Month: March 2018

Update: Mother of Invention

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30 March, 2018

8:59 am

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My Writing

I’ve now seen the proofs of my story Arguing with People on the Internet as it will appear in the upcoming Mother of Invention anthology – so exciting! It’s looking great, and I’m just stoked.

For people who didn’t back Mother of Invention on Kickstarter, the book will be available to the public in September. In the meantime, though, Twelfth Planet Press will be holding not one but two book launches. If any of you happen to be in Wisconsin at the end of May, their first launch will be at Wiscon (or, as the editors put it, FREAKING WISCON – I think they’re a bit excited about that ?).

The second book launch, which is the one I’ll be at (on account of it not being a great time to just hop a plane to Wisconsin), will be in Melbourne in June at Continuum, a convention that’s deeply close to my heart. It means a whole lot to me that Continuum will be the first place I get to hold my first really truly book-published work in my hands.

Hope to see some of you there!

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The Boiling River of the Amazon

This week I learned: Boiling River, bottleless water, and endangered Chewbacca

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25 March, 2018

12:12 pm

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This Week I Learned

This week I learned about a boiling river, bottleless water you can hold in your hand, and the lengths George Lucas went to to keep Chewbacca from getting shot.

A quick note before I get into the fun stuff: because life is getting busier for me, from next week I will be reducing my output to one post a week, on Thursdays. I’ll still be creating TWIL posts, because they’re both a lot of fun and a great way to get the creative juices flowing, but they will be posted on alternating weeks, with more serious posts in between.

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Book cover: Stories of Your Life and Others, by Ted Chiang

Book review: Ted Chiang’s ‘Stories of Your Life and Others’ pt. 2

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22 March, 2018

12:00 pm

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Reviews, Writing

This is the sequel to last week’s post about all the ways Ted Chiang’s book blows my mind and makes me want to be a better writer.

I’m aware that what follows may come across as overly critical, so let me start by reiterating that I really enjoyed these stories. They intrigued and surprised me, and made me feel like I was wrestling with some incredible intellectual notions.

If I’ve written more about what didn’t work for me than what did, it’s only because those were the aspects I felt best able to get a grip on when it comes to analysing why they affected me the way I did and applying those lessons to my own writing.

Again, this review contains very minor and non-specific spoilers – unless you’re reading the book right now, you should be fine.

Continue reading “Book review: Ted Chiang’s ‘Stories of Your Life and Others’ pt. 2” →

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Woman sittin on an island under a tree that is a brain

This week I learned: life with locked-in syndrome, voodoo wasps, and sleeping in someone else’s car

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18 March, 2018

12:00 pm

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This Week I Learned

This week I learned about how people feel about having almost no control over their bodies, about mind-controlling wasps, and about what happened when one woman let a homeless person use her car as a bed.

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Book cover: Stories of Your Life and Others, by Ted Chiang

Book review: Ted Chiang’s ‘Stories of Your Life and Others’ pt. 1

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15 March, 2018

12:00 pm

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Reviews, Writing

I said at the start of this blog that I might try the odd book review-type thing, so this is me trying one. It’s really about what I took away from this book as a writer, rather than a reader, but hopefully it will be helpful (or at least interesting) to readers and writers both.

Edited: Looking at this just post publication, I’ve realised what a wall of text it turned into. So I’m going to take a load off you (and *cough* off future me) and split it into two posts. Tune in next week for part two.

Continue reading “Book review: Ted Chiang’s ‘Stories of Your Life and Others’ pt. 1” →

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Record made out of an X-ray of two hands

This week I learned: bone music, Elmer McCurdy’s posthumous career, the fairy chimneys of Cappadocia

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11 March, 2018

12:00 pm

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This Week I Learned

About the amazing world of secret bone music, the outlaw who became Skeletor, and yet more interestingly-shaped rocks with surprising ancient history.

Continue reading “This week I learned: bone music, Elmer McCurdy’s posthumous career, the fairy chimneys of Cappadocia” →

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Man with a bow and arrow

Why “show, don’t tell” is nonsense – and why it’s important anyway

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8 March, 2018

12:00 pm

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Writing

It has to be the single most common piece of writing advice there is: “Show, don’t tell.” And yet so many of the unpublished stories I read demonstrate that their authors don’t understand it. And honestly, that’s not surprising, because taken literally it’s utter nonsense.

Writing is, by definition, telling. You’re speaking to your reader through words, not pictures. So how the heck are you supposed to do anything but tell them things?

Here’s the secret: yes, all writing is telling. But by choosing what it is you tell your reader, and how you tell it, you can create a vastly more enjoyable reading experience.

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Tiny figure lost at sea

Brain weasels; or, high-functioning mental illness and what happens when you don’t trust your own head

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1 March, 2018

12:00 pm

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Mental Health

I’ve had a couple of people ask me about the descriptor I use for myself at the top of this page: “brain weasel wrangler”. So I figure it’s time to explain a bit about the weasels, and to talk about my journey from denial to acceptance.

This is a longer post than my usual, but I hope it will give some of you something to think about when facing your own brain weasels. Warning: discussion ahead of mental illness, brief mention of suicide.

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