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Unity Walk Redux

My sister’s posted a short blog about the reason she’s doing the Unity Walk for Parkinson’s Australia. It goes a little something like this: My Dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2003, although in hindsight, he had probably been suffering some of the symptoms for about fifteen years before that. Since the diagnosis came through, Dad has accepted this condition that life has chosen for him. He’s never once asked ‘Why me?’, I’ve never heard him complain, he accepts the physical limitations imposed on him, and while he doesn’t often ask for help, he does accept it gratefully when offered. Parkinson’s Queensland have been an enormous help to Dad, and Mum, who is inevitably his primary carer. They were there to offer advice on what medical staff in hospital needed to know when Dad had his heart operation last year. They provide visits to centres to show what little devices around the home are going to make life just a little bit easier. And they offer support to thousands of Parkinson’s sufferers across Queensland, just like Dad. So Sunday, I’ll be walking for Dad, and the many thousands like him across Queensland. Thank you for your support. At this point Sally’s raised the $1,000 she was aiming for (already $500 more than she initially thought she’d get), making her the third-highest fund-raiser for the walk at the time I’m posting this. Given that she’s only $500 off becoming the second highest fund-raiser of the walk,  I figured I’d make

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25/08/2011 1 Comment
Journal

My Sister is Walking For Parkinsons Queensland

My father has Parkinson’s disease. It’s one of those things I don’t talk about here, but the short version is this: as a disease, it sucks in a pretty major way. It sucks for the person who has it, and it sucks for the people who care about them. It’s a degenerative disorder of the nervous system that causes a reduction in the dopamine levels, and it causes tremors, slowness of movement, muscle rigidity, instability and has associated affects that are even less fun. This Sunday my sister is planning on doing the Parkinsons Unity Walk to raise money for Parkinson’s Queensland and she’s currently collecting donations from supporters. If you’re in a position to sling a couple of bucks her way between now and Sunday, please consider doing so. Not just because it’s a good cause – there’s lot of good causes – but because this is a pretty damn personal cause for me, my sister, and my family. Parkinson’s isn’t curable with our current understanding of the brain and the disease. At best, it can be managed. One of the things Parkinson’s Queensland does is help thousands of people across Queensland do just that, working to help parkinsons’ suffers lead productive lives after they’ve been diagnosed. They provide support and advocacy, counselling and information. This isn’t an easy post to write. For better or worse, this isn’t something I dwell upon in public all that often, and the number of times I’ve written things and deleted them is…considerable.

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24/08/2011 1 Comment
Journal

Rain

More rain, today, and I do love the rain. Last night I turned off all the lights around nine o’clock, trundled off to bed with Fritz the Laptop, and wrote things while it was deliciously cold and wet and almost rainy. There were houses in the neighborhood who’d lit their wood fires, filling the air with a piney-smokey scent. It was…kinda awesome really. A deeply satisfying end to the evening, and one where I felt utterly justified in finishing my writing stint after hitting the thousand word goal I’d set myself. Completely satisfying days at the keyboard come along so rarely that I celebrate them when they happen. My default state is…anger, I guess. Desperation. An incessant need to do more. Doing *enough* is a foreign concept. There is never enough, really, just nights where I feel like I’ve reached the outer borders. This morning I’ve been plugging dates into calendars, marking off deadlines. I’m plugging in things I’d like to go do, writers festivals and gaming conventions and catch-ups with friends, many of which have been floating around my subconscious for months without me ever plugging them into a calendar and figuring out whether I can actually go to them, or I just think I can. I’ve been at it for an hour now, and I’m still nowhere near done. I’m looking askance at things like, say, the Queensland Poetry Festival, trying to figure how much time I can spend there without utterly blowing the next Flotsam deadline (some,

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23/08/2011 No Comments
Journal

Two Short Thoughts

It’s a cold and blustery morning here in Brisbane, and after I get home from work this evening I’m going to need to disappear down the rabbit hole and get some writing done. The entire week is something of an experiment in that front, figuring out a new routine that works around the dayjob. I’m experimenting with getting up earlier, packing an extra hour into my pre-work routine so I can tend to my email and the website and get some reading done. It seems to be going well, although by “going well” I really mean “I have time to write this here blog post and might do it again tomorrow, if only so people don’t keep assuming that I’ve been kidnapped by ninjas and sacrificed to great C’thulhu.” My curse is to spend my life wandering the earth, bemoaning the fact that I do not write enough. And it occurs to me that. as curses go, that’s probably not a bad one to have. After all, I could have been a werewolf. Or I could live in interesting times. By all accounts, both these curses suck. # Last night I started writing something I suspect is a blog post, although given that it’s looking like becoming a 4,000 word monster it’s entirely possible I’ll never get around to posting it. There’s a reason I put very little thought into planning and pre-editing these things; the moment I take them on as a project, rather than a means of dropping

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22/08/2011 No Comments
Journal

