Kaaron Warren's Blog, page 4

Refreshing the Wells 31: Alistair Rennie

Trust a Scotsman to bring whisky into it! Alistair Rennie talks to me about the magic of the water of life.

 

“To refresh my well I like to go places, do things, get active, get outside, make music, make videos, go drinking, watch football and rugby, be with friends.

I go trekking in wild places, go camping, go mountain biking, visit castles, stone circles, ancient sites of natural or historical interest, obsess over skies and explore the wild coasts. I’m very lucky to have access to places where I can do all of this with relative ease. Both in Scotland and in my second home, Italy.

All of this, I do it with friends. And they’re probably the true source of the waters I need to replenish my empty vats.

If I’m alone, I go on escapades without direction. I enter the darklands of the mood and become inwardly vacant of purpose. I become as much of a void as humanly possible. I exist with only a shimmer of sentience, with no self-consciousness at all, like a wandering animal without the awareness of an animal.

All of these activities, whether with friends or done alone, are probably a sort of emptying of the well – a psychological drainage technique, an evacuation of the dregs to make way for a fresh refill.

At the same time as the drainage occurs, the well is being filled up with new ideas derived from the experiences of seeing and feeling the world of geography and weather and night time revelry. I take these things and, in my mind, I turn them into melodrama – which is the emotional basis for ideas.

I stress ideas rather than inspiration.

Ideas, for me, are the elements of the process that inspire you to write. Inspiration alone can’t formulate a character or design a scene or envisage the outcome of a story. Ideas are “the water of life” of stories – the uisge beatha – the whisky of storytelling that puts fire in the belly of creative purpose.

That’s when I’m ready to re-enter those intensive periods required for writing. And I’ll keep going through those intensive periods till the well runs dry, till its resources are reduced to muddy silts and murky dregs – and the spirit of outdoor adventure and reckless pursuit, of drinking with friends, making music around the fire pit, lying under the stars with a beer in hand – the spirit takes over.

And the water cycle goes on again, without any kind of rationale or regularity whatsoever. Which is exactly how it should be!”

 

Alistair’s latest novel is Bleak Warrior. Jeff Vandermeer called it trangressive and hard-edged, and he should know!

Refreshing the Wells 30: Angela Slatter

Angela Slatter is an astonishingly good writer. Her story in In Your Face is one of my faves of the year so far, and that’s only one of her excellent stories. I asked her how she refreshed her well.

 

“As I’m a writer who always has multiple projects (read: deadlines) on the go, I’m also a writer who needs to refill the well regularly. Unfortunately, I’m also a writer who doesn’t always remember to refill the well.

That’s okay. My body and brain remind me, quite forcibly, when I get past the point of needing a grease and oil change, so to speak. I’ll get very tired; I’ll develop a low-level cold or a high-level headache; I’ll sit at the computer and try to write but nothing will come out, at least nothing good. Eventually (hopefully sooner rather than later) I realise I’ve reached the Buffy Summers “Fire bad, tree pretty” stage of writing – I’ve got nothing left, the creative gears are grinding against each other and producing nothing but nasty creaking sounds.

That’s generally my Ah ha! moment.

The temptation with deadlines, even for someone who’s methodical and organised in their delivery of projects, is to let them overwhelm you – to start to think that they are more important than your well-being. By all means, take them seriously, be a writer editors can rely on, but also remember to take care of yourself. Writing is a skill and a talent and a gift like any other. It needs to be exercised in order to be honed and kept sharp – but overuse will blunt it.

So, when I realise there’s a creaking sound coming from my brain – or even sometimes when I’m especially self-aware and smart* – I will stop. I will grab a book from the TBR pile and take to the couch. I will go outside and sit in the park for a while. I will watch a bad movie, sometimes a good one. I will binge-watch a series on Netflix, sometimes documentaries because they seed ideas into your brain while you’re not really paying attention (it’s kind of cheating when you’re meant to be resting). I bake something – it’s invariably a failure which fills my significant other with dread and results in me being banned from the kitchen for a while, but it does its job of taking my mind off the empty well. I go out and talk to people, catch up with friends, eat donuts. I read and critique other people’s work because although it’s still a creative and writing-related endeavour, it’s not my writing and I don’t have the same investment in it – and it has the added advantage of teaching me new techniques, reminding me of mistakes to avoid, and giving me the joy of seeing something new and amazing created by a friend.

