Peter M. Ball's Blog, page 128

So yesterday there was dayjobbery and tutoring and writin...

So yesterday there was dayjobbery and tutoring and writing, oh my, with a side of doing the page proofs for Say Zucchini, and Mean It so I can mail them back to the folks at Daily SF and fix the various muddle-headed things I've done in the story.

Usually there's something painful about the proofing process, mixing, as it does,   a multitude of how-could-I-be-so-stupid typos and syntax errors with the larger, more consuming fear that the story itself isn't any good because so-much-time-has-passed-since-you-submitted-it-and-you've-become-a-better-writer-than-you-were-and-would-do-things-so-very-differently-now.

The latter part didn't really happen this time around. I'm still fond the story and think it does all the things I wanted it to do, and the bits I'd do differently I probably wouldn't do that much better, so they don't bother me quite so much.

I'm not sure whether this bodes ill for the story or not, once it's out in the world, but I guess we'll see next week when it's sent out to Daily SF's subscribers.

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Last night's writing? The skeleton for the first half of Chapter Three for Black Candy – I know how the scenes begin and end, I just have to write the middles – and some more work on Waiting for the Steamer on the Docks of V—, which is heading off in its own little direction and getting longer every time I work on it. About 1,500 words of writing all up, which is less than I wanted by more than I expected given I didn't get home from work until 8-ish.

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This morning I woke up an hour or so before my alarm, and it was cold and dark and I wasn't all that sleepy anymore, so I stayed up and idled away the time for a bit, just enjoying the warmth of my bed and the slow shift of light on the curtains and the occasional checking of email on my phone.

Eventually the world woke up around me, so I climbed out of bed and went into the routine. I danced around the bedroom to the Sisters of Mercy's Temple of Love. I showered and I shaved. I ate breakfast and ironed a shirt to wear to the dayjob. And since I was up early, and more awake than I generally am, I finished all those things much earlier than expected, so by seven thirty I was standing around my living room trying to work out what I'd do to fill the next three quarters of an hour before I drove to work.

So I started reading The Girl With No Hands and Other Tales, since it's one of the things that was handy on my living room shelves  that I haven't also read in its entirety, largely because I've read a large majority of the stories in other locations.

I'd forgotten just how good Angela Slatter actually is. I mean, obviously I'd remembered that she's a very, very good writer and I've recommended her to people constantly, but I'd forgotten that moment where, say, you read Bluebeard for  and go "oh, sodding hell, this is  brilliant" and go give up on writing for a while because there's no chance you'll ever manage something that precise and intricate and resonant. I know this because, the first time I read this, just after Angela and I met and before we were actually friends, I wandered off and tried very hard to do what she did in that story and ended up somewhere very different and nowhere near as good.

But that's one of the ways writing works, I think. You just keep having conversations with writers who are better than you, except you do it through  fiction because telephones are scary and you're too damn lazy to email people you don't really know.

And now I go to talk about writing with undergraduates, whereupon I will try to explain writing in a far less esoteric - but potentially more useful – manner.

Billboards, Peaches, & WIP Excerpts

This morning I once again started the day with music and dancing, although I substituted PJ Harvey for Peaches The Teaches of Peaches album, which is a slightly different mood to start the day with and one that's much more likely to irritate your neighbors.

Yesterday I had a phone call from my father which started along the lines of "yes, well, I can see how PJ Harvey would wake you up in the morning." Apparently he googles bands when I mention them on my blog, just to get some idea of what I'm listening too.

So, for my dad and anyone else following my music taste online, I'm going to recommend *not* googling Peaches while at work. I mean, you can if you want, but I'm taking no responsibility when you find yourself singing Fuck the Pain Away beneath your breath while other people are in earshot.

Should you not wish to take my warning, I recommend Youtube. The clip for the song is awesome.

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Every time I hear someone banging on about sexism no longer being necessary, my first impulse is to turn and start ranting about billboards. I mean, being white and male and loaded with middle class privilige, I'm hardly the most astute feminist commentator around, and even I walk past billboards going "seriously, dude, WTF?"

Yesterday I came across one of the worst offenders I've seen in a long time. I was doing deliveries out in the southern suburbs of Brisbane, stuck at an intersection, and from a distance spotted something that looked like a billboard where the only thing that was visible from a distance were the silhouettes of three women who were in the oddly-contorted "sexy" poses I've come to associate with the billboards for one of Brisbane's most over-promoted strip clubs.

