A Link of Neatness

Storms have raced through Brisbane. We missed the worst of them here, though the lightning was spectacular.

I've had a slowish day writing wise. Just a bit under six hundred words, but they were important words. I'm glad I took it easy, I'm actually quite anxious to hit the novel tomorrow. I've that deep desire to push ahead and take my characters with me, which I certainly didn't have today - though I now have a relatively clean fishpond, and a replacement pump for the one that died*. So, hey, the fish are winners and I'm hungry to write.

Talking of writing there's a fab interview with Angela Slatter here. Angela is one of the most talented writers I know and she has some words of wisdom. My favourite being "Your guiding light has to be desire." You can put that into context by following the link.

Angela's a writer to watch**. She has been for years now. Expect her to explode in the coming year. Not literally but literaturally (yes, I just lamely invented a word, see that's why I stopped at six hundred words today).

*Yes I have fish. Three gold fish, it used to be five, but one of the bigger fish got hungry...

**Which is just code for "Trent is extremely jealous of her talent."

Oh, and I'll also be doing this

Digital Pizza

7-9pm Tuesday 3 November - A cross-platform Writing Race with beginner, emerging and published authors. Held simultaneously at QWC and AWMonline, come on your own or grab your writing buddy, and join in this fun and productive casual writing group to boost your NaNoWriMo word count or just get your Write On for 2009!
Special guests: Writing Race Captain Kim Wilkins, online Captain Trent Jamieson

To get involved in Digital Pizza at QWC, call to book on 07 3839 1243
(cost: $10 on the door, towards pizza and goodies).

Wake up, Trent!

It's been a while since I've updated this blogs details. I mean, I didn't even have a link to Orbit in my linkage section, nor a reference to the Death Works books in my bio. Now that's just not on, I mean, talk about shooting yourself in the foot!

So, just in case you don't know. I have novels coming out in the next eighteen months. Three of them. They're about Death. Death in Australia. They're fast, they're funny, and people die in them. Lots of people. You can't write about Death, and not have death - well, you could I suppose, actually that would be a story in itself.

They also contain; something called an Orpheus Manoeuvre; Sentient muttering stone knives known as Bib and Bub; and a giant Moreton Bay Fig that extends in a creaking (always creaking) rickety way over an Underworld Brisbane. Think of that tree, over two kilometres high and branching out from Mt Coot-tha, it's massive root buttresses swinging down the mountain, blades of wood the size of a three-lane freeways cutting into the rich soil of the land of the dead.

I know, I keep on about it. But these books are very major part of my life right now, and I'm dying for people to read them. I want to know what people think about Steven de Selby - I mean, I love the guy, but he could do with a real kick sometimes - not to mention Lissa Jones, and the ominous Mr D.

In far less than twelve months I'll find out.

Scary.

Reviews

I've had a couple of stories out of late, which is nice because with the novels coming out next year I've not had a lot of time (well, no time) to write short stories. So my story in Aurealis and my novella in X6 are about the only fiction of mine that is likely to see the light of day until late 2010 - that said, I do have a few shorts on the backburner and they may get some work done on them after I finish book two this month, or I may just collapse in one corner of my study and stare blankly into space for a month.

Both stories have gotten some nice reviews over at Not if You Were the Last Short Story on Earth. The coolest thing is that the reviewers have gotten what I was trying to do - which, heaven help me means I might have actually managed to achieve it.

Jamieson develops a compelling galaxy riven by turmoil and - as clever storytellers manage* - balances it finely with a very personal love story. It's the sort of story that dragged me on: there was no way I could not know what happened to those characters.

Random Alex

An ambitious space opera in miniature, this novella has the real feel of an old-fashioned SF adventure. Except for the fact that old-fashioned SF adventures usually bore the pants off me! This one has an appealingly flawed protagonist, a compelling AI whose voice gets creepier and more interesting with every new insight into its point-of-view, and some damn good writing. I particularly like the exploration of the relationship between Jack (human) and Trip (cat/AI/ship), which evokes the classic Ship Who Sang issues in a New Millenium kind of way. I also suspect deeply that there's some Stainless Steel Rat homage going on in here - and if not, it certainly has that feel to it!

Tansy Rayner Roberts

How cool. Good reviews are nice when you get 'em, though I never expect them, because, to be brutally honest, by the time a story has seen print I am usually over it - the flavours been chewed out of it and all I can see are large passages of clunk and things I would do differently because of the stuff I've learnt writing the story in the first place and writing subsequent stories. I'm a person very suspicious of my prose.

Still, Iron Temple was my first - and probably last - real stab at Space Opera and I was chasing some big dashes of rollick leavened with melancholy and, for two readers at least it, worked.

Tansy had nice things to say about my Aurealis story too - Neighbourhood of Dead Monsters. Which is very cool because I like to impress Tansy, she's one of my perfect readers (as well as being a very exciting writer and ROR mate) but very hard to please - happens when perfect reader meets less than perfect writer - so I'm always chuffed if she likes one of mine.