All of these things help replenish the creative well of my brain.

At the moment, I’m in a weird place. Not physically – I’m at the KSP Writers Centre in Perth and it’s decidedly delightful, not weird at all – but in terms of writerly things. I’m not at home. I’m far away. I’m the Established Writer-in-Residence – and yes, it does need to be a capitalised title, like Queen Angela First of Her Name – and I have a very long list of things I need to do before the end of August. Several of these are end-of-project tasks – sending off corrections to a new collection, finalising and sending off the manuscript for another collection, writing three short stories in time for a deadline, critiquing work for several other people, starting the edits on Corpselight, and beginning the plotting on Restoration.

That’s a lot of things – a lot of deadlines. The upside of being at KSP is that there’s a distinct lack of distractions, so I’ve been able to put my head down and power through the to-do list. While I’m here I’ll also be teaching and mentoring, talking a fair bit. When I go home at the end of two weeks, I’ll most definitely need to refill the well.

I’ll need to feed myself on the things that make me think, that make me look at life differently, that make me tell myself stories, the things that give me joy in my chosen profession, that fire my imagination. Writers are not, in spite of what we might wish, cornucopias; we’re not cups or horns of plenty, we don’t remain eternally full and rich. We run down, we run out, we get tired. We need to recognise and accept this fact – there’s no reward for running yourself into the ground – and plan for those times when we’re exhausted. Have a think about it: what refills your creative well? Then do those things.

 

###

Nota bene: doesn’t happen that often.”

 

Angela’s novel Vigil launches soon. Early reviews tell me this book is one not to be missed!

 

Refreshing the Wells 29: Jay Caselberg

Jay Caselberg Jay Caselberg is one of those fascinating people whose wide and varied life is reflected in his wide and varied fiction. Here’s how he refreshes his wells:

 

“It’s funny, the link with water, for as it happens, most of my inspired thinking comes standing under the shower. It is there where I get that thought, that phrase, that sentence that spurs a new story. And where does it come from? Of course, I read as if starved, generally having about four or five books on the go and that reading is across multiple genres. I read a lot of crime, lit, sf, horror, spy novels, though not much non-fiction unless I’m researching something in particular. Once upon a time, and I think this is perhaps a phase that a writer goes through, I had great difficulty reading because I found it impossible to turn off the critical analytical eye. Thankfully that passed. There’s a trap there also in constant reading, and that is that you need to be careful not to taint that well water. I also believe, however, that that’s a phase one goes through as well, gathering pieces of understanding and learning that go to make up the collage that shapes your particular voice. It’s an important part of the journey to move beyond wanting to write like someone else and instead write like yourself. All that reading needs to be a part of what feeds the voice. This is where the shower comes in, the post-sleep analysis that comes from a night of dreaming. I’m a firm believer that in my particular process, most of the work is done by my subconscious, parsing events, the things I read, world events, images and most of all, human interaction. Many of my short stories have come from dream images or scenes. Not all, but a significant proportion. Sometimes I wake, energised by the fact that I’ve just had a “story dream.”

Many of us go through fallow periods, and these are the times, at least for me, when that lizard brain entity is putting things together. I might have an idea and it can lie there for a few days, or even a few weeks or longer while somewhere, somehow, the deep brain is working it out. I don’t quite know how I know, but when it finally happens, I somehow have an awareness that it’s ready and it is only then that it turns into a story or part of a novel and I sit down and write. I don’t think the well is actually empty during those times, but rather that its contents are going through some sort of filtration process, seeping through the rocks of gathered experience. So, yes, I go places, I read stuff, I watch people, and I absorb, and then, above all, I dream. There’s something fascinating about the disconnectedness of dream images, their unconventional realities that are still in some way connected to the day to day and yet apart from it. In a dream, everything is so real and yet it is not. Writing can be quite the same as that.”

