deborahb

Not so shiny: Plenty of drama for Buffy creator Joss Whedon
– Bernard Zuel, Sydney Morning Herald, August 25, 2010

More seriously, he says that the cancellation of Firefly not only made him “the sourest man alive” but had an unexpected and potentially devastating side effect.

“I stopped having ideas, which for me is an extremely rare experience,” Whedon says. “It was something much more subtle [than losing hope], it took away my ability to think in terms of episodic television. For years.”

[snip]

“You have to have a certain naivety, almost Memento-like, and get bitch-slapped over and over. You’ve got to go in with an enormous amount of confidence because everyone is going to question everything you do. You have to be the person who believes when nobody else does.”

It seems that rather than the five stages of grief, for writers there is just one stage: wiping your memory and starting again, like the characters in Dollhouse.

“Yeah, pretty much. Anger, anger, anger. Anger. Bargaining,” he deadpans.

It was bittersweet being at the LAST Fantastic Queensland AA ceremony. Before FQ took over, I never even attended an AA event. But they made such a classy event out of it that eventually I found I couldn’t NOT attend. I’m looking forward to hearing which brave souls take up the baton. (I was about to add something about continuing the legacy, but realised what an appalling mixed metaphor that would be.)

To no one’s surprise, Greg Egan took out Best Collection. But the real intrigue of the evening lay in discovering what would happen when he did. Egan has famously removed himself from award lists for long enough that I forget why he ever did it in the first place. And he’s so notoriously private that I’ve only ever met 2 people who claim to have met him. (This fact amused my non-fandom bf so much he later used it to claim that HE, in fact, was Greg Egan & he’d been looking for a way to break it to me for the past several years.)

But since neither of the 2 Egan-witnesses can actually describe him, I figure Egan a) carries one of those Men in Black memory zappers, or b) moves in complete darkness.

So: what would happen at the moment his name was called? Would he spring from the audience on legs like pistons (a la Burton’s apes from his awful re-imagined Planet of the Apes movie), screaming his disapproval at the audience, smashing the award on the back wall of the hall and disappearing wrathfully into the night? Would he instead descend demurely, accept his award & apologise for never calling or dropping by, while we all sat mutely thinking, “So THAT’S what he looks like?”

And, did he actually DO either or both of those things before donning dark glasses and holding up his MIB memory zapper?

Because what I *remember* happening is a petite female publishing rep descending to the microphone & accepting the award on behalf of the publishers (not, notably, on behalf of Greg) & commenting that Gollancz was pleased we liked Greg’s stories.

(Those of us with more acute hearing picked up the unuttered phrase that followed: that she was maybe a little sorry that Greg didn’t like that we liked his stories.)

There were some other marvellous moments in the evening: Haines getting TWO best horror awards & giving my favourite speech of the evening (my favourite speeches are almost always the shortest ones , the establishment of the Chris Hembry award for promising new writers; and the granting of the Peter McNamara award for service to the community to Justin Ackroyd. Much deserved & long overdue! Justin’s support of the community is outstanding. For me alone he’s encouraged my involvement in fandom, he’s babysat me at my first couple of WFCs, he’s added my name to his ‘best of 2009′ book list — AND he’s personally sold (& sold out) of A Book of Endings in Melbourne, where he’s been selling books for 33 years.

That, my friends, was a blast to witness!

Also there was drinking & carousing (even if those 2 words mean the same thing) & laughs & catching up with fabulous people & then collapsing for about 24 hours straight in our free upgrade of a hotel room. All of which was a delight & a wonderful start to the writing year. Happy Year of the Tiger, everyone!

Now, back to work.

One of the opportunities A Book of Endings created was the chance to get my writing in front of a wider audience. To see what the rest of the world might think. The Australian genre scene is so warm & welcoming that I’d grown suspicious of the kind words occasionally attributed to my work in reviews & conversations.

So I pinged a couple of wider-stream review sources to see if, well, if the Emperor really was wearing any clothes.