Turned out it was a billboard for a local hardware store. The ad text, nigh invisible from the original distance, made it 100% obvious that the sexualised poses weren't accidental. It read, basically, "can't imagine these three together? We can."

Twenty four hours later I'm still bothered by the billboard's existence. I sincerely hope it's losing them business, if only so people will one day stop saying "sex sells" when talking about advertising things that have nothing to do with sex (unless, of course, this is a sex shop for those with a hardware fetish, but somehow I doubt it).

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I wrote a bunch of emails yesterday, largely just saying hello to a bunch of people I haven't seen in a while. Most of them were people I knew pre-email and aren't really email type people, but I figured there wasn't much to lose and tried it anyway.

Afterwards I sat down and wrote. About a twelve hundred words on a story titled Waiting for the Steamer on the Docks of V—, which will probably not be the final title, but amuses me for the moment because I like it when older stories use an initial and an em-dash instead of an actual name, even if I've never precisely understood why it happens. I'm somewhat fond of this story, already, and I have not been fond of any story I've written in its nascent form for quite some time. Because of this, I shall engage in WIP excerptery:

Patrick chooses the café where we eat breakfast. We walk up a narrow flight of stairs and sit on a terrace balcony, looking down the long street filled with cyclists and porters and beggars clustered around the alleyways. The café has glass tabletops that are damp with morning condensation, the droplets of water still touched with the brown of the river. There are streaks of dirt on the red tile floor. The café was recommended by a friend of Patrick's back in Brisbane. I wonder if we too will recommend it once the distance of hindsight banishes the horror of eating there.

Afterwards I wrote a beginning to Flotsam 6 which actually felt like a beginning, rather than an action sequence which didn't quite fit, and then some more tinkering on Black Candy, whereupon I realised that one of my many beginnings would actually make a fine end to the first act if one of the random-characters-who-never-actually-appears-again becomes one of the important-characters-who-doesn't-appear-enough. Once again I am the victim of novel-flail.

Honestly, I really would like to write books for a living, if I could but figure out how to write books instead of stories. I shall get there, I'm sure, but it takes so very long and there are so many foolish mistakes.

It wasn't quite a full day's quota of writing, but it was in the zone that I'm happy with between 2,000 and 2,500 words total, and I didn't feel too guilty about packing Fritz the Laptop away and going to bed a little early.

I suspect there will be very little writing tonight. There are classes, and there are proofs to proof, and I don't finish the classes until late. At some point in there I should make myself chili, for I shopped and bought real food, and it requires cooking.

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There was something else I was going to mention, but I appear to have forgotten it.

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I'm preparing to disappear into a writing bunker for the next few months, squirreling myself away behind a barricade of unread books and manuscript drafts with naught but Fritz the Laptop and the Spokesbear for company.

My plan is to read things and write things and emerge only for food, dayjobbery, roleplaying games and the occasional offer of coffee when the absence of real conversation becomes to much. Beyond that I shall practice the exquisite art of saying no to things. Preferably before people finish their invitations, lest I be tempted into whatever coolness they're offering. I shall leave aside any plans for my career or thoughts of branding and professionalism in writing or pondering whether I should be doing the ebook thing (which I would, if I wrote faster, but I don't at the moment), and I shall write. Like a demon. For ninety days.

And I shall do this because it's fun, and everything else will take care of itself.

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One of the most intriguing things about living in the future, such as we do, is that there are now writers who I love and admire that have been maintaining weblogs for a decade or more. And while it's very easy to start thinking of the internet as a place where things happen now now now, it's actually remarkably useful to go back and look through several years worth of journal entries or blog posts, noting the changes in style and the shift from being a writer who sells short stories to Asimov's or Strange Horizons, into a writer who strides across the publishing world like a colossus.

Writers grow up in public now, the vagaries of their careers charted and commented on and posted for the world to see. And that stuff sticks around, for years at a time. It's the sort of thing you only used to get by, say, reading a collected edition of a writer's letters, or the occasional writer's diary.

I say again, as I often do, fuck the flying cars. They may be the flashy side of the future, but the ease with which we can access the history of other people's thoughts is a far more subtle and impressive feat.

Longing, Essays, Wordcounts, and Dancing to PJ Harvey

This morning I got up and, lacking sufficient motivation to get ready for the dayjob, put PJ Harvey's Rid of Me on the stereo so I could dance around the house to the track 50′ Queenie while still in my pajamas.

