Brisbane has, inexplicably, decided to be cold this evening. Well, not cold, but cool. Chilly enough that I sat out on my balcony in shorts and a t-shirt earlier this evening, intending to make notes while I read, and found myself retreating back into the muggy warmth of the living room. It will change its mind soon. We will all burn to a crisp before the day is done. Brisbane cannot help itself in the midst of summer. I was back at the day-job today, beginning the four-week countdown until I finish up my contract and transition into full-time study for the first time in twenty-odd years. I spent my lunch break trying to put together a draft post about productivity and time management, since the number of conversations I’ve had about my process has reached double-digits in the space of two weeks. It’s an incredibly hard topic to write about, because people mostly ask about the tools rather than the

It’s six o’clock in the evening as I write this, sitting out on the balcony of my tiny apartment listening to the train line and the bird song and the upstairs neighbours drunkenly mispronouncing the words ‘mortar and pestle’ over and over as they talk on the phone. Which makes a nice change from the screaming argument on the street that kicked off the afternoon, reminding me why spending time inside the apartment generally trumps sitting out in the muggy summer heat. The wind is piking up and the clouds are hanging low. It doesn’t smell like rain yet, but the rain is coming later this week. This is how we start 2017. The rest of the day was exactly the kind of productive first day I always want out of a new year and never quite achieve. I wrote the first two scenes of a new novella draft; I read a bunch of things; I acquired new notebooks through nefarious

I think it’s Wednesday. It feels Wednesday-ish. I don’t know for sure because I’ve slipped into that blissful, holiday fugue where you lose track of days and time and schedules. I’ve watched a lot of television since finishing work for the Christmas break. I’ve finished reading a bunch of books. At random intervals, I leave the house to collect food and see the outside world and celebrate things. Today is pulling me out of that. Today I have read stories for friends and engaged with page proofs and generally started thinking about what’s going to happen when the holidays are over. I am preparing to rewrite a white-board and outline the projects that need to get done in January. Time to shake off the holiday inertia and reboot.

I’m rolling into plans for 2017 now that the broad strokes of the coming year have been defined. Planning things this late is weird for me – ordinarily I have ambitions and schedules and goals already mapped out in my head. I am burning through books that I’d left half-read, thinking through ways that I can start arranging notes, building a mental to-do list when it comes to my thesis topic so I’ve got some relatively clear research goals when the lights turn green and it’s time to go. December has become a weird, in-between state. I’m working out my contract on the current day-job, counting down the days until I can stop wearing real shoes and go back to my sneaker-clad existence. I’ve not yet started the thesis. Writing projects are scattered about, waiting to be corralled and planned. These are the ways I trick myself into thinking I can assert control over the universe. This morning I spent

Back in November I posted about going into a mild depressive episode. As many folks may have surmised from the Friday post a few weeks back, it turned out to be not-so-goddamn mild. I lost the first half of December to an incredibly irritating funk, which only really clicked as a more-than-mild depressive episode when a friend messaged me last week and asked how I was doing. At the time I’d just come home from a book launch, after what had already been a pretty kick-ass day at work, and I’d settled into my couch to cry for the third evening that week. I had not written anything creative for the better part of a month. I’d been cancelling or avoiding social events for two straight weeks. I was not sleeping properly. I avoided going to bed until very late in the AM, then woke up a few hours later. And since the friend who asked how I was doing

It is Monday morning and I am sitting on my balcony, listening to the trains and watching the greenery sway in the breeze and letting Brisbane warm up to its crazy Summer weather. There is a storm coming. Christmas is almost here, which means my local cafe will soon shut down for a few weeks, and I will be forced to eat breakfast at home like a monster. This would bother me less if my talent for coffee was better, and I had the patience to shave my own beetroot to go on my avocado on toast. It’s not the war on Christmas that bothers me. It’s that those fuckers on the Christmas side refuse to capitulate. Anyway. I have not blogged regularly for a long, long while. I spent a good chunk of last night stuck in traffic, waiting for the crowds to disperse around Woolloongabba stadium after the cricket was done, and I kept coming up with things

I’ve been sitting on my couch since 4:47 AM, waiting for Brisbane to raise the dial on the heat and the humidity. Now it’s nearly seven o’clock, and the muggy warmth has settled in with that jangly feeling you get after too much adrenaline. The skin prickles and the muscle is half-caught in fight or flight. It’s not yet hot enough that you recognise the cause, unless you’re paying attention to what’s going on. It has been a bad week. The gulf between what I wanted to achieve and what has actually been done is not too wide, but every failure feels like the failure when I’m in this particular mode. I am angry and I am frustrated and God, the awkwardness. Dealing with other human beings feels like a monumental task. I am performing triage on social obligations, trying to avoid anything that involves crowds or well-meaning acquaintances asking how I am. Two weeks until I find out what