Yesterday I taught my first tutorial at the University of Queensland. Quite fortunately, no-one threw things, and I started to remember all the things I actually quite like about teaching and talking to aspiring writers. I’d never really been to UQ before this. I visited once or twice about fifteen years ago, back when I […]
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 […]
My primary activity at the moment is not doing things, which is not conducive to exciting bloggery. For example, I’m not succumbing to the temptation to renew my Locus subscription; I’m not rushing out to buy the passel of books I really want to buy; I’m not going on online shopping sprees to celebrating the […]
So the latest issue of Apex Magazine is now online and features my story L’esprit de L’escalier about a guy, and endless staircase, and the things you think about during the descent. There’s already some discussion about the story taking place over at I09 which has left me thinking, among other things, “wow, I really do need […]
Apparently there really isn’t a point in a writing career where you get to stop having this conversation. I find this vaguely depressing.
1) I signed up for NaNoWriMo There’s plenty of folks among my circle of friends who do this every year, but for me it’ll be the first attempt at the nano-madness in seven or eight eight years. I primarily signed up because I miss the rigor of the public daily wordcount and it’ll be nice […]
It’s weird – the business side of writing always creeps up on me and mugs me while I’m not looking. And it’s not because I never thought I’d need to paying attention to this stuff, just that I always thought the process would move a little slower than it does. Over the last couple of […]
Over the weekend I headed out to a Professional Writing Seminar held by Marianne de Pierres which covered the terrain that’s common at such things, but also hit a few key points that I hadn’t come across before. Part of what she talked about during the seminar was taking responsible for your own professional development […]
