Category: Journal

I’m putting the finishing touches on a new Short Fiction Lab release this week, going through the story draft and making last minute tweaks and squinting at the title from different directions to make sure it’s right. The cover for this one is already done, so it will be a pretty quick production process one I’m satisfied with the story text and the author’s note. The new story is actually a very old one, in some respects. It’s a ghost story, of a sort, involving lonely roads and two people who may not be in love anymore, and what happens when a road trip goes all kinds of wrong. I wrote a very early draft of it back in 2007, but it never seemed to fit together right. Over the years I’ve pulled it out and tinkered with it dozens of times, taking it in different directions. This version…well, it started by going back to the very first draft I

Woke up this morning and put on a collared shirt and tie, good pants and shoes that were not sneakers. I drove to the far side of the city and admired the kangaroos in the gardens, avoided a gathering crowd of people for as long as I possibly could. At ten o’clock, right on schedule, we started my father’s funeral service, and the rest of the day was a blur of mourning and people offering their condolences. First, at the crematorium, and then at the small pub around the corner where we decamped for dad’s wake. Tomorrow, I go teach classes. Meet with my PhD supervisor, try to write some things, and start the process of getting our flat in order after three or four weeks of neglect. It feels–rather oddly–like coming back from holidays, that same process of gathering the loose tethers of routines that were ignored while away and trying to weave them back into a familiar life.

Last Monday, I turned forty-two and my father went into palliative care. On Tuesday night, he passed away. I stayed offline for a bit after it happened — no blogging, no real posting to social media beyond reading all the condolence messages, no checking my email unless there was something funeral-related coming through. I felt very out-of-phase with the world, and the grief felt very raw and new. It would be wrong to say that we didn’t see this coming — my father had Parkinsons, growing dementia, and issues with his blood. He’d survived a heart attack, back in 2011, and a few trips to the hospital for illnesses that disrupted treatment for his ongoing issues. A few years back, I wrote an entire essay about my father and what he meant to me and the inevitability of this day. It still caught us by surprise, when it finally happened. He went to the emergency room with a broken hip

For the last month or so we’ve been re-arranging our apartment, looking for more efficient ways of using the limited amount of space. Part of this has been setting up a work nook for me to write at–a place where there’s a clear signal that I’m doing focused work rather than just tooling around on the internet or tinkering with book covers.  This particular nook of the apartment used to be our linen closet, although the closet was an old TV cabinet. That’s now out in the lounge room, housing the TV (which used to sit on top of the book case to the left, while the DVD player and associated tech sat on the current laptop desk). This isn’t the work nook’s final form–long-term there will probably be a smaller desk so I don’t hunch over quite so much while typing and enough space for a mouse–but a lot of this week will be devoted to bedding in the

I finally had a chance to clear my RSS feed over the weekend, and uncovered a fascinating profile on Janelle Monáe and the productivity tools/corporate structure she uses over on Fast Company, and the things she’s picked up from businesses like Pixar.  Interesting reading. But I’m still not the biggest fan of Slack. # Speaking of business models: once you decide on something, especially in the early days, it can be easy to second guess yourself. In a lot of ways, building a writing career is a lot like walking a tightrope between two buildings–if you look down and pay attention to what the fuck it is you’re doing, then you’re immediately going to make things a hell of a lot harder. Instead, your main job once the destination is set is focusing on the little things you are meant to be doing in that moment–the little flexes of muscle that maintain your balance, adjusting your grip on the balance

Yesterday my partner read Eight Minutes of Usable Daylight and picked up a bunch of mistakes i’d missed, plus added a few notes about a point where the story offended her knowledge of science. This proved to be fortuitous, as fixing the problem gave me a new line of dialogue with a little more metaphorical punch than the original.  # Over on RPG.net, Capellan noted that the ending of Winged, with Sharp Teeth worked better the more he processed it, which is one of those reviews that makes me exceptionally happy. The “Lab” part of of the Short Fiction Lab isn’t just a nifty marketing gimmick–these stories are often places where I’m attempting to achieve certain things, and this time around I was deliberately experimenting with what Nick Mamamatas has referred to “leaving the ragged edge at the end” in his essay How To End A Story (via his criminally underrated writing book, Starve Better). Mamamatas argues against the neat ending, suggesting its

I’m currently riding shotgun to an old laptop as I work, monitoring the transfer of 10,000 odd fils onto the shared hard-drive I set up last year. This is one of those tasks that’s been on my to-do list for a while, but always gets delayed because completing that one step (itself time-consuming and irritating) unlocks a whole bunch of new work that I don’t particularly want to do. The files on the laptop represent my entire digital life from approximately 2006 to 2017, the data dutifully copied from computer to USB drive, from USB drive to new computer, from computer to back-up drive. Usually, when I start a new PC, I create a dump-filed label DMZ and park everything from the old computer there, then start with a new file architecture based upon whatever is top of my mind at the time. This laptop was my primary work PC for the better part of three years, and it’s the

My problem with morning commutes is the time spent in my head. Give me forty minutes to an hour on a densely packed train, where the primary task is suppressing the mild anxiety that kicks in when surrounded by people, and there’s a good chance my internal monologue will go in all sorts of negative directions. Like most commuters, I rely on distractions to get me through it: reading comics on my phone; flicking through a book; watching the scenery. Spend some quality time observing the other passengers, figuring out how to render the as fictional characters. That kid with the brolgas on his three-quarter pants becomes an antagonist in whatever I end up writing next, probably showing up as something supernatural; the middle-aged couple who board the train home every day and immediately stand together, face to face, locking the rest of the world out…well, who knows what they’re going in, but they’re logged and ready. A nice little

I broke the camera lens on my phone twelve months ago. Three times I tried to get it repaired, and three times I was rebuffed or quoted a bill far larger than I wanted to pay for a working camera. The rest of the phone worked fine, and I could still take blurry close-ups of anything truly important. If I really got desperate, I could use the selfie-camera and rely on the auto-zoom. No problem, I thought. I can do without a camera. I’ll make do with what I’ve got. I placed sticky tape over the shattered lens and got on with things.  The first problem came a few months ago, when I needed to photograph a doctors receipt for the Australian medicare app. Getting an image clear enough required several attempts, many knock-backs, and a convoluted set-up that involved lying under a coffee table and trying to take a clear selfie of the receipt on the tabletop above me.