Students, I have decided, are a bad influence.

Yesterday, Starcraft 2 was released.

Yesterday, one of my students gave me a guest pass.

…

Bye!

Last night, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott appeared for their political farce, aided and abetted by the media, who asked inane questions, pushed not at all, and allowed the term fair dinkum to be used to such an extent that cultural cringe became cool, once again.

But wait, I may tell you what I really think.

See, I got thinking, as I was watching this poor excuse for a debate, though not really about issues. For the most part, it felt like I was watching their press releases, as monitored by a pink and blue worm, one for girls, and one for boys. I’m not quite sure what the point was, for as far as I could see, neither gender went against the other. But as I was watching, I realised, slowly, about something that is very rarely talked about. Excited, I started texting my friends, to hear what they thought. Had I done it? Had I come up with a new political observation that would propel me into a state in which I might leave the apathy that exists around me and proclaim that no, it’s not true, democracy isn’t dead, that it is alive, and that these two figures are the best representations we could possibly have of it?

Nah.

However, I did think that Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott kinda, sorta, maybe, really, no, really, do kinda look alike:

Over the last few months, Night Shade Books have come under fire for not treating their authors correctly. The stories have been around for a while, though they were nothing new: failure to communicate, failure to pay, and stolen rights. In fairness, I hadn’t heard of the last until I started reading the posts by authors. Eventually these posts developed into a bit of public backlash and a bit of negative press–though it was a fairly low key, at least to my gaze. Authors tend to fear speaking up for themselves or on the behalf of other authors because getting published can be so difficult, and a lot tend to just keep their heads down. Certainly it is not a practice that I can argue against, and I find myself in constant flux over the situation myself. On one hand, I think the treatment of authors in general is fairly awful, but on the other hand, everyone likes to work, right? It can be a hard situation to find yourself in.

However, back to Night Shade: an apology was issued:

First and foremost, we at Night Shade Books would like to apologize for any problems we’ve caused any of our authors. The last three years have been brutal on us, although not in any way we could have expected. While we’ve faced the same difficulties every small and independent press has suffered in this age of sales downturns, higher-than-expected returns, and other challenges, what has caused us the most trouble have been our successes. Night Shade has grown faster and more uncontrollably than we had any idea how to handle. What started as two guys shipping books out of a garage now consists of a full staff working out of an office in San Francisco. We’ve shuffled around a lot of our responsibilities, but in many ways, we’re still figuring this out as we go.

This has led to some major miscommunication, and sometimes flat-out lack of communication, with our authors, sometimes, even amongst ourselves. We screwed up: Details were missed, one of us assumed another was handling a situation, or a reluctance to deliver bad news turned into an unprofessional excuse to procrastinate. The issues that have come up today, at their core, are really ones of communication. All this could have been avoided through simple phone calls and emails, through us letting people know what was happening.

It’s a fairly standard apology: admit wrong was done, promise to righten things, and so on and so forth. Hopefully this will happen, but anyone who has passed a business of remote size that has been caught out for doing the wrong thing will recognise the apology. Still, like I said, maybe it’ll be genuine and maybe it’ll work out. The time I met Jeremy Lassen, he had a real passion for what he was doing, and that would make a difference to such a statement, but really, only time reveals all.

What is interesting, however, is the SFWA response, of putting Night Shade on probation:

We are heartened that Night Shade has issued an apology and has pledged to correct its problems. These are needed first steps for a growing publisher that has published some memorable science fiction and fantasy in the last few years, including this year’s Nebula Award winner for Best Novel, The Windup Girl. Regardless of reasons given, such behavior by a publisher to its authors is unacceptable.

With these facts in mind, by vote of the Board, Night Shade Books is on probation as a qualified SFWA market for a period of one year, effective immediately.

In this case, “probation” means that although Night Shade Books remains on our official list of qualified SFWA markets, during the term of probation, acceptance for SFWA qualification of fiction contracted for publication by Night Shade is suspended. If Night Shade successfully completes its one-year probation period, fiction contracted by Night Shade during that time will be viewed as acceptable for qualification for SFWA membership. If it does not SFWA will remove Night Shade Books from the list of approved markets.

No fiction contracted and paid for (by initial advance payment) before the term of probation will be affected by Night Shade’s probationary status.

During the period of probation, we expect the following from Night Shade in order for it to remain on the qualifying list after its probation period:

1. That it fulfills its contractual and financial obligations to the authors it has already published, including full and accurate accounting of royalties per contract, with payment of any royalties outstanding;

2. That it examine its catalogue to ensure it is no longer offering fiction in formats for which it has no rights, and makes whole those authors whose rights it has violated;

3. That it institutes procedures and hires sufficient staff to ensure accurate record keeping for contracts and payments, both for previously published and future authors;

4. That there are no instances of contractual violations on the part of Night Shade Books against authors signed to publishing deals after the start of the probationary period.

