Category: Self-ish

Rejected!

Received my first rejection slip for Ron the Body the other day.
(Some of you might have pieced together I’m still writing the third draft. How can I get rejected when it ain’t done? Simply because I fired off a pitch to an agent when I hid the quarter-mark; you only need the first few chapters and a synopsis. I figured, correctly, it would motivate me to get the rest of draft 3 written but fast.)
It’s not the first rejection notice I’ve received – I’ve been shopping around in move and Fell Legacy for a while, with no success. But both of those books are tough sells – a publisher has every right to second guess whether they could bring them to market. They’re both pitched a bit askew from easy genre fit. (in move sits somewhere between contemporary, popular and young adult lit; Fell Legacy is a fantasy novel treated as horror movie/character study.) Plus, they’re far from perfect works of fiction – I’m still finding a voice in in move and in Fell Legacy I never really mastered the prose style I tried. So rejections for those have been easy to understand. Heck, sometimes I’ve received actual responses rather than form rejections, which have been invariably positive in the process of saying no.
It is, however, the first time I’ve tried to get interest for Ron the Body, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care about getting a no. The reasons for my sanguine response to previous rejections don’t really apply here. Ron fits clearly into the subgenre of contemporary lit that uses a fantastical element to explore its ideas (c.f. The Time-Traveller’s Wife and The Fortress of Solitude). And my craft has improved out of sight. Ron is good to go. More than anything else I’ve produced, it could hold its own on a bookstore’s shelves.
But you know what? I’m actually surprisingly cool with getting bounced back. (If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be blogging this, for one thing.) The old thing about needing to rack up a whole bunch of rejections seems to have been taken to heart somewhere along the line. I don’t bear any ire towards the agency that said no, and I don’t feel discouraged about the potential of the book. There’s any number of reasons they could have said no, including that they thought it was terrible, and I’m cool with all of them. It’s all part of the game, right?
So, then. This post marks the beginning of the rest. Onwards.

How I Spent My New Years

Over at d3vo you can see the 3-minute video taken at the New Years bach, where everyone says what their best moment of 2007 was.
Mostly of note for those who were there. You know who you are.

Streaming Video

I hate sites that deliver video content by streaming it. As soon as I see the word “buffering”, I close the browser window and do something else.
Streaming is straight-up bad technology. Let us download the files, already.
(I have always thought this, but post about it today because I discovered Cory agrees with me.)

Zine Launch

Wednesday 19 March, there will be a launching of a zine I contributed to, the rather wonderful Seven Copies Of The Scream. It’s going to be in the Welsh Dragon bar from 6pm to 8pm – do come along.
7CotS is a pretty wild joint venture. I’d honestly given up on it ever seeing the light of day, but apparently it’s now all go again. Here’s the blurb from the website:

All right so the new issue of 7COTS (that stands for SEVEN COPIES OF THE SCREAM) is ready and waiting we just need to get off our ass and get it out there so the punters (which is YOU) can read it
it is an absolute killer of an issue, 70 pages or so of P-smoking brilliance that will have you weeping in your cornflakes and inhaling rice bubbles by snorting with laughter at the wrong time
Featured articles include:
* are we all going crazy (investigative report)
* why vampires really do suck so bad
* music that is cool
* f***d up books
* the best movie review you will ever read (better than the movie and cheaper than paying $16 for a movie ticket CHRIST that is a lot of money who can afford that)
* and THE TEN GROSSEST MOVIE MOMENTS EVER (all of these are on DVD so you can get them from Aro Video)
Also lots of other random awesome.
SO make sure you don’t miss the latest issue of 7COTS because it’s probably going to be our last and its definitely the best one so far, available at places that carry zines, [this is blatantly not true, it isn’t available anywhere – morgue]
you can’t miss it because Isabella Rosellini is being nuzzled by a pig on the cover

It’s true, the cover does show Isabella Rosellini (sp?) being nuzzled by a pig.

In Community

Yesterday, while I missed the Wellington Bloggers gathering, I did manage to spend a couple hours with the other moose. It was really good to spend some time catching up. There have been some pretty major developments in both our lives since we last had a catch up worthy of the name – him more than me, which is saying something.
One thing we talked about was community, and I realised that I’m finding the community scene in Wellington to be different for me now than it was back in ’02, when I hopped a plane to the UK. Then I felt plugged in to a solid and powerful network of people and there was some cool stuff emerging out of the collective. Now… not so much. Still all the awesome people there were then, but the way the connections work has changed.
There are communities here now – but I’m choosing to float on the edges of them, even the ones comprised of many people I am glad to call friends. The communities that I was massively invested in before have either disintegrated or ceased to call to me in any powerful way. My social relationships are defined primarily as one-to-one things instead of by membership in many-to-many nets.
Partly this is the shift in my cohort to babies and suburbs. But only partly; there’s something else going on. Not sure what. Perhaps there was a direction, or a counter-direction, that we once had and that is now lacking?
And underlying all of this, of course, is the fact that I am ridiculously busy right now. Pushing hard to get RtB tightened up, at the same time as pushing work to get $$ under control, at the same time as pushing study to get MSc on point… My former data point has been the number of emails I have building up unreplied-to. That stack has got ridiculous now. New data point: I am actually relieved that my finger is busted taking me out of sport for two months, because it means I get a few more hours in the day.
Strange times. I would benefit from more time to reflect than I’m currently getting. But at least I have my priorities straight enough to blog, right? It’s pretty much the only contact I have with most of you after all..

Lessons of the Best Man

So I was Best Man on Friday for Frank. It was awesome. And now I get to share some wisdom about the Best Man speech. I bet you’re all excited.
(1) Writing jokes is hard as hell. I spent the entire 4-hour journey up trying to get one joke to work right. Going over and over and over the damn thing in my head. (Finally I told Cal all the alternatives I’d come up with and she pointed out the best one, which was also the one I liked most. It went down well.) Moral: give yourself plenty of time, so you can let your brain mull. Or be naturally funny. Whichever works for you.
(2) You can go on the internet and get your Best Man speech. There are lots of buy-a-speech sites. There are lots of free speeches to watch on YouTube or read on advice sites. This plethora of speeches does not translate into a plethora of gags you can steal, because they all use the same four lines, and they all suck. It’s still useful to look at these for structure, inspiration, and confidence that something genuine and personal always beats some crappy speech off the internet.
(3) Your Best Man speech is probably better with fewer jokes than you initially want.
(4) For best results on the night, aim to be precisely half as drunk as the average audience member.
All of the above wisdom is guaranteed 100% true and correct in all circumstances because I’m perfect.
It was a great wedding, and I loved being a Best Man. (But it stressed me out some.)