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Cool News from the Day Job

So yesterday we made a small announcement at my dayjob. It went a little something like this: Source: GenreCon News Blog The Australian Writer’s Marketplace is pleased to announce the launch of the first annual GenreCon, a convention for professional and aspiring writers of romance, mystery, science fiction, crime, fantasy, horror, thrillers, and more. One part party, one part professional development: GenreCon is the place to be if you’re an aspiring or established writer with a penchant for the types of fiction that get relegated to their own corner of the bookstore. Featuring international guests Joe Abercrombie (Author, The First Law Trilogy, Best Served Cold, The Heroes), Sarah Wendell (co-founder, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books), and Ginger Clark (Literary Agent, Curtis Brown), with more guests being announced in the coming weeks. GenreCon is the place to be if you want to: Educate yourself about the publishing industry Learn what it takes to become a successful genre author Network with other writers who are passionate about genre fiction Meet editors, agents, publishers, and other genre publishing professionals Celebrate the rich contribution genre fiction has made to Australia’s literary landscape The 2012 GenreCon will be held November 2-4, 2012 at the Rydges Hotel, Parramatta, NSW. Registrations are open now, with the special Early Bird ticket price of $190 available to the first 50 registrations. To register, visit us online at genrecon.com.au Special Guests We’re pleased to introduce you to this years international guests: Joe Abercrombie, Sarah Wendell, and Ginger Clark. Joe Abercrombie Joe Abercrombie was born in Lancaster, studied psychology at the University of Manchester,

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18/04/2012 No Comments
Journal

2:23 AM

There are many things I like about my current day-job. Many, many things. I like the people I work with, I like earning money for doing things that are interesting and challenging, and I like the fact that there’s discounts at the cafe downstairs so I can stay relatively caffeinated throughout the day. This is just an illustrative handful of things I like, but you get the picture: my appreciation of this job covers a lot of terrain. That said, I really miss staying up late. I miss spending time in the world after 2:30 in the morning when everything is quiet and I start to get that tired-but-not-quite-tired-enough feeling which results in quiet pondering and pages of scribbled notes. I miss the freedom of mainlining a whole season of a TV show I’ve discovered on DVD in one fell swoop, confident that I’ll have the time to catch up on sleep. I miss reading in bed. I miss catching my US friends online because our time-zones magically hit that point where we’d both be awake at the same time. And I miss knowing that I can always eke out an extra hour or so of writing time if I need too, right in the heart of my favourite time to write, and sleep in a little later the following day. It was 2:23 in the morning when I started writing this. I’ve got a day off tomorrow – an actual day off, as opposed to a non-dayjob kind of day that

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11/04/2012 No Comments
Journal

Back in Brisbane, Back Online

It’s a quiet, slightly gloomy Easter Monday and I’ve spent the better of my afternoon lurking in my bedroom with a copy of William Gibson’s Distrust That Particular Flavour and The Jane Austen Argument’s Somewhere Under the Radio on repeat. I’ve been meaning to write a catch-up kind of post ever since I went to Rockhampton a few weeks back, but I didn’t and somehow the fact that I kept accumulating things to blog about only meant that the gap kept winding on. Bullocks to that, though, so I figured I’d peel myself off the bed and give you the highlights. Firstly, I went to Rockhampton and it rained a great deal. This resulted in about ten hours of fun at the Rockhampton airport, watching them cancel and reschedule flights, until finally my 1:30 PM flight out finally happened at 2:00 AM instead. It made for a long day, although I did get to duck out of the airport and see the launch of Rockhampton Stories, which is one of those projects for which I take minutes, process paperwork, and otherwise admin as part of my dayjob. It’s kind of cool, and worth checking out. I will say that there are worse places to be stuck than Rockhampton Airport. They have free WiFi, for starters, and there are plenty of people who will take an interest in your predicament over twitter when you start tweeting and slowly losing your mind due to boredom. I also went to Melbourne in the same week,

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09/04/2012 1 Comment
Journal

Rockhampton

I quite like Rockhampton, at least the parts of it I’ve seen. Its an old port city with wide streets (so wagons can turn around in them), a real sense of place that cities like Brisbane are still struggling with, and some truly glorious old buildings. Like their cultural center, the Walter Reid, for example: Every time I find myself in Rockhampton I find myself wishing it hosted a big steampunk festival of some kind, SD its really the kind of city that makes me want to put on a top hat and ride a Zeppelin.

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21/03/2012 No Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Provocation

I’m flying out to Rockhampton at six AM tomorrow morning, so I really should be in bed right now. And I will be soon, I swear, but for this: earlier today I learned the latest Review of Australian Fiction is out, featuring stories by Kim Wilkins and Meg Vann. Perhaps this requires some context. Let me start again. One of the nice things about being a writer is meeting people you find yourself liking. This isn’t one of those things that happens immediately. In fact, it starts quite slowly: you spend a year or two meeting people you kind of like, or don’t like at all, and then suddenly you’re are a writing event of some kind and you stumble over a reader or fellow writer who you get along with quite well. And then you keep going to writing events, or you start hanging out with other writers, and these same people keep showing up again and again. This is, in a round-about way, how I came to know Meg Vann. For a while she was a person I recognised from writers’ workshops, then a friend of a friend, and some time after that she became one of the finest writers of crime fiction I know who hadn’t gotten around to being published yet. There was something criminal about that, too. Almost sinister, given how good Meg’s work is (I remember the first time I went to critique a chapter from Meg’s novel in a writing course; it was

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20/03/2012 1 Comment
Journal

