At which point I allowed that a) I had not, b) google wasn’t inclined to find me one, and c) I adore my new dayjob more than any other dayjob I’ve ever had.

Still, it’s a vexing kind of question to be unable to answer in the affirmative. I fired off the question to a couple of friends in the hopes that they’ve heard something, then figured I’d ask the question here just in case someone had come across such a thing. Transgender zombies and/or protagonists appear to be fair game, so far as such things go, so if you’ve come across such a thing in your readings please drop by the comments and let me know. In short: help me, Obi-net-kenobi, you’re my only hope.

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I’d be linking you to Catherynne Valentes not-quite-review of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, but it’s on livejournal and LJ has been buggy for the last few days, so I’m not entirely sure the link is going to take you where it’s supposed to take you. Should it work, I really recommend taking a gander at the review-slash-essay posted there, for it immediately makes the movie one that I absolutely must see and, I think, articulates something quite important about the reason people wander off to become artists and writers, that kind of long-term chasing down of a tribe that’s smart and passionate and engaged with the world in a very particular kind of way.

And I, as ever, want a book of Catherynne Valente essays, for they are frequently phenomenal when she posts them online and they deserve to be a book one day. I would be deeply grateful if someone would pay her to write one.

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So, of the six killer copyediting tips delivered in this blog post, I’ve managed to internalize…two. Unfortunately, the ones I still get wrong are generally the more embarrassing options on the list. I should probably work on that, since it seems like a perfectly reasonable list of things that it’d be a good idea to learn, and my problems with apostrophes are getting quite out of control.

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Every second Wednesday has become the bane of my writing routine. There simply isn’t time for sustained writing, just little bursts of wordage that are fit into a spare half-hour or so. I try not to begrudge Wednesdays this – I work and I go out, doing that thing where I see other people, which is presumably important for my continued status as a sane human being – but I am not built to take breaks from work. I live in fear of my own sloth, where I give in to the temptation to not-write because it’s easier, rather than force myself to put down new words.

Thursdays are meant to make up for it: a day off, a writing day, free of distractions. Yet I’m four weeks into the day job and it’s never quite become that, always winnowed away by odd jobs and far too brief a time spent writing.

Still, I’m getting better at carving out writing time. Not as good as I used to be, but better than I’ve been for much of the last twelve months, and I plan on getting quite a bit done on the morrow. I just wish I could come up with a solution for tonight that made me felt like I’d done enough to warrant going to bed at a reasonable hour tonight. I mean, I’ve written something on the Flotsam draft, which is almost certainly better than nothing, but somehow I can’t quite talk myself into believing that 250 words is a reasonable day’s work and no amount of but tomorrow I’ll finish the draft of the next story and be able to start editing seems to satisfy the spokesbear and my inner taskmaster.

This, I suspect, is because they know me too well. One good week of getting things done doesn’t mitigate of year of saying such things and not quite getting around to doing them.

I suspect it’s time to aim for five hundred words and try again. Which means I’d best get on with things, I suppose.

It’s a pleasant kind of feeling, one that’s been all too scarce over the last eight months, and it’s rather nice to be looking at things I could do instead of panicking about the things I haven’t yet done.

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So, yes, an update. Where shall we begin.

As I mentioned in my last post, I disappeared down the Rabbit Hole over the weekend just gone. It was a deranged and foolhardy exercise, conceived by my new boss, where a group of writers gathered together for three days and tried to write 30,000 words each. I wrote no-where near that many, nor did I expect to, but I still emerged from the weekend with 16,000 words under my belt and a substantial head-start on the next few installments of Flotsam.  I’ll be off to continue work on the draft once this blog post is done, forging ahead into this brave new world where I do not have to live in fear of deadlines.

I’ve discovered magical things happen when you do not fear your deadlines. That Douglas Adams quote about deadlines making pleasant noises as they whisk past isn’t all its cracked up to be, largely because missing deadlines just makes you stupid and slightly worthless, regardless of how nice the editor is about things. And writing isn’t one of those activities that gets better with misery and late-night cram sessions. Getting things done ahead of a deadline means the story you turn is much more likely to resemble the story you thought you were writing, for example, and you’re actually permitted to email your editor without starting using the phrase look, I’m really sorry about this, but…

There are other things being written too, quietly and in the short cracks of  free time created by the new job. Catching the train to work means I can scribble down a page or two before work, and getting a lunch break is good for another couple of hundred words. I started a new short story today, something that may be a strange kind of love story, and I suspect it may be the first love story I’ve written that actually has a happy ending. My plan is to write the entire thing on my morning commute, in one of the moleskins I was given for Christmas and never really got around to using because they were too nice for scribbled notes, and there shall be trains and people who think they know better than they do and murdered donuts who suffer excruciating deaths.

