Meet the new jacket, not the same as the old jacket.

In the late 1800’s, a Scot called Edward Le Roy was working around the docks in the new, wild land of Australia. There were a lot of sailors there freezing their various genitalia off because the seas out those parts were fucking harsh, and no matter how many woolly jumpers you stack on your nipples still turned into little black diamond-hard lumps the first time you sailed into the wind. Edward needed a solution.

“What,” he asked, “would make the wind my bitch?” Then he looked up at the sails of the ships passing through the dock and had his answer.

Sailcloth back then was thick cotton canvas treated with oil, which made a material so fucking manly that it turned gale winds – an elemental force of destruction – into your personal servant. Edward Le Roy took this material and made it into a set of rather smart casual jackets. Sailors all around the Australian coast were able to head into the piss-thick sleet of a coastal storm with their middle fingers up. Stockmen out on the northern plains watched over their flocks through freezing night and rain heavy enough to drown in.

In 1933, Edward finally registered a trademark for his beautiful, manly jackets, and a legend was born.

Driza-bone.

I’ve been looking for a jacket like this a long time. Bomber cut, nice fit, warm as hell, built to last the apocalypse. If anyone ever nukes Melbourne I’ll just curl into a ball and throw this jacket over my head and then wait till the asphalt cools.

Jackets are for life, people. Not just for Christmas.

70k… approaching the endgame.

Well, in all the excitement of getting close to the end of Alpha Slip, I totally forgot to mark my 100th post! My first How-To article, Plot vs Story, capped off the centenary. Congratulations, Plot vs Story!

I really wanted to have another short ready to post here before the end of the month, but I haven’t even stopped to look at anything but Alpha Slip since May. This isn’t the quickest I’ve ever written a novel, but it’s the quickest I’ve ever written a novel that I liked. I’m thinking this draft will probably end up at the 80k mark. Then the second draft (which will be the first I release out to close friends for opinions) will be about the same – I can see at least 10-15k worth of rubbish that needs cutting, but there’s also a TON of secondary characterisation I completely forgot to include in this draft, leaving most of the characters as thin as a sneeze. If you missed my chatting about Alpha Slip entirely, I posted the first three chapters here.

Also, my Why We Fight article usurped my Mx Sucks Plebian Balls article as most popular post on the blog, which just goes to show all you folk are suckers for blood and nudity.

I just finished reading Brasyl, so I’ll have a (very positive) review of that up soon. In the meantime, keep writing, keep dancing, keep loving.

RIP Steven Wells, Philadelphia Weekly journalist

I read Steven Wells’ article The English Patient many months ago and found it both hilarious and exceptionally depressing at the same time. It was a very personal tale of the complete inadequacies of the Philadelphia hospital system, and instantly convinced me to never, ever, get sick in the USA.

I had pretty much forgotten about that article until I saw on Warren Ellis’s blog today that Steven Wells had passed away, finally succumbing to the cancer that had made his last years so hellish. I went back to the Philadelphia Weekly site and re-read the article – and the two follow-ups – once again shocked by Steven’s honesty, candidness, and ability to admit his fears and failings in the face of death.

Then on Thurs., Jan. 29, 2009, I got a phone call from my gastroenterologist. He told me I’ve got a cancer called enteropathy-associated T-cell lymphoma— which only afflicts a small percentage of the small percentage of people who develop celiac disease. And as cancers go, it’s a bastard.

Anyhoo. I put the phone down and let out a huge, self-pitying “Why me?” The answer, of course, is the same as the answer to Travis’ shit-awful 1999 international breakthrough hit, “Why Does It Always Rain on Me?” Because you’re a fucking dick. Now shut the fuck up and grow a pair.

Linked for your convenience: Steven Wells’ final articles on cancer, health care, and accepting the end. RIP Steven Wells – the world will miss you.

The English Patient

Cell Out

His Final Column

Some clarification (it’s not goddamn Fight Club)

My last post got me a lot of reactions from people who don’t usually read this blog. Some were good, even encouraging. Others were extremely disparaging, or simply assumed that this combat training is nothing more than a try-hard fight club.

I’ll put down a few points and hope everyone absorbs them.