There are certainly worse ways to start your day, even if it does mean you're five minutes late for work and the chaos that entails. Here's hoping your day started just as well (and if it didn't, I can recommend dancing to PJ Harvey to start your day tomorrow).

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I mentioned this on twitter when I first read it, but I'm posting a link here because its just that good. If you have any interest at all in fantasy, writing, fairy tales, or just general awesomeness, please go take a look at Catherine Valente's Confessions of a Fairytale Addict over on Tor.com.

There are many writers of fiction who double as excellent writers of essays, and Valente is easily one of the best I've come across in recent years. In a fair and just world someone would probably go and pay her to write a book of essays, which would be smart and cutting and ultimately brilliant, but since we live in a capitalist culture where essays are an undervalued form we take what we can get.

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So yesterday there was writing. A thousand words on Flotsam 6, a thousand words on a short story, and some writing of new scenes for Black Candy since I've officially given up on rewriting the bastard book and just started redrafting it from the beginning so I can make it story shaped without doing my head in.

By ten o'clock I'd done my 2,500 words for the day and stopped, since I'm trying to get out of the binge-writing habit and back into something that resembles a work ethic. Being done by ten o'clock is slightly odd, since it meant there was still an hour to go before I usually collapsed into bed, half-dressed and fretting about not being done.

So I had a cup of tea and read for a bit, working my way a little deeper into Charles de Lint's Dreams Underfoot, and then I went to sleep.

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I've typed the title of the de Lint collection three times today, and every time I've typed it Dreams Underfood, which is weird because I'm not entirely sure why my subconscious is latching onto that particular mistake and repeating it over and over.

I find myself suddenly tempted to write about the existence of a magical, dreamlike land that exists at the bottom of the pantry, waging wars with the goblins who live in the nightmares that occur when eating cheese too close to bedtime.

Or, you know, not. There are some ideas that aren't quite worth pursuing.

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I find myself, inexplicably, missing a number of people I used to know. It's happened a few times this week, and it's quite bothersome, because I'm not terribly good at keeping up with the people I currently know, let alone the friends who have gradually drifted away over the years. I imagine things would have been easier if something like Skype existed ten years ago, but I suppose we had email back then, and that doesn't seemed to have helped.

I suspect this will result in stories. It usually does, for some reason. Stories are the way things get worked out in my head.

What I'd like it to result in is a whirlwind trip to Melbourne, say, or Adelaide, and places even further afield, with lots of surprise visits and bottles of wine and interesting arguments, but at the moment the logistics for a whirlwind trip to the grocery store is really more my speed.

One day I will remedy this, really I will, but today I will content myself with spicy tomato soup and a nice thick slice of crusty bread and some quality time with Fritz the laptop where I get today's 2,500 words written.

 

Rain & Writing & Too Much Pizza, Man

It's been raining in Brisbane for the last few days, but it appears that the rain has finally given up and sunlight is starting to peek through again. This makes me rather melancholy; I was rather enjoying the rain and the cold snap and watching the bands of grey cloud overhead while taking my afternoon stroll around the block.

The best part about the rain has been walking the path alongside our local drainage ditch, where the grass is the kind of green I'd forgotten grass could be and the drainage ditch actually does an impressive job of seeming like a stream.

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So I wrote a few things last night. Mostly the fifth installment of the Flotsam series, which was overdue and then overdue again on the date I said I'd have it sent through after emailing the editor and letting her know it'd be overdue. Afterwards I did a couple of hundred words on some new things. Flotsam 6, for example, and the beginnings of two other stories. Then I ate leftover pizza, again, and swore that I will find some other food to serve as the I-have-a-deadline-and-no-time-to-cook standby.

I am heartily sick of pizza right now. There's a grocery list in my wallet, full of things which will be used to make tastier, healthier meals. Bowls of chili and spicy tomato soups and plates of Moroccan chicken with couscous, which is one of those meals I make primarily because couscous is an awesome word to say aloud.

Alas, these things must wait until tomorrow, when the payday comes around and the grocery shopping actually happens.

And at least there will be writing, regardless, and I will watch my nascent little stories grow in ambition and word-count. Then I will proof my Daily SF story, which has just arrived in my inbox for proofing-type things.

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Occasionally, when I lament the wasted time that occurs in my dreaded dayjob, people will ask me why I don't sneak in a little extra writing time. This is a remarkably hard question to answer with any satisfaction, but it largely comes down to this: there is nothing sneaky about my writing process.