The Syd Uni Alumni review came out first & said: “These are unnerving and elliptical, in the main, and tread a fine line between the everyday mundaneity that never is and overblown literary style that can be tiresome when too self-conscious. Mostly they stay on the right side of the line and intrigue more than irritate.”

Yes, I spotted it, too. “Mostly”. But that’s cool. Given the book is largely retrospective I could even entertain the idea that maybe the irritating ones were the early ones, and the new ones are better. Hell, I’m occasionally optimistic that way.

The Short Review is a site dedicated to short story writing, & is definitely worth checking out. Of my book, reviewer Mario Guslandi said, “Deborah Biancotti’s debut collection left me both hopeful and frustrated. Here we have a writer with a great potential, able to produce some outstanding stories, who, unfortunately, often wastes her talent writing tasteless pieces with implausible plots and nondescript characters. When inspired, Biancotti is a top notch author. When uninspired, the author of mediocre tales can irritate, in view of what she can do when at the top of her game.”

I know, I know. Now you, like me, want to know which are the tasteless stories!

Well, I guess taste is a matter of … erm, taste. So I can’t fault Guslandi for his passionate chastisement of my choice of writing subjects. Though I am curious about it. Maybe I’ll email him to find out what he means. Since he also reviews for SF Site, infinity plus, Horrorworld and Alien Online, it’s certainly not that he’s NOT a genre reader — which would be the easiest out.

Guslandi then go on to discuss the “five sparkling gems” of the book — and this is the really interesting stuff, I find: I love finding out what stories *worked* for people. There’s no predicting it, and here again I’m surprised to find what he enjoyed the most. If I’d had to choose my 5 best stories, would I have chosen these? … Hmmm. Maybe not.

If you’ve read the book, I’d love to know what stories worked for you — & what you found positively TASTELESS! Comment or email as is your will, noble readers.

… turns out you can still buy Redsine #7, edited by Trent Jamieson & Garry Nurrish, from about 2002.

I loved Redsine and always wished it had continued for longer. It was a classy zine, and short (a good characteristic for a zine, imho: one-sitting-reading always scores well with me).

And I love it not only because it was the home of my second-ever published (and first-ever completed) story, Silicon Cast — which is, ahem, *also* still available thanks to GoogleBooks. Well, in part.

Not sure how I feel about that. *pauses to reflect* Well, pretty relaxed.

Silicon Cast feels very young to me now, but still has a relatively straight-forward horror narrative that makes me grin. I do love a bit of ‘ew’ in my reading. Terry Dowling, my first teacher, read this over for me when I was struggling and it was certainly in part because of his encouragement that I ever continued with writing. And yes, you can read a hardcopy version in A Book of Endings if you’re so inclined.

Anyhow. If you read the full version, let me know what you think of the story!

Honestly? I got into short stories because it seemed like a good way to learn to write. It’s become much more than that, of course, but I’ve not paused very often to think about what place they do have for me, and further what place they have for readers.

I’ve been surprised by the amount of interest in A Book of Endings, for example, and overwhelmed by the response of readers. Enough of my friends not only bought the book but *read* it to make me think people actually are interested in the short form. When challenged, plenty of my friends were adamant that yes, they really did like reading short stories even before my book came along and yes, they weren’t just buying it out of sympathy (though I suspect some of them were!) that I thought I’d overlooked something.

I admit I always thought short stories were rather esoteric, enjoyed more by writers than readers. Short stories are often a harder read than novels, I think. Because you have to pay attention the whole way through. Novels you can drift in and out, doze off on a daybed, miss a few words because the hammock is swinging too hard — all those hiccups that occur in perfect reading fantasies. But overall it’s easier to keep track of a novel because even if you miss bits the narrative spine will hopefully pull you through.

So I was still surprised when I read this in the Syd Uni Alumni magazine review of A Book of Endings: “Biancotti is further proof of why readers enjoy the short story, even though publishers prefer to pretend we don’t.”

