The article can be found here:

Dadaism: Kick-Starting Creativity by Freeing Your Mind. Excerpt – Coming at Dadaism from a literary perspective, it’s a fantastic way to let go of all authorial control, something a lot of authors and other artistic types struggle with, as well as to kick-start creativity and find beauty in the random and often nonsensical.

“Robogrrrl” – light-hearted sci-fi, general audience.

I’m so impressed with the rapid turn-around with this one. I submitted it late last night, and got the acceptance this morning. One Forty Fiction’s editor must have super powers!

Before I link to the interview, I should point you to their various ranges of notebooks (both lined and blank), guest books, day planners, and address books of all shapes, sizes and designs. It’s so hard picking a favourite design, and I talk more in the interview about the ones I tend to favour, but there are a couple I’ve got my eye on for my next Paperblanks spree—their Japanese Lacquer Boxes collection and the Mucha collection. They’re both so elegant and beautiful!

You can read the interview, in which I ramble about notebooks, creativity, and inspiration here. (There is also a pic of me looking all thoughtful and authorish.)

And the rest of their Featured Artist interviews can be found here.

“Morning Jaunt,” PG. 25 words of angsty speculative fiction.

I also want to mention how cool the idea behind 5×5 Fiction is. From their website:

Complete stories (not rantings or poems) must be exactly 25 words long, told in exactly 5 sentences, with each sentence comprised of exactly 5 words.

Much like the Twitter-based magazines, it’s a fun challenge coming up with something readable in so few words, but if the Twitter stories are just too short for you, this one might be a better option. I’d also highly recommend reading the other issues, as they’re all reasonably short and easy to gobble up, plus they’re full of imaginative stories and concepts from a variety of genres.

One thing I try to do when I write the passage of time in my stories is to actually time it and see just how long it really is. Let’s face it, if character A stares at character B for ‘several minutes’, there’s something seriously wrong with character A, unless they’re a known stalker, in which case staring at someone for several minutes is probably accurate (and more than a little creepy). But seriously, have you ever timed two or three minutes? It’s an age, especially for there to be a pause in which characters blink/stare incredulously/fumble for words. Even the most awkward of awkward silences rarely last that long, not when all parties are perfectly capable of leaving or going off to do something else.

I wish it didn’t drag me out of a story, as this issue crops up more often than I’d like. But I suppose if it wasn’t time passage that distracts me, it’d be something else, eh? And to be fair, I’ve never put a book aside because of the unlikely passage of time… yet.

This particular one makes me grin, as it’s something I used to do a lot when I started writing. Thankfully, I’m way more conscious of it nowadays. A couple of years ago, a good friend and I set about workshopping our earliest pieces to see what we could learn from them. The workshops were a riot—seeing ourselves as young, bouncy authors, full of excitement and dreadful clichés, lacking a certain finesse and attention to detail but having so much fun writing and developing our styles. It’s a bit like travelling back in time and spending an afternoon with the kid version of yourself. Eye-opening and amusing.

Anyway, one of the things we found occurring often was:

Countersinking

A form of expositional redundancy in which the action clearly implied in dialogue is made explicit. “‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said, urging her to leave.”

The funny thing is, I’m seeing this a lot recently in published novels—even as recent as today, while I was listening to an audiobook at work—and every time it pops up I smile. It’s strange how writing peeves can bring up so many nostalgic feelings. :)

See, in theory, I love the idea of throwing caution to the wind and just writing off the cuff, seeing where the unfolding plot and characters take me. People have said in the past that outlining in detail can spoil the fun of writing a story, because it eliminates the element of surprise and ruins the discovery process for the writer. Not using an outline does sound exciting and a little scary, a bit like a blind date, but in practise it doesn’t always work.

As with most of these things, it depends greatly on the story and author. Often I’m struck with details and ideas for my plots at the most inopportune times, like when driving at speed down a motorway, or scrubbing shampoo out of my eyes in the shower. Not the easiest of moments to grab that notebook and furiously jot things down. So whenever I’m hit with a plot twist, a new scene, or a character detail, I’ll make it my mission to write it down as soon as I’m physically able, because otherwise I know I’ll forget it. The worst time is at night when I’m trying to sleep, when I’m on the cusp between conscious thought and subconscious—that’s where some of my best ideas lurk (damn them all!). In this way, I absolutely have to outline and write down where these events are going to occur in the story. There’s often too much detail to keep in order in my brain (poor thing, *pats it encouragingly*). And once I’ve got a bunch of notes, I then feel the desire to tidy them.