(Of course, someone at worked asked about the third Miriam Aster novella today, to which the only answer is look, I’m really sorry about this, but…)

Which brings us, I suppose, to the new job.

I’ve been somewhat coy about mentioning this online, largely because the sensation of having a regular day job that I like and enjoy is a remarkably foreign experience. The short version goes something like this: three days a week I work as a project manager for a community arts project run by the Queensland Writer’s Centre, which is this very odd cross between working a meaningful, engaging, rewarding job that I really enjoy and getting to catch up with a bunch of writer-type people I usually only encounter at writers festivals, workshops, and conventions. That I get to work in offices located at the State Library, above a cafe with decent coffee and a non-mallspawn bookstore is icing on the cake.

I’m three weeks into the contract, and I’ll admit to being slightly nervous about going in this morning. I love the job dearly thus far, but i’d just spent three days in the QWC offices belting out words for the rabbit hole. Surely, I thought, this will be the day I resent the fact that I can’t just stay home and write. 

Turns out, no, it wasn’t. Not even a little. And man, I tell you, that realisation was very unsettling.

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Okay, some random things.

Kathleen Jennings draws strange and curious things with surprising regularity, and if you’re not following her blog then you’re really missing out. The Dalek Game, in particular, has been one of the highlights of my year. Last week Alan Baxter and I used the medium of twitter to produce this startling rendition of Flash Gordon, Dale Arden, and the Fourteen Ducks who can Save the Earth. Go and check it out – odds are, if you’re reading this blog, you’re going to enjoy the experience. Personally, I think the image answers any questions I ever had about why twitter was a worthwhile place to spend time.

Stephen Dedman’s The Art of Arrowcutting is a remarkable novel, one that’s done a remarkable disservice by it’s cover-blurb given the way the urban-fantasy/noir genre has shifted since the book was first released. I suspect it’s not a book I’d recommend to everyone, but also suspect that those I would recommended it to would come to love it with a kind of fierce and unholy joy. It is, however, almost certainly a book for writers to read – it was recommended to me as a book with phenomenal, Wuxia-influenced action sequences in prose form and it utterly delivered on that recommendation. It also makes me wonder why in hell it’s been five years since someone last published a Stephen Dedman novel, because there really should be more of them floating around in the world.

And: Apex Publications, a company I have a great deal of affection for, have recently had interest Diamond Distributors about carry the Apex range of books and short story anthologies in stores across the USA and the UK. Taking advantage of the opportunity means Apex needs to shift their business model away from short print runs, so they’re currently crowd-sourcing the funds they need on peer-backer.

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.

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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).

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

There are certainly worse ways to start your day, even if it does mean you’re five minutes late for work and the chaos that entails. Here’s hoping your day started just as well (and if it didn’t, I can recommend dancing to PJ Harvey to start your day tomorrow).

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I mentioned this on twitter when I first read it, but I’m posting a link here because its just that good. If you have any interest at all in fantasy, writing, fairy tales, or just general awesomeness, please go take a look at Catherine Valente’s Confessions of a Fairytale Addict over on Tor.com.

There are many writers of fiction who double as excellent writers of essays, and Valente is easily one of the best I’ve come across in recent years. In a fair and just world someone would probably go and pay her to write a book of essays, which would be smart and cutting and ultimately brilliant, but since we live in a capitalist culture where essays are an undervalued form we take what we can get.

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So yesterday there was writing. A thousand words on Flotsam 6, a thousand words on a short story, and some writing of new scenes for Black Candy since I’ve officially given up on rewriting the bastard book and just started redrafting it from the beginning so I can make it story shaped without doing my head in.

By ten o’clock I’d done my 2,500 words for the day and stopped, since I’m trying to get out of the binge-writing habit and back into something that resembles a work ethic. Being done by ten o’clock is slightly odd, since it meant there was still an hour to go before I usually collapsed into bed, half-dressed and fretting about not being done.

So I had a cup of tea and read for a bit, working my way a little deeper into Charles de Lint’s Dreams Underfoot, and then I went to sleep.

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I’ve typed the title of the de Lint collection three times today, and every time I’ve typed it Dreams Underfood, which is weird because I’m not entirely sure why my subconscious is latching onto that particular mistake and repeating it over and over.

I find myself suddenly tempted to write about the existence of a magical, dreamlike land that exists at the bottom of the pantry, waging wars with the goblins who live in the nightmares that occur when eating cheese too close to bedtime.

