Category: Journal

Arrived home from Melbourne and discovered that something was very wrong with my laptop. The casing split open; it sparked when I turned it on; the hinges that allowed me to open and close the computer made ominous noises. All things that probably should have worried me more than it does, but I go through laptops the way some people eat popcorn, so I basically unplugged and nodded and revisited my to-do list to catalogue all the things where a web-accessible laptop was an essential tool. Turns out, there was a lot of stuff, so I did the sensible thing and took it to my local laptop repair place which uses phrases like “48 hour turn-around.” They took one look and said: good news, it’s cheap to repair. Bad news, it’ll take us up to two weeks to get in the parts we need. It’s going to be a tricky couple of weeks.

Yesterday I finished my first read-through of Valiant, a werewolf PI novella I started writing in February 2015 and finished a month or so later. For those who have been following the blog for a while, you might notice this represents the three-month period immediately prior to me realising there was something awfully, awfully wrong with my sleep. The process of drafting Valiant is what made the problem clear. It’s a project where I fell asleep at the keyboard constantly, frequently dozing off a half-dozen times every hour. I can see it in the manuscript, during the read-through. The front half is full of sections where I make odd typos or launch into sentences where my attention has obviously wandered. The back half is full of…well, disjointed and faintly psychotic thought processes. Half-finished paragraphs, prolonged exchanges of dialogue where I’ve repeated the same things two or three times in a row. Character names changing three or four times every page. Points where you

The thing that wiped out my blog post yesterday? Turned out to be a Telstra-wide problem with the network which has become a thing, with Telstra doing some weird thing where they provide everyone with free mobile data over Sunday as a thank you. Said thing also wiped out access to a number of websites hosted on certain servers in the US. Those servers included the folks who host this website, and any number of small business websites across Australia. I have never, in my life, felt sorry for tech support folk the way I felt for the folks handling yesterday’s outage. People get…irrational…when it comes to the internet. It spends so much time working, and working well, that it’s become an invisible part of our culture, quietly handling every aspect of our business and social lives. It’s easy to forget that it’s actually a complicated mess of infrastructure underneath all that, which means things that go wrong in unexpected ways

Back in the early days of blogging, we all learned an important lesson: do not produce content directly on the platform. Draft on reliable software and transfer it over, for your blog will break down or fail to post, and when that happens you will lose all that work. Then the blogs grew more advanced and the mysterious failures of the software grew infrequent. We grew complacent and went with the easy option. Or, at least, I did. And so, with a great deal of nostalgia, I must admit this was not the post I intended to write this morning. I had another one, longer and carefully crafted, full of witty insight that would change your life for the better. And, as I finished and went to post, the mysteries of the internet reared their head and exiled my post into the ether. I do not have time to recreate it. There is write club today, and an article deadline,

I don’t want to be writing a blog post right now. I just got home from the first weekly RPG session of the year, after a big day’s word count at Write Club, and I feel like slacking off. There’s an old copy of Master of Orion II on my computer, and I feel an overwhelming urge to fire up a game and try to overtake the universe as a race of marauding space lizards. I probably shouldn’t be writing a blog post right now. If I’ve got energy to burn it would be better served spent getting a few pages done on the current project, or brainstorming the next one, or doing one of the half-dozen things that need doing around the house. Laundry, for example. I could do laundry. I need to do laundry so very badly, and I keep failing to do it, ’cause… Well. I’m writing a blog post. A compromise option. Productive in the most general

Yesterday the conversation began a little after nine AM, continued through the long drive up to the Sunshine Coast, and progressed through a thoroughly pleasant lunch and the drive back down to Brisbane again. I dropped one-third of the conversation at the train station a round 8:00 PM. Topics covered: books; writing; more books; notebooks; pens; books; poetry; history; books; health. I am probably missing something. There was eleven hours of conversation from beginning through to end, and it wasn’t the kind of day that lends itself to neat acts of summary.There is still the faint feeling of an interesting conversation cut very short. Of all the things a career in art will give you, nothing quite matches up to the friends you make along the way. #

