Day Jobbery

4 Things: GenreCon, Novella Diary, Upcoming Workshop, A Reminder

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NEW GENRECON GUESTS

Wait up, I’m going to deploy the banner, ’cause I *really* love our banner this year:

gc-2013-web-banner

We made some pretty big announcements over on the GenreCon site yesterday, all in the form of names being added to the conference guest list. I won’t belabour the point here, except to just post some names: John-freakin’-Connolly (best-selling Irish crime novelist who understands a thing or two about other genres); Kathryn-freakin’-Fox (best-selling Australian thriller writer who knocked the Da Vinci Code off a bunch of best-seller lists a few years back); John-freakin’-Birmingham (my family will know him for He Died With a Felafel in His Hand; everyone else should get to know his Weapons of Choice series which have been taking over bookshops over the last couple of years).

Add those names to Chuck Wendig, Anne Gracie, Anita Heiss and Kate Cuthbert and I start to get really excited about programming this year’s conference.

Now, if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I’m going to try a particularly subtle form of marketing:

COME TO MY FREAKIN’ WRITING CONFERENCE, PEOPLE. IT’S GOING TO BE WALL-TO-WALL AWESOME!

NOVELLA DIARY UPDATE

It’s not dead, just sleeping a little. I’ve moved away from the daily updates a little early in favour of doing a weekly update on Friday, where I usually have a little more time.

Also, I’m hoping that moving the updates to the Friday will break me out of my now-customary weekend stall.

UPCOMING WORKSHOP

If you’re in the Rockhampton area around June 22, I’ll be coming up to do a free workshop on Short Story Writing at the Rockhampton library. Here’s the blurb:

Short fiction has its own tropes and tricks, and this exciting course offers budding short story writers, and those looking to brush up on a few basic skills, the chance to explore and develop short fiction. This engaging workshop features writing and ideas development exercises examining beginnings, place and setting, character development, dialogue, and the all too important ending.

Bookings and additional details available on the QWC website. Including the sentence that I’ve cut off the end of that paragraph on account of it’s deployment of an exclamation mark.

I loathe exclamation marks. They’re right up there with Illinois Nazis.

On the other hand, I’m looking forward to being back in Rocky, since it’s been about a year since my last visit. I even promise not to mention the time when Virgin Blue left me stranded in the Rockhampton airport for twelve hours and just kept forgetting to announce the flight delays.

I don’t hold that against you, Rockhampton. You remain a lovely city

Virgin Blue, on the other hand, is on my shit-list.

A REMINDER: TRASHY TUESDAY WRITING SCHOOL

I’m going to write a whole bunch of writing advice based on some pretty trashy movies. I’m still looking for feedback on the films people would really like to see. Come nominate your preferences, and save me from the overwhelming number of people who seem to be amused by the idea of making me re-watch Suckerpunch.

GenreCon 2013 is live

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So yesterday, at the day job, we announced this:

gc-2013-web-banner

I was going to post it here this morning and give you the spiel about the limited number of early bird tickets and the crazy discounted prices they represent, but since going on sale at 4:00 PM yesterday we’ve blown through about 70% of the early bird tickets in twelve hours. So instead the spiel is this: if you want to come to GenreCon for less than $200, go book now, ’cause I fully expect the early bird rate to be gone by the end of the day.

We’ve already revealed  the first two guests – Chuck Wendig and Anita Heiss – with the ever popular more to come still yet to be announced. It’s going to be crazy. It’s going to be awesome. And I’m getting the impression I should be really happy we asked for the big auditorium in the state library, ’cause we’re now at the point it took us two months to achieve last year, which suggests we might get a slightly larger crowd in Brisbane than we did in Sydney.

This is, as they say, fucking brilliant. Terrifying, but fucking brilliant.

And we haven’t even begun to roll out the full, awesome power of our guest list yet (although, I have to admit, the comment thread in Chuck Wendig’s post about coming to Australia is one of my favourite things ever)

In other news, I had one of those performance review type things at the day-job yesterday, which is pretty much the first time I’ve ever had one of those. Apparently I don’t suck at my job – who knew? Not that this is connected to the above – Cons, in my opinion, live and die by the quality of the guests and the participants, and we were blessed with folks who were truly outstanding and really got the vibe we were trying to create last year – but after the sturm und drang of last year it’s nice to know that I didn’t mess anything up too badly.

Also, that the long-term plans of things I want to do in regards to GenreCon and the AWM aren’t entirely off-track with where QWC is going.

Which is to say: I love my fucking job. Complete fucking air guitar moment.

It’s going to be a seriously rocking day.

And now I’m off to write things. Take care of yourselves, people, and rock hard.

Reasons to Love the Dayjob

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Went back to work at the day-job today. Discovered that the Queensland Writers Center has been dubbed one of the best arts organisations to work at in 2013, which is utterly true, but not for the reasons that are listed in the article. It cites the vast scope of QWCs partnerships and the sprawling Queensland lifestyle as the key reasons for wanting a job there.

And, you know, fair enough.

But QWC isn’t my first ride of the pony when it comes to having a day-job that looks idyllic from the outside. It is, however, the first time I’ve enjoyed working a day-job as much as I expected to enjoy it when I started. That’s got nothing to do with the Queensland heat and the cozy Queensland arts scene.

What matters to me, what makes it a fucking kick-ass place to work, is this:

1) The work matters. I can look at what we do, see how benefits people, and it’s something I care about. It’s also hard, which means occasionally there are weeks where I could go at the world with a bazooka, but even those weeks are worthwhile when you look at the overall picture.

2) The people rock. I mean, my co-workers are fucking awesome. Seriously some of the coolest people I’ve ever had the privlidge to know, and for the most part they aren’t folks I’d befriend under regular circumstances. I like getting to know smart, passionate people who care about what they’re doing, and these folks do.

3) Genrecon. Back again in 2013 and still pretty much my dream project.

Everything else is gravy.