As promised, the hat of awesome

Many Sri Lankan love cakes died to bring you this photo. Thanks for the donations, peeps. I have never been so happy to abandon my dignity for a good cause.

Bake Off! or, I Offer to Throw My Dignity Away to Make Up for My Lack of Skillz

We’re in the midst of a competitive bake-off at work this week, endeavoring to raise money in support of International Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month. QWC staff have diligently unearthed the most impressive cakes they can, pitched their merits via facebook, and asked people to donate and vote for their favourite baked treat. Funds raised will go towards supporting the […]

5 Short Story Recommendations in 1,012 Words or Less

Over the last few weeks I’ve occasionally thrown a short-story link up on twitter, in that way that you do when you remember there are *fucking awesome short stories* out there and you want to share them with other people. Twitter is a horrible medium for recommending short fiction though – it has the kind […]

In this post, I swear a lot for no apparent reason

I’m sitting here on a Sunday trying to remember what I was going to blog about. There was plan a while back – perhaps even a written one – but I’m afflicted with a curse that causes me to forget anything remotely plan-like the moment I sit down at a keyboard. Fortunately, I have a […]

Cool News from the Day Job

So yesterday we made a small announcement at my dayjob. It went a little something like this: Source: GenreCon News Blog The Australian Writer’s Marketplace is pleased to announce the launch of the first annual GenreCon, a convention for professional and aspiring writers of romance, mystery, science fiction, crime, fantasy, horror, thrillers, and more. One part party, one […]

Provocation

I’m flying out to Rockhampton at six AM tomorrow morning, so I really should be in bed right now. And I will be soon, I swear, but for this: earlier today I learned the latest Review of Australian Fiction is out, featuring stories by Kim Wilkins and Meg Vann. Perhaps this requires some context. Let […]

Me Teach You to Write Good, eh?

There’s a more substantive blog post coming, but I’m just dropping past to announce the following to anyone who may be interested in this writing course that’s kicking off next Wednesday Night. It’s an introductory course run as part of my dayjob at the Queensland Writers Centre. ‘Course, I’m a sucker for talking about writing, […]

Horn Spotting

So back in 2010 I get an email from Alisa over at Twelfth Planet  sent me an email that said, in effect, there’s some people making a TV show that’d like to use a couple of TPP books as background props.  Apparently there are contracts that needed to be signed when this kind of thing […]

Stories told, Stories Consumed, and a link to Cats Sleeping

There was no story unlocked when I walked across the Kurilpa bridge this morning, which is a matter of some sorrow to me. I was counting on that moment today, since I’m looking askance at the second chapter of Claw and trying to figure out what’s going to go in there. I know some things, yes: corpses, […]

The Writer in a Silly Hat

I was given a particularly silly hat for Christmas, and the first thing my mother said was oh god, it’ll be up on his blog by tomorrow morning. My mother is a wise woman, but she failed to take into account the delays inevitably caused by moving house and cleaning and the other minutia of the last […]

Things I wrote doing stuff out in the world

I’ve been meaning to drop past and blog a few things for the last couple of days, but my times largely been taking up by packing and writing and desperately trying to reach the pre-moving deadlines, and so most of this is old news to anyone following me on twitter or facebook. In any case, […]

Mostly About Things I’ve Read Online

I met Laura Goodin several years ago at a writers workshop. She was forthrightly American in many ways, despite being expatriated to Australia for several years now, and we frequently found ourselves coming from stories at very different angles. Despite her handicap as a non-native Australian, she wrote one of the finest SF cricket stories […]