End of the Month Report: March 2014

Submissions: 3
Rejections: 1
Acceptances: 0 (but I did get a hold request which is looking pretty good)
Published: 0
Stories out in the wild: 8
New stories completed: 1
Mood: What happened to March? Where did it go?

There Went That Sunday

After a morning of reading, I've just spent almost 4 hours finishing up a story for the funny anthology and sending it. I keep trying to get into this antho (this is my second sub for this round). I've almost made it a couple of times, but never quite. It's a bone I won't let go of, unfortunately. A challenge I want to conquer, I suppose you could also call it. Possibly a waste of a Sunday, you might also insinuate, or a delusion I won't get real about (Funny! Hah!) The upshot of this writing frenzy is that I haven't done a single domestic thing around the house, and must now get a move on to fit in a few mundane practicalities before the sun goes down.

Still, I had fun :) Even if the funny folk at the funny antho don't think it's funny...

And in a feel-good addendum, exactly just as I hit send, an email came in about a horror story that might be published if I'm amendable to minor edits - but it's still just a great big MIGHT. Anyway, I'm grinning because the first of the three comments from an editor reads: An elegant and technically precise story; excellent core concept and well maintained rhythm throughout.

Nice. I love a little praise on a Sunday. Or anytime :) See, I put in another smiley face. It's that kind of a day. I'm a bit high on writing, me thinks.

Now, where's my vacuum cleaner? I know it should be in the house somewhere...

***18.40 update. There, housework time wasn't a complete bust. Whilst ironing, I came up with a vague idea for a dieselpunk story, the name of the main character, and a first line that pleases me immensely. Now for the rest of it. I'll play with it tomorrow on the train. It's going to be a nasty one...

Because You Can Never Have Too Many Punks

Every now and then, scooting around the internet looking for writing markets, one bumps into a project that immediately appeals to something deep within one's psyche. Most themed anthologies are slow burners that sit in the back of my head until a eureka moment hits, or I already have a half-done story that seems to fit the bill so I get back to work on it, but occasionally one makes me sit up and want to get started on it from scratch right away. Like now! 

This submission call for original fiction for The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk is just such a one.

As it proclaims: If you need to know what dieselpunk is, it's a subcategory of steampunk, essentially, covering the 1920s through to the 1950s, including the Roaring Twenties, the Depression, World War II, and even a little beyond that.

I like this site for its classy pictures and atmosphere. I really need to give this project a go, I think, if only for the sheer fun of it.

 I see trench coats and smart little hats, a wintry night, dark Northern climes, mountains, trains... I do love trains. Maybe an explosion or two. Or not. A Depression Era tale maybe? And both World Wars always make interesting settings for weirdness set amidst global chaos. Not sure yet, but my brain is on it.

Go brain.

And after that?  Check out all the punks here.

Elfpunk maybe?

Hmmmm.  

Happy Day

It was a good day.

I aired my tent in preparation for an upcoming Big Horse Ride, and felt happy imagining the mountain trails and just thinking about the fun to come. I got a hold request for a story, and felt happy that someone likes that particular story enough to maybe publish it. I wrote flat out for 2.5 hours, almost finished a story, and felt happy about the work I'd accomplished. I only napped once, did some reading, and generally got things done.

Yes, 'twas a good day.

Hair-Trigger Scribes?

Reading Jane Turner's regular column 'Turning Pages' in The Age this morning, I was pointed towards a piece from last year in Ploughshares magazine by novelist Rebecca Makkai.

Titled 14 Ways to Tick Off A Writer, the content is, I think, self-explanatory. If you're in doubt, she opens with: Writers are fun and easy to annoy. Minimum effort, maximum rage. She goes on to provide details about how to poke your favourite scribe with a stick just for the heck of it. Mind you, she's mostly referring to novelists with actual publications under their belt, so much of this was news to me.

Anyway, the one I liked most is: Turn up at a reading. Raise your hand to ask a question. Launch into a ten minute description of your novel-in-progress. But in a whiny voice, with a question mark at the end. That totally makes it a question.

