Two weekends back, we drove out to a rescue shelter a few hours out of Brisbane and adopted ourselves a cat. She’s going by the name Admiral Coco Marshmallow Flerkin-Wittingstall, and seems determined to win us over with the deployment of weaponised cuteness: The week that followed was a mad dash to make the cat […]
The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own […]
Earlier this year, I noticed this Tweet on my feed and flagged it as something I wanted to think about more: “Oh, I’d love to write a book but I just don’t have time!” Fuck. You. I wrote my first two novels during my lunch hours in a 9-5 job while also teaching and training […]
I am probably offline when you read this. Of late, I’ve been programming Freedom to block my internet access for eight or nine hours a day. No social media, no checking sales numbers, no logging into this blog to check stats. The net result is a lot of writing, and a whole lot of reading. […]
From a recent (re)post at Warren Ellis Ltd: Capitalism is lately cast as that Lovecraftian force that some people should not look directly at for fear of going completely mad and being banged up in the Arkham Sanitarium. Maybe meditating upon it as some Dark God From Beyond Space that is crushing the world into new […]
The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own […]
ACHIEVEMENTS THIS WEEK: I’ve set up my workspace to deliver really loooooong stretches where I have no internet, just to see how it reshapes things. It turns out, quite a bit. I cleared my average weekly draft count in the space of three days, and I’ve started rethinking what that might mean for workflow. I […]
Every Friday I go through my well over-stocked folder of blog posts, articles, and other online produce that’s been marked “To Read” and clear out a handful. The best of them–aka those that still seem interesting or useful here in 2019–get posted here (and you can see the previous instalments using the Vintage Links tag). […]
Over the weekend, Matt Farrer (AKA the Shira Calpurnia scribe and general literary bad-ass) did a small thing on twitter where he’d write a description of a spaceship named after you. It roughly coincided with one of those rare moments when I scanned my carefully curated twitter lists, so naturally, I signed on. I am […]
I knew Father’s Day would be rough for me this year, so i didn’t push myself to do too much writing last week while the advertising was in full swing. Instead, I gave the week over to all sorts of catch-up projects and a bunch of forward planning in an effort to make good use […]
Many years ago, I worked a shift at dayjob where shit well-and-truly hit the fan. We were preparing for one of our busiest periods of the year–lots of incoming calls from lots of panicked writers looking to double-check a big opportunity™ deadline, while simultaneously trying to prep for other big projects that were coming up. […]
What do you do when your date tells you Ragnarök starts next Tuesday? Logan expected his date with Stina Lorne to be a disaster, quickly ending after dinner when they acknowledged she was out of his league. Instead they went for a long drive, then a walk along a familiar beach. In fact, everything seems […]
