i can't help but count the seconds ticking by

Time is proving more elusive than usual, of late. This is possibly (shh, don't tell anyone) due to being a smidge over-committed. On pretty much all fronts.

There's the personal deadline for the zero draft of the faerie novel, which is fast approaching (and the recalcitrant thing shows no signs of approaching its narrative end any time within that deadline). Of course, being self-imposed, that's a little flexible — but I'm loathe to mess with it, because I need to be able to stamp =30= on something approximating a draft of this thing and let it collapse under its own weight and sort itself out in a drawer for a while. It's well past time.

Then there's the bunch of short stories, most longer than short and one (hopefully) just normal short, that I've committed to writing. Those deadlines are not flexible — and, I admit, it bothers me that I don't have any words against any of these stories yet. (Well, I have a collection of notes against one of them. I did have 10,000 words on that one, but that was me feeling my way. In the wrong direction, as it turned out. C'est la writing process, eh?)

Still. I trust my process (or I'm resolutely telling myself I do), if not that I'll have time to dedicate to it.

On top of that there's the Kindle links, which I am still getting to but so inch-by-inch that it breaks my heart. I've managed to pretty up the page some, and I've just yesterday included a form so that now people can submit their own links.

This sort of workload and over-commitment is always dangerous, for me. I'm far too inclined as it is to spend my weekends on words, and when I feel I have no leeway it's too easy to forget that I need time away from the words in order to be able to work with them.

Luckily, life is compensating by throwing social engagements my way, whether I want them or not. It's almost like it's summer, and normal people don't catch cancer by venturing outdoors at this time of year. Crazy!

4 February 2012 @ 16:12 | No Comments

today's alpha draft addiction is the em-dash

The playlist for the kelpie story is full of drowning songs. Sinking songs. Listening to it is like having all the air siphoned slowly out of my lungs while weariness expands like a squeaking black balloon in my head.

I suspect I need to write this story very, very quickly — or else very, very slowly.

Probably I will do neither of these things.

10 January 2012 @ 19:30 | No Comments

sometimes, daily means when you can

I started this year with an admittedly-ambitious daily target: 1,200 a day on the faerie novel and 700 a day on a short story (which will probably end up not entirely that short). I could have aimed for a lower target, but that would have meant working on Saturdays and Sundays and one thing I learnt last year is that time off — and flexibility — are things I can't skimp on.

So naturally this week threw me two non-writing day curveballs in the form of a 3-hour round trip to get the hail damage on the car assessed on Thursday, and a dizzy spell on Friday. So today has been all about catching up (on the faerie novel, at least). Sometimes, writing every day does not mean writing daily.

Eh. Whatever works, right?

I "met" this fellow at the Tiergarten Schönbrunn: he's a Marabou, a species of bird of which I had never heard before that day. He's part of the stork family, and he's from Africa.

And he has a magnificent get-off-my-damn-lawn! dance the like of which I have never seen before. Wings akimbo, he would cover the length of each wall of his enclosure in a sliding-hopping-gliding motion in heartbeats.

Do storks dance in courtship, or is it only the crane family who do that?

I wonder if the poor, magnificent fellow was simply bored, and passing the time?

I'd love to see him in the wild.

7 January 2012 @ 20:28 | No Comments

there is no moral to this tale

Glimpse by whim by "What if…?", the Europe trip is starting to take shape. So far there's no actual firm itinerary, but just today StumbleUpon gave me 66 Beautiful Small Cities & Towns in Europe and hello!

Bern, Graz and Salzburg, Bled, Trogir and Hvar were already on my list, but I'm now seriously considering a day trip to Mostar into the bargain. I was trying to find a way to get across from Dubrovnik to Meteora, but so far the world is not proving particularly accommodating in that regard. Colour me somewhat peeved.

I'm also told by reliable sources that there are a range of castles for sale in Slovenia to suit any budget. If that's true, I'm totally buying one. It may be my only chance to own property, ever.

In more banal news, it's been an "I'm a writing CHUMP" sort of string of days, lately. Mostly this has been because I turned back to the thorn girls story to do some more revision, now that it's had a little bit of time to sit alone and unattended and think about what it really wants to be. Stories are like children: if you want them to be cogent, you have to ignore them. They chatter too fast when they're born to take absolutely everything they say seriously.

(Actually, I really like that analogy.)

(Like, a lot.)

(Anyway.)

Feedback on this story has been varied, so juggling what I want for the story, versus what readers want and need (this is definitely one of those stories where the latter two attributes are not the same), has resulted in much whining, stomping of feet, and snarling at the screen. When all of this failed, I picked a new title.

And suddenly it all fell into place. The feel, the focus, the direction, the words I should choose over their similar-but-slightly-different synonyms… Titles, it turns out, matter. Who knew? This is why I wish I could find them at the start of writing a story, instead of at the end.

