Category: Big Thoughts

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 to authors I owe responses to for Brain Jar (alas, I’m still behind, for reasons that will be clear below); clearing some tasks on the NEIS training program that’ll eventually become the NIES assistance scheme helping the press along next year. Then I spent a good chunk of yesterday afternoon trying to navigate the complex bureaucracies of Australia’s unemployment system for the fourth time this week, which is starting to feel a little like I’ve stepped into Kafka’s The Trial in the sheer absurdity of trying to get a simple problem resolved. It’s become particularly frustrating because I first called because they’d overpaid me, and

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 was part of the appeal, and even in the absence of interactive responses, the potential of interactivity remained. The membrane between you and the readership was thin, and highly permeable. Over the years permeability feels like it’s fallen away. Conversations sped up as responses moved to tools like Facebook and Twitter, or became siloed to the comments section because folks weren’t maintaining their own feed of information. The nature of blogs transformed as folks figured out how to take this weird conversation platform and monetise it as a content publisher, setting off a boom of increasingly focused blogs devoted to tightly constrained topics, evergreen content

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 it was when they launched back in 2007 Practically every damn thing in your life is different than it was when you first encountered it. The technology progressed. You adapted. This is why I am fundamentally confused by the fuckers who insist that the definition of feminism and racism they learned in 1984 is basically consistent with the way the word is used today. Things change. You keep up. If you can figure out how to use a goddamn cell phone without seeming like a dinosaur, you can figure out how to keep up with the conversations around sexism, racism, and other forms of cultural oppression.

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 makes me weary as a reader. Provocation for its own sake just makes me wish for something undercutting the attempts to shock and provoke. I’m now old enough that I get cranky with young people for parking tractors on my lawn. Old enough I can still remember the point that phrase got lodged in my consciousness, back in the nineties: an episode of Good News Week, repeating a statement by the British PM John Major out of context for comic purposes. I still prefer blogs to social media. Email to messenger programs. I get mildly irritated at tools like Slack every time I’m forced to

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 play. THE LONG VERSION Every year, when the literary festival season comes around, I see the same iteration of the same argument: why don’t Australian literary festivals feature more fantasy writers/romance writers/things-that-aren’t-lit-fic writers. Every year, people offer up solutions that aren’t really solutions because there’s a fundamental disconnect between the way they think festivals work and the way they’re actually being put together. This year, a bunch of self-published authors have started a campaign to try and rectify the lack of self-published authors on festival programs and award slates. Slightly new take, but I have exactly same doubts about its success. Now, I first self-published

“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 google with the obvious search term and checking the information already out there. Dear god, there was a lot. And if you listen to the internet, beards did have health benefits that were worth paying attention too. There were blog posts. There were newspaper articles. Beards were big business on the internet at that point, the epitome of hipster cool, and everyone had a listicle or informative article out there. Beards were good for your health, motherfucker. The fix was fucking in. 8 Health Benefits of Growing a Beard. 14 Ways A Beard is Good For Your Health.  Because I’m me and I dislike taking

  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 telling me they didn’t have the parts. After that, I placed tape over the broken lens and made do until I had the chance to get it repaired for good. The camera will still take photos, but they aren’t crisp and the colours are all washed out. The kind of photos that are no longer suitable for scanning documents with the phone, or photographing receipts that are uploaded to a rebate app. The kind of problems that are annoying enough that you notice when they come up, but aren’t quite regular enough to justify the time and the money it takes to resolve them when

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 of the few pieces of furniture not moving during the process, has played host to a small pile of things set aside as part of that final 20%, which I’ve largely been ignoring for the last seven days as I worked from the couch. It’s all too easy to find reasons to work from the couch, instead of addressing the problem. To work with the state of the desk as it is, and look for a quick solution. It’s not that the mess is hard to clear, but that clearing it means I may need to consider the questions that come after the space is

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 June and September asking questions about what is a fairly obtuse story. Some of these emails ask very smart questions, which is great, but they’ve they’ve now become common enough that I rarely have time to deliver anything meaningful as an answer. To that end, I figure it will be useful to have a stock response I point people towards/show up if they Google the story, so I’m throwing some story notes up here on the blog that I can refer people to. FIRST, SOME GENERAL CAVEATS In general, when it comes to these sorts of questions, I am entirely the wrong person to talk