This I can relate to. It gives me flashbacks of the uncomfortable sort. I love attending literary festivals, buying books, bumping into folk and chatting, hearing the wise sages of writing dispense interesting facts and advice, but am far less enamoured with the question times after.

Sure, every now and then, you get a good session, with smart people who raise interesting topics that aren't all about them. However, more times than I can count, I've curled my toes and stared hard at the floor while long-winded people try desperately to impress the writer up on the stage with their own brilliant output by going into great detail about the amazingly different novel, which is sort of like the guest speaker's, they're presently working on. Or worse, they give a not so quick rundown of the three manuscripts at home in their drawer that no publisher will take, the inference being that they'd like the guest speaker to champion their masterpieces. Or they launch into a dissertation about how they, with their particular genius, interpreted the writer's work in a way that no-one else has ever done before and they've made a fifty point list of fascinating observations that they alone have uncovered which they would now like to share...

Cue groans.

I feel sorry for some of them, I do, the ones with their neediness so nakedly on display or those determinedly struggling with awkwardness so as to seize what they believe is their big moment, but at the same time, such behaviour seems rather obviously ill-mannered to me. Festival attendees are supposed to be smart people, yet some simply cannot comprehend that the audience has paid to hear pearls from the proven writer, not listen to the ramblings of floor stealers.

I suppose it's all human nature though, the kind of boorish behaviour that celebrities draw from certain types. You get the wannabes and attention seekers at conventions of all kinds, be the speaker a star of SF, a Wall Street predator imparting advice on how to smilingly rip money from the hands of the gullible masses, or a combination of the two, namely a Kardashian.

End of the Month Report: February 2014

Submissions:4
Rejections: 4 (the 4 I submitted)
Acceptances: 0
Published: 0
Stories out in the wild: 6
New stories completed: 1
Mood: My output was only a slight improvement on last month. Alas, just as I was building up steam, I was, as per usual, derailed by the Real World. I'm presently dragging myself out of a deep funk. The Arvo Job events of a few weeks ago hit me harder than I'd wanted (or been willing) to admit - first came the numbing shock, then the anger, then, unbeknownst even to myself for a goodly while, I slowly slid into a bluesy kind of place full of glum thoughts and the not much doing of stuff. But I've rallied and am tottering forwards. A nice weekend of writing, that's what I need to clear my system. Life is too short to waste too much headspace time on stuff one cannot control. Moving on.

Moving in a Direction that isn't Backwards

After a week of hot weather, fire horror stories, commuting problems, a major Arvo Job drama, hospital crap, a general queasiness pervading my days, and bulldozers razing a lovely, old garden to create a blitzed landscape up behind my house and across the boundaries of the two properties on either side of me, which has, by the by, completely changed the micro-climate of my backyard, I had a surprisingly lovely Sunday.

There was peace, there was quiet, there were cool breezes wafting through the house, there was much reading done (The Man Who Loved China by Simon Winchester), and after a couple of hours of sustained effort, there was a brand new story all finished on my hard drive just waiting for a polish in a week or two. And I submitted a story as well. I haven't done any submitting for quite a while, so I hope I've now reset my habits.

So there, I think I can get through next week now.

Everything Old is New Again.

Didn't we suspect all those keyboards were doing us no good, especially the kiddies?

Read on the train on the way home tonight, in the Age today, an article about the (for some) forgotten art of penmanship and all the competitive advantages of occasionally picking up a pen rather than always keyboarding it. Who knows, maybe in a year or two, self-proclaimed progressive schools all over the country will be putting out shiny brochures that tout their brain-enhancing, quill and parchment sessions in conjunction with their usual brain-shrinking, advanced computer skills classes:

Educational research has concluded that handwriting skills increase brain activation and also stimulate the learning process. At the University of Stavanger in Norway, magnetic resonance imaging research established a cognitive link between the haptics of writing by hand and the activation of the brain's sensorimotor system. That is, students writing by hand remembered letters better than those typing on a keyboard.

Studies undertaken at the University of Washington determined that students wrote faster and in more complete sentences when writing by hand as opposed to writing using a keyboard.

