work after taking the first ten days of January off for the purposes of taking a break from writing, celebrating my mother’s birthday, and writing my somewhat over-detailed yearly plan (sixteen pages and counting) of what needs to done on the writing front.

My T0-Do List for January and February:

1) Redraft Black Candy
2) Write 3 short-stories I owe people after saying “yes” when they asked if I’d be interested in submitting
3) Write 2 short-stories to replenish the somewhat bare submission pile
4) Brainstorm the project I’m planning to draft in February or March (time permitting) – aiming for about 4 pages of notes a day.

Place your best on how long it’ll take me to go off the rails.