I am watching the second season of Once Upon A Time and admiring the way they set up their antagonists. Regina the “Evil” Queen. Rumplestiltskin, the Dark One. The vengeful Captain Hook. The kind of glorious, cartoonish evil that you admire to a certain extent because they’re clever, they’re gleeful about the things they’re doing, […]
THE BLACKHOUSE is the first novel in Peter May’s Lewis trilogy, police procedurals set on the Isle of Lewis out in the Scottish Hebrides. It’s a novel about the isolation, the traditions that built out of that isolation, and the history of a protagonist who goes home, reluctantly, in order to investigate a crime. I […]
Today I spent a lot of time walking around the city, alternating between finding quiet places to write and popping into bookstores and art galleries to check out the notebooks they had on sale. I spent longer than intended in the Brisbane gallery because I had to check my bag before I could go to […]
Yesterday, I wrote 979 words on Pixie Dust, with Whisky Chaser. Finished up right about the point where my beloved fell asleep after suffering an epic bout of insomnia, so I wrote up today’s edition of Notes from the Brain Jar, watched Dream Dangerously, the documentary about Neil Gaiman’s last signing tour, and thought very hard about […]
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 […]
I never really jelled with Star Trek. The SF of my childhood was always Star Wars and Buck Rodgers and Baker-era Dr Who, which eschewed the exploration narrative neatly captured in Trek’s boldly go approach to narrative. They were narratives that seemed faster-paced, so Trek always seemed slow, and I lived in places where SF fans […]
Angela Slatter’s second novel, Corpselight, is on my table alongside a fresh cup of coffee. I get to read this week, ahead of it’s official launch on July 14, because one of the perks of being writer is befriending other writers who give you advanced copies of their books. If you’re in Brisbane on July […]
I’m halfway through Glen Weldon’s The Caped Crusader, a book that traces the evolution of Batman and the rise of geek culture. It is, at alternating intervals, fascinating and smart and very, very funny, but it also loops back to a series of conceits and bits that irritate the fuck out of me. Mostly, it […]
In need of distraction, I started reading Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber aloud to fill the empty spaces in my flat. I’ve adored that book since it was recommended to me back in my early twenties, but I’ve never actually paid attention to the vocal components of the language. Reading aloud, you quickly recognise just how […]
I started reading the Inhabitat blog eight or nine years ago, maybe. Not long after I’d started writing fiction after a long spell in the trenches of other writing work. I stopped reading back in 2013, because Habitat publishes a lot of content and there simply wasn’t time to read it while working a part-time […]
My copy of Caitlin Kiernan’s latest short story collection arrived in the mail last week. It’s a beautiful book full of beautiful, terrible stories in the old-school definition of terrible, meaning they are causing or likely to cause terror. The kind of stories that make Kant’s description of the sublime comprehensible, which is more than […]
Over the weekend I dropped three hundred bucks to pick up a Dell Inspiron that was on sale at my local JB HiFi. I’d been edging around the idea of getting a small netbook capable of running OneNote while I’m gaming for a few weeks, and I seriously thought that would be all I used […]
