ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

I nipped off to the local shopping centre to have a haircut today. Not that you’d notice to look at me, all things considered, since in my vernacular having a haircut largely translates as choosing to look like an ill-kept hobo rather than arriving there accidentally. Fortunately, today’s hairdresser was one of the few who understood that was the goal of having a haircut, rather than attempting to try and make me look neat and tidy. I long ago came to grips with the fact that my hair doesn’t do neat and tidy unless I’m willing to shave most of it off, but for some reason hairdressers seem to take that as a challenge. # I’m a bit behind on things at the moment. I’m behind at the dayjob, I’m behind on the writing front, and I’m behind on the packing and cleaning plan that will allow me to vacate my flat on the 17th of December with minimal hassles and panic. I suspect there will be a point in the near future when things will calm down a bit, but those points are all in January, which isn’t really helpful when the vast majority of the things I’m behind on have deadlines in December. ‘Course, once I’m done with the December deadlines, I’m done with all the deadlines. 2011 has been a year of many, many deadlines and almost all of them were agreed to back in 2010 when I was an unemployed writer with time on his hands. Not

I’ve come to the opinion that migrating a website from one host to another is rather like being in charge of the Death Star firing controls. You sit there quietly, doing your job, counting off the minutes until you unleash the awesome power of some technological masteripeice capable of destroying planets, and in your moment of triumph – right as you count down to one, in fact – it all goes to hell and your space station is obliterated in a fireball. I have all sorts of sympathy for Moff Tarkin this week. Poor dude was just trying to get shit done, you know?

I’m drinking coffee with my breakfast this morning. This is worth mentioning because, quite honestly, for the last three weeks I’ve been sufficiently under the weather that the very thought of drinking coffee with breakfast was enough to induce nausea. Huzzah for good health; you always miss it when it fails you for a time. Today I’m going to write things. Like the coffee, it’s been a good three weeks since I last did that as well. Wish me luck.

Things I’ve been doing instead of posting on this here blog: Writing things. Mostly this thing, but occasionally other things. Yes, that’s very vague, but that’s pretty much the way my brain works at this point: Writing! Things! Woo! Reading things. Specifically: reading Dashiel Hammett’s Red Harvest (pretty good), the Bloodshot/Hellbent tandem from Cherie Preist (also pretty good), the new Christa Faust novel, Choke Hold (awesome), and Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (very good, but I’m a sucker for essays). Going to things. Specifically: AusCon 2 and the EWF Digital Writers conference Working a day job which, magically, does not suck and continues to be awesome. Doing my washing. Preparing to move out of my current abode in December. How about you guys? Anyone up to anything interesting?

There’s something rather pleasant about writing in hotel rooms. For starters, there’s nothing to distract you, especially if the room you’re renting is marked by a list of things that don’t work: lights, television, the hotel’s broadband network. Hotel rooms endeavour to be pleasingly utilitarian at the best of times, and once you remove those little creature comforts there’s really nothing to do but go out, sleep, or write. And I’m in Rockhampton for work at the moment. Fritz the Laptop is getting a pretty good workout as a result. It’s kinda odd, ’cause I feel like I should be complaining about the various things that aren’t functioning in the room, but mostly I’ve just found them to be a pleasant surprise. It meant I did things I wouldn’t ordinarily do, like take a bath in the hotel bathroom and dance to the light of the laptop screen, and go to bed at a reasonable hour. My only complaint is the hotel air-conditioning, which seems to have been cranked up to over-enthusiastic and left me feeling pretty bletchy when I woke up. And now it’s morning, several hours to check-out time, and after eating breakfast and packing my belongings, I’ve discovered there’s really nothing to do except write and think and write some more. Pity the internet still isn’t working, though. It’d be nice to post this after I finish, instead of carting it home on a USB drive and hoping I remember to post it while it’s still relevant. Well, relevant-ish.

A few weeks ago my sister signed up for the Unity Walk to raise money for Parkinson’s Queensland. Her initial goal, quite modestly, was raising $500 in sponsorship. By last Sunday, when she started the walk, she’d raised $2185, most of that in the seven-day period between her first putting the link up on Facebook and now. According to the Unity Walk website, she was the second highest individual fund-raiser in the state. I know a bunch of people donated after reading about the walk on this blog. Some did it openly, some anonymously, and everyone did so generously. We wanted to say thank-you. You people, you all rock in the hardest and most rocking-est kind of way.