Refreshing the Wells 28

Refreshing the Wells today by listening to as many variations of “Gloomy Sunday” as I can bear. This song really does sit like a weight on your shoulders after a while.

Refreshing the Wells 27: Donna Hanson

Here’s the multi-talented, prolific Donna Hanson talking about what refreshes her well. Check out Donna’s website to discover just how multi-talented she is.

“This is a really hard question.  A well seems like a quiet place to me. Dark, with drops of water rippling the surface. A place where there is a centre and peace. I’d like that place. I may have to go looking for it.  My well is a turbulent place, like someone pulled the plug and everything is a swirling mass and the suction sound is drowning everything else. Its full of stuff! Ideas, stories, emotions, craft project, thoughts of friends, family, the news all crawling over themselves to climb out of the well. So if that is the state of my well, then what feeds it? How do I make sense of it?
For writing, things just come to me in random places. I’m in a seminar and a totally random idea comes to me. It may have nothing to do with where I am but had been fomenting from a conversation the week before. Or from a book I read, or a thing I’ve seen, a word or a song. So that must be that life refreshes my well. I’m an extroverted thinker so this probably makes sense. Chaos seeking chaos may be. I want to know and experience so much. I want to shove it all in, cram it down, taste it, be it.
 
But I do crave that well, that place where I can gather myself. This morning I was walking to the bus and Tuggeranong valley was before me, a white, foamy layer of mist hanging before the mountains.  I wished that I could share that sight, that feeling it evoked. I looked at that vista and sighed and drew it in to that calm place that must exist inside of me, that part of me that rejoices in the beauty around. Perhaps it is that that stops the vortex in my well from escaping. It’s what helps me make sense of it. I have a lovely deck. I don’t sit on it often enough and look at the mountains and the valley and the clouds, but I try to look at least once a day and it’s never the same.”

 

Refreshing the Wells 26: Ben Peek

I’ve always loved Ben Peek’s stories. He has a truly individual voice and way of seeing the world, and this shines through in his work. So with the arrival of his novels The Godless and Leviathan’s Blood in the mail, I was spurred to ask him how he refreshes his wells, because everything I read from him is fresh, bright and new.

Ben said, “When I am not writing, I read, mostly. It is terribly boring of me. I write and I read. Between the two, I talk about books, and every now and then, I think I should take up something worthwhile. Perhaps I should work with refugees, or learn how to be a doctor. A medical doctor, that is. But in the end, I go back to reading, to writing, to my quiet obsessions.

A few years back, it occurred to me that I could count how many books I would read before I died. It was an estimation, of course, but still, it was not too difficult. I keep a list of the books I read in a year. It is roughly between fifty and sixty, a book or so a week. In ten years, I realised, I might read five hundred books, maybe six hundred. I am thirty-nine, now. If I live another fifty years – and let us assume, for the sake of argument, that I will – then I will read anywhere between 2500 and 3000 books. Then, hopefully in a spectacular event involving recreational drugs, beautiful people, and a cruise ship, I will die, and be buried at sea. Perhaps. But regardless of how I exit this life of mine, I will not have read a lot of books.

So, I read.

I read anything, by and large. What I don’t like, I give up. It’s the numbers that haunt me. Because of them I have been left with little tolerance for books with flawed craft. Bad pacing, bad words, a lazy thought process. You can learn these things. An author should. I have no time for the author who approaches their craft with an anti intellectual stance that rejects this crafts. Just as I have no time for small minded, xenophobic works. Nor am I interested in books that are cruel for no other reason than to be cruel. I also, and perhaps this is the most peculiar habit of mine, will not read books where pets are killed. Of all the things I mentioned, it is this one that I have broken only once as an adult, and that was for László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango.

