Journal
What I’m doing this week
Planning out my week in Melbourne Airport. This Friday’s entry gave me a moment if pause Even when you know it’s coming, it sneaks up on you.
PeterMBall
15/08/2016
Planning out my week in Melbourne Airport. This Friday’s entry gave me a moment if pause Even when you know it’s coming, it sneaks up on you.
The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them). After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all. Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here). MY CHECK-IN What am I working on this week? Thanks to a massively productive
So, let’s just rip this band-aid off: I’m leaving my job at Queensland Writers Centre at the end of next week. *Takes a deep breath* *Exhales meaningfully* *Gets a little misty-eyed* It doesn’t seem that long ago that I started with QWC, coming aboard to work on a arts project on a six month contract. I thought I would finish up at the end of 2011, pack up my stuff and head off to Melbourne for the next phase of my life. Instead, I kept signing new contracts and getting new gigs. Managing the Australian Writers Marketplace. Convening the GenreCon writers conference and shepherding it through its first three years. Going out and talking to writers, new and established, about business and craft and networking and all the other things I’m passionate about when it comes to writer’s careers. I got to meet and befriend an incredible number of talented writers, publishers, and agents. I got to give people advice in
Love and Friendship looks like a Jane Austen film, when you first glance in its direction. This is largely because it’s based on Lady Susan, Austen’s epistolary novella that you’ve probably only read if you’re a hardcore Austen reader or someone who picked up a volume with a title like “The Complete Works of Jane Austen” that took it’s remit rather seriously. And because you walk into it thinking its an Austen film, and you know exactly what you’re going to get, Love and Friendship is all kinds of fucking glorious as it starts to fuck with those expectations. It’s incredibly funny without devolving into parody; incredibly engaging, without actually having a sympathetic character; incredibly slippery, in that there are machinations at work throughout the film and you’re never entirely sure of a character’s motivations. It is a two-hour love-letter to the fact that Austen is incredibly funny, when you read her works, and the film takes it as a personal
It’s a public holiday, here in Brisbane, which means my favourite cafe is closed and I have not had my morning coffee and Brisbane folks have a whole lot of extra time to get cranky about the Australian census today. And, going by the #CensusFail hashtag on Twitter, there is a lot of anger out there. People are yelling about the already-understandable concerns about the changes in the way Australia is keeping its census data, which raises privacy concerns (that we’re raising these on Facebook amuses me, ’cause…well, Facebook); people are expressing rage at a website that crashed more-or-less immediately when all of fucking Australia tried to log in on the same evening. People are losing their minds about the mixed messages from the Australian Bureau of Statistics regarding what they’re meant to be doing, especially in light of the “do the census or get fined, motherfuckers” tone that has been adopted in recent weeks. I have sympathy for all of
Day two of habit hacking this week, and it’s made somewhat easier by the fact that I’m heading to work in forty-five minutes. Work creates clean edges to work against. I like that. It’s been a good morning thus far. Mostly, because I instituted the first rule of getting shit done: get your motherfucking cell phone out of the bedroom. Also: your laptop, your tablet, and everything else connected to the internet. I used to be good at this, but the events of this year saw me migrate my phone back to the bedside table because I was having a lot of online conversations that were ongoing. Now? Not so much. And so it’s time for the phone to start living on my coffee table, where it will not tempt me to check email, facebook, twitter, messenger, text messages, and youtube as soon as I wake up in the morning. It seems a simple thing, but removing that temptation seriously gets
One of the things I like about working a day job is its tendency to provide nice, clean habit triggers. When 7:30 rolls around and I know that I need to be on a train by 8:30, its an immediate flag that I should sit down and write things. When I get into the office at 9:00 AM on a Monday morning, it’s a trigger that I need to sit down and do my weekly checkpoint while all the information I need is right in front of me. And when I get home from work, three days of the week, it triggers that little habit where I check my writing email and do a hundred words or so, just so it’s fresh in my mind that I’m meant to be writing things before I go cook dinner or do evening things. And I know, three days a week, this is when I put down the rough drafts for blog posts. I
The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them). After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all. Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here). MY CHECK-IN What am I working on this week? I am overrun with half-finished
This morning I woke up, went over to the Low Road Cafe,and ate a tasty breakfast of avocado on toast. Then I drank an industrial-sized mug of coffee while critiquing a friends story, made some notes about what I’m going to write today, and generally felt good about my life. I’m pondering this at the moment, because one of the questions that routinely appears on any test for depression is Have you lost interest in things you used to enjoy? and my default response, when contemplating that, was how would I know? How do I tell the difference between things I enjoy and habits I’ve established to keep me vaguely functional? It’s only in the last week or three that I’ve started being able to make that distinction between habit and happy again. But going to the cafe? Critiquing good stories? Definitely on the happy side of the list. Also on there: eating pork belly; going to the movies (who knew?); catching up
Awake at six AM today. Wandering around the house, listening to the Dresden Dolls covering War Pigs, falling back into the routine I left behind several months ago: shower; clothing; breakfast; Bullet Journal. Review the weekly checkpoint, get started on the urgent tasks for the day. Today’s urgent tasks: booking a doctor’s appointment so I can get my liver checked, to make sure the current antidepressants are not causing it damage; review the answers to interview questions, to make sure I don’t sound like a numpty; write something. Then remember to go to my day-job after spending the last ten days on leave, catching up with people. Apparently the combination of antidepressants and the promise of either breakfast foods, pork belly, or butter chicken will make me insanely social.
From While Not Writing A Book, in Helen Garner’s essay collection Everywhere I Look: At the health farm, fasting. I must be hallucinating: when I walk past a pile of folded towels I see them as a huge club sandwich. I present myself for reiki treatment. The woman announces that she is going to massage my aura. I submit with a sigh. I don’t have any trouble at all believing that people have auras: you only need to have seen a dying and then a dead body to know this. But I wanted my massage to be about my gross earthly body. I do not know how many ways I can recommend this book, but I’m putting this quote here so I can add one more to the list.
The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them). After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all. Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here). MY CHECK-IN What am I working on this week? I made so little progress