Category: Journal

I’m cleaning up digital spaces this morning. Clearing out the current projects folder on the portable drive, which ceased holding current projects back in November and simply became the place where narrative detritus and applications gathered. Clearing out the RSS reader, assessing which feeds I’m going to keep and which I’m going to cut because they have ceased being useful. Clearing out writing systems, so I’m not randomly switching between Word, Google Docs, and Scrivener for various projects based upon whatever random thought I’ve had about “fixing” my process while in a state of high anxiety. And I keep streaming the film clip for Fiona Apple’s Not About Love, because Zach Galifianakis and his magnificent beard are hypnotic with their lip-syncing.

On Monday night I finally sat down and rebuilt the white-board that tells me where I’m meant to be going and what I’m meant to be doing over the course of the week. I sat down and wrote out the long-term plan for the next three months, identifying all the commitments and distractions that will keep me away from work. I spent some quality time looking at the next month, identifying what needed to be done and who I needed to see. I spent four hours re-reading Work Clean, making notes and fleshing out ideas, figuring out what I can apply. Realised I’m now through the parts of the book that’s really useful, so I can skim-read the rest and move onto the next book. Some habits are like an engine you’re trying to start in mid-winter. It may take a few attempts to get the thing warmed up, but it’ll work fine once you’re up and running. Yesterday I went

My relationship to non-fiction reading changes immediately when I make a point of reading with a notepad and pen in close proximity. It slows down my reading, but I retain a lot more: core phrases and ideas; stray thoughts that come up in response to the content; ideas that will eventually become stories and blog posts. This morning I picked up William Woods The History of the Devil, which I read a few weeks back without annotating at all, and immediately realised I am going to end up re-reading it because all the dog-eared pages don’t actually mean anything anymore. There are too many bits, too little context. It’s a book that would have been far more enjoyable, had I actually read it right, but I was distracted by other things and it was read on trains, or over lunch, or in-between other things. Of all the things I’m looking forward to about doing a PhD, having the time to read

Every playlist on Youtube finds its way to the Arctic Monkeys. I start off listening to gothic cabaret playlists thirty songs in the autoplay function will kick up Do You Want to Know? I realise it’s been a long time since I heard a Stiff Little Fingers song, and the algorithm works its way through The Clash and The Buzzcocks and The Sex Pistols before the next logical thing appears to be Do You Want to Know? as well. Leonard Cohen finds its way to the Arctic Monkeys. Jeff Buckley. Courtney Barnett. The Pixies. David Bowie. Hell, starting with Justin Timberlake or the fucking Spice Girls seems to do it. All of them end at the same place. I don’t particularly care for the Arctic Monkeys, but I have no way of telling the algorithm to stop it. And so every repeated play tells Youtube that it should bring that clip up a little more. I have no way to fight back against

Brisbane has, inexplicably, decided to be cold this evening. Well, not cold, but cool. Chilly enough that I sat out on my balcony in shorts and a t-shirt earlier this evening, intending to make notes while I read, and found myself retreating back into the muggy warmth of the living room. It will change its mind soon. We will all burn to a crisp before the day is done. Brisbane cannot help itself in the midst of summer. I was back at the day-job today, beginning the four-week countdown until I finish up my contract and transition into full-time study for the first time in twenty-odd years. I spent my lunch break trying to put together a draft post about productivity and time management, since the number of conversations I’ve had about my process has reached double-digits in the space of two weeks. It’s an incredibly hard topic to write about, because people mostly ask about the tools rather than the

It’s six o’clock in the evening as I write this, sitting out on the balcony of my tiny apartment listening to the train line and the bird song and the upstairs neighbours drunkenly mispronouncing the words ‘mortar and pestle’ over and over as they talk on the phone. Which makes a nice change from the screaming argument on the street that kicked off the afternoon, reminding me why spending time inside the apartment generally trumps sitting out in the muggy summer heat. The wind is piking up and the clouds are hanging low. It doesn’t smell like rain yet, but the rain is coming later this week. This is how we start 2017. The rest of the day was exactly the kind of productive first day I always want out of a new year and never quite achieve. I wrote the first two scenes of a new novella draft; I read a bunch of things; I acquired new notebooks through nefarious

