Brendan D Carson’s fiction

Su Lynn came around today.  She is one of the younger people at Clarion, and remarkably talented - I think she wrote her first short story when she was a fetus.  She was talking about facebook and other recent developments in the fast-moving field of electro-kinematography. 

“I really love netface” she shizzled, or words to that effect.  “I was browsing, and I found Neil Gaiman.  My friend twittered his blog.” 

She mentioned netfacing, and friendsurfing, and how as a writer you had to make your RSS accessible to everyone, which alarmed me, and she talked about other things. 

I crouched in the corner, my dorsal fin angled to catch the sunlight, waiting until I was warm enough to move, and watching the shadows move across the cycads.  Perhaps, I though, I will go down to the water’s edge, and watch the ammonites sail past, majestic and silent in the shallow Permian Sea.  

“It’s pretty much essential,” she popped, or locked, one or the other.  She said how pretty much everyone she read, everyone she knew who wrote, was on My/Live/Face/Space/Book/Journal, or something of the kind. 

And I felt the cold, unyielding shape - the bull-bar, I believe, of Time’s winged chariot - pressing into my lumbar spine, and I realised that I cannot indulge myself any more, and me and the twenty first century are going to have to love one another or die. 

See, for a number of sincere but self-evidently stupid reasons, I have not done this up to now.  I don’t write with a quill, I don’t go to the barber to have my teeth pulled, I don’t vote for the party of small government, but I am a case of arrested cyber development.  It’s the byte version of those radio stations that play Starship and, if they’re feeling edgy, Billy Joel with all of the biting social commentary left in.   

My reasons for this are as many as they are bullshit.  My wife is computer literate, which has allowed me to get away with being helpless (imagine one of those books where it’s all big outliney pictures, and you dip a paintbrush into water and sloosh it on the page and the colours magically appear.  That is my computer reading age.  I have a cyberliteracy of ages three and up.  I find this kind of stuff hard).   

Facebook and so forth in my head are still associated with demographics “with which I don’t want to associate”.  It’s not them, as they say, it’s me:  I worry about things.  I imagine myself having one of these things and then I think about a forty three year old men friending someone calling herself Sexymeowth who has an icon of herself as a kitten in miniskirt, and it fills me with a mixture of contempt and despair.  

Without wishing to go on about it, there are the worries associated with unprotected social intercourse.  

But I know my reasons can be reduced down to a few simple, unpalatable things - fear, stupidity, self-indulgence.  I like to think of this as a charming archaicism, something that evokes Montaigne, or at least Wilde, or maybe of something fusty and Old World and endearing - but it’s neither of those things.  It’s disabling, it’s getting other people to do work for you, and it’s embarrassing.  And it’s stopping people hearing about my work.   

So - my wife, a few months back, has put me on facebook.  I’ve never  looked.  In my absence I hear that vandals have broken in and have written things on the wall - that’s going to have to be fixed.  But seriously, I have asked Kate and Rob, two of our almost manically helpful convenors, to tell us how to facebook or whatever, and I am going to find my own facebook thing, and I’m going to do it, and make it interesting, and friend, or at least aquaintance, lots of people.  Writers and readers and people I know and people I want to know and poeple whose work I admire and so on.

But not Sexymeowth.  She’s on her own. 

Anyway - watch this space for more information. 

Thanks for listening,
BDC

Hail,
Day Nine of the Clarion South experience, and I do not know if I have been this tired in years. 

Seriously.  The term “sleep debt” is actually one that contains several deep truths.  I have had around about four or five hours sleep a night for the last week.  In sleep debt terms, this means I have been living off what I imagine is some kind of oneiric credit card.  Like all instances of excess, this has consequences, and the recent drop in interest rates seems not to have reached the Kingdom of Morpheus.  I am paying badly - or rather, I am failing badly to pay.  I think some kind of limit is being reached, and around about midnight I suspect there will be a knock on the door, and it will be a psychopomp with a pickaxe handle, who will explain my obligations to me in considerable and distressing detail. 

And if that doesn’t work, they’ll come around and repossess my hypothalamus. 

Honestly - so. 
tired.
words.
drip.
out.
in.
little.
dropsandmakepuddlesonthefloorbeneathmydesk.   

