ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

This is my set-up for the day: I will not leave the bed until I have finished some short stories and polished them up, all ready to submit. This shouldn’t be too hard – there’s at least a half-dozen story drafts on my hard drive that are finished and critiqued and basically waiting for me to give them the time to day, but for various reasons I haven’t been doing that and that’s gotta stop. I constantly try to fight it, but the bed is pretty much my natural working place. I like being horizontal when I work. I like having room to spread out. I like being able to snuggle under blankets during winter and find a nice breeze in summer, and I like being close to my books (the vast majority of which live in my bedroom and always have). Further, there’s something indolent about working from the bed. As if the work you do there isn’t really work, not the way it is when you actually get up and get out of your jammies and go somewhere else to get things done. I like studies too, don’t get me wrong. There are months when I acknowledge that a desk and a regular place and a schedule are utterly necessary, but today is not one of those days and February is not one of those months. March, I expect, will find me back in the office chair rather than lazing on the bed. March is always like that.

So I’m not in Melbourne anymore and that makes me kinda sad. For the last four days I’ve been aimlessly wandering the city, catching up with friends I don’t get to see too often, eating good food and exercising my low-key superpower of being the only person in the world who goes to Melbourne and drinks bad coffee. I’ve returned to Brisbane fatter and happier than I left. Now I’m warming up for the pre-work writing shift and a day that’s looking…well, kind of crazy, to be honest. There’s going to be a lot packed into the next three days of day-jobbery, from opening the next iteration of GenreCon through to shepherding a complete redesign of the website I’m managing. More importantly, I shaved this morning. I don’t know what it is without me and Melbourne and not-shaving, but it always seems to happen and it never drives me crazy until I’m halfway home and sporting the kind of bum-fluff three day growth that represents my darnedest attempt to grow a beard. It was good to shave. And Brisbane, well, Brisbane has welcomed me home with a pretty fucking spectacular morning. Just the right mixture of cool air and sunlight and…well, Brisbane stuff. I am not terribly eloquent this morning. I flew home last night and suffered from my usual air travel karma, which means there were delays and malfunctions and some arriving home far later than I expected to arrive home, and thus I am operating on less sleep

It’s a bit wet in Brisbane right now. There are parts of the city where that’s proving to be a problem, prompting flood warnings and a twitter feed full of alerts notifying folks of their local sandbag locations. We’re still a bit twitchy about rain around these parts, given the big floods of a few years back, and I’ve had a couple of conversations with people from other states who were understandably concerned by the news. Fortunately, all is well. I’ve spent the better part of the weekend away from the computer, so I wasn’t really aware there was flooding going on until the text messages started coming through and I started logging onto twitter. In contrast to some other parts of the city, my weekend has been very idle. I’ve watched a bunch of movies and read a bunch of books and occasionally sat down at the computer and written things, be they fiction or non-fiction or the occasional rant. It’s cooled down enough that I finally dragged a blanket over my bed, which also means I’ve decamped from the study and dragged the Shifty Silas the Laptop into bed with me. I’d forgotten how much I liked writing in bed. I gave it up last year, since I couldn’t really afford the time it took as a habit; these days I’ve got a lot more time on my hands, so I’m embracing the act of typing while horizontal again. It’s kinda pleasant, lying under a blanket, getting some

My weekend, lo, it’s been a lazy one. Today I try and redeem that a little, through the virtue of writing lots of things prior to 7:00 PM, when I shall gather with The Flatmate and the Downstairs Neighbor and we shall watch John Carter (which, it must be said, I didn’t see at the cinemas purely because I always want to add “Of Mars” to the end of the title). The Flatmate claims John Carter is a good, watchable movie. On one hand, he was entirely correct when he used that claim to lure me into watching Battleship last weekend, which is a perfectly watchable big dumb movie. On the other hand, he’s also the man who talked me into watching Starcrash, Zardoz, and Ice Planet, all of which are not perfectly watchable big, dumb movies. Either way, I’ll report back on the morrow. Before that happens, though, I’ve got an article to write and some page-proofs to finish and at some point I’m going to write some new words on the novel and the short story I’m working on. Forward progress and all that. I’ve got some Rage Against the Machine playing (who knew they did a covers album?); I’ve got Shift Silas the Laptop set up and ready. I’ve got my coffee at my side. Lets go.