On the matter of X6, I'm reading the novellas now, and they're very good - seriously, I'm still bowled over that I'm in there, really, it's some very excellent real estate.

Which segues to:

I'll be in Sydney Thursday week for the book launch.

Details below.

Berkelouw Books Leichhardt (upstairs) 70 Norton Street, Leichhardt NSW Thursday 12th November, 2009 7.00pm

Come along if you're in the area, it's going to be a lot of fun.

*Blush

Tomorrow

is a big day. The death march for Death Most Demanding's structural edits. I know it's as good as I can get it, but there's always that desire to do a little more (Tempered by the feeling that every sentence is clunky and every character's motivations suspect) and fear that I haven't done enough - or, conversely too much.

I'm itching to get Managing Death finished. I love my protag. Steven de Selby is fun to write, but you can spend too much time in a single character's head, and I've spent most of 2009 in Steven's head (or he's spent it in mine). I worry about him a lot. He's not a hero in the traditional sense and he goes to some pretty dark places - the kind of things I obsess about in my writing like they're a sore tooth that you can't stop running your tongue over until it bleeds.

Not the healthiest mind set to constantly inhabit. I'm looking forward to a couple of weeks off in January. Though I really want to see him through to the end of the next book, things only grow darker and I don't like leaving my characters alone. You know how it is.

Finally

the rain has come, the roof is singing, and I’m in the middle of my final read through of my structural edits for Death Most Definite. The book is going off to Orbit no later than Wednesday, and I’m doing a desperate last minute rush to make sure there are as few discrepancies, typos and passive sentences as possible for the next stage – the copyedit.

At this stage I am far too close to the novel to do anything but this line-by-line focus. I can’t tell if it works, if the pacing is right, if it even makes sense. Fairly standard feelings at this stage in the lifecycle of writing a book. At the same time I’m beating book two Managing Death into shape, there are some scenes in that novel that I am very proud of. In this final stage of getting the draft completed things are still exciting to me, but I can feel the lure of book three The Business of Death on the horizon – which is about right too.

Well, head down, arse up. There's books to be written.

Once a month

does not a vibrant blog make.

I'll be better, I promise.

This is my favourite little ramble-home, knitted up with my lit loves, and I've been so neglectful of late. That's because deadlines loom and the world has been a bit nasty (as the world often is - not to say that it isn't also wonderful, but it's a wonderful with teeth and an ironic sense of humour).

But I'll find more words for this space. Dear little blog has grown most gaunt, and for no reason but my own distraction.

It's draw a line in the sand time at Trentonomicon. Starting now.

Current things that excite me include:

1. Nearly finishing Managing Death - it's getting close, very close.

2.Jeff Vandermeer's new novel Finch - I was lucky enough to hear him read from it, which is really lucky considering the rather large distances that separate Qld from Florida.

3.My little bookclub at Avid. The Science Fiction Sunday folk who have let me and my partner in crime Paul Landymore direct their reading these last twelve months with everything from Moorcock to Mirrlees and de Pierres. We just finished reading Lud-in-the-Mist. How many reading groups read Lud-in-the-Mist after reading Behold the Man? They're a great bunch - and any Brisbanites are invited to join follow this link

4.My wife who has finally entered the digital age and bought a lap-top. A greater leap I have never seen her take. Of course, she always excites me - who else puts up with my jokes.

5.The possibility of rain tomorrow. Three wet days. All I need to blast deadlines into oblivion.

I'll let you know about 5, and 1 soon. Though 2 threatens to stall 1. 2 is extremely hard to resist - but I must, though we'll probably discuss it in 3. I wonder if 4 will check up on this?

So

it's been quiet. Quiet is good. Quiet means that I've been busy, and that I've been working. And I always figure that it's better to be quiet here, than quiet on the writing front.

X6 is out. I finally picked it up from the PO box a few days ago - well, Diana did, bless her wonderful peripatetic heart. It's a fabulous looking volume. I haven't had a chance to do more than dip into it, but it looks great and anything that contains novellas by Margo Lanagan, Paul Haines, Cat Sparks, Terry Dowling, and Louise Katz is a must hunt down and buy at all costs.

You can check it out here.

For Me it's All About Being Creative

Writing is about play.

For me that's the most important part. It's the joyous fusion of words to make cool sentences and stories. The snout that sniffs after obsessions. It's about making shit up. It's about getting into someone else's head with the most elegant and inadequate tool we possess. It's about yelling, look at me! Before you tumble into a heap. It's about being the fool, and the oracle, and hoping that your stuff doesn't stink too badly.

Writing is about surprising yourself. It's a ship of verse, a rattling hearse with two flat tyres. It's sitting on your arse and typing till your fingers ache and your eyes burn. It's scrawling in notebooks on the bus.

It's the most terrifying thing I do.