I’m trying to get my brain into gear for a return to QWC today and my brain is not terribly interested in complying. The last month has been remarkably pleasant, possibly the longest period I’ve had off work since I actually went out and got a job with a regular pay cheque, and I find myself slightly miffed at the thought of having to go deal with other writers problems instead of my own. It will wear off once I get there. Possibly after I clear out the terrifying amount of email that has backed up over my month-long absence. Naturally, hitting the end of the holidays mean I’ve suddenly started doing all the things that I meant to at the beginning. Yearly budget. Yearly plan. Sudden bursts of writing productivity after weeks of letting things lie fallow while I binged on a bunch of Netflix shows. I’m not quite caught up with things, but I’m closer than I expected to be

Everyone I know is going back to work today. I am staying at home, having taken a two extra weeks of leave this holiday season, and it feels utterly decadent to know that I’m still fifteen days away from my return to the day-job. On the other hand, the lack of regular work schedule has meant that I don’t do my grocery shopping on a regular schedule, and I am now out of coffee. It’s all swings and roundabouts in the end. I have hit the scene on the current work in progress where it would be really useful to know what’s going on, so I’ve spent the morning writing little page-long myths and legends about the characters in the novel so their back-story is fleshed out enough to give me something to work with. Now I shall do grocery shopping, ’cause the need for coffee is pressing.

I lose track of things when I don’t go to work. Things like what day it is, what time it is, when it was that I last ate. My sleep patterns go to hell. I’ll sit down to type an email at 10 AM and look up to discover that it’s now 4 AM the following morning and I’ve eaten nothing but cheese slices for the last nine hours. There’s a reason I dislike taking holidays. A lot of the advice around writing is built around habit, and habits are burnt in by particular triggers and sequences of behaviour. Most of mine are built around going to and from work, which makes the absence of work problematic. Even worse is this: I am pretty good at avoiding the siren song of the internet when I’ve only got an hour or two to get some writing done. I am terrible at it when I’ve got an entire day to work with

In Brisbane – and in much of the rest of Australia – people tend to have a “local” when it comes to their coffee. The place that does it better than everywhere else, that will serve you a breakfast that’s just a little bit better than everywhere else, and generally has an atmosphere conducive to spending quality time enjoying said coffee and breakfast. (There are rumours, in other countries, that cafes serve things like lunch and dinner, but that shit is un-Australian. You go to your cafe for breakfast and coffee dammit) My local cafe shut down for the holidays. They don’t re-open until after Australia Day. For weeks now I have ducked across the train tracks just outside my apartment, stumbled the hand-full of meters to my local, and ordered a pretty damn good flat white and an outstanding avocado on toast concoction that came with an assortment of nuts, a whole goddamn spice-rack full of herbs, and tiny,

It’s summer. It’s hot. I’m already covered in an obscene amount of sweat and it hasn’t even crossed 9:00 AM here in Brisbane. I’m off to write club in a half-hour, so putting on the air conditioning for such a short period isn’t really cost-effective. And I just got news of a short-story acceptance, so I can think of no better time to hang out the single and say: See you all tomorrow, peeps. If you feel the need for your daily dose of writing neepery, may I suggest checking out this post at writerly scrawls about taking the stress out of freelancing.

It’s Monday morning and I’m sitting on my couch, listening to old INXS songs on youtube. Writing this, instead of working on the Space Marine: Pew! Pew! Pew! manuscript, because Monday is one of the days when I can get away with that. I should probably go make coffee. Or go collect coffee from the cafe on the far side of the train tracks, if there’s enough spare change in my change-jar to justify that kind of expenditure. I’m trying to stay chill because, lo, I watched a bunch of movies this weekend, and so many of them had characters who are writers, and that is the stuff of rage. Movies give us an endless parades of characters who agonize about writers block and disappear on book tours and live with an absolute conviction that what they do is the most important shit in the world. “It’s not important,” the none writer characters will say. “It’s just a book.” “It’s