ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

I really did intend, when writing my last blog post, to keep using my computer for writing purposes right up until I started my writing-in-notebooks experiment on September 1st. I figured I’d finish off the projects I’d started there, keep using the notebooks for notes, ease into the idea of doing everything longhand, you know? Turns out, not so much. I shut off the computer after my last post and leapt into the notebook world whole hog, only turning the laptop on once in the last seven days (and that was to type up the story I’d written for a friend’s birthday, so I could post it on his Facebook wall). And now it appears that I can hit 10 pages of handwriting a day – somewhere between 1,500 and 1,800 words, depending on the notebook and my handwriting – pretty consistently. Books are taking shape, stories are getting written, my hand is not hurting from the endless scribble. There’s something aesthetically pleasing about writing in notebooks and, well, the portability. Oh, god, the portability. Weekends are usually Kryptonite for me and regular writing processes. I wake up on Saturday morning wanting nothing to do with keyboards and computers, preferring to stay in bed and idle the hours away. Sunday is just like Saturday, except I’m even less inclined to work. When I’m in that kind of mood, any distraction will do. And my house is full of neat distractions. So, this morning, when I was tired and getting grumpy about

Home again, after four days of traipsing around northern Queensland. Nowhere near as wrecked as I should be, given I just spent four days delivering workshops and travelling, which may well mean the post-teaching/travel exhaustion I’ve come to expect in recent years is another one of those things that connected to the apnoea. Still, it is good to be home. I’m putting serious thought, post-trip, into abandoning the computer as a first-draft tool. A few weeks back I made the decision to abandon all digital screens after ten PM, turning off the computer, the television, and my phone a good two hours before I finally went to bed. This started putting a serious crimp in my productivity, but there was no arguing the fact that I was sleeping better and it stopped bad habit of staying up past bedtime in order to mainline a TV series or play a marathon game of Civilization. Instead of writing, I’d use those two hours to edit print-outs of existing manuscripts and brainstorming ideas for new work, which meant I started digging out notebooks for the first time in ages. And since I carried all those habits with me, when I went away, the notebooks came along for the ride. Since they were easier to use than the computer in airports and such, I’d occasionally dig them out and scribble away in my scratchy handwriting. Then the fine folks at iWrite in Townsville gave me a seriously pretty notebook as a thank-you for doing the session. We’re talking

I wrote a different post earlier today, but it appears that wordpress ate it and refuses to give it back, so you miss out on my moments of wit regarding the hazards of sleeping with a CPAP machine while you have a head cold (here’s a hint: ew). Now it’s later in the day and instead of catching up on some pretty miserable stuff, I’m back from a quick trip into the city where I shopped at Pulp Fiction bookstore, perused the Night Noodle Markets at South Bank, ate Pumpkin Pie at the South Side Diner, and went to see Ant Man. The Noodle Markets broke out the pretty for me. Case in point: Ant-Man was far better than a movie about Ant-Man should have been, especially given the departure of Edgar Wright from the project. And while a lot of people talk about seeing the Wright-isms in the film, I think that takes a lot away from replacement director Petyon Reed’s contributions. Reeds not as obviously stylized in his approach as Wright would have been, but he’s done some pretty solid work. You can see echoes of the man who delivered Bring It On in Ant-Man, and he’s not entirely without an aesthetic approach to cinema. Given a solid script, he produces good work. Given a not-so-solid script, he’ll at least produce something interesting. I’m with pretty much everyone who would have liked to see Evangeline Lily’s Wasp a feature of the film, rather than a quiet extra that’s tagged at the end. Back to writing

Writing is a funny business. Case in point: I signed a reprint contract for a short-story this morning. It’s not the first time this story has been reprinted (and, Gods willing, it won’t be the last), but this reprint means that a single story of around 7,000 words has earned me more money in the space of four years than all five novellas I’ve written put together. There’s nothing surprising about this – it’s how writing works. You write things and you keep writing things and eventually some of the things you wrote a while back come around and start earning you money again. But it’s timely, this coming through this week, ’cause I recently made the decision to cut back my hours at the Writers Centre a little in order to free up a second day each week that can be devoted to writing. Part of me – the part that frets about the mortgage – keeps looking at that decision and wondering if was going to come back and bite me. In the short term? Almost certainly, yes. I’ve more-or-less forgotten all the financial habits I’d built up through years of contracting and freelance work, which means I need to re-learn them. In the long term, well. I got a lot of things I wanna get written, and I have a fair idea how much that extra day a week is worth. # Nine days left in the month of July. Three writing things that need to be done before the end of