But moving back to scrapping outlines and letting the story whisk you away, it can work for me when I’m writing shorter fiction. Stories around the 5k mark can just explode out onto the page without many time-lines and pie charts and summaries. It’s the idea of tackling something longer, say over 10k, without an outline that frankly terrifies me, and I respect authors who dive right in there without inflatable armbands and come up with something spectacularly awesome.

So, flist, do you always outline? If not, when do you choose to outline? Or are you a writer who tosses outlines to the wind and writes without a clear plan where you’re headed? Do you find you end up without direction, and abandon some stories when you work this way?

Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of anti-art to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.

Many Dadaists believed that the ‘reason’ and ‘logic’ of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality.

Our own Dada exercise focussed less on politics and more on letting go of authorial control, something I struggle with a lot. It’s easy enough to try at home, or anywhere, really. All you need to do is pick a couple of passages from any book, magazine or printed source, print them out and then cut out individual words and/or small sentences, mix them around, then reassemble them into something new—without forcing them to make sense. One of the key things about this, and one of the things I found most difficult to start with, is allowing the word order to be totally random. I kept wanting to put certain words next to each other to form a coherence. So after a semi-Dada practise run, I managed to make a fully random Dada paragraph.

We used excerpts from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. I don’t know if I’d call it a poem, because even that suggests some kind of ‘ordering’, so I’ll just say it is what it is:

Patriarch’s Ponds. Associations, dressed in a Berlioz, an awe horn-rimmed glasses my utterance / And and with who called Massolit / broad-shouldered drag drink deep and by thee, O torments me. Hair, eternal my.

And these are my semi-Dada pieces, where I’d not quite let go of control and there was a little conscious placement:

The lips should utterance / One of you pseudonym of Homeless / And his conduct and vengeance

I must excited quickly dark-haired, plump, bald / Destroy him by perish / The spirits their murderer / The poet feel, poet agony; this shall feel the dead over

Sharing them with each other was most of the fun. Some of them were hilarious, others a little eerie, and all contained interesting concepts or prompts that could be expanded into longer pieces. This is definitely an exercise I’ll be trying again in the future.

It’s a 3,900 word dark, urban fantasy with hints of a monster-apocalypse and a dash of tongue-in-cheek. You can also download a .pdf of the full issue here, which I recommend because then you’ll be able to read all the stories from issue 27.

I also want to say a massive thank you to Yvonne Anisimowicz and Dabs Lyons for their superb beta reading. ♥

Gosh, it’s so nice to finally have something to share!

Towards the end of last year I spent a load of time plotting and researching for a new steampunk novel project that I decided to start as soon as 1012 hit the ground, and I’m thrilled to say that so far so good! I’m well over target on my word count and we’re only 6 days in. The difference between this novel and one I wrote at the beginning of 2011 is that with this one I have the start and I have the end, but the middle bits are still a little shady in places, where-as with the 2011 novel I outlined everything–every scene in each chapter, from the first to the final. This time, I’ve taken off the brakes and I’m letting it roll on its own steam (pun totally intended).

With a steampunk story, this sense of unfolding and discovery and invention is more fitting, so I’m not going to fret it at all (even if I have the odd moment of “Omg is this even working?!”). Not knowing where the next shadowed alleyway is going to lead me helps ease me into the right frame of mind for the dank, angsty story I’m writing, and I’m constantly amazed at how the story just knows where it needs to go. I hope that means the world-building is working and that my characters are strong enough to have direction, even if I’m not always 100% certain what that direction is!

Anyway, I’m aiming for 80,000 words, but I may have to adjust my estimated word count as this thing clunks its way through my brainpan. I’m also going to try my best to have the first draft pwned by the end of March. Then, to Editland I will go, and you probably won’t see me again until I re-emerge some months later, skinny and bony and bedraggled and crooning something about a Precious.

Or, y’know, maybe I’ll just drink loads of tea and continue updating as normal. We’ll see.