So the thorn girls story, which was never officially titled the thorn girls but instead had a string of ill-fitting names to do with reclamation and silence, is now "The Wages of Honey". Which is just perfect.1

  1. And here's hoping whoever publishes it, if I can find someone to publish it, agrees. 'Cos now I love that title and never want to give it up. [↩]

23 May 2011 @ 21:30 | 2 Comments

it's alive!

You guys, I've done it: I've finished the thorn girls short story.

And by short I mean 9,156 / 10,750 words (depending on whether you count by human rules or printer's rule), so, um, yeah, not exactly short. In fact, it's what I affectionately like to call one of those unsellable lengths between a short story and a novel.

And by finished I mean I have a working first draft that I'm not ashamed to show people, and will doubtless need more work but I'm pretty sure said work, from this point on, will be polishing only, not structural. (Please, please, please let it not need any more structural work. This story has been taken apart and put back into exactly the same shape only different so many times I've lost count. Not to mention numerous brain cells in the process.)

This poor little frankenstein of a story was first started halfway through 2007, which takes a bit of believing even for me. I always forget that writing a short story is no quicker for me than writing a novel — in fact sometimes it's slower. Although in all honesty a great deal of the slowness in this case had to do with the story being constantly temporarily abandoned in favour of higher priorities, such as the editing passes on Shadow Queen and Shadow Bound.

There's something heady about the moment you know you have an actual draft, a "finished" draft. Somewhat akin to the moment you pull your hands back from adding the final card to a house of cards, holding your breath for fear of triggering the collapse and realising no, it's steady.

If I had the means on hand, I would totally be getting celebratorily drunk right now.

13 March 2011 @ 22:41 | 2 Comments

your mission for sunday: stare at the screen

Today I am full of yearning.

It's been too long since I travelled; I've forgotten the feel of an open sky. There are plans … not in place, but at least taking shape, for the next trip; but they won't come to fruition for months. MONTHS. All I can do is flick through my pictures of Mongolia and Bhutan and promise/remind myself there will be mountains before the year's end.

(I love Melbourne, but I must admit to missing hills. Australia doesn't really do mountains, not by a world scale, but Melbourne takes that to ridiculous extremes and while that can be great for walking everywhere it's not great for getting my lungs somewhere they can feel swept clean of cobwebs.)

The next trip is going to be Switzerland — or rather, it shall start in Switzerland. That part has been set by a friend's wedding. The rest, though, is yet to be determined. I'm tempted to head east to Vienna, then south to Croatia through Slovenia. What do you recommend, my better-travelled blog people? Have you been over that way? What should I know about, so I don't miss it?

In the meantime, my weekends will consist of the usual staring contest between my and my brain.

thorn girls: a battle of wills, wordcount, and attrition

6 March 2011 @ 13:54 | 11 Comments

two months down? already?

I'm behind in my blogging (as usual), and partly that's because I'm this close to wrapping up the thorn girls short story. I am tempted to indulge in the cliche so close I can taste it, but really that would only be attractive if finishing were, say, a peanut butter sandwich. With fresh white bread. Yum.

Last night I got the structure all but nailed down (albeit with an awful lot of white space in the manuscript which is nothing more than the note GET HIM OUTSIDE NOW, or some other such crossing-the-room instruction); tonight I get to trawl through and put in all those room-crossings and transitions.

Normally when I write my first draft, I put the transitions in — but in a tricky first draft, such as this one, which I got half-written and then threw at Tess in desperation, and sulked until she came back with the suggestion to rip it to pieces (which was more helpful than it sounds, given she told me which pieces I needed to keep) and thus required significant structural edits at the same time as trying to write the rest of the story … well. In those cases I tend to skip the transitions. Mostly because I find I'll spend hours agonising over the one sentence that will impel the character across the room, only to find that character now needs to not be in the scene at all. Structural edits never progress linearly, for me. Heck, nothing about my story-writing process is linear. Let's be honest.

So, because listening to me opine about editing is bound to be a little dry, I'll point you instead to Gillian's blog, where there is a piece up by me in honour of Women's History Month, where I talk about my dayjob:

…my favourite subjects were mathematics and chemistry. …I could go on at length about the appeal of science and engineering — the way it takes hard physical evidence and observable, reproducible phenomena, and strings theorems and hypotheses between them to create stories of why the leaves are green and the sky is blue. That, just like writing, it's about past experiences, a shared history, imagination, and daring to dream. The fact that the entire discipline is built on a premise of being collaborative and rigorously open, encouraging invention and innovation, like a global remix project centred around numbers and factoids. I like that language is immaterial, that the stars speak to us through chemicals and fractals and ratios.

In the end, it comes down to the fact that I crave answers, yes, but more than anything, I want space and the chance to both be curious and to indulge that curiosity.

ETA: Oops! Link was borked. Fixt.