That is, the correlation between better handwriting skills and improved academic performance in reading and writing can no longer be ignored.

Children who have the capacity to write fluently, legibly and automatically are better equipped to generate and evaluate ideas, judge responses and organise their thoughts. Indeed, poor handwriters struggle to write down their ideas and will quit the writing process sooner than those who write fluently.
 

 

I Write, Uhm, Stuff...

The Locus Recommended Reading List for 2013 is up here. For once, thanks to my mighty e-reader and the easiness of downloading magazines as they come out, I'm a little more au fait with many of the works mentioned. As I scan the list this year, I can nod in approval, frown with disapproval, tut-tut and cheer, making it a far more participatory process.

And while you're over at Locus, stop for a quick read of Kameron Hurley's essay 'Making Excuses for Science Fiction'. I've been there. I still find myself there from time to time if I carelessly wander during a conversation. Mostly I just avoid telling people outside a certain group that I write because then they'll want to know what I write, and I don't want to go there because, like, you know, they wouldn't understand! Or so I tell myself. And often it's true - I can see the odd expressions on their faces. Mostly, it's just too hard.

Kameron Hurley also tackles geeky elitism as part of the problem, and  wisely writes:

Yet I contributed to this very narrative about my work. Instead of talking about my books as serious (or at least fun) literature, I found myself fall­ing into the same self-conscious trap I had as a kid, when I muttered about how I was writing a story about an expedition to Venus where the volcanos erupted with flowers. I said stuff like: ‘‘Oh, you probably won’t like it. It’s pretty weird,’’ or ‘‘It’s not for everyone,’’ or ‘‘You’ll only like it if you read a lot of science fiction.’’

I anticipated their reactions, and pulled my punches.

One might think I said these things in a pure fit of shame. But as I got older and moved in geekier and geekier circles with folks who loved the same books I did, I recognized that some of this was not shame, but pride. There was some elitism in it of the, ‘‘People like me just get this and you won’t’’ variety.

That’s not pulling a punch. That’s punching yourself in the face.

 And yet it all just boils down to telling stories and readers hopefully enjoying them. Why, oh why, must we complicate things?

End of the Month Report : January 2014

Submissions:1
Rejections: 4
Acceptances: 0
Published: 0
Stories out in the wild: 5
New stories completed: 0
Mood: Keep moving. Absolutely nothing to see here this month.

Friday Pay Off

So this morning I jotted 3 story ideas complete with titles in my trusty notebook, then took one of those possible tales out for a test run as I headed to the Arvo Job and wrote flat chat for an hour on the train this morning.

Ah, my brain is back, just in time for the upcoming long weekend. Now I can get on with things.

Finnegan Begin Again

January has been a bust writingwise, and in a general getting-things-done way with too much Real Life taking up all my time and energy, so I think, by necessity, I'll can my 2014 plan for hitting the ground running from day one, spend the last week of this month clearing the decks, lining up lists and projects, switch to the lunar cycle, shake off this false beginning and make the upcoming Year of the Horse my new starting line.

Year of the Horse. Now that sounds like my kind of a year! I'm not sure officially what the predictions are from those in the know, but since I don't believe in that kind of thing anyway, I can make it whatever I want it to be. I choose to make it just like horse riding - a speedy, exhilarating, going places, wind in my hair, slightly dangerous kind of a year interspersed with leisurely rambles through forests, beautiful scenery, good companionship, and much chatting.

Yep, that's a plan. Bring on the ponies.

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

This week was one of those just-get-through-it times with me trying to pace things so as to not to slide back into the Cold that Came for Christmas, negotiating an ad hoc transport system while they do maintenance on the train lines, and making it to the Arvo Job as much as possible (which turned out to be not very much at all) between a stretch of let's-start-the-year-with-a-round-of- hospital-crap. I made it to the weekend relatively intact, but no writing was done, so I'm catching up on bits and pieces today so as to set myself up for a more organised next week.