When I'm at my most subtle, writing still consists of talking to myself and sighing a lot and staring at the ceiling trying to picture what happens next. This is something of a rarity, reserved for those instances where I write in public, for when writing alone in my house the act of writing is considerably more physical.

I pace from room to room, pondering things. I re-enact scenes, complete with conversations that are spoken aloud. Often I will find myself dancing for plot, which is less euphemistic than it sounds since it largely involves actual dancing, assuming dancing is the correct verb for the peculiar bopping and flailing that happens when I'm alone in my apartment.

I suspect I pull funny faces too, although I've never written in front of a mirror to check this. But there is nothing subtle or sneaky about writing fiction, so it's never something I'll sneak in at the dreaded dayjob. If I tried, someone would inevitably notice, and I suspect my dreaded dayjob wouldn't be a dayjob for much longer.

Which would be fine by me if writing paid my rent, but thus far, writing does not.

I just walked up these stairs and, man, I'm buggered…

Once upon a time I didn't own a car and I lived in a city with a laughable idea of public transport. Since I was also young and broke and generally wanted to go to places buses didn't really go, I ended up walking everywhere and got quite good at it. It became a big part of my identity. My name was Peter and I walked places; any trek that required less than an hour or two meant I didn't really bother with public transport.

Naturally, the walking went away after I acquired my first car, even if the mental image of myself as a guy who walked didn't. And about a year after driving everywhere I walked fifteen minutes to the shops down the street and it utterly wiped me out. I found myself huffing and puffing my way home, two liters of milk tucked under my arm, wondering what the fuck, exactly, had happened.

Because I am not terribly smart, this kind of thing happened a couple of dozen times before I made the connection. I no longer walked, and thus I was no longer a walker. Being surprised that walking now took considerable effort was kind of idiotic.

I write five thousand words over the weekend. I was utterly exhausted when I finally hit the end of the story on Sunday night. This isn't the first time this has happened, but it seems it's this time where I've finally made the connection. Two and a half thousand words a day used to be an average, not something to strive for.

So I'm no longer a guy who writes a lot either. Which shouldn't been a surprise, because there's been many excuses not to write over the last year, and I've taken almost all of them, but it still came as a surprise.

Writing a lot, incidentally, means far more to me than walking ever did.

So it appears my creative muscles have atrophied considerably. If you need me, I'll be over here, having a startling revelation that shocks me to the core of my sense of self. After that I'll be planning the writing equivalent of going to the gym.

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According to SF Signal my short story, Say Zucchini, and Mean It, should be sent out to DailySF subscribers  on May 17th. I mention this because subscription is free and gets you all sorts of interesting stories sent to you via email every weekday, which seems a far better way of procrastinating at work than spending yet another hour on facebook.

I'm also pretty sure that Say Zucchini, and Mean It will be my last non-Flotsam story for a while. There's nothing else waiting to be published, nothing else doing the rounds of submission, and I'm not writing any new short fiction until Flotsam is done with.

And, sure, every time I said something like this in the past, I immediately go into a mad panic and write a bunch of stories to try and correct the situation, but it's entirely possible that this time I mean it. I have a dayjob now. More than one. I can eat without selling short fiction, and so it's entirely possible I'm slowing down

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Lest this be entirely bogged down in mournful observation, allow me to say this: we played our weekly session of Deadlands early this weekend, and it was awesome. I make no secret of the fact that I adore my Deadland's peeps and the campaign we're currently playing has been a cracker, so much so that it's successfully transitioned the regular Sunday night game into Deadland's night rather than C'thulhu night when I put it into my calendar.

Finally, after many months, we hit the scenes I'd identified as the mid-point of the campaign, which is probably best identified as "Aliens in the Old West, if the Xenomorphs wore cow skins as a disguise."

Afterwards we feasted on roasted pork, courtesy of our hosts.

And really, when your weekend includes good company and good food and a horror-western filled with cattle mutilation, life is pretty good.

I am Peter's outright fear of his to-do list.

So I was going to post something about computer games the next time I appeared in the wide and untamed lands of Blogistan, but time has been a bit short for putting together the second part of that particular expedition. Navigating the bog of deep thinking requires time to rethink and edit, and time's been at a premium this week.

I keep casting furtive glances at my to-do list and it keeps scolding me for not getting things done. My sole achievements this week have been marking student assignments for the dayjob I actually like, and finally sending off a round of emails for a gaming project that I was meant to send back in January before Brisbane flooded and things got derailed.