3 March 2011 @ 16:32 |

i asked him for a title and all he said was: i see…

What to say about today?

Mostly I worked on the thorn girls story (which is now 2 pages longer, bringing the tally up to 46 pages — I live in a dreamworld in that I still hope, despite all evidence and rationality to the contrary, that it will shrink to a manageable length some time very soon). Today's efforts involved killing a character with sudden violence, a little bit of blood, and a lot of ennui. This, I think, is a worthy enough effort for now. It's an effort that cost me some seven cups of tea, at a conservative estimate. However much Earl Grey a human body can stand before the brain begins to pickle in the tannins, I think I've had one sip less than that.

I also attempted to minimise the STUFF I own. It just accumulates despite my best efforts. I've hatched a daring new tactic: if I sell its breeding grounds, the drawers and empty surfaces and nooks and crannies otherwise known as my desk and filing cabinet, then I might be able to wipe out this infestation right proper. Or at least cut it back to non-plague levels. (Anyone want a desk? Or filing cabinet? C'mon. Save me from ebay.) So far I've managed to throw out a lot of ink-less pens I apparently thought would be worth hoarding in case of apocalypse. (What? They'd make excellent dart-blowers. I could sit on my balcony poison-darting all those zombies jostling three floors below. It would be sport and entertainment at the same time!)

I also realised, for the zillionth time this past four weeks, that despite knowing there are hot cross buns available for delicious purchase right now, I have (STILL) yet to buy any.

This has got to change. And HOW.

12 February 2011 @ 18:24 |

podcast

People, it's ALIVE.

It, in this case, being the podcast of my short story "The Wages of Salt".


Squatting to examine a buried shadow, I nodded. There was no academic or scientific value in salt — it would not advance my thesis, nor bring any glimmer of knowledge about the theriomorphs — but it would sell. White gold, the economic cornerstone of New Persia.

I brushed at the crust. Dirty grains clung to the sweat of my palms. The shadow underneath, too clean-edged to be a phantasm, didn’t change. “Here,” I said. “Help me.”

“It’ll just be another ammonite.” But he knelt and set to scraping beside me.

My fingers touched cloth.

I jerked back, staring at the dark linen we’d uncovered. Suspicion lifted the hairs on my nape and I dug faster, harder, in danger of damaging the specimen with haste.

An arm emerged from the salt. Beside me, Hareem had uncovered a knee. Working feverishly now, we followed the contours, salt flying from our fingers, until the entire body lay bare to the sky.

Hareem let out a low whistle. “Now this,” he said, “will fetch a fiefdom.”

So, if you couldn't get hold of a copy of Postscripts, or you really have a hankering for audio fiction, or heck if you simply like free fiction, trot yourself on over to PodCastle and enjoy.

14 August 2010 @ 16:13 | 2 Comments

tell the rambler, the gambler, the back-biter

I have been the slightest bit remiss, of late, in my authorly duties. Or rather in broadcasting to you all just how my authorly duties have been carrying on while I wasn't watching. (Damn things require careful supervision, or they start nesting in the corners. You know how it is.)

So!

First up, a little whiles back I participated in an discussion-type interview about writers and writing.

Writers deal in conundrums and contradictions, striving to “open a vein”, as the saying goes, and tap something you don’t necessarily want on public display in order to produce worthwhile writing, and at the same time working very hard, crafting and polishing, in order to produce something worthy of public display. Reconciling those opposed desires, as Tess pointed out, requires sleight of mind (that’s such a great phrase!), especially during the initial draft.

The discussion was triggered by Gillian Pollack's new anthology, "Baggage",1 which I for one am pretty keen to read. It veered into all sorts of interesting places, from cultural baggage and the (often irrational) process of writing, to writing on difficult/sensitive/arresting subjects that have no solution. And it isn't just me mouthing off; the wonderfully irreverent Tessa and incisive KJ Bishop get all wise into the bargain — so go, read. Marvel at our flippant biographies and potted wisdom. (Or thank your lucky stars you don't have to live in any of our brains. Take your pick.)

Secondly, my contributor's copy of ASIM #45 arrived in the post a little whiles back. Look! Is it not pretty?

The ASIM website is still listing #43 as the most recent issue, but I'm assured that #45 will soon be on shelves or available for purchase through the website. This is the copy of ASIM that features my week one Clarion South story, "Shaping Lily", a story about a little old lady on an epic quest, with fruit bats and hearts and Consequences.

And finally, because I think you should admire my mad photography skillz some more love you all, have another Mongolia snap.

  1. I don't have a story in Baggage. I'm not entirely sure how I therefore earned myself a place in this discussion, but when people call me rather wonderful and ask me to say things, I do not quibble. I'm nice like that. [↩]

God's Gonna Cut You Down (Johnny Cash — American V: A Hundred Highways)

24 July 2010 @ 10:47 | 2 Comments
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