I did, however, get to see two writerly movies. After hospital crap late Friday afternoon, rather than head home during peak hour traffic, I treated myself to fried noodles, ice cream, and a movie no-one else I know wanted to see -  Saving Mr Banks - which still has me thinking about many aspects of storytelling. Australian born PL Travers ditched both her nationality (so crass) and her childhood name then reinvented herself as a British writer, used aspects of her own life to propel her Mary Poppins stories, then struggled with the idea of handing over her creation to someone she was convinced would rewrite the character. She knew the Disney populist version would swamp her rather stern and non-coddling nanny and turn Mary Poppins into a singing, twinkling, more sugary individual, and she was entirely correct. These days, when anyone thinks Mary Poppins, they think of Julie Andrews. And for the record, I adored that movie as a kid. But I feel for Travers and her loss of creative control. Unfortunately, Travers was broke. Backed into a corner, and fearful of poverty, she did the deal. Once more, penury forced an artist's hand. Still, she got to keep her house and was set up for life, which isn't to be sniffed at.

Anyway, I liked the idea of a movie about two creative people battling it out for their own version of a character, about popular entertainment versus literature, and all the layers of wondering how much of the real Walt Disney and PL Travers made it into movie and their various biographies, how much their own life stories informed their work, and how much they both used their work to redress the deprivations and wrongs of their childhoods. With the real lives and subsequent industry based on other writers' and filmfolks' interpretations of two such strong-minded individuals, there's much to sort through, and a lot of storytelling of both the truthful, not so truthful, and purely exploitative kinds to negotiate.

The other movie was The Book Thief, which also had many scenes to warm a writerly heart. I was told after the movie that I meaningfully aaaahed in certain places, which I don't usually do (how annoying!), but I'd say it would have been caused by me identifying with a young person who loves books and writing, and uses them as a calm focus to steady herself amidst the chaos and often cruel twists of our mortal existence.

If you're not one of those people who haunted libraries as a kid in search of Answers to Life's Mysteries and who views books as portals to other, often realer than Real Life places, then my behaviour is not something I can explain to you.

End of the Month Report: December 2013

Submissions:3
Rejections: 3
Acceptances: 1 (Sassanid Sands)
Published: 0
Stories out in the wild: 11
New stories completed: 0
Mood: I've got that usual end-of-the-old-year, I'm-definitely-going-to-pull-up-my-footy/writing-socks-and-kick-many-goals-in-the-new-year-no-matter-what-the-Fates-throw-at-me conviction, and am hoping I'll make good on it.

Now, time to brace myself for 2014.  Happy New Year everyone.

One Minute to Midnight Sale

It looks like my dark and sad little story Sassanid Sands has found a home, which is both a lovely end to my writing year as well as a welcome just-in-the-nick-of-time-to-count-as-a-2013 writing statistic to boost my less than spectacular sales tally.

With only a day of the year to go, I'd say that a few projects that were scheduled for 2013 but haven't happened yet will now be booted to 2014 (I hope so!) - such is the publishing industry - which will make my number of publications for this year take a sudden nosedive and give next year the appearance of being positively stuffed with stories (if more are sold, naturally).

It's been a slow year for me writingwise, but much crappy crap occurred, including another operation, treatments, and lots of energy leaking into the ether. Sometimes, to just keep moving is about the best you can hope for, and you have to make sure that you remember to be grateful for the fact that you are indeed capable of moving. I was mostly still able to do my Arvo Job duties, though with reduced hours, occasionally go horse riding, head off for a movie each week, get out and about to a few special events, visit friends, pat cats, read, and take care of day to day life. I only wrote four new stories from scratch this year, but have almost finished a few biggies that have been simmering a goodly while, and sold 5 stories.

For now, that's good enough.

Egg the Second

I thought it was a one-off event. Something of a miracle, really. I wasn't expecting a repeat performance. But today, 22 sleeps after the initial surprise, as I was going about my business, I spied this ovoid beauty from, presumably, the Chook nestling in one of the cats' cuddly sleeping thingies. It's beginning to feel a lot like Easter rather than ye olde Yule tyme.

Otherwise, I've been busy relaxing, looking for new writing markets (I found a few anthos that peaked my interest) and tidying up the work board over my desk, jotting down ideas, reading, and, of course, lovingly preparing the annual Danish Xmas food for Wednesday. It's best not to rush these things.

