We’ve had a few days of storms here in Brisbane, but today they’ve given way to blue skies and warm breeze and a very happy cat reclaiming her spot on the balcony. I’ve spent a good chunk of yesterday morning answering email: replying to quote requests from folks interested in book and cover design; responding […]
Back in the old days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and WiFi hadn’t yet migrated to phones, blogging used to feel like the first step of an interactive process. You’d post something, and other folks would respond on their blogs, setting up a slow moving conversation as other folks joined in on their blogs. Interactivity […]
I posted this to Facebook four years ago, when some folks who refused to acknowledge systemic bias decried any suggestion there might be an element of racism in their actions. Computers have evolved since the seventies and eighties. Cars have evolved, banking has evolved, food has evolved. Your iPhone is a very different beast than […]
I’m coming up on my forty-second birthday in two weeks, which means I am officially middle aged and set in my ways. I do not discover new bands with anything approaching regularity. I tend to read the authors I know I’ll like rather than reach out for the cutting edge. Experimentation for its own sake […]
TL/DR VERSION: There’s a recurring discussion that occurs year after year about the types of writers who get excluded from literary festivals (the latest iteration being the self-publishers behind #SelfPubIsHere). As a writer, former conference organiser, and current PhD student/cultural theory wonk I put together a bunch of thoughts about the types of publishing capital in […]
“You should write a blog post about the health benefits of beards,” my boss said. He meant it as a kind of joke, but I was finishing up my contract and my replacement was already in place. I had a few hours to kill on my way out so I did the preliminary research, hitting […]
I broke the lens on my phone camera moving furniture around my flat. There’s no memory of it happening, just an afternoon lugging boxes of books into the afternoon and the realisation that the lens was shattered. My first two attempts to fix it resulted in failure, the repair places shrugging their shoulders and […]
We rearranged our apartment two weeks ago, slotting furniture into new configurations and making more space for my partners stuff. Then, I got sick with a head cold, and my partner inherited the cold from me, so the job remains 80% done instead of getting everything tucked away and finalised. My desk, which was one […]
I am still one of those people who follows blogs through an RSS reader, setting aside a portion of my day to process a whacking great chunk of data from around the internet. My feeds are pretty carefully curated and sorted into categories, so I can narrow my focus down to writing advice, say, or […]
Somewhere along the way, one of my stories got put on a HSC prep exam somewhere in Australia. On one hand, this is cool – I didn’t get into this gig to write things that do not get read. On the other hand, it also means I have reached that point where I get semi-regular emails between […]
I picked up the first book in C.S. Friedman’s Coldfire trilogy from a remainder table when I was fourteen, part of a five-books-for-ten-bucks deal where I deployed my limited teenage resources. Over the years that remainder table introduced me to many books I wouldn’t have picked up otherwise, but Black Sun Rising was one of […]
It’s 1994 and I’m sitting in a cinema with tears on my cheeks. Gareth has just died and Matthew is at the pulpit, reading W.H. Auden’s Funeral Blues as the eulogy for his friend. It wrecks me as few things have wrecked me, in my young life. John Hannah delivers a performance that makes me […]
