Monthly Archives: December 2016

December 31, 2016

2016: A Year in Review

By Josh Melican

Hmmm, what to say about 2016…

It’s pretty widely acknowledged that this year was not the best, for a great many reasons. For me there was a tragedy in my extended family near the start of the year, like the rest of you a cavalcade of deaths of celebrities I admired, the US election result, and then it ended with more bad news for good friends of mine.

So perhaps F-U 2016 is the best response. Good Riddance.

fu-2016

Image from this article (which was written before we lost Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds)

Which is not to say there were no positives (for pop-culture, the resurgence of Star Wars through both Force Awakens and Rogue One, and the return of Spidey to the MCU) but, yeah… not a year for the highlights reel.

As a writer, this year was a tough one. I had my first short published in 2014, in a tiny token-payment magazine which is now defunct. In 2015 I had a story in one of Australia’s most significant SFF magazines, and felt like I was making progress. In 2016, no shorts published. I did have a greater focus on novel writing between late 2015 and now, but there were a few short stories I put out there, without any of them getting published. Hit the second round on a few magazines, including one major Hugo-award-winning international magazine. I’m taking that as a sign of progress in the quality of what I’m putting out there, but near-misses are still misses.

Novel-wise, well, ups-and-downs. I started well, in February completing a manuscript of a sequel to my novel ‘Rakan’. That makes the third full-length novel manuscript I’ve written, and I’m definitely feeling the improvement in understanding the process and in getting the work done. I’ve had some success with ‘Rakan’, some full-requests and some great feedback on what it does well. Still querying and still waiting on some decisions, so that’s in a bit of a holding-pattern. Watch-this-space. After finishing the Rakan sequel and mapping out the third of the trilogy I have shifted focus, experimenting with several novel ideas without really committing to any until late in the year. Now I’m committed to ‘Biotropolis’, which is at about the 30,000 word mark and looking like it’ll get to somewhere between 70 and 80k.

As a reader, I’ve shifted through a few genres. The year started with a classic: ‘The Big Sleep‘, by Raymond Chandler, which helped me a great deal in understanding Crime Noir’s origins and the value of a tight, well-paced plot. ‘Road Brothers‘ is Mark Lawrence’s collection of short stories based on characters from his Broken Empire trilogy, and a good example of character-driven Fantasy (Grimdark?) shorts. ‘Aurora‘ by Kim Stanley Robinson was Hard SF, harder than I’d normally read but I really enjoyed his science, moreso than his characters. ‘Binti‘ by Nnedi Okorafor, was much different Sci=Fi, a sharp little novella full of ideas and alien images. I enjoyed the focus on communication, rather than conflict. 2016 was also a year where I read more YA, and Aussie YA at that. Jay Kristoff’s ‘Nevernight‘ was a Fantasy revenge tale of a young girl honed into a master assassin. The first of a trilogy, it was more violent and sexual than I’d expected from a YA novel. Also by Kristoff, co-authored with Amie Kaufman, ‘Illuminae’ was a highlight. A Sci-FI adventure narrative cobbled together from transcripts, emails, message boards and other non-standard narrative forms. I’m currently reading the sequel, ‘Gemina’ which is as good and features illustrations by Marie Lu. The release of ‘Gemina’ interrupted my reading of ‘Ninefox Gambit’ by Yoon Ha Lee, which had an intriguing start and which should be right up my alley, being space-opera with weird and mathematics mixed in. I’m looking forward to returning to once ‘Gemina’ is finished.

For short stories, I enjoyed Brooke Bolander’s harpy revenge story, ‘Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies‘, published in Uncanny, and Cassandra Khaw’s dark mermaid horror, ‘And In Our Daughters, We Find A Voice‘, published in The Dark Magazine.

In other media, the Star Wars films were a highlight, as I said. ‘Captain America: Civil War’ was also great (team Cap!). ‘Zootopia’ and ‘Finding Dory’ were good fun with the kids. ‘Jason Bourne’ was a disappointment. We don’t get many chances to go to the movies, and that was one wasted. We missed a few I want to see as well. I did discover the most excellent movies channel on YouTube: ‘Movies With Mikey’ which is amazing and wonderful.

On TV, I finally discovered Black Mirror, I enjoyed the crazy/horror/comedy/gorefest nostalgia of Ash Vs Evil Dead, and the Marvel TV Shows. Liked the Punisher storyline in Daredevil S2, but was less interested in the Elektra and ninjas and all the rest. Jessica Jones was great, but sometimes very difficult to watch. Luke Cage was stylish and cool and excellent while Cottonmouth was around, and spiraled hard toward a disappointing finale when he wasn’t. The Brazilian sci-fi 3% was pretty interesting, even through the bad dubbing. The Expanse started pretty well but for some reason failed to keep me hooked. Netflix has me watching more than I used to, but there’s still not a great deal of time for TV. Game of Thrones, always an exception.

I got stuck playing ‘Fallout 4′, in Survival Mode, slowly rebuilding the wasteland with comfortable beds and dining areas for all my multitudinous Minute-Men-loyal settlers. I got the remastered ‘Skyrim’ too, and sometimes I just go and walk by the lake I can see from the manor I built, just enjoying the way the water moves and fending off the occasional threat.

And what will 2017 bring? Who knows. There’s an unpredictable geo-politic at play and a sense that things will get tougher before they get better, (near-future sci-fi will be difficult to write, as the ridiculousness of our reality outpaces it), but there is no way out but through and the rewards will come to those who keep working for them. Persistence and progress. It can feel like a tough slog at times, and each hard-fought inch of forward motion can sap our energy, but ever-onward. Write the thing, submit the thing, write the next thing. Keep writing, keep submitting. Keep reading, keep learning.

