Journal

One of the most disorienting places I’ve ever been was this hotel in Adelaide I visited last year. It’s one of those places that had the kind of endless sameness you get in movies when they point a camera at a hotel corridor and make it seem like a subtly alien kind of place. I stepped out of the lift and looked down the hall and said whoa all Bill-and-Ted-like.

Then I hit my room and my room was huge (I got upgraded) and my plans for the evening rapidly became lie around this here room and marvel at the craziness of it, cause you’ll never be in a hotel room this huge and weird again.

And that’s what I did.

I ducked out to grab some fast-food, ’cause eating fast-food in a room like that seemed like the kind of sacrilegious that needed to be performed, just as I may have busted out a whole bunch of punk songs just to see how out-of-place they were when played in a venue like that. Turns out the acoustics in the room where kind of great, which made up for the somewhat dodgy speakers on Shifty Silas the Laptop.

I spent a lot of time in hotel rooms last year, ’cause I spent a lot of time on the road for work and personal reasons.

It seems crazy that I’m doing even more of it this year, but it seems that’s the case. There’s exactly three months this year where I’m not going to be boarding a flight to somewhere, and I fully expect that at least one of those months will end up with my flying for work as we start getting into the Writing Festival season.

I don’t usually travel that much.  My sister loves it, as do my parents, but it was never really my thing. I’ve never owned a suitcase, ’cause most of my trips could be done by throwing clothes into a small bag, and the handful of times that wasn’t true I just borrowed what I need. That ended at Christmas time, when it became apparent that I’d probably need a suitcase of my own and my family got together and provided one.

There are days when I look at my calendar for this year and say whoa, all Bill-and-Ted-like. This year is already looking kind of crazy, and it’ll be May until I get a complete month off from the seemingly endless list of places I’m going and things that need getting done. It’s slowly sinking in that the great irony of going to three days a week is that I’m going to be busier and out engaging with the world far more than I’ve ever been.

Then there’s that thing I always forget: the more you do, the more opportunities you’re given to do more. Which is awesome, but it’s totally not the year I planned around having.

The last month has been heavy on the invitations to do more. Usually this doesn’t bother me – I’m comfortable saying no to something if it does’t fit into my schedule – but at the moment I keep finding myself being unsure about what’s a good idea and what’s not. I have no framework for understanding what I’m still capable of taking on, ’cause I’m not really sure I understand the shape of my year anymore.

I feel like I’m back in the Adelaide hotel room, trying to enjoy the space for as long as possible ’cause I’ll never find my way into a place this crazy and weird again. My life, it’s pretty good right now, almost ideal, but it’s ideal in all kinds of ways that I’m totally unfamiliar with.

And occasionally I find myself wondering whether it is just this year that’s going to be crazy, or if this is the new thing.

I’m off to the Gold Coast this weekend. Ostensibly I’m there to hang out with my family for a stretch, but I imagine that there’s going to be an awful lot of time spent locked up in the guest room, planning out my year in a little more detail. I expect I’m going to bust out a whole bunch of time-management tools I haven’t actually looked at in a real long time, ’cause I’ve got the sneaking suspicion I need to become a freakin’ productivity ninja to get through this year without making a mess of something.

This is my set-up for the day:

I will not leave the bed until I have finished some short stories and polished them up, all ready to submit. This shouldn’t be too hard – there’s at least a half-dozen story drafts on my hard drive that are finished and critiqued and basically waiting for me to give them the time to day, but for various reasons I haven’t been doing that and that’s gotta stop.

I constantly try to fight it, but the bed is pretty much my natural working place. I like being horizontal when I work. I like having room to spread out. I like being able to snuggle under blankets during winter and find a nice breeze in summer, and I like being close to my books (the vast majority of which live in my bedroom and always have). Further, there’s something indolent about working from the bed. As if the work you do there isn’t really work, not the way it is when you actually get up and get out of your jammies and go somewhere else to get things done.

I like studies too, don’t get me wrong. There are months when I acknowledge that a desk and a regular place and a schedule are utterly necessary, but today is not one of those days and February is not one of those months. March, I expect, will find me back in the office chair rather than lazing on the bed. March is always like that. It demands commitment.

