I done a move. Sunday, May 4 2008

Okay, so I moved in with my girlfriend. She doesn’t know this yet because she’s in New Plymouth making soup out of her old teeth. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been so quiet lately, moving out of my home of four years has been an Epic Feat. Especially since I carried most of my stuff by hand.

I had a whole lot of anecdotes about moving but I’ve forgotten most of them now. There was the guy who tried to intimidate me when I walked past him quickly in one direction with an empty suitcase (”You’d better run, brother!”) and then showed polite interest when I returned more slowly in the opposite direction with a very heavy suitcase (”You moving out, bro?”). Maybe I reformed him somehow with my example of perseverence. I never had any real trouble from the weird intimidating shady types who populate Newtown, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to miss them.

What else… I carried an extremely heavy desk to Kilbirnie at 1:00 in the morning in the rain. This was just to prove how tough I was.

Anyway, after a couple of days of Recovery I’ll start Producing stuff again. Hopefully.

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Post deficit. Wednesday, Apr 30 2008

Hmm, that’s the longest Thomsen Space has been without a post.

I’m suffering from some kind of existential artist angst. I spend most of my time at work brainstorming the Perfect Idea, the book or whatever that is the best thing I could possibly ever write, but the result is that now I have way too many ideas and trouble committing myself to a single one.

And then I’ll start working on an idea and it’ll shift or change or refuse to be pinned down. And then I think that everything has been done already anyway, so why bother doing anything at all?

And then there’s the problem of people reacting to my work and freaking me out. Like in my last Subcutaneous post, someone saying “You have an excellent wit sir. I love reading these.” Argh! He’s like some random guy appreciating my work. I don’t know how to handle that, and yet presumably it’s exactly what I want as a writer.

No wonder I’ve been burying myself in consumerism lately, it’s a passive and easy way to assert some kind of identity.

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Transformers comparison. Thursday, Apr 17 2008

In the 21st century, Transformers cartoons are batshit crazy. In the 21st century, Transformers cartoons were batshit awful.

Personally I prefer the show now that the autobots have a ninja and the decepticons have a pirate. Optimus Prime is still an ass, though.

Writing has been like hard work lately. It don’t seem to be enjoying it as much as I used to. It’s depressing.

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Bah. Tuesday, Apr 15 2008

Blah. The way I wrote Pirate Space may have been flawed, but at least it worked. I wrote a whole bunch of random scenes, knitted them together into a story and rewrote the entire thing based around that story.

I’ve been trying to write another novel by cutting out the first part and jumping straight to the bit where I write a novel based around the story. It doesn’t seem to be working. For some reason my creative process involves paradoxes. I need to write before I can think of a story, and I need to think of a story before I can write. And what seems to me like wasting time writing stuff that I don’t intend to print is actually an important part of writing stuff I do intend to print.

I think I’m cursed to write every story twice.

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Rock The Casbah Saturday, Apr 12 2008

I need to sort out my writing. I think it’s evolved since I wrote Pirate Space. For the better or worse I don’t know. I’ve been having trouble writing Subcutaneous because I naturally write the chapters how I used to write rather than how I should be writing now. If that makes sense.

I like The Clash more that I’ve stopped associating them with my annoying neighbour.

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Blakes 7 Tuesday, Apr 8 2008

My girlfriend kept giving away spoilers for Blakes 7 so I spent a couple of days of marathon viewing to get through it all before she could give away too much.

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Not the albatross, but some other metaphor. I forget. Saturday, Apr 5 2008

On friday morning I woke up an hour earlier before work than I usually do. That mean I lay in bed for an hour contemplating the fact that I was about to go to work. It depressed me quite a bit. Usually I just wake up and get dressed and go to work and don’t really have time to think about it. I guess the fact that most mornings I didn’t have to think about going to work was keeping me sane.

I got annoyed with myself. I’d spent so much time working on publishing Pirate Space on Lulu that I’d naturally assumed I’d publish all my books the same way. I’d forgotten that writing a book with the intention of seriously submitting it to actual publishers was a course still open to me.

I’d been writing book #2 specifically to have it self-published. There’s no reason I couldn’t write book #2 to have it submitted to a publisher and then published on Lulu if that failed. That way I won’t be burning a bridge I have no real reason to burn other than a rather idiotic sense of pride.

So. I’m going to put that book aside and only pick it up again if I start having any success on Lulu. Instead I’m going to write a book with the intention of impressing publishers. Because the horror of work can make anyone a sell-out.

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De-snarking? Really? Tuesday, Apr 1 2008

One thing that Teletraan I (the Transformers wiki) has that Brickipedia (the Lego wiki) doesn’t is a sense of humour. Where the latter is very dry and informative, the former is quite happy to poke fun at the eccentricities of it subject. This excerpt, from the entry on a rather ugly Galvatron toy, for example:

“The tank shows very little purple on its hull, presumably to keep it a reasonably realistic representation of a real-life tank. The tank likewise has a giant translucent orange laser cannon that can fire a translucent orange missile, also keeping in the spirit of realistic alt-modes.”

So I was bothered to read the box at the top of this page and realise that there will always be people who object to the having of ‘fun’ in something so important as the online encyclopedia of a children’s toy.

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The size of the internet divided by the size of me. Wednesday, Mar 26 2008

Remember that project I mentioned last week but said I would only link to if I proved to myself I was able to persevere with it? It’s here. A serial story on deviantART. How am I supposed to be noticed among the 10,000 other people writing serial stories on deviantART? I don’t know. But I’ve posted two parts so far and for each of those parts I’ve had one complete stranger ’subcribe’ to my work, so maybe if I post one part every week, within one year I’ll have… 52 readers. Maybe one of them will want to buy a book?

To come up with the idea for the story I just combined a name I already wanted to use for something with a story I already wanted to write somewhere. The benefit of thinking of more projects than I work on is that I’m never short of ideas when I need one.

One of the good things about deviantART is that I can also post pictures if I want to. So I could post random cartoons and things along with my story. I was going to post ‘bollards! fuck!’ but didn’t know how well the swearing would go down. Also the distinctive bollards might confuse people outside Wellington.

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Musing Monday, Mar 24 2008

I’m too lazy (and untalented) to draw a cool cover myself and too poor to pay anyone to do it for me, but I was thinking that the cover as it is would be fine if I just made it look better. So I scanned some real wood to use instead of the obviously Photoshopped wood I already have, and I’ll also scan a painted version of a pirate flag.

My girlfriend suggested that I use a customised Jolly Roger instead of the standard one I was already using, so after throwing ideas around I thought of using an infinity symbol in place of the bones, like this:

I’ll print some out onto badges so that I can make people wear them.

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