Category: Journal

Eleven days ago I noticed something weird – I hit the end of the two hours I’d set aside for writing and I was a good 400 words short of the word-count I expected. Not a huge deal, all things considered, but I’d been writing at a pretty regular speed ever since I went back to typing manuscripts. I shrugged. It was just a weird thing, and a little surprising after being so regular in my productivity, but I hadn’t been sleeping well and I was feeling a little uneven that week. Ten days ago, I kicked off a mild depressive episode. My first since going on antidepressants back in August. First my sleep patterns went to shit, and then I found myself wanting to shout at strangers for the cardinal sin of sitting at the table next to mine at a cafe, and the next thing I knew I’d spent thirteen hours glued to the couch spamming my self-loathing’s greatest hits

I’ve grown complacent about travelling in recent years. I went from doing very little of it, to doing a whole lot, and somewhere along the line I stopped fretting about the logistics of getting places and packing things. I paid for that, over the weekend. Three nights in Melbourne with antidepressants and a power chord for the CPAP machine meant I was feeling particularly blunted by the end of the trip. I yawned a lot. I got light-headed in the afternoons, just like I did before the apnea was treated. I had headaches and wasn’t quite so in-charge of my emotional state as I’ve grown used to in recent weeks. Now I am home and medicated and catching up on sleep. Still blunt, but getting sharper, and vowing not to leave things behind again. I went to see Nerve last night, and it was terrible, but exactly the right kind of terrible for my mood and mental state. If you’re okay

Towards the end of 2015 I sat down and wrote up a list of my current obsessions, which tend to inform my creative work and the types of things I end up blogging about here. By their very nature, obsessions are a short-term thing: they may stem from long-term interests, but I tend to follow them down the rabbit hole while answering a particular kind of issue or momentary curiosity, and then they get replaced by what comes next. It’s been a while since that post was done, and a hell of a lot has changed in my life, so I figured it was worth revisiting. Here is a list of the current obsessions that are dominating my reading and thinking, and will inevitably lead into the blogging. ONE: THE WORK HABITS OF ARTISTS AND CREATIVES This is one of those recurring obsessions that comes up every week or so, and it’s been stoked by a weekend in Melbourne where

I blog for a living now. Not here, obviously, but in general – I go into the office and I boot up a computer and I write blog post after blog post. When I’m not writing a blog post, I’m researching a blog post or pitching a blog post or putting together a blogging schedule. Then I’ll go get lunch, eat some sushi, then rinse and repeat the morning throughout the afternoon. It’s a weird kind of job, blogging about stuff. I dig it. The focus helps a lot – for the first time in years I have a day-job that where the scope of what I’m doing is comparatively narrow. Go in, write things, produce content. It plays to my strengths, and I don’t have to switch gears too often. I like that. I worried it was going to burn me out, doing this much writing. That the days I spent at the day-job would leave me too worn

I woke up early this morning and sent off some writing emails. Discovered another couple of emails that really need to be dealt with, so they’ve been flagged for me to deal with tomorrow morning. I begin to see the benefits of the dedicated admin day, which Kathleen Jennings has mentioned on multiple Sunday Circles, but I’m still not entirely sure where it’s going to fit into my schedule. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, this week, about the new job and writing and how to establish new routines that support what I want to do. Because my old job was familiar; I knew its contours and its frustrations and its routines. I could work around it, after five years at QWC, because I knew how to predict the effect of things going on in the office. Not with 100% accuracy, but with enough certainty to plan with relative confidence. The new job is wild and unfamiliar territory. It

Today is my last day at Queensland Writers Centre. As of 5:00 PM this afternoon, I no longer have a job where people get to ask me questions about writing or publishing. Figure I may as well celebrating that by doing my favourite thing to do here on the blog: answering questions about writing and publishing. If you’ve got ’em, let me know. Putting together answers will help me ride out the withdrawal as I face the existential horror of being technically unemployed for until the  new job starts on Tuesday…

This morning is coffee and Patti Smith and Lou Reed. This morning has been getting out of bed too late because I was reading Catherynne Valente’s The Bread We Eat in Dreams and falling in love with story after story, falling in love with each shiny little jewel of language that’s deployed. This morning is porridge and a warm shower and a mild irritation about the fact that I have to shave. This morning is listening to Piss Factory, over and over. This morning is thinking, well, two days to go, and realising that I still haven’t quite locked down the details for next week. This morning is an alert from the transit app letting me know all trains have been delayed. This morning is missing Melbourne, just a little. This morning is looking forward to lunch. This morning is getting jealous at the friends who have wandered off to Adelaide this weekend, in order to attend the Romance Writers of Australia conference. This morning is

Back in December I read Patti Smith’s M Train, a book that starts with (and frequently returns  to) Smith’s daily ritual of heading to her local cafe for a coffee, toast, and a period of reflection where she writes in her notebook. M Train gets sold as a memoir, but that doesn’t feel like an adequate representation of the experience. It’s a book about thinking, much of the time, and there’s an incredible serenity and ritual at work. A place and an action imbued with meaning through repetition. Just Kids is a memoir about Smith’s life up to a certain point. M Train is a memoir about Smith’s interests, thoughts, and habits. I started going to my local cafe a lot, after reading M Train. Not because of the book, directly, but because I started to pay more attention to the habits in my life that brought me satisfaction. I started meeting a friend there for breakfast once a week. Occasionally I’d duck over

Planning out my week in Melbourne Airport. This Friday’s entry gave me a moment if pause  Even when you know it’s coming, it sneaks up on you.

It’s a public holiday, here in Brisbane, which means my favourite cafe is closed and I have not had my morning coffee and Brisbane folks have a whole lot of extra time to get cranky about the Australian census today. And, going by the #CensusFail hashtag on Twitter, there is a lot of anger out there. People are yelling about the already-understandable concerns about the changes in the way Australia is keeping its census data, which raises privacy concerns (that we’re raising these on Facebook amuses me, ’cause…well, Facebook); people are expressing rage at a website that crashed more-or-less immediately when all of fucking Australia tried to log in on the same evening. People are losing their minds about the mixed messages from the Australian Bureau of Statistics regarding what they’re meant to be doing, especially in light of the “do the census or get fined, motherfuckers” tone that has been adopted in recent weeks. I have sympathy for all of

Awake at six AM today. Wandering around the house, listening to the Dresden Dolls covering War Pigs, falling back into the routine I left behind several months ago: shower; clothing; breakfast; Bullet Journal. Review the weekly checkpoint, get started on the urgent tasks for the day. Today’s urgent tasks: booking a doctor’s appointment so I can get my liver checked, to make sure the current antidepressants are not causing it damage; review the answers to interview questions, to make sure I don’t sound like a numpty; write something. Then remember to go to my day-job after spending the last ten days on leave, catching up with people. Apparently the combination of antidepressants and the promise of either breakfast foods, pork belly, or butter chicken will make me insanely social.

I spent the weekend finishing a story draft. Mostly, it should be said, to prove to myself that I still had the ability to write a story, ’cause the last few months have battered my process to the point where it’s unrecognisable. So my goal, in writing the story, was largely getting something written. It’s short, it’s probably quite half-baked, but it’s been months since I wrote something and reached a point where I type THE END. By the time you read this, I will be redrafting. Figuring out what the story is really about, so I can take out the bits that no longer fit and adding in bits that do. Poking every sentence to make sure it’s doing what it’s meant to be doing. Trying to clean up the obvious mistakes. Eking out a little space to be a writer, amid the chaos of work and dodgy brain-chemistry and day-to-day life.