February doesn’t. February is a month for dreaming, for tinkering, to fleshing ideas out. For shoring up a rickety story and sending it off to fly, fully cognizant of the possibility that it may topple over the edge and crash.

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I keep meaning to blog about the trip to Melbourne, but truthfully there really isn’t much to blog about there that would make sense to anyone that isn’t me. Melbourne and I have a weird kind of relationship; for decades now it’s the city that charms and kidnaps my favourite people in this world, luring them to the south to start new lives that always seem vaguely awesome from the outside. And every time I’m down there, I feel this little pang that my plans to move there didn’t pan out in 2011 (I got the day-job at QWC instead, which kept going longer than I’d originally been contracted for and rapidly proved too awesome to leave).

I caught up with my friend L. this trip; he moved down there years ago to work in a bookshop and has, since then, worked in a series of bookshops around Melbourne that always seem to be that little bit more impressive than the last one. I missed him on the last trip down ’cause he’d left the store he was working for and started at the Avenue Bookstore, which is one of those places that feels like a bookshop should feel and actually goes out of its way to stock an author’s back list along with their current books. I spent about an hour wandering around and checking stuff out, unintentionally walking out with three books I totally didn’t mean to buy simply ’cause there are some book stores that demand you buy stuff simply ’cause the store deserves your patronage.

I spent a lot of time hanging with my C’thulhu peeps, Al and Nic, who moved down there last year, and whose presence I miss horribly every Sunday evening when we used to gather and hang out. They continued their fine tradition of introducing me to new board games, showing off some of Melbourne’s more engaging bars, and introducing me to their local cafe which served one of the best cafe breakfasts I’ve ever eaten.

In case you can’t make it out, that’s home-made baked beans (with some kind of shredded pork-belly in the sauce), a poached egg, and a chorizo sausage. It’s the food of the gods and I may have ended up dragging Al down there for breakfast a second time simply ’cause I wanted another go-around. It’s officially going on the list of things I must do in Melbourne now, right up there with a trip to San Churro and drinking too much.

I also spent a little time walking around the city this trip, which I don’t ordinarily do ’cause I’m usually there for work or cons rather than just taking a holiday. I was dismayed to discover there are parts of Melbourne where people grow palm trees in their parks:

There are no words for how disappointed I am by this.

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There is no third part to this post. I thought there might be, but I was wrong.

So I’m not in Melbourne anymore and that makes me kinda sad. For the last four days I’ve been aimlessly wandering the city, catching up with friends I don’t get to see too often, eating good food and exercising my low-key superpower of being the only person in the world who goes to Melbourne and drinks bad coffee. I’ve returned to Brisbane fatter and happier than I left.

Now I’m warming up for the pre-work writing shift and a day that’s looking…well, kind of crazy, to be honest. There’s going to be a lot packed into the next three days of day-jobbery, from opening the next iteration of GenreCon through to shepherding a complete redesign of the website I’m managing.

More importantly, I shaved this morning. I don’t know what it is without me and Melbourne and not-shaving, but it always seems to happen and it never drives me crazy until I’m halfway home and sporting the kind of bum-fluff three day growth that represents my darnedest attempt to grow a beard.

It was good to shave.

And Brisbane, well, Brisbane has welcomed me home with a pretty fucking spectacular morning. Just the right mixture of cool air and sunlight and…well, Brisbane stuff.

I am not terribly eloquent this morning. I flew home last night and suffered from my usual air travel karma, which means there were delays and malfunctions and some arriving home far later than I expected to arrive home, and thus I am operating on less sleep than I’d wish.

In other news, I got asked if I’d be willing to write a post about rejection ratios for the Science of Fiction website a week or so back, and being the kind of guy who likes to muse on such things, I went ahead and wrote one (mostly in the form of a long email response to Andrew’s question; my natural state when answering all writing questions is basically set to rant).

Now I’m going to plug the earphones in and listen to a little Jane Austen Argument and get some words done.