There is a Flotsam story due this week. Today, in fact. I'm running late, despite my best efforts, and thus I am frustrated. Very frustrated. There have been attacks of itinerant insomnia. And so part two of Emotion and Video Games essay gets pushed back until next week, after the paying gigs are done with.

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The worst part about being busy is that people ask me to do things and I end up saying yes because I'm too busy to spend the time figuring out how to say no. I'm currently looking at the list of three or four things that I really don't want to do, get no meaningful benefit out of doing, and generally suck at. One of the women at my less-than-pleasant day job keeps asking me to read her son's university essays. And so I breathe a sigh of relief when I check my email at two AM aren't there *aren't* essays sitting there, waiting to be corrected.

No, I don't know why I agree to do this. I suspect it's one of those things that'll be easy as hell to cut from the to-do list.

Of course, it's going to be replaced with "learn to say no more often."

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There are currently but five weeks left until I'm done with my teaching gig at University of Queensland, which makes me sad on several levels because it's been quite enjoyable to actually go and tutor writing again (so much so that I'm saying this *after* marking the latest round of assignments, which is not my favourite part of the job). Plus, the money's good. Seriously good.

On the plus side, in six weeks time, I'll get my Thursday Night RPG session back (assuming the players still want to play) and I'll stop being twitchy about the fact that I'm only running one RPG session a week these days. And I'll be broke again, which means I either write or live on the other dayjob's paycheque, which isn't really the kind of money that you're supposed to live on.

 

Emotion, Attachment and Video Games

So one of the things that happened at Swancon was this: I found myself double-booked on Friday night and sided with the Gentleman's Etymological Society event rather than the Emotion, Attachment, and Video Games panel. This wasn't really intentional – originally they'd been scheduled to go one after the other – but such things happens in cons and decisions must be made.

I do, however, have several pages of notes I put together in preparation for the panel I didn't make it too, and since I'm a waste-not, want-not kind of guy, I figured I'd torture the rest of you with a more formalized write-up of the argument I would have made. Turns out I had rather a lot of material once I started writing things up, so it's probably going to happen in three or four posts over the next couple of days. Consider yourselves warned.

Emotion, Attachment, and Video Games

Part One: The Confession of a Computer Game Tragic

I live in fear of computer games. I am, at my core, one of those gamers – the kind who lacks the self-control to say 'now is the time to walk away.' Once the game is started, I have about half an hour to turn it off and get back to my real life; beyond that, I've committed. I want to figure out how to win, or how it ends, or even what the next cut scene might be, and then it's three days later and I haven't slept and I've burned through the bulk of my sick leave in an attempt to try and stop the dark spawn from taking over Ferelden. The game itself doesn't seem to matter – I can spend three days trying to figure out how to beat an online flash game like Dice Wars or take my promotion to the top in my favourite wrestling sim just as easily as I'll get sucked into high-profile, gaming wonders with state-of-the-art CGI and thousands upon thousands hours spent in development.

My only defence against this obsessive impulse seems to be refusing to play in the first place, so for the last seven or eight years I've refused to let computer games into my house. Mostly this is pretty easy, because I control the technology around me. My computers are low-budget machines, utterly incapable of running state of the art games; I've refused to own a gaming consol since I picked up an original NES system at an op-shop in my twenties and lost six weeks to beating the original Super Mario Brothers games; my despair when I upgraded my mobile phone and it came with computer games was considerable, but I found the resolve to delete the ones I liked and now play the ones I don't when stuck in an airport.

Yet despite my best effort, technology creeps forward. Computers die and get replaced, and suddenly all those games I would have played a few years back if the technology had been up to it are available to me. And occasionally I'll slip. I'll break out the copy of Blood Bowl, which I justified as an online game that has a set time-limit to prevent me from going overboard, or I'll fire up my favourite wrestling sim, which is by nature unbeatable and therefore unlikely to set off my need to achieve.

These are, of course, convenient lies I tell myself because I can't quite kick the computer game habit, but at least I've grown familiar with the cycle of playing both games over the last few years. After a day, maybe two, I'll realise that my promise that I'm just firing it up for an hour or so is shot and pull myself to a halt.

It would be easier if my friends gave up gaming as well, but they don't. People will rave at me about their new favourites from time to time, rattling off the cool features, and I'll find myself tempted. Very occasionally I'll break and ask to borrow their copy, and I now thank the digital gods that most people now have Steam accounts and aren't in a position to loan me their actual discs. With the delivery of games via disc becoming outmoded, I am safer from computer games than ever before.