Why We Fight (Fight Training June 2009)

There is purity in a fistfight.

Ruzkin on Writing – Plot vs Story

Plot and story. What’s the difference? Is there a difference? Some would argue there is no real distinction between the two. Others, myself included, believe there’s a world of difference between a plot and a story.

Now, what I’m going to discuss here isn’t that much different from the same opinions put forward by Stephen King, David Morrell and Sol Stein, although I’m might be a little blunter in my explanation. I’m blunt because I feel I have to be to get the point across. Recognising the difference between plot and story is a fundamental skill for writers, especially when writing extended pieces (novels or novellas) and yet I keep seeing aspiring writers churning out hundreds of thousands of words of plot with very little story. Not just aspiring writers, but highly paid professionals as well (William Gibson, I’m looking at YOU).

A book with a well-crafted story will keep a reader’s attention even if afterwards they put it down and say “Man, that was shallow.” Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code is a good example. A book with a good plot but no story might sometimes keep us going until the end… but something will always feel intrinsically wrong, or lacking. Plot-heavy books are often the ones we give up on halfway through.

So what’s the difference?

This is just beautiful – Israeli newspaper Haaretz lets the authors take over

For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news.

How can you beat poet Roni Somek’s brief, lyrical weather report?

Summer is the pencil
that is least sharp
in the seasons’ pencil case.

Not much else from me lately. Alpha Slip passed the 50,000 word mark, and I finished university for the semester. My first how-to-write article will be finished soon. More at 11.

Best of luck to all those Aussie authors stuck in the winter doldrums!

Book Review – Spook Country, by William Gibson

If you’ve never heard of William Gibson, or read any of his stuff, shame on you. He is the premier bad-ass of sci-fi. You ever heard the term “cyber-space?”

Out in the malls and plazas, moths were batting themselves to death against the neon, but in Bobby’s loft the only light came from a monitor screen and the green and red LED’s on the face of the matrix simulator. I knew every chip in Bobby’s simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the “Cyberspace Seven,” but I’d rebuilt it so many times that you’d have had a hard time finding a square millimetre of factory circuitry in all that silicon.

William Gibson, Burning Chrome

That’s right. Gibson invented a term so awesome it became a buzzword for an entire generation. Then it became uncool, the sort of things politicians use when making arguments about banning game-violence, and that just goes to show how far he’s permeated tech culture.

His first novel, Neuromancer, is widely considered the birthplace of the cyber-punk movement. What’s more, it’s all about hacking, and Gibson wrote it without knowing anything about hacking at all. He just read about it and thought it was awesome. That’s like Jackie Chan, the cornerstone of modern cinematic martial arts, just turning up on the set of his first film saying “What, me fight? No, never tried it. Never practiced. But I read a book about it, how hard can it be?”

So if Gibson is such a bad-ass, why is his most recent novel such a let-down?

Onwards, into June.

First: Thankyou to everyone who checked out my blag during May. For the first time ever, I got 1000 views in a single month, which to me is a whole damn lot. When I look at Scalzi’s blog and see his stats (40,000 readers a day) I kind of wobble a bit and have to sit down. But it’s nice now that I have a statistic with three zeros in it.

Second: it’s cold here. If you see me during June without my beanie or a cup of tea in hand, it’s not really me. Pod-people have hijacked my body.

Third: I have three worth-while posts planned for June, but they’re gonna take a little while to prepare. The first – a new short story. I have three in the re-draft stage that could go somewhere good, and I want one done before July. The second – a new book review. I just finished Spook Country, and I want to whine about it publicly. Third – my first “Writing Tips” article, inspired by everything I found wrong with Spook Country. It’ll be about Plot vs Story, and hopefully it’ll be of use to someone.

See you guys soon, best of luck with SOCNOC to Tama Wise and best of luck with Rebel and Traitor to Merillee Faber! Best of luck to ALL of us poor, unpublished, inglourious basteaurrrrds.

My first photography portfolio:

Just some samples from my photography portfolio (which I’m handing in today, glee!) The rest are on my flickr account, which you can click through to easily enough. Some minor colour correction on all of these, no real photoshop magic involved.