My train of thought has become more like the Montoglfier balloon, drifting erratically over the cityscape while concerned onlookers in top hats grab each other and point.  Like the Montgolfier balloon my brain continues to function only due to the frantic application of copious amounts of hot fluids - not heated air, in this case, but hogsheads of weapons grade coffee.  Unlike the Montgolfier balloon, it does not actually contain a sheep called Montauciel. 

 And today I have to start my new story, because my second one was critted today, which means ars longus, vita brevis, so I have to get off my ars and get on with it, because the next one is due in Monday, and I have rung around, and the million monkeys plus keyboards won’t be delivered until Wednesay.   

Critting goes well.  We are still relatively courteous, and the good thing about Clarion South is the worse your story is, the more benefit you get from the critting process - I have been raking in the insights.  Each session is sortof like literary electro-convulsive therapy.  I suspect this niceness will fall away soon, and we will become less courteous, and conversations will be more like this: 

Critter:  “I couldn’t believe your character’s motivation…”

Crittee:  “Yeah?  Well, I can’t believe… YOUR FACE!”

Critter:  “Right.  I didn’t really feel the tension…”

Crittee:  “YOUR MUM felt the tension!”

Or perhaps this:

Critter:  “And you’ve changed from pluperfect to simple past at the top of page eight…”

Crittee:  (stares for a long moment)  And do you think with this bauble to buy your life? It will avail you naught (shift to Gothic font, underlined and bold, progressively increasing font size every three words until entire page obscured).  Because I say unto you that nothing, nothing, not riches, not power, not all the trappings and gewgaws and shiny things of this world will subtract in any way from the aeons of suffering you will suffer as you suffer in your… sufferitude, as you writhe and plead and beg in the pits of hellfire I created in the beginning of time for the eternal and everlasting, - everlasting, I say! - punishment of Those Who Do Offend Mine Eye And Richly Deserve My Wrath in Time and In Eternity!  Bwa hahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrr…..” (repeat to fade as dragged from the room by campus security). 

Yes, well.  And in fifteen minutes I will be meeting with our tutor.  I have been careful to respect Sean Williams’ requests for anonymity in cases like this, so throughout this passage I will refer to Sean Williams as “John”, and not as Sean Williams, author of some thirty novels, countless short stories and recipient of more awards than Stalin.   

“John” (not his real name) is superlative.  If you do what he says - and it’s not even that, it’s him showing you how to look at text, how to see stuff, and then once you’ve seen it you go off and fix it - you write better.  He’s a bit like one of those artefacts you used to find in AD&D, a Goblet of Writeryness or Ee’s Perceptive Biro of the Protagonist.  It is fortunate that he has sworn only to use his vast powers for good.  He is remarkably knowledgeable, his understanding of the field is wide and deep, he has an almost Yodan ability to discern the story you feel and believe and want to tell under the halting, stuttering, bolted-together-from-leftovers farrago you handed in the day before. 

He’s funny, and approachable, and hard-working, and polite, and deeply decent, so much so that in the real world he’d be a serial killer.  The benefit of having John as a tutor stems as much from what he is as much as what he says - he shows, he doesn’t tell, what a professional writer should be.  I suspect he would be embarrassed by further praise, but as he knows, suffering for the art and audience - even him suffering for mine - is part of being a writer.  It if anyone reading this wants anyone to teach anyone anything about writing, start with… John.  He’s bloody brilliant. 

Anyway - time passes.  I’d better go off and attempt to talk face to face with him, and see if I can save the Zombie Nun story.  At the moment I am still loving this.  Next week’s post, of course, may just be a faltering transcriptions of my sobs, or a whispered webcam confession as I crouch beneath my desk, a bloodied biro in my mouth and wearing only a loincloth made from shredded pages from Strunk and White, but we will see. 
See you soon,
BDC

Well…
Here I am in Queensland.  Sunny Queensland.  Somewhat muggy Queensland.  Queensland that appears to be a thin biofilm of suburbia photoshopped onto a great thick swadge of Mesozoic jungle.  I’m serious - there are great green trees laden with strange, prickly fruit.  Glossy green birds pant as they labour through the still, sodden air.  There are beetles the size of your fist, stick insect things a cubit long.  Rain prickles, scrub birds clatter, bats utter strange cries and strike fear into the hearts of my fellow writers, for we are a superstitious and cowardly lot.  I think there is a curare frog outside my window at night. 

