I’ve written a minimum of 1,402 words every day for the last seven days. There’s nothing special about that. I’ve done it plenty of times before. But I’m noting it, in this instance, because one of my goals for 2014 is to put together a writing streak. This is predicated on the Seinfeld approach to productivity, […]
I try to be pretty sanguine about changes to the tools I use to access the internet. A lot of them are free, for certain values of free that translate to “we make money by getting you to come here and generate data,” which means I’m generally pretty low-key in my responses to, say, Facebook […]
More rain, today, and I do love the rain. Last night I turned off all the lights around nine o’clock, trundled off to bed with Fritz the Laptop, and wrote things while it was deliciously cold and wet and almost rainy. There were houses in the neighborhood who’d lit their wood fires, filling the air […]
Once upon a time I didn’t own a car and I lived in a city with a laughable idea of public transport. Since I was also young and broke and generally wanted to go to places buses didn’t really go, I ended up walking everywhere and got quite good at it. It became a big […]
This is my four hundred and eighteenth post to this blog, which I guess means we’re on the downhill slope towards five hundred blog entries (whereupon I probably turn into a pumpkin). The last few days have settled into a comfortable kind of routine – I get home from the dayjob, I don’t turn on […]
I wasn’t going to spam you with dodgy phone-camera records of the Great Bookshelf Reorganisation of 2011, but I got a phone-call from my dad and at some point he asked for an update, and I like my dad enough that I’m going to oblige him. The photograph above contains the first seven shelves of […]
On Saturday night, around 4 am, I started reorganising bookshelves. It seemed like the thing to do, since I’d been studiously not-sleeping for five hours after going to bed. Bookcases are one of the places where mess accumulates in my flat, largely because there’s so many of the damn things and I’ve developed a bad habit of […]
A few months ago I decided to do the sensible thing by my financial situation and give up any plans of going to Swancon 36 (aka Australia’s nat-con). It was the right decision back that – I was unemployed and broke and heavily in debt, and although there were all sorts of good reasons to […]
So I’ve set myself some modest goals this week: 500 words a day of writing; three blog posts*; at least one day where I limit myself to two coffees**; buy one Christmas present so I don’t get stuck shopping during the evil December shopping crush. Thus far, I’ve failed horribly at all three, although I […]
And so I have hit the point where I need to tackle that debacle that is my writing desk, which has been looking like this since I got back from my cat-sitting adventure: The irony of this is that I rarely spend much time writing at said desk, even when it is cleared off. I […]
This morning I woke up in the pre-dawn hours to hie myself over to the airport and pick up the globetrotting pair of friends whose house I’ve been living at for the last month. They’re now safely ensconced in their house and I am, officially, FREE OF THE DAMN CAT. Unfortunate news for those of […]
Yesterday I sat down with the Spokesbear, a bunch of e-mail, my copy of Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife, and a notepad to construct my to-do list for the rest of the year. It’s a habit I fell into a few years back (well, sans the Booklife part, but I suspect I’ll be rereading it often in […]