And over here at the Guardian, some discussion about why women, in particular, are being recognised in the short story field (are they? well, isn’t that good news).

Short stories, on the other hand, are famously uncommercial; that, coupled with the perceived exactingness of the form and its heavyweight literary lineage, means that short stories by women are taken seriously – and awarded accordingly.

That would be ironic if true: women gain more recognition in short stories because short stories aren’t coveted by publishers either.

I made it. With the emailing of the full draft of my 21st Century Gothic essay on NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, I’m done. That’s it. I’ve met my deadlines for 2009. Which is remarkable because for a while there I thought I wasn’t going to make it.

(I think I made it by going a little crazy for a while.)

Of course, a lot of those deadlines were for A BOOK OF ENDINGS (six new stories, yours now via Twelfth Planet Press!), but the timetable of 2009 work made it all the way into December. Now I’ve got to start thinking about my timetable for (*gulp*) 2010. Something a little calmer, I hope, though I maybe have just signed up for another Gilgamesh project. And there’s editing for the contemporary Ishtar story soon, most likely.

Anyhoooo, the essay. It’s in & it may or may not coherently argue that the battle of good (Sheriff Bell) and evil (Anton Chigurh) for the soul of one man (Llewellyn Moss), the elements of the supernatural, the voice of despair, the struggle to believe in a God who seems less involved in the world than Satan are all Gothic elements of this modern novel. There’s other stuff, too. I refer to Anne Radcliffe and Terminator in about equal measures, and naturally I mention MELMOTH THE WANDERER more than once.

But here’s the thing: I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about gothic literature. Turns out I’m not that knowledgeable at all. It impresses me how much trust esteemed editor Danel Olson has placed in his extensive contributor list (2 volumes!).

Plus, essays. Wow, I’d forgotten how hard they can be.

For now, though, the next steps are to return to the fun stuff. My stuff. The BROKEN novel. I’d left off with John Eiger about to — well, let’s just say he could be making a big mistake.

Man, I love when characters make big mistakes. I love sitting alongside them thinking, ‘oooooohhh, buddy, you’re in trouble now….’.

But tonight some rest and something new to read that *isn’t* NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. I’m thinking it’s time to return to some Michael Robotham.

I’ve had some shitty day jobs.

There was the mortgage-processing job, where the boss was at great pains on day 1 to tell me about the culture of ‘no blame, only teamwork’. And two months in when I uncovered an error that had been made with some mortgage cheques, he tried to guilt-trip me about the costly solution he’d have to implement — apparently assuming that because I’d uncovered the error, I’d also made it. (I hadn’t.)

There was the workplace I refer to as the Toxic Avenger, where my last defiant act was to act as a witness in a formal complaint of corporate bullying. I hadn’t really considered the aggressive, ignorant behaviour of my superiors to be bullying until I went to HR for something else & they showed me a copy of the Anti-Bullying Policy. Which was about when I realised that no one had ever described my exec director as accurately as that document. He was also a liar, but the policy didn’t cover that.

There was the Narcissism Is Me workplace, where the MD was prone to sending self-pitying emails to all staff about stuff he’d decided to take personally: staff leaving, staff not filling in their timesheets, staff calling him a moron (oh, wait, no one told him that, right?). He also had a nifty way of firing people or downsizing a role without ever actually having to pay out a redundancy. He wasn’t so much a liar as a man living in a land of complete make-believe, fantasising about his own efficacy in the chaotic organisation he’d fostered. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those at greatest geographical distance from him reported being the most happy in their jobs.

Reading back over this list I can see the truth of the idea that people don’t leave bad workplaces, they leave bad bosses.

And of course, we must note the good jobs. The State Library job was a lot of fun. I loved working in a ‘cultural institution’, loved the events, loved the Library’s mission, loved the history, the building, loved a bunch of the people. The casual jobs I had while at or just after uni were great. I worked on campus in a bunch of roles: stuffing envelopes, staffing the info centre, admin-ing at the careers centre. None of it taxing, all of it cheering. The multimedia job I had (right before the internet ate all the multimedia technologies that weren’t net-specific) was also awesome for the 3 months it took the company to go bust.