Confessions of an Absentee Writer

It’s been a quiet handful of weeks. I wrote, I got the latest instalment of Flotsam away on time, despite the fact that it’s a giant bastard chunk of story, then I collapsed onto a couch for two weeks watching the glory that is the Bruce Timm DC Animated Oeuvre. I have know come to the conclusion that Bruce Timm’s animated works are kinda like cocaine, but awesome and not really bad for you. Batman Beyond has Henry Rollins as a supervillain named Mad Stan that is every bit as glorious as Henry Rollins playing a supervillain should be. The Superman animated series has Lorry Petty playing a supervillain, and as a child of the nineties who has watched Tank Girl far more often than is healthy, it’s safe to say that there is never enough Lorry Petty being awesome in the world. If the Justice League Unlimited series managed to wedge Ice Cube into its voice actor list alongside Nathan Fillion and Gina Torres, we could just call Bruce Timm the ultimate nerdcore showrunner and be done with it (if you’re not a comic geek or animated fan, Bruce Timm is kinda like Joss Whedon, except he doesn’t disappoint as often). I could easily continue my mad cartoon bender for another week at least – I’m only halfway through the Superman series, and there’s four glorious seasons of Batman to go once I’m done, but I suspect I’d start showing up for work smelling funny and start getting odd

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15/08/2011 No Comments
Journal

The internet knows everything, and so I ask…

I was at work today, innocently doing my job, when one of my co-workers turned around asked “have you ever come across a transgender zombie story?” At which point I allowed that a) I had not, b) google wasn’t inclined to find me one, and c) I adore my new dayjob more than any other dayjob I’ve ever had. Still, it’s a vexing kind of question to be unable to answer in the affirmative. I fired off the question to a couple of friends in the hopes that they’ve heard something, then figured I’d ask the question here just in case someone had come across such a thing. Transgender zombies and/or protagonists appear to be fair game, so far as such things go, so if you’ve come across such a thing in your readings please drop by the comments and let me know. In short: help me, Obi-net-kenobi, you’re my only hope. # I’d be linking you to Catherynne Valentes not-quite-review of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, but it’s on livejournal and LJ has been buggy for the last few days, so I’m not entirely sure the link is going to take you where it’s supposed to take you. Should it work, I really recommend taking a gander at the review-slash-essay posted there, for it immediately makes the movie one that I absolutely must see and, I think, articulates something quite important about the reason people wander off to become artists and writers, that kind of long-term chasing down of a tribe

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28/07/2011 1 Comment
Journal

Once we give toasters a modicum of AI, the whole damn world is doomed

If you haven’t read Kelly Link’s Swans before, you can do so over at Fantasy Magazine today. I really recommend it, and I’m totally okay with you going over and reading it now. I mean, I’m not going anywhere, and I’m happy to wait. # Tried cooking chili tonight. Ordinarily not a thing that’s noteworthy, but so far I’ve managed to burn the bottom of the saucepan and forget to put on the rice and leave off half the optional ingredients that I usually put into a bowl of chili in order to transform it into the kind of chili I enjoy eating. Tried to work at the day-job today. Again, not ordinarily noteworthy, but after spending three hours watching tech support try to figure out why my computer wasn’t actually interested in doing things necessary to my job – on my computer, or any others in the office, for the work server obstinately believed I shouldn’t be there – it was generally acknowledge that I should take an early mark and come back in to make up the time on Friday when things had been corrected. Personally, I blame the toasters. They know I’m on to them. My ailing toaster huddles in the corner of the kitchen, unwilling to toast things that should be toasted, plotting my downfall. One of these days I shall wake up with the power chord ’round my throat, the prongs waving menacingly in my face, the toaster glaring down at me with that angry, heated,

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26/07/2011 No Comments
Journal

Sunday

It’s generally a bad sign when the cleanest room in my flat is the study, but it appears I’ve reached that point. I predict a day of epic tidying and cleaning in my future, but right now I’ll settle for getting the washing up done and putting away the clean laundry. That’s next hour’s problem, though. Right now there is coffee and bloggery and answering some emails. Possibly some toast while I try to work out whether the toaster is really broken, or just bitching about the cold. It feels like that kind of afternoon. # Every now and then I come across people who really, really like the idea of creativity. It drives me crazy. Otherwise ordinary conversations are derailed by statements like “writing? Wow, it must be nice to be so creative” or “I’m a writer and creativity is one of my strengths,” mostly because I then froth at the mouth and stomp around until someone gives me a cup of tea and tells me to have a lie down. Creativity is one of the most ill-defined words in our culture, with a myriad of different meanings that all rely on understanding the context in which it’s used. And unlike other context-driven words – like, say, love – you can never be entirely sure which context people are using when they deploy creativity. It’s too bound up in myths about muses and inspiration and the idea that somehow creativity is automatically a transcendent thing. Near as I can

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24/07/2011 1 Comment
Journal