Except when the games are cool enough that people really want to make sure they never lose their copy to hard-drive failure or power surges. Apparently there are still some games worth picking up, old school-like, and thus remain available for being left out. Which is how, six months ago, I found myself playing Dragon Age: Origins. Before I began, I was told three things: play it all the way through, once; play all the introductory stories; be prepared to spend the majority of your time talking to people in the camping site.

While I never managed to reach the end of the game – it's crack-like qualities were sufficient that after the first week of playing I gave the discs back and asked that it never be leant to me again, for fear I'd stop writing altogether – I did play several of the introductions and the camp proved to be the most fascinating part of the game-play. I also know how it ends – my frustration with the gameplay interrupting the narrative led me to checking out walkthroughs and cheat-sheets, which ultimately led to me shrugging and realising that I was less interested in the game as a game once I knew all the alternative storylines.

This is not the first time this has happened. Many years ago, back before I realised me and computer games didn't really mix, I started playing Starcraft. My interest in the game ended the moment a friend said "you know, I have this DVD full of cut scenes", whereupon I promptly watched the story without the game and went on with my life.

Here's the brutal truth of my relationship with computer games: I'm interested in their narratives, but can't engage with the narrative because of the game play. As soon as you establish conditions of victory or submission, I'm hardwired to try and win. This, more than anything else, kills my interest in the game the moment it becomes apparent that victory will take days or weeks to achieve.

Computer games aren't stories, and in this respect their attempts to manipulate emotions always feels like a bit of a cheat.

To be continued…

Back from the West Coast

I've been in Perth for the last four days, having a very nice time at the fiftieth National Science Fiction convention. Generally I'm not good with the con-report type things, since I get frustrated by my inability to summarize things, and so come up with glib one-line descriptions like awesome, with too much curry, which, yes, does encapsulate my con experience, but doesn't really describe it in any adequate manner.

It's not actually hard to explain why I enjoy Cons. About twenty-five minutes into Amanda Palmer's Berlkee Music Clinic recording she launches into a description of the life most artists and musicians dream about – something akin to Paris in the twenties where you could wander down to the west bank and step into a bar and immediately be surrounded by like-minded artists and thinkers who are happy to see you. She theorizes that most artists aren't really interested in money or success so much as the wine moment where you all come together. SF cons, for me, are exactly this experience. Probably because I spend most of the time in a bar. The side-effect of the experience is a general reluctance to try and codify it afterwards, because writing it up means letting the moment slip through your fingers. It means acknowledging that it's over and the dayjob is back, and your life is once again filled with washing up and noisy neighbours and the demands of paying rent, and the closest your going to get to finding all these people you love in a bar is getting on twitter at an opportune moment when everyone is busy chatting.

So Swancon was awesome, and involved a great deal of curry. Perth seems like a very nice city – at least, the two blocks of it between my hotel and the Con did – and the people where phenomenal and the panels I attended where generally interesting and frequently spawned even more interesting conversations in the bar afterwards. I accumulated too many books, as is my wont, and only drank a little more than I intended to once. The high point, if I need have one, was probably this:

Why yes, that is a shiny new Eclipse 4 sitting on top of my bookhaul from the con, which may very well be the most awesome anthology I've ever had the privilege of being in.

A Season in Hell

The Gold Coast, in my younger days, was not a city that welcomed serious readers. It's a long, skinny strip of a city pressed up against the South East Queensland coastline, a city predicated on beachfront tourism and theme parks and being a nice place to retire. I often introduce it to American friends as a nightmarish version of Miami that lacks all the class, which is possibly unfair, but I lived there for a very long time and I am very bitter about the experience. In my memory Gold Coast bookstores were characterized by their focus on the holiday read, easily digested books that could be burned through on a one-week getaway. When other serious readers recoil in the face of an airport bookshop, I feel a strange sense of nostalgia for the bookstores of my youth whose approach was startlingly familiar.

In my early teens, when my reading tastes focused on the biggest names of the big-name doorstop fantasy genre, this wasn't that big a deal. By the age of eighteen the anaemic F&SF and Modern Literature sections started to grate against my nerves. Finding books I wanted to read involved months of hunting, requesting special orders, or travelling to Brisbane where real bookshops could be found. Had Amazon existed when I was eighteen, it's entirely possibly I would have a very different relationship to fiction in addition to the kind of credit card debt that could cripple a small nation. Fortunately, it did not, and so I became a hunter of books, squirreling away the odd and unusual finds for later consumption.