Or, you know, not. There are some ideas that aren’t quite worth pursuing.

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I find myself, inexplicably, missing a number of people I used to know. It’s happened a few times this week, and it’s quite bothersome, because I’m not terribly good at keeping up with the people I currently know, let alone the friends who have gradually drifted away over the years. I imagine things would have been easier if something like Skype existed ten years ago, but I suppose we had email back then, and that doesn’t seemed to have helped.

I suspect this will result in stories. It usually does, for some reason. Stories are the way things get worked out in my head.

What I’d like it to result in is a whirlwind trip to Melbourne, say, or Adelaide, and places even further afield, with lots of surprise visits and bottles of wine and interesting arguments, but at the moment the logistics for a whirlwind trip to the grocery store is really more my speed.

One day I will remedy this, really I will, but today I will content myself with spicy tomato soup and a nice thick slice of crusty bread and some quality time with Fritz the laptop where I get today’s 2,500 words written.

The best part about the rain has been walking the path alongside our local drainage ditch, where the grass is the kind of green I’d forgotten grass could be and the drainage ditch actually does an impressive job of seeming like a stream.

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So I wrote a few things last night. Mostly the fifth installment of the Flotsam series, which was overdue and then overdue again on the date I said I’d have it sent through after emailing the editor and letting her know it’d be overdue. Afterwards I did a couple of hundred words on some new things. Flotsam 6, for example, and the beginnings of two other stories. Then I ate leftover pizza, again, and swore that I will find some other food to serve as the I-have-a-deadline-and-no-time-to-cook standby.

I am heartily sick of pizza right now. There’s a grocery list in my wallet, full of things which will be used to make tastier, healthier meals. Bowls of chili and spicy tomato soups and plates of Moroccan chicken with couscous, which is one of those meals I make primarily because couscous is an awesome word to say aloud.

Alas, these things must wait until tomorrow, when the payday comes around and the grocery shopping actually happens.

And at least there will be writing, regardless, and I will watch my nascent little stories grow in ambition and word-count. Then I will proof my Daily SF story, which has just arrived in my inbox for proofing-type things.

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Occasionally, when I lament the wasted time that occurs in my dreaded dayjob, people will ask me why I don’t sneak in a little extra writing time. This is a remarkably hard question to answer with any satisfaction, but it largely comes down to this: there is nothing sneaky about my writing process.

When I’m at my most subtle, writing still consists of talking to myself and sighing a lot and staring at the ceiling trying to picture what happens next. This is something of a rarity, reserved for those instances where I write in public, for when writing alone in my house the act of writing is considerably more physical.

I pace from room to room, pondering things. I re-enact scenes, complete with conversations that are spoken aloud. Often I will find myself dancing for plot, which is less euphemistic than it sounds since it largely involves actual dancing, assuming dancing is the correct verb for the peculiar bopping and flailing that happens when I’m alone in my apartment.

I suspect I pull funny faces too, although I’ve never written in front of a mirror to check this. But there is nothing subtle or sneaky about writing fiction, so it’s never something I’ll sneak in at the dreaded dayjob. If I tried, someone would inevitably notice, and I suspect my dreaded dayjob wouldn’t be a dayjob for much longer.

Which would be fine by me if writing paid my rent, but thus far, writing does not.

Somehow people neglected to mention that I was having a truly dire bad hair day yesterday. I managed to ignore it myself, right up until I got home from tutorials, caught sight of my reflection, and thought “hmmm, that’s not a look I want to continue with, is it?”

For a while now I’ve been aware that I’m hitting the decision point where I either shave my head again, or settle in for the process of growing my hair out. These are, by and large, the only real options with my hair – genetics have essentially eliminated all other possibilities due to a weird series of cowlicks and a tendency towards ringlets.

I used to think it came from my mother’s side of the family, largely because my dad has maintained the same hairstyle since I was, like, four, but after his brief experimentation with forgoing the regular haircut earlier this year I learned that it may well have been the male half of my DNA that’s causing problems.

Still, either way, I’m destined for either short-haired spikes or long-haired scruffiness. They’re the only two approaches that have ever really worked for me (for a certain value of “works” which mostly includes being better than the alternatives), and I’m still not entirely sure which I want to head towards.

Expect I will flip a coin over the weekend.

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Two good days of writing in a row. Not great writing, but that’s fine, I’m writing first drafts and they don’t have to be great. But good writing, stuff that feels like it’s heading in a direction I like, rather than being written for the sake of writing wordcount.

Either way, I suspect I’m done with my attack of distemper. If I’ve been scaring you off with the attack of the grumpy pants this week, it’s probably safe to return.

Probably.