But the caveat on each day job is that it must feed the writing. Occasionally this has felt like the inevitable failure to serve two masters. Sometimes — less often — it’s worked.

The multimedia fed the writing because it was both creative AND structured (I was a Macromedia Director author, in case anyone recognises that terminology) – but because I loved it I also worked a bunch of extra hours on it, which limited my writing time. In contrast, the Toxic Avenger allowed me a helluva lot of time (these were the years when I was most active in the blogosphere) but made me feel dead on the inside. It’s hard to write when you’re dead. Not so hard to blog, oddly.

I figure by now I’ve tried just about everything I can think of. I’ve tried the dead-end, dull job, I’ve tried the all-in, exhaustive job, & a bunch of patterns in between. I’ve tried a day-job in writing & several well outside. I’ve tried part-time & full-time work. I’ve learned what -– for want of a better word — works. I’ve tried my darnedest to maximise that stuff & minimise the rest.

And I think Eden Robins’ post over at Ecstatic Days is the picture-perfect day-job description. If you’re a similar kinda writer as me, that is.

I’ve been checking back in with Angel Zapata’s blog for more news of our plagiarist friend, Richard Ridyard, & by now I’ve learned:

* Richard Ridyard is the name of a deceased journalist, who — if he had any kind of professional integrity — must be rolling in his grave to see his reputation sullied by some petty thief.

* Editor after editor is coming forward to express their horror at being duped by a guy that would steal the words of STEPHEN KING, fer goodness sake (there’s some speculation this one was a cry for help — after all, someone will eventually twig to what you’re doing if you’re stealing from Stephen freaking King, kiddo).

* ‘Ridyard’ also approached Infinite Windows with his “The Tyburg Jig”, with my stolen paragraph in it. Infinite Windows has removed all his work.

* ‘Ridyard’ has also been publishing under the name RM Valentine — & “The Tyburg Jig” has been shopped under that name as well over at StoryWrite (who have now taken all RM’s stories down)

* I didn’t know this, but the Tyburg Jig is the dance of a hanged body. How … apt.

* The Facebook pages for Valentine Publications & co-founder Matthew Shackleton (who professed to knowing his buddy Ridyard ‘for ten years’) have both disappeared, and the website has also disappeared.

* Brimstone Press has a little something to say about ANOTHER theft.

I mention the names of the zines because I think they deserve kudos for reacting so quickly to the discovery of plagiarism. Thanks, guys! Ridyard appears to be disappearing into a vortex of his own making.

What baffles me, though, is how prolific this guy’s been with his stolen stories. Hell, he’s published “The Tyburg Jig” at least 3 times. I only sold that story once!

Clearly I have been slack.

But just think, if he’d poured all that effort into original work, instead of cutting & pasting & emailing that sucker out so many times (and all the other stolen stories, of course), he’d probably *be* Stephen King by now.

This morning a good morning on The Great Unsaleable. It’s coming together nicely on this draft. By taking a secondary character and making her more primary, I’ve — unexpectedly — added a layer of logic to the events. This is gratifying & confusing in equal measure. (I’m trying not to question it. Go with it, deborahb, goooooo with it.)

This afternoon, doesn’t bear discussion.

This evening, a glass of red to ease out of the afternoon, two episodes of Burn Notice, time spent staring at The Great Unsaleable, moving pieces about like shifting blocks back and forth on the floor. Perhaps not a lot achieved, but something consolidated. Perhaps that’s just in my head? Afraid to work too much on it in case, in my frustrated/red-wined way, I screw it up.

Watching Burn Notice makes me think it’s time for me to do one of my infamous (ie. not-famous-at-all) livejournal polls. Which you’ll find here.

I’ll start you off. I wish I’d written Burn Notice. Damn, it’s fun!

