Category: Journal

This is going to be a lazy week on the writing front. For one thing, today is my last day in Melbourne. I have caught up with friends and played a good number of board games and guest-starred as Ronan the Accuser in Patrick O’Duffy’s Annihilation campaign, which means I’m still running on the endorphin high of rolling a shitload of d12s and wielding the Universal Weapon in defence of the cosmos. Later today, there will be a flight home. A few hours sleep. Then: a return to the day job.. For another thing, The Flotsam Omnibus gets released in two days. Pre-orders for the ebook version are already live, if you’re the kind of personality who absolutely cannot wait. You can pay for that bad-boy now and it will be automatically delivered to the reading device of your choice on release. Fuck people who complain about the lack of jet packs and flying cars. The future is doing just

It’s NaNoWriMo season and the internet is awash with writing advice, much of it focused on the early stages of getting words down and belting out a first draft. At the same time, I holed up in my apartment with the lights off, illuminated by the glow of NXT playing on the WWE network, quietly trying to shake the very mild panic attack that inevitably follows every conference I’ve ever attended. It would seem a stupid time to start considering returning to regular blogging, with a focus on the craft and business of writing, and yet I find myself doing so. It’s been five months since I swore off using the blog for such purposes, but I’m surprised how often those old blog posts about writing have come in useful since then. GenreCon was the most recent example – the news filtered through that I was going to need an opening night speech on short notice, and once I knew the topic

I really did intend, when writing my last blog post, to keep using my computer for writing purposes right up until I started my writing-in-notebooks experiment on September 1st. I figured I’d finish off the projects I’d started there, keep using the notebooks for notes, ease into the idea of doing everything longhand, you know? Turns out, not so much. I shut off the computer after my last post and leapt into the notebook world whole hog, only turning the laptop on once in the last seven days (and that was to type up the story I’d written for a friend’s birthday, so I could post it on his Facebook wall). And now it appears that I can hit 10 pages of handwriting a day – somewhere between 1,500 and 1,800 words, depending on the notebook and my handwriting – pretty consistently. Books are taking shape, stories are getting written, my hand is not hurting from the endless scribble. There’s something

Home again, after four days of traipsing around northern Queensland. Nowhere near as wrecked as I should be, given I just spent four days delivering workshops and travelling, which may well mean the post-teaching/travel exhaustion I’ve come to expect in recent years is another one of those things that connected to the apnoea. Still, it is good to be home. I’m putting serious thought, post-trip, into abandoning the computer as a first-draft tool. A few weeks back I made the decision to abandon all digital screens after ten PM, turning off the computer, the television, and my phone a good two hours before I finally went to bed. This started putting a serious crimp in my productivity, but there was no arguing the fact that I was sleeping better and it stopped bad habit of staying up past bedtime in order to mainline a TV series or play a marathon game of Civilization. Instead of writing, I’d use those two hours to edit print-outs

I wrote a different post earlier today, but it appears that wordpress ate it and refuses to give it back, so you miss out on my moments of wit regarding the hazards of sleeping with a CPAP machine while you have a head cold (here’s a hint: ew). Now it’s later in the day and instead of catching up on some pretty miserable stuff, I’m back from a quick trip into the city where I shopped at Pulp Fiction bookstore, perused the Night Noodle Markets at South Bank, ate Pumpkin Pie at the South Side Diner, and went to see Ant Man. The Noodle Markets broke out the pretty for me. Case in point: Ant-Man was far better than a movie about Ant-Man should have been, especially given the departure of Edgar Wright from the project. And while a lot of people talk about seeing the Wright-isms in the film, I think that takes a lot away from replacement director Petyon Reed’s

Writing is a funny business. Case in point: I signed a reprint contract for a short-story this morning. It’s not the first time this story has been reprinted (and, Gods willing, it won’t be the last), but this reprint means that a single story of around 7,000 words has earned me more money in the space of four years than all five novellas I’ve written put together. There’s nothing surprising about this – it’s how writing works. You write things and you keep writing things and eventually some of the things you wrote a while back come around and start earning you money again. But it’s timely, this coming through this week, ’cause I recently made the decision to cut back my hours at the Writers Centre a little in order to free up a second day each week that can be devoted to writing. Part of me – the part that frets about the mortgage – keeps looking at that decision and wondering

It’s cold in Brisbane this week and I’m not sleeping as well as I should be. Large chunks of today were spent fighting to stay focused, which is much less fun than it used to be. I’ve been watching the first season of In the Thick of It between stints at the keyboard and suddenly find myself looking at Peter Capaldi’s Doctor Who in a whole different light. # Last week, I removed the Facebook app from my phone and slid the Kindle app into the space the Facebook icon used to occupy. Not because I’m abandoning Facebook at all, but I was trying to disrupt the habit of using the House of Zuckerberg to kill time. It’s turned out pretty well, so far. The time I used to spend scrolling through the same items in my feed is now spent reading short fiction, clearing the backlog of magazines I subscribed to via Weightless Books. The last few days have been devoted

I’m meant to off at a friend’s place tonight, enjoying the double-barrelled awfulness that is Avengers Grimm. Instead I’m here, in my apartment, trying to sort out a story for a deadline that crept up on me, being slightly grumpy ‘bout the fact I still don’t have hot water. I’ve been thinking ‘bout blogs, lately, and how they have changed in the last ten years, ever since we started sharing things on Facebook and Twitter. Mostly, I’ve been thinking ‘bout the those changes jibe with the blogs I tend to follow, versus the kinds of posts that I actually sit down and write. And I’ve been thinking about the fact that I sound angry, these days, whenever I sit down to write a post, especially compared to my posts from 2011 when I was, in fact, a seething ball of rage. And after pondering this, for the last few days, I’ve come to a conclusion: I think I’d like to stop now, please. Not

So when I mentioned the sleep apnea thing back at the start of April, a whole bunch of folks were like “Get thee to a CPAP Machine.” To which I nodded sagely and said, well, yes, that’s on the list, we’re just waiting to see how bad things really are.  Last week, I took twenty-four hours off work and did my first official sleep test to see how things were. I spent a couple of hours hooked up to electrodes and other stuff while I slept. It gathered data. Turns out, things were pretty fucking bad. The diagnoses for chronic sleep apnea kicks in at around 30+ interruptions in sleep per hour. I was averaging 60-70 interruptions an hour, with a couple of periods where I’d stop breathing for up to a minute and a half at a time. When I start doing the math on that, my ongoing feeling of utter lethargy starts making all kinds of sense. “We should probably

To borrow a line from L.P. Hartley: “The past is foreign country; they do things differently there.” This line has been haunting me for most of the weekend, since I was down on the Gold Coast to man a booth at Supanova and it involved seeing parts of the Gold Coast I don’t often go to. While I frequently went down there to visit my parents over the last few years, it was relatively easy to ignore the vast bulk of the city while doing that – I barely had to get off the highway to reach their house, and there was never any call to go toward the beach where the bulk of the Gold Coast lives. The Gold Coast Supanova, on the other hand, takes place in Broadbeach – right next to the Casino and Pacific Fair shopping mall, right across the road from the Broadbeach mall where I spent a lot of Friday and Saturday nights in my