Category: Works in Progress

One of the perils of working in a Writers Centre is the moments of downtime when your colleagues will turn to you and ask, so, what are you writing at the moment? Not a bad thing during the times when you’re actually working on things and eager to talk about it, but right now I’m kinda…not doing anything. Or rather, I’m giving myself a break after a year of deadline after deadline, accompanied by the fact that I’m still in the process of moving out of my old place (there’s a bunch of stuff still waiting to go into storage, and a whole mess of cleaning to do after Christmas is done with). So when asked during the walk to collect lunch for the office today, my response was, well, nothing really.  Mostly what I’m doing at the moment is catching up on things. Specifically, catching up on email, which has been a little…untouched…during the process of packing and moving

I’m spending some quality time with the keyboard tonight, chasing the elusive end of the Flotsam story-sequence. I keep scribbling notes in the margins about things I’d like to mention when I eventually do the Flotsam recap, given the somewhat usual space the entire thing occupied in my process, but that’s most just keep the hamster wheel inside my head spinning while it comes up with the bit that comes next. It’s remarkably tempting to just type Rock’s Fall, Everyone Dies, but somehow that doesn’t seem an adequate conclusion for Keith and co (Public Service Announcement: the link in the sentence prior to this leads you to TV Tropes. God knows I just lost 45 minutes tooling around following links. You Have Been Warned). Because I’m packing and they’re around, I find myself working while wearing the dreaded paperbaghat. Basically, I’ve spent much of the evening looking like this: And, as is traditional, I forgot to take the damn thing off when

Yesterday evening I was walking from work to the train-station, taking the long-cut through Southbank so I could enjoy the afternoon breeze and the Brisbane river, and I came across a pair of buskers playing a version of the Beatle’s Norwegian Wood as a duet on violin and banjo. They were kind of phenomenal, I think, considering they were utilizing a banjo, but the best part of it was the surprise of finding them there, just doing their thing, while the rest of us ambled to and fro, getting away from our dayjobs and heading into the evening. Had it been a different kind of evening I would have stopped and listened for a bit longer. I probably should have, but my mind kept drifting to other things, and I was hurrying home to pack and clean and get some writing done. And somewhere amid all that, it occurred to me that I should blog, and here we are, trying to figure

It’s been a particularly lazy morning around these parts. I woke up, I read things, I dozed. I repeated the process until I’d read the latest installment of Trent Jamieson’s Death Works series, whereupon I emerged and ate breakfast and generally started pottering on the internet. In a couple of minutes I’ll head off to get some lunch and do my washing, whereupon I’ll write some things. Later, I’ll pack some books ahead of the move, then go across town to catch up with the Cthulhu peeps and play Space: 1889 a few days ahead of our usual schedule. So it goes on Fridays, where I have the option of being lazy and engaging in crazy rescheduling shenanigans. Thursdays are writing days, the one where I blow out my wordcount in a manic enthusiasm. Fridays are about respectable, reasoned levels of wordage. They’re about reigning in my impulses and saying “yes, I know there are two more days of this to

My sister’s posted a short blog about the reason she’s doing the Unity Walk for Parkinson’s Australia. It goes a little something like this: My Dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2003, although in hindsight, he had probably been suffering some of the symptoms for about fifteen years before that. Since the diagnosis came through, Dad has accepted this condition that life has chosen for him. He’s never once asked ‘Why me?’, I’ve never heard him complain, he accepts the physical limitations imposed on him, and while he doesn’t often ask for help, he does accept it gratefully when offered. Parkinson’s Queensland have been an enormous help to Dad, and Mum, who is inevitably his primary carer. They were there to offer advice on what medical staff in hospital needed to know when Dad had his heart operation last year. They provide visits to centres to show what little devices around the home are going to make life just