Tag Archives: gauntlet

State of the Gauntlet

Writing

I’ll admit, there was a recent moment of doubt. A respectable pile of writing and auxilliary writing goals was starting to pile up on me there. There’s a looming grant application, Project Lucy, some extensive edits for a commissioned piece, and the workload for Midnight Echo #6, just to name some of the stuff that appeared all at once, and needed to be addressed pretty damn quickly (some goals were self imposed, several of them contingent on outside factors such as deadlines, or the scornful mockery of Peter M Ball). 

Woe is me, I cried. How will I ever prune back this growing pile of wordy goals?

I wrote down a to-do list, I listened to some 80s hair metal, made myself a cuppa, and I then proceeded to stay up late and punch said list square in the junk. I finished the mop-up of auxilliary goals with a solid slab of Project Lucy, and it felt awesome 🙂 so there is proof positive, elbow grease can get you out of just about any jam.

Also, the Gauntlet theme music du jour is as follows:

The Incremental Growth of Lucy, and Some Random Thoughts

Funny/WTF?, Writing

Found an hour and a bit of time last night, and poured just over 700 words into Project Lucy. Nice! Good words too, which makes me feel quite happy given that a sustainable target when writing 1st draft is supposed to be about 500 words/hour.

Now, for some random thoughts that have been bugging me:

  • Is “Monkey” technically a road movie?
  • What do the soldiers in the recent Transformers movies actually do? They seem to pose a lot with guns, say snappy one-liners, and not much else. They shoot at the Decepticons in places, but do they ever actually kill any of them?  What is the point of these dudes?
  • If you take out Jar-Jar Binks and the painful rail-roading of Anakin into Darth Vader, are the first three Star Wars movies actually okay?  I’m much more forgiving of them these days.

The Medieval Ski-Glove Smack-Down

Writing,

So yeah, Gauntlet, steely fists etc. I have officially succeeded in getting a whole bunch of little things done by procrastinating on the one big scary task, which I count as a partial win due to achieving stuff.  But with no excuses left, I have embarked upon my not-so-secret project.  But because saying “jesusman novel and arts grant application” is a mouthful at best, I shall henceforth refer to this gauntletty project as Lucy, in a somewhat mysterious fashion 🙂

Like many other writer folks, I’ve come into the game equipped with all sorts of deceptive and counter-productive fail-safes hardwired into my brain.  Almost immediately I’ve run into one of my personal favourites, which is “OMG it’s not looking as good on paper as it does in my brain.”  And folks, I do this EVERY SINGLE TIME, even though I know it’s bollocks, and simply the natural inclination of the Fisch to follow the path of least resistance. 

That’s not how a gauntleteer should roll, hell no. Enter bogan tunes, steely-eyed determination, and the application of a concrete pill.  You simply take one, and harden the fuck up 🙂

My usual method of writing is to kinda do a 1st and 2nd draft at the same time, because I cannot cope with poking at a dog’s breakfast every evening, and I almost always do a quick skim-through and fix a few things up before I add to the congealing mass.  It’s not the worst way to go about things, but it sometimes takes a little while to really get things going. A 2-3 hour writing session seems to be about the optimum window of productivity. 

I have true admiration for anyone who can squeeze into twenty spare minutes and just crank out a bunch of new words!  I can do it this way but it’s like pulling teeth and I basically need to hire a hitman just to tap me on the back of the head with a dirty great gun, every time my thoughts wander, or if I think about engaging in internet faffery. In the perfect world, Peter would bring the medieval ski-glove smack-down whilst yelling the equivalent of “JUST WRITE, BEYOTCH!” (while effortlessly pulling another masterpiece out of his fundament) but he’s in Queensland suffering the various wraths of nature, and there’s only so much corrective motivation that can be delivered cross-continent. Fisch, it’s truly up to you mate.  One man and his Lucy.

From the depths of Gauntlet 2011

Writing
  • Working every night, and not faffing around online.  Being in the right mindset is good, and consistent productivity is a good feeling.
  • Have polished up and sent out a formidable phalanx of short story submissions…struck at the trunk stories with a vengeance, in some instances completely rewriting them.  Only one left to do, the remainder of the trunk is actually godawful and beyond salvage.
  • An important email went missing, and lo, I did weep, gnash my teeth, and turn on my “read receipts” option in Outlook.  Yet 5000 lolcat pictures went through that day, no worries.  DAMN YOU MURPHY’S LAW.
  • Drawing together names and background detail for an upcoming project, looking in the strangest of places.  Scanning through a Thomas the Tank Engine toy catalogue, I find a character by the name of Rheneas.  “OMG” quoth the Fisch, “I must use that name, for it is the shizzle”.  Turns out it exists nowhere but the Island of Sodor, and as such is guarded by the fell beasts of Copyright.  Fie on you, Reverend W. Audrey, you name-hogging train nerd.
  • Gauntlet continues, transmission ends.

The Gauntlet is DOWN

Writing

The origins of the Gauntlet are somewhat lost to the mists of time, but sometime after Clarion South 2007, a bunch of us survivors slapped the bejesus out of each other with virtual metal gloves, challenging one another to write like one possessed, cranking out a stupid amount of work in a very short time.  A bit like Nanowrimo, perhaps, but on a smaller scale and with many more friendly insults.

From time to time, it serves us well to blow the dust off the Fists of Steel, declare “GAUNTLET!!!” and have at the keyboard.  Now is such a time.  Following the fallow period that was Video Game January, my legendary ink-brother Peter Ball and I are taking 2011 by the throat and making it whimper.  We’ve both got a bunch of writing goals that need meeting, and there’s only one thing for it:

I won’t be posting much in the way of word-counter thingies or updates, it’s sort of a personal superstition and I just don’t enjoy being publicly accountable if I have a crappy day or if Toddler Fisch/Real Life hijacks a writing session.  But know this, there’s eye-strain and bad 80s music and a stupid amount of writing going on, up till March or so.  It’s on, beyotches.