Today I turn 44, and I’m returning to one of my most enduring birthday traditions: posting god-awful birthday selfies designed to worry my Mother about the kinds of content that gets put up on the internet. It’s the first of these that I’ve done in a log while, largely because 2019 and 2020 where incredibly […]
Our not-so-beloved downstairs neighbours are moving out today, in the midst of the Brisbane lockdown. It’s a bizarre riot of sound compared to a very quiet Saturday, during which the cat slept on the laptop table for several hours and I engaged in a prolonged doomscroll following Australia’s current virus news, American post-election fall-out, and […]
I’ve used RescueTime to track my computer and phone usage for a few years now, and it continues to be a surprisingly underrated tool in my kit. Today they sent in my year in review for 2020, showing me how I spent my screen time throughout last year, and it was really interesting to note […]
I spent the dying days of 2020 making lists of habits I’d like to establish (or, in most cases, re-establish in the wake of 2020’s unpredictable daily routines). Stuff like I’d like to start blogging everyday, and maybe turn the blog into a monthly zine or chapbook’s worth of content or post a free short […]
It’s New Year’s Day here in Brisbane. January 1st, 2021. The hell year of 2020 is in the rear view, and the coming year is shiny and new and only a little splattered by the ongoing shit it inherited from the previous 365 days. I woke up this morning, wrote three pages, then spent an […]
I spend a lot of time fascinated by the mutability of words, which is one of those things that’s seeped into my fiction from time-to-time. This made me a sucker for Something Something Soup Something, a concept that’s part-online game and part philosophy experiment about the mutability of a simple concept like “soup”. The narrative behind the […]
Every December, around this time, my blog goes a little crazy as folks discover the What Writers Out To Know About Die Hard series of posts and start asking particularly sensible questions like, “wait, we’re only halfway through, were’s the rest of the series?” and “so you’re going to finish writing this, right?” And much […]
On the 30th of November I celebrate three years since Brain Jar Press launched its first book, the Birdcage Heart & Other Strange Tales. I’d been so focused on the upending Brain Jar birthday I overlooked another milestone—on the 27th it’s been twelve years since I started writing this blog and charting my progress as […]
Ah, the holiday season is almost upon us. All the signs are there: Brisbane is turning into a sweltering slow cooker of humidity; Netflix swarms viewers with terrible Christmas movies (and, frankly, the temptation to watch them all is oddly overwhelming); NaNoWriMo is in full swing; and the sales of Brian Jar books evaporate into […]
If you haven’t not seen any of the articles about an out-of-control train being caught by the fluke of a whale sculpture, I can heartily recommend it as a temporary respite from the stress of the world right now. Go check it out. Personally, I’ve hit the point where I’ve removed all forms of social […]
One of the weirder side-effects of going all-in on doing print projects with Brain Jar Press was the increased number of folks who hired me to do layout and cover design in other places. It turns out small chapbooks make for very effective business cards. I kinda put some long and hard thought into accepting […]
We’ve had a few days of storms here in Brisbane, but today they’ve given way to blue skies and warm breeze and a very happy cat reclaiming her spot on the balcony. I’ve spent a good chunk of yesterday morning answering email: replying to quote requests from folks interested in book and cover design; responding […]
