Professionalism

I’ve kinda neglected the blogging a bit lately – call it a spurt of professionalism, in that I only wanted to blog Things Of Note and not just pollute my new site with rubbish jokes, pictures of stupid stuff I found funny, and all of the crimes against humour that I committed on my old Livejournal site since 2007 or so.  I tend now to email this stuff to a select few and spare the greater world my special brand of spam 🙂

Still, I’ve rethought this approach, particularly as my parents even read this to find out what’s going on and I’ve been more or less silent, barring some writing-related news.  There seems to be a cast-iron infallible belief amongst many aspirant writers that, above all else, you have to be professional at all times, and conduct yourself with perfect decorum in your online life, and most definitely in person when you are at cons or what have you.

To a point, yes, this is true.  This is a job, in every sense of the word, and you need to be somewhat professional when it comes to your bread-and-butter income (or what you hope will be one day).  But I think you’re also allowed to be human, with all sorts of opinions, anecdotes, world experience and yes, the humour.  One thing that brought this home was an awesomely cool moment at Writers of the Future.  The good people at Locus throw a Charles Brown Memorial Party for the contestants and judges, and it’s basically a big room party with drinks and nibblies, where you get to chat to the judges in an informal setting.

Without going into the details, a few of us sat down with the lovely Mike Resnick and heard at least a couple hours worth of juicy anecdotes from the Golden Age and onwards, of all sorts of salacious and downright hilarious behaviour engaged in by our illustrious genre forebears.  And to our shame, pretty much nothing any of us had could even hope to match any of these tales, in terms of a good room-party story.

In the collective striving to Be Professional, we really have become kinda boring.  In many instances, this is a good thing, don’t get me wrong.  Someone acting in a truly offensive or nasty way will deservedly blacklist themselves or at least lose some readers, particularly in such a close-knit community.  And there’s really no excuse for certain sorts of humour or behaviour – some of those old school anecdotes related things I’d never want to be connected with, not if I wanted to show my face in public afterwards 🙂

Still, maybe once in a while, I’ll put some funny or personal stuff on here, maybe even an opinion on something – whenever I read someone else’s online leavings, that’s the stuff that keeps it all interesting, and this Bloggeth-Only-That-of-Note has kinda left the place a bit sterile, something that I’ve only been poking at with the greatest of care.

Bugger that.  I’m back, baby 🙂

Goings on

The writing has been kicking along quite nicely.  I’ve recently handed in the completed “After the World: Corpus Christi”, the sequel to Gravesend.  I found it quite challenging to revisit previously established characters, and went way over the set word-limit for the piece.  Gravesend fell out of my head with barely any struggle, but this one was a little bit more work.  Thankfully I got most of it sorted out in the redraft and have left some interesting plot-lines for what I hope will be my third novella in the series.  Working title?  “Esprit De Corpse” 🙂

With that done, I’ve started work on an interesting work-for-hire project that I’ve been accepted into, a short story for a pro-rates anthology.  I’m gonna be boring and not talk about this too much until it’s all official.  I’m not sure if it’s under embargo but you can’t be too careful.  Again, it’s great fun working in someone else’s universe and I find that I’m up to the challenges this brings.

Once that’s sorted, I’ve got several freshly minted short stories to polish up and get out into submissions land (inc. my WOTF 24 hour story – these have a historically high success rate), and a much longer project that I’m playing around with at the moment.  I don’t want to use the “N” word and jinx myself, but there are notes and there is a passion for the story, which is more than I can say for the dead-in-the-water Candlecraft.  RIP, you brave but ultimately flawed idea.

Absurdity

Toddler Fisch is the light of my life, goes without saying.  At almost 2 years old now, he’s got a real personality and a great little sense of humour.  He’s known for busting in on my writing sessions and wanting me to play him crazy stuff on the computer, and he won’t give up until I’ve Googled up pictures or videos of Postman Pat, Dora the Explorer, or his all-time favourite, cars & trucks, and the “WOW!”-worthy favourite, construction equipment.

That is how I stumbled upon this little beauty, shared for your amusement.  There is apparently a DVD of children’s songs dedicated to trucks and construction equipment, which is a cool idea for those times when a tantrum seems nigh unbreakable.  But the end result?  Just has to be seen to be believed.  I never thought I’d hear a downbeat, angsty children’s song about an excavator, and they were definitely pushing it with some of the lyrics.  I love the spoken verse mid song, and get the feeling this is a broken-hearts song retrofitted to make a quick buck.

Still, Toddler Fisch bloody loves it, so they must be onto something.

“This is the work I really love, because THAT’S WHAT AN EXCAVATOR DOES”