Thanks to being grossly behind with my RSS feeds I failed to notice that my review of Brum outfit Walk.DontWalk‘s debut album, A Horse To Be Reckoned With, had gone live over at The Dreaded Press. On April 18th. I think that qualifies as a big fat fail.
This seems as opportune a moment as any to announce that some of my music reviews will henceforth be sent over to The Dreaded Press. They’ll take a little longer to appear online but they’ll be read by many more people, which seems like a sensible trade-off.
Infamous powerhouse of satire The Onion recently put up a video report about a reality TV show in which autoworkers at two Ford plants compete against one another in a variety of challenges. The prize? Keeping their jobs, pensions and healthcare.
Losing your job and being singled out for humiliation on national television? Ouch. My only hope is that a company’s employees finger the boss for the sack – which seems only fair, given that turning to this sort of sick roulette is effectively an admission of professional incompetence.
I forgot to mention this at the time, but the most recent issue of Vector featured my review of Ray Bradbury’s reissued classic Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Vector is the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association and is only available to members. The main BSFA site is here, Vector’s rarely-updated site is here, and the much more happenin’ Vector editor’s blog is here.
Okay, okay. I’ve been terrible for the last few weeks. Without even the del.icio.us round-ups this blog’s been looking like a ghost town. Here’s the thing: I’ve been torn two ways between sleeping really badly (insomnia is no fun) and being really busy with the day job. I know no one reading this gives a rat’s ass about excuses, but that’s yer lot.
I also need to shake up what I’m spending my time on. Project 365! has been fun, but it’s also quite intense and I’m routinely leaving it a fortnight between posts. I think I’m going to knock that little experiment on the head unless anyone is really enjoying it. As in masturbating whilst reading and unable to achieve climax without an update. Project 52! I’ll probably keep going because it doesn’t require such regular updates, and this allows me to think a little deeper and write a little more broadly about the books I’ve read.
I’ve enjoyed the few music reviews I’ve done recently and I want to start doing more of those. Every time I listen to a new record or attend a show I’m thinking about what I can write about it. The actual writing it up part is a bit trickier, but I’ll work something out. Even if it means taking a little notepad to shows and looking like a bit of a dork.
Friday flash fiction: as you’ve no doubt seen there’s been very little of this for a while. I’m pleased that the few people who got back to me about ‘Funeral’ had positive things to say as that was an interesting one to write. Going back a bit further, however, to the week where I posted four stories in five days, I realised that I was pushing myself to achieve quantity rather than quality, and often I was writing up half-formed ideas. ‘Heralded By Iron’ isn’t even an idea: it’s a collection of vaguely cool images. I don’t want to be sharing sub-standard fiction. Or at least, sub-standard for my own meagre abilities.
So as far as the flashfic goes, I’ll post one up when I feel like writing one. No promises. I get the most readers and feedback for my short stories, though, so don’t think this is me abandoning the Glorious Experiment altogether.
I also want to get back into writing longer fiction. In fact I have a couple of novel ideas floating around that I’d like to try and make a start on. It’s been some time since I attempted a novel (not since ’07, I think). This is not even mentioning the dozens of longer short pieces that I need to rewrite and try to get published. Did I mention that I’m lazy and poorly motivated?
Here’s the plan: I’m not going to force myself to meet any sort of schedule. I react poorly to deadlines and very quickly grow to resent them. What I am going to do is write what I want, when I want, as often as I want. This may be a music review or flash fiction or a P52! post or even one of my intermittent political ragebursts, and you folks will see these. Or it may be some work on something longer, and you won’t see these, but if there’s something interesting about the creative process, my mistakes, or my successes, I will probably share these anecdotes. I may even write occasionally about my band, Wrecktheplacefantastic, because our new drummer has pretty much nailed all our old songs and we’re looking to write new material and start gigging again.
Sound fair?
Thanks to everyone who regularly visits this blog: you make it all worthwhile.
NFI is back online, as should be obvious from reading this. Apologies for the outage, everyone. Apparently something went wrong with my host’s Linux server(s) last Friday, and it was only late last night that they finished restoring the doohickeys and thingymabobs on the whassat.
This has also affected my email servers so I’m going to be a bit behind with that for a few days. I won’t be catching up tonight as I’m off to see Propagandhi. Woohoo!
It’s been a while since I’ve posted a piece of Friday flash fiction. I hope to post another entry later in the day explaining why. For the time being, here is another story that is technically too long to be flash, clocking in at 1,171 words.
Project 365! is an ongoing series of posts in which I listen to some albums and write a little about them. They’re mostly records I’ve not heard before, and there’ll be one for every day of the year. It should also provide some lols as we all learn more things about which I am ignorant. Good times!
The quality of the audio is not great, but it will reward your focus and attention.
I’ll let the video speak for itself, but do keep an eye out for the projection on the part of the defensive party in the debate – the accusations of recourse to baseless rhetoric, of ahistorical lack of perspective, and so forth – as well as the attempts to smear by association. Perhaps you could turn it into a sort of drinking game.
This all comes in the responses toward the end of the debate, at about 39:10, though even if you’re only interested in the pugilism you should watch both participants’ speeches in order to ground those verbal blows in the context of their approaches to debate.