- Jay Lake says sensible things about writers and psychotic dedication.
- ASIF has posted their recommended reading list for 2008, with much love thrown in the direction of the ever-awesome Angela Slatter.
- The 2007 Clarion Blog Nostalgia Extravaganza continues over at Lee Battersby’s site, with entries by clarion peeps Michael Greenhut and Helen Venn.
- A photo-series on dead Asian themeparks. (snurched from Elizabeth Bear’s livejournal).
- Gen Con Australia and my former/sometimes current boss Hooly talks candidly about the 2009 convention (I am, for the record, involved in the con this year, but at a greatly reduced capacity – hence he’s only an intermittent boss these days)
- If you’re in Brisbane and an aspiring writer-type trying to figure out what happens next, I’d recommend signing up for Marianne de Pierres workshop at Sunnybank library. It’s free and I can say from experience that Marianne’s workshops tend to be both informative and eye-opening.
- And for the more artistic types – Small Beer Press is holding an open-call to find the cover-image for the next Interfictions anthology.
- Sean Williams pokes people with a stick regarding the Australian Natcon in Adelaide and the ‘sploding comments thread of doom reminds me of why I’m booking flights to Adelaide regardless (That I’ve been part of a con that had similar public-communications issues and still managed a to hit a level of awesome on the day helps as well;).
- Jeff Vandermeer talks about the genesis of Shriek: An Afterword complete with scans of annotated manuscript pages; my inner fascination with how other people work kicked in immediately.
Angela Slatter
28 Days of Thesis Updates: Days Six through Eight
The university library has a mold problem. A significant mold problem that’s led to the closing down of the stacks in the library where most of the books I need are located. Couple this with the library’s odd opening hours until the semester starts and you probably get some idea of where my time went over the weekend – it took three trips, some net-time, and some odd conversations with the librarians as I tried to explain that I didn’t know what the call numbers of the books where because I’m used to just *going there and finding them* after all these years, but I finally got about two-thirds of the texts I wanted this afternoon. The rest at basically MIA, which isn’t going to change until the mold is done with and the library returns to life.
The rest of the weekend was non-productive, but fun. Eberron game on Saturday, lunch with Angela and her fellow clarionite Lisa Hannett on Sunday where we discussed writer-type things, then far to little sleep as I fretted about what I’m going to do if this library situation continues the way it’s going (probably make weekly drives to the Gold Coast, but that’s not ideal…). Now I’m fretting about being behind on the word-count again, but the situation isn’t yet untenable so I should probably stop.