The lurgy is finally lifting, thankfully. For a while there it was impossible to sleep AND breathe simultaneously. Which can add a layer of difficulty to, oh, everything.

From the weekend surfing:

* Rebecca Solnit, “You know, a lot of my work has been based on the field of disaster sociology, which emerged after the World War II, when the US government decided it wanted to know how human beings would behave in the aftermath of an all-out nuclear war. The assumption, as it often is, is that we would become childlike and sheepish and panic and be helpless, or that we’d become sort of venal and savage and barbaric. And the disaster scholars started to look at this and eventually dismantled almost every stereotype we have and found that people are actually, as I’ve been saying, resourceful, altruistic, brave, innovative and often oddly joyful, because a lot of the alienation and isolation of everyday life is removed. [snip] What you also see is that because the authorities think that we’re monsters, they themselves panic and become the monsters in disaster.” Elite panic, it’s called. Solnit’s book, A Paradise Built in Hell, has gone into the shopping cart.

* How to Innovate Like Apple: this includes nurturing talent, flattening hierarchies, and ignoring market research.

* Relatedly, an article on why big business isn’t bothered about helping you find your stolen iPhone.

* Follow the Reader: a blog for readers

* The Short Review: a review site for short story collections (I so wish I’d known about this a year back when I was putting together my own short story collection — think of all the brilliant ideas I could’ve stolen learned from!

* And finally, via catsparx: if architects had to work like web designers (so. very. true.)

And the even better news is that the brain is working well enough again for me to be pushing forward on the writing schedule. Over the past few days I’m managed to get halfway through my Ishtar contemporary novella (currently being brought down from 23K to the requisite 20K) & I am having a blast with this project.

Ah, Ishtar. Putting the FUN! back into love & war.

Years back, when I was clearly more of an optimist than I am now, I started collecting links on ‘promoting your book’. Just the links, not the articles, because I didn’t want to fill up my computer with useless words. And now that I have a book, of course all those links are out of date. I have text files full of links to broken pages! What, I wonder, did those pages say? And where are today’s pages?

My head is filled with questions!

So now I’m looking for good resources on promotion for writers. I understand there are such things as ‘press releases’ and ‘review venues’ & even ‘bookstores’, & I’m wondering how you write ‘em, contact ‘em, or convince ‘em to carry your book.

I’ve been wondering this for a couple weeks (since the launch, in fact), but today the questions were really brought to the fore when one gentle friend said to me, “I looked for your book in Borders AND Dymocks, and they both didn’t have it!” She even, apparently, convinced the helpful woman in one of these stores to put it on ‘the list’, whatever ‘the list’ is. I hope it’s a good list. I hope I get on it!

If you, gentle reader, have a link (that’s still active) to a place in the interwebby which addresses any or all of these questions, feel free to post that link here.

Conversely, if you are a marketing student looking to work for free for a good cause, well, you probably should be looking into the plight of native fruit bats or something, rather than wasting your time with my queries — but if you do have a term paper lying around that explains all these things, well, your work is welcome here.

Now I might do some recreational reading, for once, because my head is toast.

A quick update because I have to do some novel writing tonight, but wanted to say hurrah! and thanks! to all the people who came to the very first launch of my very first book, A Book of Endings at Cabinet Bar over the Continuum weekend in Melbourne. I’m not sure if it was the Lady Lara’s (ie. gin & champagne cocktails), the welcoming staff at Cabinet, the cheeriness of the crowd who were able to find their way out of the con hotel, down the road, around the corner, into the alley way (past the garbage bins) to brave the steep staircase into the bar, or whether, indeed, it was Mr Strahan’s compelling & convincing speech & Mz Krasnostein’s convivial catering — or indeed, whether it was ALL of these things — but the launch was a blast!

