ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

It’s Wednesday evening and the dayjob is done for the week. I’m now girding myself for the next few days, which will be best described as a tsunami of words. My plans for the evening involve reading the last fifty pages of Un Lun Dun, writing a bunch of things that need to be finished before tonight is over, then putting what little energy remains into sketching notes on the short novella I conceptualized on the way to work this morning. Tomorrow…well. Tomorrow I gird myself for the Queensland Writer’s Center’s Rabbit Hole event, where a bunch of us gather and attempt to write 30,000 words over three days. In theory I’ll be aiming to get the final five Flotsam stories done over those three days, if only so I can free myself up for other writing for the rest of the year. This will require plans and scene maps and perhaps some notes on what needs to happen where, if only because my current plan stopped being useful about three or four months back. It’s a busy week, all things considered. I suspect I will not blog again until the rabbit hole is done. So, in the spirit of a fly-by kind of update: This was my second week at the new dayjob, and it’s awesome. I’d forgotten what doing a job I really, really liked was like. I now get to commute to work via train, which means there’s time to read and scribble notes. I keep reading books really

It is morning and there is no coffee in the house, which means I should either duck down to the local espresso bar I haven’t been to yet, or buckle up and drive to the shops in order to acquire more coffee. The latter option will obviously need to occur either way, for I don’t have the means to duck down to the espresso bar again should I face this problem on the morrow, but still…there’s the issue of immediacy. It’s morning (or it was, when I first started typing this), and mornings need coffee to stop bad things happening for the rest of the day. Especially today. In a week or so Friday’s will be a magical, awesome day set aside for the purposes of writing and lounging around the house reading books, but this week there is much to do on my to-do list for the day, so it’s going to be somewhat frantic. Of course, given my inability to make a decision, I’m currently stuck in the part of the day set aside as mooch around the house and listen to PJ Harvey albums. Which isn’t all bad, I can tell you, except for the fact that I’ll be making up the lost minutes later in the evening. # Various parts of my life are in states of disarray at the moment. Not falling apart, not at all, just that glorious kind of mess that comes when you pull everything off the shelves and spread it out across your lounge room, then

It’s morning and it’s cold and I’m sitting in the study with bare feet, kicking my heels against the floorboards, which is basically one of my favourite things ever. Eventually it will get too cold and I’ll be forced to put on socks, or shoes, or slippers, but for the moment this is one of those pleasantly cold mornings made for barefooted padding about the house. There were contracts in the mail this morning, which probably means it’s safe to mention that The Clockwork Goat and the Smokestack Magi, my story from Shimmer’s Clockwork Junglebook issue, is going to be reprinted in the Mammoth Book of Steampunk alongside lots of very cool other stuff. And I will probably mention this again, in more detail, once I’m back into the blogging habit and used to saying things in public again, but my friend Chris Green has released a short story collection, Love and Other Losses, for the Kindle. If you all went and bought it now, I wouldn’t have to write several hundred words that essentially boil down to “Chris Green is a phenomenal short story writer and this collection is really good” in order to convince you to purchase. I own a copy and I don’t even own a kindle (I’m old-school; I read my ebooks on the computer). # I’ve been hand-writing things a lot lately, which is unusual for me. Partially this is the result of the broken office chair, partially it’s the result of me getting sick of sitting in

So: 1) I quit the dreaded dayjob and worked out my notice. I was officially done at 1:30 last Friday, and that moment has been one of the better moments of my year. I would say no words can describe how much I disliked that job, but that would be a patent lie. Of course words can describe it; describing things with words is what I do, after all. Unfortunately the words I’d use to describe the experience aren’t particularly useful in polite company, or fair to the company in question who were more frustrating to deal with than maliciously determined to make my life miserable, so I elect to say nothing in public. 2) I am behind on email. Well, behind on everything really – you should see the state of my kitchen – but email and blogging are my default means of communicating with the world, and so it’s usually worth mentioning when I’m behind on such things to forestall the series of “are you still alive?” messages that crop up. Other things I am behind on: writing projects, critiques I owe people of their stories/novels, marking, washing up, cleaning mold off the ceiling, washing, sleep, tidying the office, catching up with people, prepping my Mutants and Masterminds game for Thursday night, reading, grocery shopping, and disposing of broken and/or unwanted furniture. If it were possible to be behind on breathing without dying, it’s entirely possible I’d be behind on that too. Fortunately I’ve got a week or so before

Today I’m doing that thing where I stare without really looking at things, and it’s entirely possible that there are portions of my brain that have dozed off figuring that the rest of my brain will pick up the slack. Unfortunately no-one told the rest of my brain that, so I’m focusing on things in very short bursts, for as long as my concentration holds, and then I go back to whatever I’m doing when I’m staring into space. Which is mostly thinking about going back to bed or daydreaming about lunch.