It’s a good thing to see, even if I do think the probation is a touch meaningless–though in this, perhaps I am under estimating the interest and or power of being on the SFWA list of publishers. Living where and as I do, it’s not as if the SFWA has a huge baring on my day, week, or year, but it’s done some good things, and with any luck, their stance on this will be one of those good things as well.

Time, however, will tell.

I have found, over the years, that the best way to write is to be consistent. Either you sit down every day, or you write a certain amount a week, or another choice that never entered my mind. Personally, I like to try for the writing every day, though I usually end up skipping on Wednesday and Sunday, just because those days are busy with teaching. I try to write around a thousand words each of those days. Most days I do. Some days I can do twice, other days I do half. Occasionally, time comes into it and occasionally, time doesn’t. The point is, I sit at my laptop, in positions that alternate throughout my place during the year, and I write. I chip away at things. I rewrite. I type. I do my thing until things are finished–however long that is–and sometimes I like what I have in the end, and other times I think they’re a bit of a waste. Mostly, I’m finished when I can’t stand the sight of something any more.

I’m always very happy when I get everything, writing wise, done in the day. I mean, why do it otherwise if you’re not happy doing it? The gig is a touch soul destroying some days, and you can push endless at it and feel like you’re going nowhere for the longest time. So, you might as well enjoy the writing itself.

Today, however, I did not write, except for this blog post.

Some days, it’s a bit like that.

I am sure I had intelligent and thoughtful things to say today, but then I discovered Rambo: the Musical.

Honestly, I should just admit that this blog is slowly becoming trash culture centre.

This morning, the bank asked me if I would like a financial health check.

I don’t know why I agreed, but I did, and the woman no doubt wondered why I agreed too. She did not seem to quite understand how I had no financial goals for the next twelve months. “You don’t want to buy a house, maybe a car?” she asked, a couple of times, and each time I said no, amused, because she had my account information. How I was going to buy either of those things without going into debt, I had no idea, but perhaps her goal was to lead me into some kind of debt relationship with the bank.

But no, I have no financial goals like that. I started working on a new novel and I got ten thousand words of that down, and I fiddle with short stories, and I work, and I keep myself busy, and that pretty much is it to life.

Other than giant balloon art, that is.

There is a “coherent and significant connection” between radiation from Vatican Radio aerials and childhood cancer, researchers have said.

The Italian experts looked at high numbers of tumours and leukaemia in children who live close to Vatican Radio transmitters.

The 60 antennas stand in villages and towns near Rome.

The Vatican said it was astonished and would present contrary views to a court in Rome.

Much linked, I know, but still darkly funny.

Link.

Boat people.

Just the name is enough to make me sigh, sink into my chair, and switch off mentally. It’s nothing short of a political distraction, an item to toss around when there are more important things to discuss, one that gets the multicultural country of Australia up in arms, and has politicians making all sorts of random proposals, and why not? Boat people are a minuscule number of the country’s intake of migrants, they also represent a minority that is not only voiceless, but happens to be from another country. In short, you can say and do anything you want with boat people, because boat people are voiceless. To put into perspective just how voiceless, I came across a graph the other day, which I thought particularly interesting.

The boat people debate has been around for years, however, and a cynical person might suggest that our new Prime Minister has attacked it with such relentless ambition because it provides an easy distraction from her sudden step into power, the back down over the mining policy (read: big business owns Australia, and they just showed it) and the slow turning voter tide that is taking place in Western Sydney. Indeed, Western Sydney has been tossed into the same pool as the boat people, with various commentators claiming that the reason why this issue has to be solved now, is because the people in Western Sydney are the ‘front line’ and are concerned, mad, ill informed, or any combination of those three plus more, about the subject.

It is, in short, bullshit.

The Western Suburbs of Sydney is not worrying about boat people. I know this because I live in the Western Suburbs of Sydney, a deeply multicultural area which has long been misrepresented by the media, especially by journalists, who have more than once been accused of not travelling beyond Leichardt. It is an area that has long lived under the sigma of misrepresentation: the gangs of Campbelltown, Blacktown, Fairfield, and Mt Druitt, to name a few, the violence in each, the poverty, the racism, and so on and so forth, in an ugly collection of bad news reporting, stereotypes, and misinformation.

The truth about a voter turn against anyone in the NSW government is based in the story of a government that has been in power for much too long, and which has over the years fallen into a series of scandals over sexuality, money, and race. If the Labor Government of NSW is removed it will have nothing to do with the politics of Australia at all–it will not rely upon boat people, mining taxes, or whether or not Tony Abbott or Julia Gillard look good in a bathing suit. It will be due to stagnation, to simply being tired of the same old lies. Anyone telling you otherwise is peddling the same old story for years, which like everywhere else, has an ounce of truth in it, just as another ounce of people reject it fully. It’s a large, multicultural community lodged out here, and it’s worth remembering that.