And it’s great.  We are staying in student dormitories - there are a few young folk around, popping and locking with their shizzle and their being funky and so forth - but largely we are left alone.  The nutter-to-me ratio in my dorm is reassuringly low, and in fact, everyone seems almost suspiciously courteous, committed and professional.  There have been no disputes over the feng shui of the cutlery drawer, or bitter accusations of someone using someone else’s fire extinguisher without their permission, and everyone seems to be getting on fine.  I think that is probably due to a combination of mutual terror, intrinsic social skilss and essential niceness.  After about a fortnight the terror should have gone, and we shall see how far we get on social skill and niceness. 

We gather ourselves together once a day for critiqueing.  What this means is we file into the Room, and three or four of us have submittedstories a few days earlier, and we say what we thought of a particular story - what workd and what didn’t, how to fix things, who does this well and how to do it.  Sometimes there is a bit of a general discussion, lead by the tutor, who will be the subject of an entire post the next time. 

And then you go off and write your next story.  We are “meant to” write about (there is some stretch) one spec fic story a week.  That means mornings we meet, afternoons and evenings and for me, the dawn hours) we write.  Minimum five hundred, more like fifteen hundred words a day, plus read between six and twenty thousand, and comment as extensively as necessary upon each.  The terror concentrates your mind wonderfully.   

They say Clarion is a wonderful place to meet people like yourself.  I tend to be shy, not so much the primary shyness where you hide under a blanket rather than meet people - I can go out and blather relatively easily - but a kind of secondary shyness where any subsequent unprotected social intercourse is terrifying.  I don’t want to go out to chat with my fellow Clarionites, not because they are unpleasant or unlikeable or threatening - although a few are armed with remarkably quick wits - but because I… just don’t feel like it.  And anyway - they’re probably writing, or should be.  Or I should be.  And it’s late, or early, or hot.  And anyway, there’s other things to do, lots of other things.  Important things.  Like fold socks.  Hoow can I expect to learn things from my fellow writers if my socks are all over the place?  Maybe later.  Maybe once I’ve written this next bit, or once they’ve all gone to bed, or Clarion’s over.  Or once I finish these socks. 

Anyway - my fellows do seem decent people, and the dread is diminishing.  At first, before I learned everyone’s name, and when all we had from anyoone was their first stories, I referred to people by linking them mentally to their stories:  There goes mermaid girl.  Hey, cannibal woman, zombie boy, strange tree-spirit man.  Got to remember to ask alien lad about that grammar book thing.  

Sounds like a very bad version of the Legion of Superheroes, doesn’t it? 

Anyhow - what this means is that most of the time is me alone with my brain, me and my story, me and words.  I have been trying not to get too emotional about this, but here goes - I love this.  I love the solitude.  I love the learning.  I love writing and working out what works and rewriting and going over things.  I love finding the exact word, the right rhythm and rhyme, the alliteration and the allusions. I  love walking past a tv and seeing someone using a sling to throw a stone and remembering that Aelfwen (I haven’t forgotten my novel) uses a sling, and working out how and where to show that. 

And it’s not that I don’t miss Katy - I do, and I don’t think I could do this if my relationship wasn’t as good now as it is, and if we didn’t ring or sms six times a day.  And I miss Sherman, my soft-furred, long-fanged, gloriously dignified cat, and I miss my friends, including those who are better writers than me, and I miss the back-yard where the chooks are bobbing their heads and the plums are ripening.  I am almost speechless with gratitude and awe that this has been permitted for me. 

But if I want all of this to work, I have to write.  Which means, I susepct, moving away from the keyboard and getting to bed so that I can get up at five to write more.  I am a little bit drunk (in case you can’t tell) , and a whole lot grateful and engaged and lobe-ignitingly inspired. 

Words tomorrow.  I will blog again soon.  Thanks for listening,
BDC