I think it’s Wednesday. It feels Wednesday-ish. I don’t know for sure because I’ve slipped into that blissful, holiday fugue where you lose track of days and time and schedules. I’ve watched a lot of television since finishing work for the Christmas break. I’ve finished reading a bunch of books. At random intervals, I leave the house to collect food and see the outside world and celebrate things. Today is pulling me out of that. Today I have read stories for friends and engaged with page proofs and generally started thinking about what’s going to happen when the holidays are over. I am preparing to rewrite a white-board and outline the projects that need to get done in January. Time to shake off the holiday inertia and reboot.

I’m rolling into plans for 2017 now that the broad strokes of the coming year have been defined. Planning things this late is weird for me – ordinarily I have ambitions and schedules and goals already mapped out in my head. I am burning through books that I’d left half-read, thinking through ways that I can start arranging notes, building a mental to-do list when it comes to my thesis topic so I’ve got some relatively clear research goals when the lights turn green and it’s time to go. December has become a weird, in-between state. I’m working out my contract on the current day-job, counting down the days until I can stop wearing real shoes and go back to my sneaker-clad existence. I’ve not yet started the thesis. Writing projects are scattered about, waiting to be corralled and planned. These are the ways I trick myself into thinking I can assert control over the universe. This morning I spent

Back in November I posted about going into a mild depressive episode. As many folks may have surmised from the Friday post a few weeks back, it turned out to be not-so-goddamn mild. I lost the first half of December to an incredibly irritating funk, which only really clicked as a more-than-mild depressive episode when a friend messaged me last week and asked how I was doing. At the time I’d just come home from a book launch, after what had already been a pretty kick-ass day at work, and I’d settled into my couch to cry for the third evening that week. I had not written anything creative for the better part of a month. I’d been cancelling or avoiding social events for two straight weeks. I was not sleeping properly. I avoided going to bed until very late in the AM, then woke up a few hours later. And since the friend who asked how I was doing

It is Monday morning and I am sitting on my balcony, listening to the trains and watching the greenery sway in the breeze and letting Brisbane warm up to its crazy Summer weather. There is a storm coming. Christmas is almost here, which means my local cafe will soon shut down for a few weeks, and I will be forced to eat breakfast at home like a monster. This would bother me less if my talent for coffee was better, and I had the patience to shave my own beetroot to go on my avocado on toast. It’s not the war on Christmas that bothers me. It’s that those fuckers on the Christmas side refuse to capitulate. Anyway. I have not blogged regularly for a long, long while. I spent a good chunk of last night stuck in traffic, waiting for the crowds to disperse around Woolloongabba stadium after the cricket was done, and I kept coming up with things

I’ve been sitting on my couch since 4:47 AM, waiting for Brisbane to raise the dial on the heat and the humidity. Now it’s nearly seven o’clock, and the muggy warmth has settled in with that jangly feeling you get after too much adrenaline. The skin prickles and the muscle is half-caught in fight or flight. It’s not yet hot enough that you recognise the cause, unless you’re paying attention to what’s going on. It has been a bad week. The gulf between what I wanted to achieve and what has actually been done is not too wide, but every failure feels like the failure when I’m in this particular mode. I am angry and I am frustrated and God, the awkwardness. Dealing with other human beings feels like a monumental task. I am performing triage on social obligations, trying to avoid anything that involves crowds or well-meaning acquaintances asking how I am. Two weeks until I find out what

I am incredibly behind on everything. There are too man old things left undone, and too many new things that I want to get started on, so my procrastination of choice becomes tearing down old things and trying to build new things from the rubble. I’m revisiting plans, rebuilding systems. I have spent far to much time familiarising myself with Trello boards and adding projects to them, finding gaps in my planning systems. Trello is not my preferred solution for this, but I am out of places to hang whiteboards in my apartment. All this is trying to solve a single problem: 2017 is unknown terrain for me right now. There are too many things that I might be doing, depending on what happens in the next 30 days, and the ideal preparation for the two most likely options is very, very different. Certainty doesn’t arrive until December 23rd. It’s proving to be a very long wait. My notebook is full of