Lol.

So, I came across this ‘I write like’ thing a few minutes ago, and for amusement, I started dropping my stuff into it. Recent stuff, old stuff, published, upcoming, not yet published, anything really. The answers were pretty amusing–my dystopian novel, Black Sheep, saw me compared to Douglas Adams, and at other times I was compared to Jack London and Chuck Palanhiuk, to name a few.

Then I thought, what if I try three excerpts that are similar?

The answers are below–two novellas, one novel. Of them, Octavia E Butler is probably the most different in voice, but not hugely. It’s really a shame I haven’t been able to sell that, but the rejections have been interesting, from editors telling me that Butler is too niche to draw a large audience, and others telling me that they knew Butler as a person, and while they know the story isn’t about her, they can’t step outside it. I’ll probably never sell it–and maybe the audience for it isn’t there–but sometimes you write something cause it’s meaningful to yourself and all that other stuff isn’t of real importance.

That’s neither here nor there, however, since I am the hybrid James Joyce Ray Bradbury Dan Brown author of the future.

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Matthew Brady was transported at the age of twenty-two for murder.

He considered it a black piece of humour that he had been convicted for the death of one man since, at the age of sixteen, he had been part of the Shibtri Isles Army. For nearly six years he had fought in campaigns across dry, burnt soil that lay beneath empty red skies. When not fighting on the land he had been born on, he traveled and fought on soggy, sodden, yellowed half-grown fields beneath the same sun; or in the long tunnels of the Queen’s Empire, where the only light was provided by phosphorescent stones and moss. In these campaigns, the dark, maroon uniform of Brady’s native country remained the same no matter his antagonistic or defensive role, though he found no fault in this at the time. The military was the only employment he had ever known and he had joined, not through of a sense of patriotism or duty, but rather because the dangerous and violent nature of the work offered to him was attractive. He wasn’t like his brother, Alex—Alexander—who had the natural gift of intelligence. No, for Brady, life existed in the physical, the tangible, and the pleasures that were offered through these experiences, and so when the recruiters stood in their maroon uniforms in the middle of the broken cement quadrangle of the under funded school he attended and told him that he could have a life with money, food, and travel in addition, he did not hesitate. That he was to be part of campaigns that resulted in the deaths of men and women with whom he had no personal connection with did not bother him. It never occurred to him that it should. Likewise, he was similarly unconcerned by the destruction caused to towns and cities and countries he visited. Why should he have been? The question of why he was there had been made before the army was sent into battle, and he never saw a reason to question them—until, that is, the day he killed William Morris.

I write like
Ray Bradbury

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Eleven nights after the death of his wife, Eli Kurran watched a city fall from the sky.

He had not been asleep when the warning alarms began. His presence in bed was only to reassure his daughter, Lilia, that normality had returned to their lives after her mother’s passing. In truth, nine out of the past eleven nights had seen Kurran lie on his side of the wide, red iron-framed bed, and stare at the empty expanse before him. Most of the time his thoughts drifted in a dull, angry ache, unformed in their insomniac grief. On those nights when exhaustion forced him to sleep, however, he dreamed of his wife, and his loss was sharp. In those torments, the room had a hot, feverish light, and Del lay across from him. She was deathly thin, the silver spikes of her purifiers gleaming strongly like a second, artificial spine along her back. He wanted desperately to reach out to her, to touch her one final time, but he never moved, and neither did she. There was only the sickness and the knowledge that nothing could be done.

I write like
Dan Brown

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I was eleven when you gave me the knife.

The day was cold, grey: the end of winter, but early enough that my final year in St. Mary’s Sanctuary was a long way from completion. Despite that, on the day that I met you I was thinking about how good it would be to no longer have to walk past the fences that ran outside the school in thick, sandy brick. The contraction between these thoughts and the fact that I was early did not escape me, however, and soon you would tell me that was how you knew my uncle was staying with me. It was a lie, of course: you knew because you were me.

I pushed open the blue metal door to the classroom and saw you standing in front of a map of the world. At first, I thought that you were a relief teacher, and if not that, a rich mother. I did not suspect otherwise: you were not black, you were not tall, and you did not have the thick, black curly hair that I had. You were white, of medium height, and with close cropped hair that might have been black if it had grown out. In short, you were as physically removed from me as you could have been. You were right not to tell me that this was me, that I was staring at my own future self. You were right to start our conversation by saying, “The infected areas are coloured red, right? It has been a while since I’ve seen one.”