So after setting myself the goal of blogging every day in the coming week, I’m sneaking this one in under a technicality (specifically, the one that says a new day doesn’t actually start until your sleep and wake up in the morning. It makes sense in my head, even if the clocks disagree). It’s one of those rare Saturday nights when none of my neighbors are having a party, so the flat is remarkably cold and quiet. Dark too, since I’ve replaced the broken office chair with one that’s actually comfortable to sit in and that allows for prolonged periods of sitting and working and not really noticing that sunset slipped past and you missed it. Fortunately I have defrosted spicy tomato soup to ward off the oh-right, I-forgot-dinner-too hunger pangs. The downside, now that I’ve stopped, is that I don’t really have the option of not-noticing the cold anymore. I find myself wishing I’d invested in fingerless gloves. Or, at least, a jumper with very long sleeves that would go over my very cold hands when I type. # So, two links before I head off and get some sleep. There’s a new installment of Kathleen Jenning’s Dalek Game illustrations out today, combining a particular sad and pensive-looking dalek with Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book. I found myself wishing Kathleen put the illustrations on coffee mugs and such, for it seems like a very friendly kind of image to have on your morning coffee. Plus, honestly, who can say no to a

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24/07/2011 No Comments
Journal

I went to Pulp Fiction (Brisbane’s Finest Specialty Crime & SF bookstore) and bought new books earlier this week and I’ve managed to forget that until six minutes ago, when I rummaged through my bag and unearthed copies of Charlie Huston’s Sleepless and the Zombies Vs Unicorns anthology and the latest Gail Carriger novel and…well, it was the kind of shopping trip that involved mass consumption, so it’s rather nice to  forget about the books and unearth them once more. And there is, as always, a paper bag. And I have, as always, used the paper bag as a hat; there is no wastepaper baset in the study, so wearing the paper-bag-hat ensures the bag gets thrown out next time I’m walking past a bin. But yes, I forgot I bought books. It’s been that kind of week. On Monday I went up to Rockhampton for the day job, meeting with people and seeing places that are part of the project I’m project-officering for the Queensland Writer’s Center. I’ve known a few people who grew up in Rockhampton over the years, most of whom speak of their former home with the lack of affection that comes from being a teenager growing up in a smallish-city/largish-town, but it turned out to be a lovely city that utterly deserves to be overrun by a steampunks. Lots of glorious old buildings and very wide streets and a surprisingly good sushi place in the CBD. My favourite part of the trip, however, was the ride

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23/07/2011 1 Comment
Journal

As I drink my celebratory snifter of port…

It’s a cool winter evening and I’ve turned off most of the lights in the flat, shuffling around the study by dim glow of the desk lamp, swaying in a slightly dreamy manner to Bauhaus songs while I poke bits of Flotsam with a stick.  In theory I should be writing right now, but I figure if I don’t sneak off and blog now, I’ll get all caught up in drowning Keith Murphy in the demonic equivalent of a baptismal font and it’ll be another week before I post here again. I’m going to mention, first off, that Angela Slatter is in the process of delivering a very special series of Friday Drive-By interviews focusing on the contributors to the forthcoming Stephen Jones anthology A Book of Horrors. The first link takes you straight to the page she’s set up for it on her website, which means you miss out on the very charming otters that appeared on the post announcing the interview series, but it’s definitely worth keeping an on eye on things if you’re a fan of Angela’s work (as I am),  Stephen Jones’ anthologies (er, yes, fan of them too), or just Angela’s drive-by interview series in general (yes, sorry, I’m a fan of those too). Hold on, I’ve run out of Bauhaus songs. It’s time to move on to Joy Division (If you’ve never seen the Australian film Three Dollars where David “Faramir” Wenham dances like Ian Curtis, you’re missing out). Okay, so, other things. I wrote

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12/07/2011 No Comments
Journal

Lull

Tonight’s a moment of respite, I think, amid the pell-mell rush of the last few weeks. And for all that it’s been a good kind of rush, full of new jobs and new words and ticking things off the metaphorical to-do list, I’m kind of glad to be easing off the accelerator a little. I’m currently sitting my study with a snifter of port, my belly full of well-roasted vegetables, and my head full of stories that I’d really like to write in the near future. It’s a pleasant kind of feeling, one that’s been all too scarce over the last eight months, and it’s rather nice to be looking at things I could do instead of panicking about the things I haven’t yet done. # So, yes, an update. Where shall we begin. As I mentioned in my last post, I disappeared down the Rabbit Hole over the weekend just gone. It was a deranged and foolhardy exercise, conceived by my new boss, where a group of writers gathered together for three days and tried to write 30,000 words each. I wrote no-where near that many, nor did I expect to, but I still emerged from the weekend with 16,000 words under my belt and a substantial head-start on the next few installments of Flotsam.  I’ll be off to continue work on the draft once this blog post is done, forging ahead into this brave new world where I do not have to live in fear of deadlines. I’ve

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11/07/2011 No Comments

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