Nowhere Day

After lots of flat out, end of the year Arvo Jobbing (with two more days to go *sigh*), much Xmas busyness (and more to come) and a weekend of movies and horse riding etc, I gave myself permission to do absolutely nothing today. In fact, I insisted upon it. Apart from a reading, the hanging of Xmas lights out the back, and a few household tasks, I'm proud to announce that I napped a lot and accomplished my goal!

The weather helped, I have to admit. There's nothing like a really hot and daggy day to help one maintain low performance and stay on track to achieving not a single pre-determined target.

Alas, I did slip up a little. All my floating around with an offline brain proved conducive to ruminating upon story ideas, and even though I told the half-done tales that presented themselves that I was off for the day, a few notes were jotted. But nothing major! I swear!

Oh, and I did go 'yay' to an email about a story being held for consideration, but it was a very soft cheer. Hardly audible.

   

Kids Will Be Kids

I love it when archaeology gives us a glimpse into the everyday lives of past peoples and show us that some things just never change, thank goodness.

In the 1950s archaeologists made a great discovery near the city of Novgorod, Russia: they dug up hundreds of pieces of birch bark with all sorts of texts written on them. The 915 items are mostly letters, notes and receipts, all written between the 11th and 15th century

In the 13th century, young schoolboys learning to write filled these scraps with alphabets and short texts. Bark was ideal material for writing down things with such a short half-life. Then the pupils got bored and started to doodle, as kids do...

http://erikkwakkel.tumblr.com/post/67681966023/medieval-kids-doodles-on-birch-bark-heres

One of these doodling kids was a certain Onfim, who had dramatic daydreams indeed. You can read more about his artwork here: http://www.goldschp.net/SIG/onfim/onfim.html 

Onfim was being taught to write, but he was obviously restless with his lessons and when he could get away with it, he intermixed his assignments with doodlings. In this first example, he started to write out the first eleven letters of the alphabet in the upper right corner, but got bored and drew a picture of himself as a grown-up warrior impaling an enemy with his spear. To remove any doubt about the identity of the warrior, he even labelled the person on the horse as "Onfim."

I especially like the doodle with Onfim as a mini-warrior with his warrior Dad:

 Ah, kids. Give them a stick of chalk or a piece of bark...

Oh, What a Tangle of Cords We Weave

Today I recharged me with a sleep in and a couple of naps so I won't conk out at the Arvo Job over the next couple of days, and added some power to my iPod to prevent a catastrophic inability to access sanity-saving, mind-expanding but gentle-on-computer-strained-eyes audio books during my breaks. Strange to think I once scoffed the notion of listening to books.

 I also juiced up my mobile phone, mostly so I can receive texts as I hate talking on the thing in public, and topped up my notebook lest I find myself working away on a story on the train, tapping words in a rush of inspiration only to have the dreaded 'battery low' warning pop up, bringing on a mad scramble for old fashioned paper and a pen so I can capture a few shiny sentences before they disappear into the ether. And to think that once upon a time, I could only write in my non-moving study at my very own keyboard with no-one in the room and absolute silence around me. What a wuss I was.

 Last, but not least, I uploaded a new collection to my e-reader, and left the device to siphon energy so I can keep up with my now habitual daily intake of short stories (usually 2). It's turning out to be a real gem that e-reader. I'm getting a real feel for the work of different writers, and love the way I can now easily access collections I'm curious about.

So, I'm all powered up (and I'm a relative Philistine compared with many device-dependant people I know) and ready to hit the commuting trail again tomorrow.

Aaaaaah, only 2.5 weeks to the Christmas hols....

End of the Month Report: November 2013

Submissions: 9 (3 to the same antho)
Rejections: 6
Acceptances: 0
Published: 1 (Winds of Change)
Stories out in the wild: 11
New stories completed: 1 (has already been sent out and rejected for the first time)
Mood: Slowly but surely, I'm getting more done writingwise. Will now slowly but surely get on with doing some more :)