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:
Once again we find ourselves rocketing towards the Aussie Natcon, which means that it’s once more Ditmar Awards season. I hereby give you my annual shameless self-promoting blog post 🙂 the usual disclaimers apply, this list of my eligible works is for information only, and you should of course be nominating the works that you found most worthy or awesome. Rumours of a Jason Fischer Ditmar pork-barrel are sadly exaggerated, and it seems it’s merit or nothing, until some sort of SF pun category sees the light of day (man, I’d be a SHOE-IN).
There’s a scarily comprehensive wiki being maintained, a pretty thorough list of what Aussie genre writers published in 2010. The relevant page can be found here: http://wiki.sf.org.au/2011_Ditmar_eligibility_list , but to make life easier for you, here are my eligible stories for the 2011 Ditmar Awards.
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Best Novella or Novellette
gunning for a tinkerman, Aurealis Magazine #44
Best Short Story
The House of Nameless, Writers of the Future Vol XXVI
The School Bus, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #46 (Highly Recommended, HorrorScope 2010 Recommended Reading List)
If you haven’t read any of these works or can’t get hold of them, please comment here, or send me an email at mail AT jasonfischer DOT com DOT au. I will hook you up with a reading copy of any of these, most likely electronic. I’ve made sure to get clearance from the publisher of Writers of the Future to share my winning story for this sort of purpose, so if you couldn’t get hold of the anthology and want to have a peek at my tale, please let me know.
I always take my Ditmar voting very seriously, and put quite a bit of effort into my nomination sheet, often rocking the establishment by not voting solely for myself in every category 🙂 I’m gonna go away and think about what other folks did in 2010 that rocked my socks, and will most likely post a list of this stuff when I figure it all out.
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.
…is mostly for Peter M Ball, but too good not to share. You may remember this song from about 10 years ago, but I bet you don’t remember the GODDAMN MAD MAX FILM CLIP. Awesome.
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.
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.