Thank-you to the peeps who came, the peeps who accosted me the next day in the corridors to say, ‘Sorry I missed your launch!’, & the peeps who couldn’t make it but thought about it, or are thinking of coming to the next one:

Sydney Launch of A Book of Endings
3pm Saturday 10 October
NG Art Gallery
Upstairs at 3 Little Queen St
Chippendale NSW 2008
(about 2 bus stops from Central Station or a 10-minute walk)

Launching by the inimitable Mr Garth Nix.

And if you stick around at the gallery (well, if you stick around until October 27), you can see Nick Stathopoulos’s gallery exhibition, Playtime. I had a preview of some of the new works recently & they’re fabulous.

Now that A Book of Endings is largely done — for me, at least (until the launches. Stay tuned!) — I can get back to projects I enjoy, have been missing have put off for the interim. My first task was to come up with a timeline to get me through the writing committments until the end of the year (project management fans: yes, I really do mean I made a Gantt chart). Then I prioritised the committments so I know which ones I can give up if I have to. Then I stared at the plan for a while with a kind of ‘holy fuck’ gaze.

Then I closed down the plan and opened up instead my favourite project (of the moment): the Great Unsaleable Novel. Which, I’m pleased to say, on Draft 4 is a lot less unsaleable than it used to be. But as I’m only at the beginning of Draft 4, there is still a shinto-load of work left to be done.

And all this mundane news is delivered in real time to your screens because I am bookending. Not bookmarking, as I read it initially, but bookending: the process of alerting a supportive friend to your plans in order to keep yourself on track, knowing you’ll have to report back later. I followed a link from the Procrastinating Writers to the Relaxed Writer (a journey I’d like to take spiritually myself someday) to find out about bookending & I’m kinda liking the idea.

Apart from the fact that previously whenever I’ve read posts/tweets announcing things like ‘Writing now’, ‘Taking a break from writing now to make dinner’, I’ve always thought, “Who gives a damn?”

But clearly I was in the wrong, & this is EXACTLY the kind of info you should be sharing.

So: I’m writing now.

At highschool I had a friend who insisted it was important right after an exam to take the rest of the day off and not study. Important to rest the brain and re-establish your energies. Workable idea, provided you didn’t have a second exam that day.

I treat a lot of things like that. Reading (always take a break between books), writing, day-jobbing. A break is replenishing. Gets the mind geared up for the next thing.

Right now, my brain is exhausted, just like I’ve been through an intense exam period, but the schedule I put together earlier this month to plot out all my writing committments for the rest of the year (some of which are committments just to myself) is screaming, ‘No time to rest!’

… Best thing to do is just to shut down the schedule, I figure.

The window is replaced, the excitement has died down, I still can’t find anything missing from the house after last week’s uninvited visit. But now we have a motion-sensitive light over our backyard & a locksmith scheduled to make our internal door even more steadfast than it proved to be last week.

(What a great idea that internal door was. I always figured I was just being paranoid.)

Energy levels have finally recovered, too, after last weekend’s 33-hour Robert McKee Story seminar in Sydney. And though the organisers & I will agree to disagree on some aspects, it was a worthwhile weekend. Satisfying? I couldn’t call it that.

Because what McKee reminds me of is how good story can get, & that’s always going to make you remember the gap in your own work between where you are & where you want to be. “Only amateurs love everything they write,” says McKee, further pointing out that, “Ninety per cent of all writing is shit.”

Ninety per cent of your own writing — he assures us — is shit. That’s why you need that ‘passion for perfection’, that willingness to throw stuff away, the desire to edit & re-edit, to plan, to process, to pull out just that ten per cent & to keep doing it.

People will tell you, says McKee, that writing is a highly competitive business, that writers are a dime a dozen. But that’s not true, because for someone who can actually write good story, “There is no competition.”

It’s a seller’s market. If you can do it.

“Write the truth.” That’s what he wrote when he signed my edition of his book. Don’t write the facts (“The facts are what happened. The truth is our human interpretation of what happened.”). Don’t be satisfied with the ninety per cent.

Write the truth.

… Sound easy?