An excerpt from my favourite bit of online reading this week: We did play Mark of Cain on Triple J, but not in the breakfast program. This is because Mark of Cain sounded like a pneumatic drill slowed to the pace of a Fitzroy junkie looking for his tram ticket and so were only played […]
I’ve been broke a few times in my life. Sometimes it’s been because I worked contract gigs. Sometimes it’s been because I’m unemployed. Either way, a lot of the stuff that Eric Ravenscraft talks about in his blog post for Lifehacker seems really familiar, particularly the stuff about financial advice being aimed at people who […]
2013 was a hell of a year. I did a lot of stuff. A lot of that stuff was huge: I ran GenreCon; I produced eight or nine full-day workshops over the course of the year; I went to so many cons that I could spend 2014 sleeping and still not pay back my sleep […]
I keep reading articles that say blogging is mandatory for writers nowadays. That agents and editors won’t take you on if you don’t already have a platform. This is hooey. Let me repeat that. Hooey. Cat Rambo has a sensible blog post about not blogging up on her website this week, which I’m linking to because: […]
From the latest installment of the Lefsetz Letter, tracing the changes that have occurred in our lifetime. As always, Bob Lefsetz is writing about the music industry, but if you’re a writer and you’re not reading this and mentally inserting “book” instead of “album”, it may be time to start paying a little more attention […]
One of the things that makes the great truly great is their ability to make difficult things seem effortless, at least when they’re looked upon from the outside. It’s one of the reasons I’m intrigued by seeing the process of great writers up close, even if I’m long past the stage where I believe there’s […]
I’m about to commit a metric butt-load of white-male-privilege sins by being a white-male-guy whose linking to another white-male-guy saying sensible things about writing and feminisim, but just this once I’m going to be okay with it. Chuck Wendig wrote a post about Sexism and Misogyny in Publishing. It got some responses, ’cause Chuck knows […]
So Charlotte Nash came across my radar last year, courtesy of some recommendations people made for emerging writers who’d be a good fit for panels at GenreCon. Unfortunately I missed the panels she was on – curse of being an organiser instead of a punter – but all feedback suggests that Charlotte was a) very […]
This week has been a lesson in the ways of the internet. I put a handful of links to a brilliant Ira Glass video on creativity and taste in the middle of my post about On Writing and only 3% of you fuckers went and watched it, despite the fact that I talk the damn thing up […]
…those who win will have two qualities. One, they’ll be great. Two, they’ll persevere. Getting Lucky, Lefsetz.com On the surface, the daily Lefsetz Letter that arrives in my inbox doesn’t have much to do with writing. Bob Lefsetz writes about music and the music industry, mailing out his thoughts every weekday, and the tagline, first in […]
The cold that chased me through the Rabbit Hole and Continuum finally caught up with me over the last weekend. I picked up a couple of books to keep me entertained over the weekend of coughing, spluttering, and spending some quality time in bed. By the time you read this, I’ll have spent two days […]
You must be prepared to work always without applause. When you are excited about something is when the first draft is done. But no one can see it until you have gone over it again and again until you have communicated the emotion, the sights, and the sounds to the reader, and by the time […]
