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 […]
Two weeks ago, the last Heartbeat log I put up on Instagram included the line “Realised the sore throat, aching muscles, and disrupted equilibrium may mean I’m getting sick (do not want).” The next morning, I woke up discovered that I was right on both fronts: I was sick with the flu, and I truly […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
I am sitting at my desk and trying to corral all the projects on my immediate to-do list, which I’ve allowed to get slightly out of control. That was to be expected this week, so I’ve largely run with the wolves, but I’m not sure it would be a good idea to carry this level […]
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) […]
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 […]
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 […]
Yesterday, Melbourne writer David Witteveen retweeted this forty-second clip of a bee hatching that kept me amused for an half-hour, and thus went onto the list of links I’ll revisit for a future project that is rather bee-centric. You should probably follow David’s twitter feed – it’s frequently full of interesting stuff, in that way […]