Otherwise, I read anything. I read for the beautiful constructions such as J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Or for the consistently excellent and personally fulfilling Usagi Yojimbo by Sam Sakai. I read the intelligent fury in Kathy Acker’s body of work. The beautiful language of strange in Fritz Leiber. For the world view I take from Salman Rushdie. I read because it introduces me to fabulous people – to Hilary Mantel, Lavie Tidhar, N.K. Jemisin, Matt Kindt, Octavia Bulter, Avram Davidson, Hilda Hilst, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and more and more – and to the fabulous things they make.

And then I return to the work I have, which is inferior, yes. I try to equal those people I admire, to create works that someone, out there, will read in their limited amount of time to read in this world of ours. I hope it means as much to them, as others do to me.”

 

 

By the way, there’s a Goodreads giveaway for The Godless.

Refreshing the Wells 26

I’ve always loved Ben Peek’s stories. He has a truly individual voice and way of seeing the world, and this shines through in his work. So with the arrival of his novels The Godless and Leviathan’s Blood in the mail, I was spurred to ask him how he refreshes his wells, because everything I read from him is fresh, bright and new.

Ben said, “When I am not writing, I read, mostly. It is terribly boring of me. I write and I read. Between the two, I talk about books, and every now and then, I think I should take up something worthwhile. Perhaps I should work with refugees, or learn how to be a doctor. A medical doctor, that is. But in the end, I go back to reading, to writing, to my quiet obsessions.

A few years back, it occurred to me that I could count how many books I would read before I died. It was an estimation, of course, but still, it was not too difficult. I keep a list of the books I read in a year. It is roughly between fifty and sixty, a book or so a week. In ten years, I realised, I might read five hundred books, maybe six hundred. I am thirty-nine, now. If I live another fifty years – and let us assume, for the sake of argument, that I will – then I will read anywhere between 2500 and 3000 books. Then, hopefully in a spectacular event involving recreational drugs, beautiful people, and a cruise ship, I will die, and be buried at sea. Perhaps. But regardless of how I exit this life of mine, I will not have read a lot of books.

So, I read.

I read anything, by and large. What I don’t like, I give up. It’s the numbers that haunt me. Because of them I have been left with little tolerance for books with flawed craft. Bad pacing, bad words, a lazy thought process. You can learn these things. An author should. I have no time for the author who approaches their craft with an anti intellectual stance that rejects this crafts. Just as I have no time for small minded, xenophobic works. Nor am I interested in books that are cruel for no other reason than to be cruel. I also, and perhaps this is the most peculiar habit of mine, will not read books where pets are killed. Of all the things I mentioned, it is this one that I have broken only once as an adult, and that was for László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango.

Otherwise, I read anything. I read for the beautiful constructions such as J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. Or for the consistently excellent and personally fulfilling Usagi Yojimbo by Sam Sakai. I read the intelligent fury in Kathy Acker’s body of work. The beautiful language of strange in Fritz Leiber. For the world view I take from Salman Rushdie. I read because it introduces me to fabulous people – to Hilary Mantel, Lavie Tidhar, N.K. Jemisin, Matt Kindt, Octavia Bulter, Avram Davidson, Hilda Hilst, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and more and more – and to the fabulous things they make.

And then I return to the work I have, which is inferior, yes. I try to equal those people I admire, to create works that someone, out there, will read in their limited amount of time to read in this world of ours. I hope it means as much to them, as others do to me.”

 

 

By the way, there’s a Goodreads giveaway for The Godless.

Smokelong Interview

Ellen Datlow and I embarked on a project we call “The Tool Series”, where she sends me a photo of one of her amazing old tools and I write a story about it.

 

Here’s an interview we did with Smokelong Quarterly, an online publisher of flash fiction.

 

You can see the tools and read the stories here, on Ellen’s Facebook page.

