Category: Journal

ONE: WRITING WHILE SLEEPY So I missed a blog post yesterday, but in my defence I was squirrelled away writing a little over 4,000 words on various creative projects. That represents nearly a third of my wordcount for April thus far, so I’m feeling pretty happy about that. Yesterday was also the point where I added the words “FUCK THE APNEA” to the top of my spreadsheet where I’m tracking my yearly wordcount. One of the reasons I feared admitting there was something wrong was the self-knowledge that I am a lazy, lazy writer. Give me a good reason to not write, and I’ll take it. I’ll happily prioritize other things ahead of writing goals. (For all the people who mentioned CPAP machines when I first posted about the Apnea – after consulting with my doctor and talking over how serious things have gotten, I’ve been booked into a sleep clinic later this month to begin a home assessment. That

PART ONE: THE DEAR OLD HOUSE THAT I GREW UP IN My parents are in the process of selling their house, so over Easter I went down to the Gold Coast to help move around some furniture, pick up the boxes of spare books I had stored there, and make some executive decisions about stuff like old books/games/toys that were shoved into the wardrobe of my old bedroom and never really looked at after I left. When we were done, my mother mentioned that it may well be the last time I ever visit them there. At the time, I didn’t think that was a big deal. We moved into the house when I was twelve. I’d moved out by the time I was twenty-two. I’ve spent two thirds of my life living in places that were not that house. For the last third of my life, it’s actually been in a city I like, as opposed to my thoroughly

ONE I’m reading Courtney Milan’s Unraveled at the moment, picked up courtesy of this review over on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and thus far it’s proving to be every big as glorious as the review promised it would be. Highly recommended if you’re the kind of person whose into Historical romance. TWO I’m at the tail end of writing Crusade, the third off the Flotsam novellas I’m doing for Apocalypse Ink.My current estimate is that I’m about 85% of the way done, and I’ll officially be writing The END on the current draft sometime this week. This means I’m taking a serious look at what gets done next, since I’ll officially be done with all my contracted work for the year and I’ve got about two weeks of leave coming up in November where I plan on locking myself away in my house and writing. THREE I’m fighting off the tail end of a cold that’s been with me since Thursday

Day three of feeling under the weather, courtesy of the throat infection that laid me low on Sunday. Finally taking my doctors advice and going to bed to twelve consecutive hours, letting the panadol and amoxycillin to do their job (it wasn’t the throat ache that did me in; it was the terrifying ear-ache that woke me up at five in the morning). Which means I’ll be taking it easy over on this blog, but I’ve been out and about on other people’s blogs over the past couple of weeks, so if you find yourself wishing for a Man Vs. Bear hit, I’ve got you covered. For instance, Over on Karen Miller’s new blog, I’ve written a little thing called THE FOUR THINGS NO-ONE TELLS YOU ABOUT HAVING A NEW BOOK OUT. Stick around and check out the rest of the posts while you’re there – there’s a bunch of cool guest-posts in addition to Karen talking about her own work. If you’re one of the

So here’s the thing: I’m sick this week. Probably not the entire week, but certainly for the 48 hours where I normally write my blog posts for the week (aka The Weekend). I am lying in my bed, sweating and coughing up unpleasant substances. I am all aches and nausea. It feels like someone has replaced my lungs with flesh backs of gravel and razor-blades. I despise being sick. We live in a culture where people make jokes about man flu and shit, but that’s never really been my thing. I will power on through the flu. I spent years of my life working as a contractor and casual employee while I did my degree; if I didn’t work, I didn’t get paid. If I didn’t get paid, I didn’t pay rent. And I always paid my rent. The idea of running late on those payments was unthinkable to me, no matter what happened. I’d load up on cold and

