The most bewildering comment I’ve ever gotten on social media, from an old family friend: “Who knew you were carrying around so much anger?”
To me, the answer seemed obvious: “Anyone who was paying attention.”
But it wasn’t the anger that caught them off-guard, it was the decision to do something with it. To use anger as an impetus, not just a feeling. To speak about the anger, and why it existed, rater than staying politely silent.
They reacted to the use of anger as a spur to look at the state of the world and say this is not good enough, rather than a flagellum turned against the self to diminish your expectations.
Do not diminish the anger. Use it to get shit done.
I’ve been watching a motorized scooter helmet migrate around the neighbourhood for the last few weeks. It started out in the neighbour’s yard, moved to a spot behind another neighbour’s rubbish bins, and now exists in the liminal space beside the trainline that the public can’t access.
My guess is that it will stay there until the next round of track work, or somebody needs it bad enough to jump the high fence and recover it.
The days are long and hot here in Australia. Two states are basically on fire courtesy of the Summer bushfires. Our government has largely shirked the issue, as treating bushfires like this as serious seems to suggest that they may be wrong on issues of climate change.
I keep thinking of a quote from a recent news article over on the ABC:
“If anything, this Government is more ideologically driven than Abbott. They want to win the culture wars they see in education, in the public service, in all of our institutions, and they’ll come for the ABC too, of course. There will be a big cleanout at the top of the public service, but Morrison will wait for a while to do that. They believe the Left has been winning the war for the last 20 years and are determined to turn the tables. Morrison will just be craftier about the way he goes about it.”
As someone who, frankly, wishes the culture wars of the last twenty years had seen more gains for the opposite side, it’s a timely reminder that you no can no longer get the kind of government (or world) you want merely by voting for it and hoping other people will do the work.
It’s been just over a year since my second short story collection came out, and it did pretty well for itself. It made the shortlist for Best Collection in the Aurealis Awards, and had some pretty strong sales for one of my ebooks in a year when my attention was mostly on other things.
At the same time, it’s lagged behind my first collection in a lot of milestones. Most notably, getting a print edition together, and attempting to refine the messaging and branding.
Last week I started to change that: taking a bunch of newly acquired skills from some dedicated research into making better book covers, plus a workflow that is better suited to going from ebook cover to print, I made the revamped cover you can see above (and, if you want, contrast against the old cover to the right).
They’re small changes, but just repositioning things and strengthening font choices has a big impact in setting reader expectations about genre and content. The original cover left the image to tell the story of what’s coming; the new version says it with the whole cover.
More importantly, it was easy to import the design into a print book cover, rather than redesigning everything from the ground up as I did previously. This drastically cuts down the design hours needed to get a book up-and-running, and makes the time invested in learning-to-do-things-better considerably more valuable.