 

You know what would be interesting? If an artist continued the chain; drew a picture having read my story but not seen the original picture! Then someone writes a story based only on that new piece of art. I wonder what we’d end up with?

Alan Baxter Trilogy

To celebrate the release of Alan Baxter’s Alex Caine Series in print edition, I resurrected my Sparks  series and asked Alan to tell me about where the idea for the books came from. Alan brings all the knowledge and experience of his two careers together in the books, creating something quite unique.

 

Alan: Kaaron asked me to write about the spark that led to the sprawling bushfire that is The Alex Caine Series. It’s actually a very simple thing but it took a long time to come around. My first novel was RealmShift, originally self-published in 2006, then acquired by Gryphonwood Press in 2010. The main character in that book and its sequel, MageSign, is a guy called Isiah. He’s a powerful immortal with an unenviable burden, and he’s also an accomplished martial artist. After all, you can get pretty good at something when you’re immortal.

Because of those books, among other things, I got a reputation for writing good fight scenes. Given that I’ve been a martial artist for over 35 years now, and my day job is as a martial arts instructor, it’s no real surprise that I was writing what I knew there, and apparently doing an okay job of it. For a long while I’ve been running workshops on the subject, helping other writers to put together more realistic and compelling fight scenes.

And then I got to thinking. I’ve written lots of characters who happen to be capable martial artists. But I’ve never written a character who was a career martial artist. A practitioner and competitor, happily living his martial arts life, who then becomes embroiled in a story. And that was the spark for the character of Alex Caine. Caine starts the story as a successful underground cage fighter, making good money in illegal MMA matches, until he runs afoul of mobsters and magic. I’d also been noodling around with this evil book idea, a subverted fantasy quest idea (set in our time, our world, with dark and horrible occurrences involved) and it all slammed together and Bound, the first book in the Alex Caine trilogy, was born.

Books 2 and 3, Obsidian and Abduction, were quick to follow. And Alex Caine’s life as a fighter at the top of his game must seem like such a distant memory to the poor bugger by now. But he’s certainly had  the opportunity to put an awful lot of his martial arts training to the test.

The Alex Caine Series – Bound, Obsidian and Abduction – is available in paperback and ebook now.

 

Here’s Alan’s bio: Alan Baxter is a British-Australian author who writes dark fantasy, horror and sci-fi, rides a motorcycle and loves his dog. He also teaches Kung Fu. He lives among dairy paddocks on the beautiful south coast of NSW, Australia, with his wife, son, dog and cat. He’s the award-winning author of several novels and over sixty short stories and novellas. So far. Read extracts from his novels, a novella and short stories at his website – www.warriorscribe.com – or find him on Twitter @AlanBaxter and Facebook, and feel free to tell him what you think. About anything.

 

 

Here’s Alan getting excited about his books. I love that such a well-published, award-winning writer still gets excited by it all!

For those of you in Sydney or nearby, you should definitely got to the launch of these books. Alan in conversation with the amazing Garth Nix, who is both wise and funny and knows how to pour a glass of wine.

 

 

In the Wild

Some recent anthologies my stories appear in. In my Backyard rather than the Wild, but still!

“All Roll Over” is a very vicious story, inspired by an old mattress I saw on the side of the road. In Your Face is edited by Tehani Wessely and published by Fablecroft Press.

“68 Days” was inspired by a news article I read that said life expectancy in long distance space travel was 68 days. True of not, it got me thinking about how you’d ensure knowledge could be passed quickly from one person to the next.

Tomorrow’s Cthulu is edited by Scott Gable and C. Dombrowski, published by Broken Eye Books.

“Working for the God of the Love of Money” is a reprint story. I wrote it in response to watching a kid asking for coins in Sydney years ago, and the way people acted towards him.

Street Magicks is edited by Paula Guran and published by Prime Books.

 

“Dead Sea Fruit” is the story reprinted here. The story of the Ash-Mouth Man and the skinny girls who love him.

The Humanity of Monsters is edited by Michael Matheson and published by Chizine.