Week of Doom

So, the birthday. I got some good, solid slacking-off-with-an-arm-thrown-over-my face. I went and had dinner with my parents and my sister. There were new pairs of Converse sneakers (my secret vice), Crème brûlée, and a card from my mother that was covered in unicorns. They put a birthday candle in my crème brûlée, so I even blew out a candle for the first time in years. Then I went into work today and logged onto my facebook and found a wall timeline full of people wishing my happy birthday, which is one of those things about modern life and interconnectivity that I haven’t quite gotten the hang of. Plus, I always feel like I’m disappointing people by being so sedate  in my celebrating. To say nothing of the fact that I’m a horrible facebook user, what with being a convert to Twitter. Still, thank you all. I shall endeavour to celebrating harder next year, I swear. # Tomorrow will be the sole sane day in my entire week. Wednesday I’m off to Rockhampton in the morning, something that’ll require a 6 am flight, and I’ll be back in time to teach my 6 pm class at the QWC. Thursday I go and find somewhere to vote, since I’ve just realised I’ll be out of town during the state elections, then I’ll working late at the QWC staffing an event. Friday morning I fly down to Melbourne on a flight so early it makes the Rockhampton flight look sane and reasonable, and once I’m down there

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19/03/2012 No Comments
Journal

and now we are thirty-five

It’s the morning of my 35th Birthday, which means two things. First, that it’s time to post the traditional morning-of-my-birthday-self-portrait-that-will-cause-my-parents-to-complain-about-the-things-I-put-up-on-the-internet. Not quite the grim visage of death I used for my thirty-third birthday, but I do plan on staying like this for most of the damn day. It’s Sunday, after all, and Sundays were meant for staying in bed with an arm thrown over your face, pretending the outside world doesn’t exist. Secondly, it means I should reread Haruki Murakami’s Birthday Stories anthology, ’cause that’s what I do on my birthday. Yes, I know, least exciting blog post ever, but hey – it’s tradition. And a Sunday.

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18/03/2012 1 Comment
Journal

Oops, Mae Maxima Culpa

Yesterday’s post seems to have come across a little gloomier than I’d intended. So much so that I actually went back and re-read what I’d written, trying to puzzle out why it was drawing the comments it was (which, don’t get me wrong, are thoroughly brilliant and affirming and my thanks go out to all of you) and the conversations I kept having today with people who thought that maybe I needed a hug and a pep talk. Which is nice, sure, but it kind of baffled me. Surely it’s not that bad? I thought. I mean, I did write that paragraph about my life being essentially awesome most of the time, right? Then I re-read the post and realised, yes, I’d written that paragraph, but I’d also deleted it from the final post. And yes, it was a post that came with a side of gloom cookies, and I probably did sound rather like I needed a hug at the end of it. So, er, sorry for being a downer. Mae culpa. I do generally try to keep the sturm und drang off the blog. Sturm und drang is the spokesbear’s job. He’s also a pretty damn good dispense of hugs. I also promise I’m not about to go throw this whole writing thing for a lark and go find a real job. For starters, I’m really fond of my current dayjob. Also, this writing thing? I feel like I’m only just starting to get good at it.  

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14/03/2012 1 Comment
Journal

BILDUNGSROMAN

ONE I was twenty-one when I first realised that writing wasn’t going to be easy. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. I was fresh out of my undergraduate, fresh out of home, and about to dive back into an honours year at University. I remember sitting on the balcony of my shitty share-house flat in the wee hours of the morning, nursing a cup of coffee and paging through one of the cheap, shitty poetry anthologies I’d picked up in a second hand book store. This is back when I lived on the Gold Coast, where even the best second hand book stores are fairly starved for poetry. At the time I still figured I’d grow up to be a poet, and I already knew there was no chance of making a living at that. So I drank my coffee and read poetry and thought about what I was going to do with my life, looking at the big ol’ stretch of poverty that appeared before me. And I thought, you know what, fuck it. I can handle being broke.  And I also thought, stupidly, worse case scenario, I’ll write a book and try to win the Vogel or something  before I’m thirty-five. It’s the kind of stupidity that makes me laugh now. TWO My favourite line of dialogue ever comes from Romeo & Juliet. It occurs in Act ii, Scene ii, during the first serious meeting between the titular characters. Romeo and Juliet go through their

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14/03/2012 4 Comments
Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Ticking Things Off the To-Do List

I’m having something of a catch-up evening this evening. One of those nights where long un-answered email is finally responded to and long ignored tasks finally get ticked off the to-do list. On tonight’s list: book flights to Melbourne in two weeks; write up an invoice or two that needs to get mailed out; write a blog post. Two of three are done, and once I click post I get to parade around the house in triumph, confident in the fact that I have rocked the kasbah. Sadly, the presence of my flatmate means I’m no longer being literal when I say that. Still to do: respond to unanswered email; line up places to stay while in Melbourne; crit things; write things that are not blog posts. It’s a busy, ramshackle kind of evening, but it’s been a ramshackle kind of month thus far, so all things considered that makes a kind of sense. # I watched Midnight in Paris yesterday. Only, that isn’t really the best way to start. Lets try this: I run very hot and cold on Woody Allen films, but the ones I tend to enjoy the most are the ones where he plays with genre, particularly genres with a very distinct sense of time. Purple Rose of Cairo, for example, or The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. They aren’t perfect films, not by a long shot, but for all his faults Allen seems to have a knack for evoking a sense of nostalgia and deconstructing it a

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12/03/2012 No Comments

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