I was twenty and an aspiring poet when I came into possession of the coolest book I would ever own. It was a cloth-bound hardcore edition of Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, illustrated with a series of photographs from Robert Mapplethorpe, and it was precious despite the fact that I understood very little of what was written or how to read the black-and-white photographs that accompanied the text. It was a puzzle that needed to be understood, and I'd frequently carry it with me, rereading it again and again on busses and in food courts and the foyer of the local unemployment office where I'd alienate the staff by insisting "writer" was a viable job and that my part-time post-graduate studies were going to get me a full-time career.

I'm not entirely sure how I came to own the book, but I can make some reasonable guesses. It would invariably come from a remainder bin outside of one of the book chains, literary detritus going cheap, as many cool things on my bookshelves tended to be. I can still remember the yellow sticker with the marked down price – a $50 book picked up for five or ten dollars. Being young and ignorant of the ways of publishing, I regarded this as a lucky bargain, rather than a sign that so few people wanted this treasure that it was effectively being thrown away.

Where it came from is the simple part, the real problem is the how I acquired it: did I buy it or was it bought for me? Either is equally likely, and since it's now one of those books that has passed from my collection, it's impossible to tell for sure. At twenty I bought books of poetry on reflex, regardless of who wrote them. It was a trained response learnt after the frustration of seeing nothing but Shakespeare's sonnets and Jewel's A Night Without Armor in the poetry shelf of the local bookstores. Poetry was stuff found in second-hand shops, where at least the discarded school readers could be unearthed, rather than acquiring it shiny and new in bookstores.

More likely, however, is that the book was bought for me. Trading books of poetry and art and music was the default mode of courtship in my twenties and there are still large chunks of my bookshelf that are inherited from relationships with women better-read and more artistically aware than I. My first serious relationship seems like one long exchange of obsessions and fandoms – Mapplethorpe's photography for my obsession with Neil Gaiman's Death comics; Angela Carter's fiction for a taped copy of Ani DiFranco's Living in Clip live album and the back catalogue of Lou Reed – and there are times when I think it ended simply because there were no more obsessions to trade. My second serious relationship was much the same, perhaps, for my twenties were a shallow time (my thirties, perhaps, are just as shallow, but I tend to date less now). I remember many aspects of those relationships with despair and anger and regret, but I can never regret the books and music and art they introduced me too.

And for many years A Season in Hell was a talisman against the city I lived in. I never quite understood the book, but I studied it and read about it and tried to comprehend it's mysteries. I sought out biographies of Rimbaud and webpages devoted to his work, I read lit papers about his works and sought out the rest of his poetry, and I started searching for more about Mapplethorpe and photography in general. I discovered Sontag's On Photography and Barthes' Camera Lucida, and proposed academic creative projects that revolved around both works that never seemed to stay on focus as I dragged my heels through the writing phase. I made a terribly academic. My interest was always in the reading and the discussion of the books, never in the writing about them. Once I understood, or found a new lever to try and unearth some new kernel of understanding, I was ready to move on.

And through it all Rimbaud's book remained the coolest book I ever owned, until one day I was in Brisbane and I didn't own it any longer. I was older and hopefully smarter, and by then I knew the magic that came with the names of the author and the photographer, but as I unpacked my book collection A Season in Hell was gone. I have my suspicions where it might have gone – I'd moved out of a relationship a few months prior, and many things went missing because I packed fast and bailed out like I was jumping off an burning airplane– but I was never in a position to really confirm that and so its absence became a mystery. It might be with a former significant other, it may be sitting in some box I never bothered moving out of my parents spare room, it may be sitting in a local second-hand shop, just like the beat-up jacket and CD singles I found a few weeks after the break-up and didn't have the discretionary cash to reacquire.

I hope, wherever it is, it's being appreciated by the people who own it. I hope it continues to be the coolest book in someone's collection, even if it isn't the coolest book in my own. Then again, perhaps it can't be, if it's the book you're still in possession of. Perhaps it loses some luster when it's something you can pull down off the shelf and reread with relative ease. My version of the book exists only in memory, attached to a time and a place, and it's probably more precious and more awesome because of that. The things you get to keep are never quite as precious as the things you allow yourself to lose, even if they gain value in other ways through the years of familiarity.