Keep going…

My reading/writing goals for 2017:

Read 12 novels (one per month)
Read 50 Short stories (approx one per week)
Finish ‘Biotropolis’ by mid year
Finish at least the full first draft of another novel
Keep querying with ‘Rakan’
Start querying with ‘Biotropolis’
Write 6 short stories
Keep on submitting…

All the best for 2017, you guys. Thanks for stopping by and reading, and thanks for giving me an audience while I shout out into the void.

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December 2, 2016

On the benefits of ‘failure’

By Josh Melican

I set myself a goal at the start of the month.

In fact I set several.

The most salient goal for this blog was the #NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words written in November. I did not achieve that goal. I didn’t even come close. It wasn’t a case of ‘just one more day’, or ‘just a little short.’ I failed to achieve 50,000. I failed to achieve half that.

 

from this blog on why we shouldn't fear failure: http://aib.edu.au/blog/fear-of-failure-4-reasons-embrace-failure/

sourced from this blog on how to embrace failure

And that’s ok.

Coincidentally, at the start of November, I also started a new job. It’s a similar role to the role I previously had, but the small and specific differences are significant. It’s at a different organisation, and a much larger organisation, than my previous employment. I’ve had to learn the new culture, the new hierarchies, the systems and protocols and all those elements of a workplace which go so often unstated. I’ve had to meet new people, learn names, determine the interconnections between each of them and me, between their roles and mine, how I can help them, how they can help me. It’s been a big transition, and in many ways one which is time-consuming and mentally demanding, coming into an existing project and quickly evaluating how the expertise and experience I bring will contribute. And I feel (one month in) that it has been a success.

I also set a personal health goal at the start of November, because I was feeling run-down and unhealthy, I was overweight (no shaming intended, but overweight for me. You be whatever weight you’re comfortable and happy with. I wasn’t comfortable and I wasn’t happy, so ‘overweight’), I wasn’t sleeping well, I wasn’t eating well, I was stressed… I was struggling. So I made some changes, on my own terms, and I set some health goals and behavioural/habit goals. And I’ve been successful there too, both in terms of the numerical targets I’m hitting and the general feeling of wellbeing.

And then there was the election of course, and all of the existential doubt and fear that flowed from it.

Graph of November

Graph of November (from here)

Life is about balancing things. That’s probably as true for you, reading this, as it is for me. It’s probably true for all of us. But sometimes we see people doing amazing things, devoting a lot of time and energy we don’t see to produce fantastic results we do. I had a friend posting astounding word-counts for the first week or so of #NaNoWriMo, an the temptation to compare myself unfavourably was strong. But I wasn’t competing with her, and her circumstances were not my own.

Recently Kameron Hurley spoke on Twitter about being a ‘binge writer’: writing tens-of-thousands of words a day, for several days on end, rather than writing every day (a nice antidote to the ‘write every day‘ mantra which can lead to feelings of guilt or failure when your life doesn’t allow you to write). But I’m not competing with her, and her circumstances are not my own.

I think there’s a lot to be said for the discipline of writing. One of the most striking changes I see in myself between my earliest dilettante days of ‘aspiring’ to be a writer (the advice to drop that qualifier was invaluable for self-perception) and the ongoing development in the midst of which I sit today, is my understanding of what writing is, what it is not, and what it requires.

Among other things, writing requires failure.

Initially in the sense that you need to accept failure merely to write anything at all, because it’s important to give yourself permission to suck, and to accept that your first draft of anything is shit.

But more than that I think writing (and really any creative/artistic endeavour) requires that we strive for something we know we may never achieve. And yet that we keep striving.

This is why we should not hate bad art. Peter Ball pointed this out for me, and it has changed the way I look at the Beibers of our world. We should critique, of course. We can express our dissatisfaction or distaste. We can call out problematic or offensive tropes and features. But bad art is important. It’s especially important if other people (for some unfathomable reason beyond your ken) like it, even love it. It’s the creative endeavour. It’s someone trying to make something and share it, and maybe you don’t like what they made, but then again maybe you’re not the intended audience, or maybe it doesn’t matter if no one else likes it because bad art matters to the artist. And bad art is so often a precursor to good art, or to better art, at least. If people stop making bad art, or are afraid to make bad art, how can they ever move through that phase to what comes next? As Alison Gerber points out, bad art benefits us all.

If you are serious about writing, you will create bad writing. You’ll fall into cliche, lean heavily on tired tropes, trot out stock phrases, overuse your pet words. You’ll make errors, break grammatical conventions accidentally or with ill-conceived intent, run-on your sentences, split your infinitives, dangle your participles, changed your tense mid-sentence. You’ll be incomprehensible, miss the mark, wander off on tangents, maybe be bland or boring. All of this is part of the process. If we castigate ourselves for these ‘failings’, or worse, if our fear of them paralyses us, we will never achieve the greatness which may lie just beyond them, just a little further along the path, just beyond the work-shopping and revision and re-writing which can only follow once a thing is written.

So what benefits are there in this failure, my #NaNoWriMo failure?

  1. I have about 20,000 words about a weaponised infection, a dying city, and the reluctant poetry student who may hold the key to the cure.
  2. I added another 5,000 words or so to a separate story about a retired government cyber-agent drawn into an international quest to learn the truth about her high-school sweetheart’s death.
  3. I have a much clearer sense of where both of these stories are going, and more fully developed planning documents which will guide me there.

And I have perspective.

The month was not wasted because I fell (well) short of the arbitrary figure set for #NaNoWriMo. I have another month, and another after that, and at 25,000 or so words per month, I’m only a couple of months away from finishing another novel.

That’s an exciting feeling.

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