ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

I’ve been in Perth for the last four days, having a very nice time at the fiftieth National Science Fiction convention. Generally I’m not good with the con-report type things, since I get frustrated by my inability to summarize things, and so come up with glib one-line descriptions like awesome, with too much curry, which, yes, does encapsulate my con experience, but doesn’t really describe it in any adequate manner. It’s not actually hard to explain why I enjoy Cons. About twenty-five minutes into Amanda Palmer’s Berlkee Music Clinic recording she launches into a description of the life most artists and musicians dream about – something akin to Paris in the twenties where you could wander down to the west bank and step into a bar and immediately be surrounded by like-minded artists and thinkers who are happy to see you. She theorizes that most artists aren’t really interested in money or success so much as the wine moment where you all come together. SF cons, for me, are exactly this experience. Probably because I spend most of the time in a bar. The side-effect of the experience is a general reluctance to try and codify it afterwards, because writing it up means letting the moment slip through your fingers. It means acknowledging that it’s over and the dayjob is back, and your life is once again filled with washing up and noisy neighbours and the demands of paying rent, and the closest your going to get to finding all these

I’ve written and deleted five blog entries today, all because I couldn’t address the thing I wanted to address without devolving into whining. This on top of yesterday’s thwarted blogging attempt for much the same reason. So, yes, perhaps not quite as back as I thought. I no longer feel like swearing, but my head is far from being in a place where I can communicate like a reasonable human being.

The curtains in my bedroom do a poor job of keeping the morning out of my face. I’m not going to speak about the week that was, because no-one really needs to see me complain and swear and generally carry on, but suffice it to say that the inability to keep out the morning sun was a source of great distress to me this morning. My first real night of sleep in weeks turned out to be not so full of slumber, and not for any of the good reasons, and I really wanted a sleep in to make up for it. Alas. Alak. The daystar strikes again and I my internal monologue now inserts three swear words between every thought instead of the two curses that were my default throughout the week. I mean, you should see the words I’ve had to edit out of this entry. It would have read like an Erving Walsh novel in its original form (’cause, really, my internal monologue is far to fond of using gobshite and bullocks and now, apparently, goblinfucker). So, things. There’s apparently a Publisher’s Weekly review of Eclipse 4, which is kinda exciting because I’m in the anthology and can’t actually wait to see the finished book. There was a reprint request in the email this week, which I haven’t responded to as fast as I should, because email has been beyond me for the last week and I haven’t been at the computer which has the file I

There’s people on leave at the dayjob this week, which means I working a lot of overtime this week and my dayjob has gone from “seriously, wtf did you hire me for, there’s nothing to do” to “not enough hours in the day to do the work of the two people I’m covering for.” I have the next installment of Flotsam to write. My house is a mess, I’m sleeping four hours a night, and I’m living on baked beans ’cause I don’t have the time to go shopping at the moment. I’m incapable of communicating with the world in a language other than panic and bile this week. In the words of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five: Don’t push me, ’cause I’m close to the edge. See you next week when things are calmer.

Tomorrow night I am making chili. If I’d thought to defrost some of the necessary components, I’d probably make chili for lunch when I got home from the dayjob, but since this morning was one of those mornings where I was lucky to leave the house with pants on the defrosting will have to wait. Ergo, tomorrow there will be chili, which is a better dinner meal than a lunch meal anyway. I’m behind on things again. It’s like a magic trick, the way it happens. One moment I’m chugging along, happily getting things done, then the world gestures with the left hand to distract me from the right hand, and then I’m looking at the to-do list and going “really? All of this? When did all of this arrive?” So it will be a light week of blogging this week, because I’m behind, and one of the things on my to-do list is ringing the internet company and informing them that they’ve accidentally cut off my internet access. Again. It’s just a given, really; roadwork happens somewhere on my street and the internet goes out, even if they’re not working on the phone lines. I’m tired and I’m cranky and I’m hovering on the edges of a cold and talking to the phone company isn’t very high on the list of things I’d like to do right now. So the plan for the week is this: go to the dayjob, come home, make chili, write. Theoretically, if I do that often enough,