You know, like, 90% safe. Or maybe 85%, if we’re giving ourselves a buffer.

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I am behind on email again. This, too, will be rectified over the weekend.

And I really need to start remembering to bring a snack to the Dayjob on Fridays, because the sprint from the dayjob offices to the university tutorial room doesn’t exactly leave time for eating. This is how bad habits start forming, much like the late finish on Thursday nights is turning into a bugger it, I’ll just eat take-out habit on the way home.

My life, I tell you, the glamour and wonder.

See you all monday.

I wasn’t going to spam you with dodgy phone-camera records of the Great Bookshelf Reorganisation of 2011, but I got a phone-call from my dad and at some point he asked for an update, and I like my dad enough that I’m going to oblige him.

The photograph above contains the first seven shelves of the reorganisation – top left is the brag shelf, the first two on the right are the selected nonfiction shelves, and the rest are just books by writers that remind me why I wanted to be a writer in the first place. The vast majority of books on those shelves were written by about a dozen authors, and in a year I’ll have to reorganise the whole thing because many of them are still releasing books.

I’m still not entirely sure what to do with the bottom shelves, though. I tend to fill bookcases based on a theme, but bottom shelves ruin that by being the place where no-one (well, me) goes looking for things. It’s usually where I hide folders and old RPG  books and other stuff that doesn’t get used terribly often.

That isn’t going to work this time around.

I suspect the bottom right will  be given over to art-books and comics and really big hardcovers, although I’m not entirely sure I have enough of them to make an entire shelve work because it’s a deceptively large amount of space that’s also very narrow. The bottom left may remain a haven for folders, should I figure out a way to keep them looking neat.

Tonight I start work on the noir and pulp bookshelf, then figure out where I’m planning on putting the rapidly growing pile of YA novels and short story anthologies in my collection.

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Last night there was write-club with Angela Slatter, who is normally there, and Kathleen Jennings, who is one of the new write-club recruits that we keep forgetting to talk about. As befits the write-club tradition ate chilli and drank coffee and put  a dent in the chocolate supply while nattering about writing.

Not a large dent, since more people means more chocolate, and the uneaten candy will now sit around the house tempting me until the next write club.

Somewhere amid all that we admired Kathleen’s home-made paper doll that can be eaten by butterflies (she’s giving away prints to those who donate to the various natural disaster recover funds), Angela found her books sitting next to my Kim Newman collection on the bookshelves and was summarily pleased by the location, and we sat down and wrote a couple of thousand words apiece.

All in all, it was a pleasant kind of evening, and a short story that’s been plaguing me for the last month finally snapped into focus and became writable.

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There’s a fascinating and brilliant interview with China Miéville over at the BLDGBlog that covers the use of cities in his work and the way inhabiting a space changes it. There’s something endlessly fascinating about the intensity with which Miéville approaches things like this; the way he thinks about genre and narrative, drawing inspiration from academic theory without being bogged down with it, is phenomenal. If he’d been around back when I was an undergraduate, it’s entirely possible I would have paid more attention in University.

I’ve also been deploying kitchen timers and to-do lists this week, which is slowly starting to make a difference when it comes to getting things done. I’m yet to actually finish a to-do list, mind, but I’m usually averaging five or six things on a list of ten goals for the day. I’m still debating whether the timer is going with me to the Gold Coast or not; in theory I’ll be spending the bulk of my time down there doing a rewrite on the sparse first-quarter of Claw (which is messy and needs to be rewritten in order for me to figure out the dreaded what-happens-next) and rewriting isn’t an activity that I do in timed increments due to the concentration required.

On the plus side, Claw has grown. I’ve managed to average about a thousand words a day for the last week, gotten some non-Clawwriting done on the side, and generally started to get my shit together on the writing front. My main concern for the next few days is actually finding ways to thin the story down a little so I don’t blow out the wordcount horribly – I’m about two-thousand words over where I wanted to be at this point, and I’m only a quarter done.
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Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 7
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 10/30
Rejections in 2010: 21/100
Claw Word Count (Finish Date: 15th November)
 

All in all, I’m starting to remember how this writing thing goes again.

Interestingly, kicking the draft version of Claw into gear has involved sketching the bare bones of a scene – basically, getting the conflict and the final line down – then trusting that I’ll be able to come back and flesh things out once I’ve got the structure in place. This is a new and different territory so far as my process goes, and may well come back to bite me in a few thousand words time.
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Current Writing Metrics
Consecutive Days Writing (500+ words): 2
New Short Stories Sent Into the Wild: 10/30
Rejections in 2010: 21/100
Claw Word Count (Finish Date: 15th November)