Writers with new books out should not be trusted with blogs and social media. Every impulse you have is basically starts screaming talk about the book…talk about the book…Book! Book! Book! BOOOOOOOOOK! and you lose any real sense of scale you have about the line between promotion and…well, being a little sad. So I am going to mention Exile is out and available from many fine perveyors of electronic reading material. And I am going to mention the interview I did with the Apocalypse Ink folks about adapting Flotsam to a novella series and why I chose the Gold Coast as the setting. But I’m just going to do it all subtle-like, you know? ‘Cause this post ain’t about me. It’s about you guys.I’ve got a humble request: TELL ME ABOUT THE COOL SHIT YOU’VE GOT GOING ON RIGHT NOW. What have you been up to that you’re really excited about? What have you got coming up in the near future that you’re all, like,

So, the three things I’ve got planned for my weekend. LINE-EDITING EXILE The final round of Exile proofs edits landed in my inbox this morning, confirming that I’ve more-or-less managed to patch the big ol’ story holes that were in the first submission but left in a bunch of numpty-headed mistakes that need to be fixed. I’ve got about a week to turn these around, but I suspect it’ll take less time than that ’cause of the holy-shit, this is almost done factor. Which may make this the first deadline I’ve actually hit in the process of getting Exile together since Jenn at AI contacted me back in February of 2013, asking if I’d be interested in turning Flotsam into a novella series. I suddenly find myself thinking of a Neil Gaiman quote from his Make Good Art commencement address: “You get work however you get work, but keep people keep working in a freelance world (and more and more of todays world is

Woke up early this morning and wrote 2,000 words. Not a bad start, since I’m aiming to have the draft of Frost finished by June 9th, which means 2000 words is the minimum daily rate I need to hit in order to achieve that. After all the dramas that surrounded Exile, Frost is going in on time if I have to kill myself to do it. It’s also the rate I’m aiming for that’ll make my big yearly to-do list achievable, if only I can maintain the pace, so it’s an important victory in this rebuilding my writing process process The rest of the week will not be quite so manic; I’m largely planning on running my ‘writing day’ from 9 AM to 9 AM, which means I’ll be getting a jump-start on tomorrow’s 2000 words when I come home from work tonight. It’s a routine that’s worked for me pretty well in the past, particularly when writing longer works. It should keep

It’s the tail end of a Sunday morning, which is as good a reason to break out the Velvet Underground as I can imagine. ‘Cause if you have heard this song before, it’s probably time to hear it again. And if you haven’t heard this song before…well. You know what to do. I spent yesterday fixing up some stories so they could go into the submission cycle again. Mostly ’cause the thought of starting Frost from scratch is still vaguely irritating, and I’ll start coming up with wild maybe I’ll find the USB if I… type hypothesis every time I sit down to write. Today I have to ignore that feeling and get on with it. I’ve got, more or less, two weeks to get this baby written and mailed off to beta readers before my yearly schedule is in all kinds of trouble. And with that, I’m off to write something…

So, on the plus side, I had a really good writing day today. Got up and did some early morning writing, then followed it up by joining Angela Slatter for our regular Write Club. Net result: about 2,000 words. A whole chapter of the novella done, plus half of the second one finished. On the downside, I lost my USB drive on the way home. I spent a couple of hours looking for it, went back to the grocery store where it most likely slipped free of my pocket, but I didn’t have any luck tracking it down. Which means it’s time to buy a new USB and restore things from back-up. This is the second time I’ve lost a USB in 2014 – the first time happened back in March, right on the deadline for the first Flotsam novella, when I dropped Shifty Silas the laptop USB first and snapped it in two. I’m pretty good about back-ups, so I only lost

So I bought an apartment. A brand-new, one-bedroom kinda thing in the inner-city of Brisbane, right next to the train line that’ll take me to work. Its…well, it’s definitely a thing. An exciting thing. A satisfying thing. A moderately, deeply terrifying thing. Take your pick, ’cause all of these things are accurate. On the list of things I expected from my life, owning property rated right up there with adopting a real life unicorn on the list of things that would never actually happen. And yet, here I am. Sitting in a lounge room that’s essentially my lounge room, looking at the piles of partially unpacked boxes. It doesn’t feel like home yet. For one thing, I don’t have my routines down yet. I keep reaching for light switches that aren’t where I expect them to be. Nothing in the space triggers certain behaviours, whether it’s cooking dinner or sitting down to write or even going to bed at a specific time. I’m still getting used