These days it would be relatively easy to replace. I can find a copy second-hand on Amazon without too much difficulty, and while they'll never be as cheap as my first copy, they're not unreasonably priced. Presumably, if I put in the effort, there would be other options available online. For some reason, I choose not to do that. I guess I've gotten used to it being owned by someone else, and I don't really need my copy anymore. It wouldn't be the same.

But it was an awesome thing to have owned once, and I've never really owned anything quite like it. And I probably owe someone a thank-you for that, even if I can't remember who and I have no idea where they are now.

"There's so much I could'a done if they'd let me"

Today, because I'm in such a cheerful mood, I'm mainlining Nick Cave's Murder Ballads album. Somewhere in my CD collection I've got a copy of his b-sides and rarities triple-disc thingy, which includes a four-part, extended thirty-minute long version of O'Malley's Bar. That's going on next, 'cause sometimes, misogyny be damned, you just need a series of songs about killing every mother-fucker in the room in an unrelenting and utterly debauched fashion.

This is my alternative to curling up on the floor of my bedroom and having a temper tantrum, 'cause really the closest I'm getting to articulating my mood these days is the ability to randomly shout "Hate! Hate! Hate!" at the top of my lungs. There are very few things in my life that aren't filling me with loathing at the moment, from my less-interesting dayjob (which puts Fight Club into all kinds of interesting new perspectives for me) to my more interesting dayjob (which I hate, primarily, because it's kinda awesome and not my primary dayjob, which just makes the other dayjob even worse) to my neighbor (seriously, *turn down your fucking stereo at 4 AM*) to myself (which, really, is a let me count the ways kind of thing).

None of this is particularly new – anger has probably been my default state since I was thirteen or fourteen – but I usually have a better grip on it than I do right now. I can cobble together a mask that more or less resembles a civilized human being and go out and function in civilized society. Normally I can swallow anger and work at it rationally, figuring out solutions, or I can vent at the things that are making me less than pleased through the medium of fiction. Or I'll catch up with friends and rant at them until the anger burns itself out and I've overused the words fuck, at which point I'm more clear-headed and able to behave myself a little better.

The anger's rarely directed at specific people, except for myself, since it's really just a general pissed-offness at the world. I'd actually be more worried if I woke up and I wasn't pissed off about something, because the world is a terminally unfair place and I continue to exist in it, which means I'm going to keep finding things that make me angry.

For all that it's got a reputation as a negative emotion, I actually think anger is important.

Anger is, after all, where writing comes from.

It's possible this isn't a universal thing for all writers, but I'm pretty sure it's not just me. I vaguely remember Ray Bradbury talking about stories coming from a place of anger in his Zen and the Art of Writing collection of essays, and there's any number of writers with overtly angry or political stances being displayed in their fiction. The artistic myth of the angry young man is almost as predominant as the artist driven crazy by the muse, and of the two I find the angry young man more palatable (at least, once man is switched out for person). At least the AYM/W is in control of his/her artistic practice, rather than sacrificing it to some unnameable entity and refusing to take responsibility for what they do.

Really, that's all window dressing. The real reason fiction comes from a place of anger is this: all stories are revolutions.

It's one of those ideas that's ingrained in the very structure of the story – whether you spend a thousands words, five thousand words, an entire novel, or a three-book trilogy – you are building towards a climax. One of the best descriptions of the climax came from a film lecturerer I worked with a few years back, who described it as point where the most important moral decision of the book is made, the one that changes the character's world forever. The good are rewarded, the evil are punished. As a writer you establish a new status quo, correcting whatever flaw in the world existed in the opening of the story, and so there's a series of political decisions being made about what's incorrect and what isn't*.

And really, if you're not angry about something, why bother going to the trouble? Whenever I'm stuck on a story, or I look back on something I've written and don't really feel satsified by it, it's invariably because the anger isn't there. Whether it was never ther, or if I simply lost it, is occasionally unclear, but it's certainly gone in that particular reading.

*Want an example? Lets take, say, Star Wars. For all that the original Star Wars ends with a bang at its climax, the actual destruction of the Death Star actually pales next to the two big decisions made just prior – Luke Skywalker turning off his computer, rejecting the technology (which, in Star Wars, is the tool of the Empire since they've got the big death machine) and embracing the spirituality of the Force, and the sudden return of the Millennium Falcon to save the day and align the morally gray Han Solo with the white hats from there forward. Destroying the Death Star is really just the reward for those decisions. Destroying the Death Star is a physical victory, but the emotional victory of these two moments