Having been a luddite for some time, I’ve finally dragged myself into the 21st century, kicking and screaming (well, grumbling and shuffling). I…I should have done it sooner. It’s really not that scary, and all quite useful and informative. Given that my method of gaining most writer-type news was second hand or via the erstwhile LiveJournal, it’s nice to not be out of the loop on things.

I’m now twitting over at Twitter, and my handle is @jasonifischerio

I’m also at Facebook now, and can be found at http://www.facebook.com/jasonifischerio. All going well, this post should port directly to Facebook, my luddite fingers are crossed. Couldn’t get the dratted thing to work, have kicked Networked Blogs app to the KERB.

Carry on! [dusts off his semaphore flags]

Just trying out the embedding of You-Tube clips via WordPress…was having some troubles, but an update looks like it stops the code from just dropping off the page when I hit update. It’s been flipping ages since I got a video clip to work on this site. To my sadness though, I seem to have lost the awesome banner that Nyssa Pascoe designed for me. Sigh.

It seems fitting that the attempt at embeddery is used to share the most ridiculous Gunners song. I think that “So Fine” was recorded as a joke, but it is hard to dislodge this early 90s ear-worm. I apologise for the excessive shots of Axl Rose’s junk, which the white shorts do little to disguise (or indeed, flatter).

The flash-fiction collective known as the Daily Cabal is winding its way to a dignified end, and myself and several of the previous contributors have given final short pieces of fiction to the site by way of goodbye.

My own piece “Shore-Birth” can be found at the following link:

http://www.dailycabal.com/2011/03/shore-birth/

This piece has much meaning for me, and I wrote it shortly after my son was born, and we first dipped his new toes into an almost still sea, on a weird muggy day. It became the opening for a much longer story, but I could never quite get it to work. This story narrates the birth (or rebirth) of Raoul Mithras, the protagonist of my WOTF winning story “The House of Nameless”.

So a story about birth amongst death seems an appropriate send-off for a noble venture. Something like four solid years of flash fiction, updated daily. Previous writers for the Daily Cabal included Angela Slatter, Sara Genge, Jeremiah Tolbert, Luc Reid, Daniel Braum, and Jason Erik Lundberg amongst many other talented and prodigious scribblers. Thanks for having me folks, it was a blast!

If a rebellious commoner in revolutionary France wore happy pants, would he be a Comic Sans Culottes?

Oh yes, I’ll admit it.  I’m a dirty double-spacer, and everytime I hit a full stop, it’s automatically followed with a rapid tap-tap! of that big key on the bottom.  I’ve been typing like this since forever, the practise instilled into me during typing class at high school (yes, I did this, and yes, I was the only boy).  By all accounts this was a standard business practice, even during the early-mid 90s, and some folks in the class questioned this.  Not only was it part of the curriculum, it was in all the style guides and text books, and religiously adhered to.  So, when we all learned to type without looking at the keys, we also had the double-tap drummed into us, much like the protagonist in Zombieland.  And this was in the era where PCs were already widely in use, and the nascent internet was just kicking off, so I’m not a crusty old typewriter fetishist (okay, I’m that too, but that’s a revelation for another day).  I honestly didn’t even hear about the “OMG how dare they double-space” brigade until a few months back.

So yeah, nowadays some publishers are requesting that the extra space go the way of the dodo, and it’s even occasionally in the submission guidelines.  I’m pretty sure WordPress takes the space out, to protect me from myself, and I’m starting to run a Find+Replace before submitting my fiction to markets, replacing all instances of two spaces with one space.  It’s just another thing to think about, but I’ve resigned myself to the fact that it’s a bugbear for many folks, and I just have to take a concrete pill and harden up.

But…I don’t see what the big deal is.  Some folks see that extra space and assume that I also kick puppies and push old people down the stairs.  The double-space is completely invisible to me, and I personally never notice these supposedly horrific gaping chasms of white space in the average manuscript (which is *already* double-spaced vertically, with tonnes of room for comments and editorial jottings).

I’ll do it, but I think it’s bloody pedantic and I don’t mind saying so.

Some time ago, I came to the realisation that, if I wanted to be a professional writer, I was going to have to sacrifice my one great love, the humble video game. Given that I favour time-sucking strategy games and RPGs, this was a wise decision. However, all work and no play makes me a grumpy sod, so once a year I down tools and scratch that itch for a month or so. Last year it was Fallout 3 and all of the Thief games, this time around I’ve dusted off the PS2 and rented me some pixellated goodness. Given that the end of 2010 was frantic writing-wise, and that a huuuge stretch of writing is about to kick off, this is some well-earnt me time and I’ve loved every button-mashing minute.

Silent Hill: Origins

I’ve quite liked this series; its weird, moody atmospherics, the resource scrabble reminiscent of the Resident Evil games, and just a shade of old school survival horror, looking back to the original Alone in the Dark.  Good times.  This is a prequel of sorts to the Silent Hill series, but effectively it’s more of the same stuff – you trudge through a haunted hospital, a haunted loony-bin, a haunted theatre and then a haunted hotel.  Oh, and there’s another mirror world underneath all this stuff that is even creepier.  You basically need to hit up the walk-through if you want to finish this game in under six months, lots of puzzles and to-and-froing.  When I got to the haunted hotel, and saw how much stuff I had to do, I will admit that I ejected the disc in disgust.  That’s cool though, cause next up was:

Star Wars: Battlefront

Yay!  I’m in an X-wing, I’m in an AT-ST, now I’m a wookie!  Pew pew pew!  Great fun, drop it like it’s Hoth.

Civilisation IV

My long beloved time-sucking computer mistress.  This game has carved away perhaps a year of my life in total?  Worth every second.  Settlers make cities, cities make units, units make with the turn-based conquest.  I have all of the expansions for this, and must say I was never too enamoured of Beyond the Sword – it was just too busy, and with the addition of Espionage and Corporations, there was just too much going on for me to enjoy this game.  Micro-managers might dig that level of control, but I just want to jam a trireme full of vikings and just wreck someone’s shit.  So I’ve been cranking out Civ IV: Warlords, and a cool fantasy mod (Fall From Heaven) for the original Civ IV itself.

So I’ve officially had my gaming fix, and now I’m onto the outstanding submissions, doing some long-overdue edits, and I have a particular story up on the blocks for a complete rebuild.  Once that’s done, I’m going to stomp 2011 in the face, and exciting times await!

Me: “So, there’s this new 13th zodiac sign, and turns out it’s actually mine”

Workmate: “Really, what’s the name of it?”

Me: “It’s Fisch’s.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiuchus

(true, it is mine!)