D1sc0r0b0t

It's most of the way through January and I'm only now getting around to a summary of 2009. Which pretty much sums it up. I had some pretty big writing plans for 2009 and achieved exactly none.

So what happened?

The day job went from being a day job to being day, night, weekends... It happens, sometimes. And I am proud of what I achieved. I built something pretty damn impressive, in a far shorter timeframe than I would have expected. Full credit to Microsoft for that. The .NET stack in general and Silverlight in particular have been a huge force multiplier for me. Any other technology wouldn't have got me as far so quickly.

But those long hours still killed me. Rushing to meet deadline after deadline was not cool. By the end of the year I was a tired and grumpy, insomniac. I still am. Hoping I'll get back to some decent energy levels soon.

OK, enough complaining. There was a lot of good stuff to celebrate this year.

Starting in March I took part in the  Australian Horror Writers Association mentor program.  The AHWA are kind enough to consider Kiwis honorary Aussies, so I was able to work with multi-award winning author Lee Battersby. He took some of my stories, pulled them apart, and when we put them back together they were so much better than when I started. If you're in NZ or Australia, you should check out the AHWA. They're a great bunch of people.

Queen's Birthday weekend I attended my first con, Conscription, where I met fellow writer (and the driving force behind Spec Fic NZ), Ripley Patton. Ripley really did make the con for me - I wouldn't have enjoyed it nearly as much without her. The weekend passed in a blur and by the time it was done I'd ended up winning the Julius Vogel. I'd be lying if I didn't say that was hella cool.


NZ Speculative Fiction Blogging Week. How good was that, ay? Want to bet it'll be even bigger next year?

Other nice things. Had my first reprints:Dick Whittington's Blues in the Semaphore anthology and The Salt Line at Wily Writers. The Salt Line was also the first of my stories to be podcast, with an excellent narration from Tim Jones.

That was last year. So what's next?

That work overload killed my writing. So this year, all I'm planning on doing is getting my mojo back. I'm just going to stick to the basics - words on paper. This is the equivalent of me jogging round the streets of Philadelphia, pounding on carcases in the freezer, climbing up the art museum steps. I've got some big plans for later, but I won't get anywhere unless I can get that muscle mass back. Blunt Force Trauma. Various other boxing cliches.

I don't know if I'll be blogging here very much - I want to put as much energy into fiction as I can. If this affects my chances of winning some sort of journalism prize then I'm OK with that.

What I should be doing is writing a post about StarShipSofa's fundraiser for Spider Robinson. Thing is, my buddy Matthew Sanborn Smith has done a better job than I could. So I'm going to copy his post here. That's right, I'm plagiarizing - for charity! Then I'm heading over to the Sofa to get my copy of Lord Dickens's Declaration.

You should too.

(If this was BoingBoing, this line would say "Matt Sez,")

Today's the big day! I hope that all of you are out there blogging about StarShipSofa's fundraiser for Spider and Jeanne Robinson. We had a fantastic response on Twitter yesterday. Thanks to all of you who tweeted and re-tweeted. I saw something like two-hundred tweets about the fundraiser. That's fantastic. I got a couple of notes during the day from Tony at the Sofa saying how he could see donation traffic picking up yesterday. I'm hoping we'll see even more traffic today.

Why? Because if people are actually blogging about it today, like we've asked, the message will reach people that it didn't reach on Twitter. We'll reach science fiction fans who don't use Twitter and we'll reach non-science fiction fans as well.

Why should you donate?

THE SHORT VERSION
1) It's a good cause, you big silly!
2) It only costs about $5.00, American.
3) You get an awesome e-book!

THE SLIGHTLY LONGER VERSION
1) From Spider's Blog: Earlier his year a brilliant surgeon, Dr. Andresz Busczowski, helped Jeanne Robinson beat back a rare and virulent form of biliary cancer. But it’s so rare even he can’t say how much time he‘s bought her, how soon it might recur—and her latest blood tests have been so discouraging they’ve now decided she needs to start chemotherapy as soon as possible. Besides the prescription drugs to counteract the chemotherapy, she needs special therapies and supplements, counseling, and extensive diet and lifestyle changes, to reduce her stress level and the strain on her liver to as close to zero as possible. All those things are expensive...and like many artists today the Robinsons were already running on fumes financially.

2) ONLY FIVE BUCKS! (More if you want to give more!)

3) You get Larry Santoro's excellent e-book novella, Lord Dickens's Declaration. Listen folks, a lot of you don't know Larry Santoro's work. In fact, most of us Sofanauts hadn't even heard of him until his stories began appearing on StarShipSofa's Aural Delights podcast. But let me tell you . . .

Wow.

That's Larry's work in a nutshell. I didn't know this guy from Adam a couple of years ago and now he's one of my favorite writers. He's been hiding out in the theater world and in Horrorland, sharpening his pen and now he can slice atoms with it. Larry controls his words, they don't control him, and at the same time he feeds them out like ten-thousand feet of kite string to play in the sky. They think they're running free, they don't know. All the while he knows where every one of them runs and what they're going to do next.

And Lord Dickens's Declaration is an absolute blast. Alternate history, steampunky, put-your-brain-in-a-box-and-don't-stop-shaking-it cool. The story features a world in which historians are the big guns and a computer which stretches across hundreds of acres (sometimes), called The Beast, sends those historians back in time. And let me ask you, have you ever known historians to put things back where they found them? Me neither. And that's what drives this mad world. It's 1902 in a world where Jesus ran the Roman Empire and a ninety-something Edgar Allen Poe runs North America. Occam is the man and who the hell is Charles Darwin?

Buy this book. Read this book. Enjoy, enjoy this book. Rest the rest of the righteously smug, knowing that your pleasure is also a Karmic write-off, all 100% of your electronic money is helping good people who are seeing a rough time.




And then tell all of your big-hearted friends to pick up a copy as well. Thanks!

My story The Living Dead Boy is now available in the latest issue of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine.  Despite the title, it's got nothing to do with zombies.  It may be partially autobiographical but I can't be sure.  Some stories you don't want to look directly at them when you're putting them together.

While I was writing this one, I was listening to American Music Club's The Golden Age and The National's Alligator on endless repeat.  So it's partially their fault.