i have been team-built

For those of you waiting for its arrival: I haven't seen a copy myself yet, but it looks like Postscripts #18 has been released into the wild.

This is the issue which features my story, "The Wages of Salt", and google alerts tells me it's made at least one good impression so far.

Now, being a writer, and therefore of delicate emotional constitution, this pleases me immensely. But I'm especially glad to see this story available for general purchase, because it's one of my favourites. Part of that is because, of everything I've written, "The Wages of Salt" is the story which best survived the translation from my head to the written word; it's always a tricky process, and every story takes a few wounds in the process of being pinned to the page. Also, partly it's because I simply adore the world I created in that story, and I'm keen to go back and write more in that same world. I have a few snippets of ideas, waiting for time and inspiration and a solid plot.

melbournebotanicgardens02

I took this photo yesterday morning, as I wandered through the Royal Botanic Gardens on my way to work. (In fact, I took quite a lot of photos. I would have taken more, but it was 8 o'clock in the morning and only 6°C: my fingers froze.) I liked the image of a circle of chairs gathered beneath a circle of trees, all empty. I wonder what meetings go on there? (Whatever they are, I bet the ones I'm imagining are far more interesting than the reality.)

28 May 2009 @ 19:19 |

every damn morning

What I read: EROTIC POTS

What the sign actually says: EXOTIC POTS

This exercise in Freudian visual disturbances is made worse by the fact that the second line of the sign is EXOTIC STAFF. What on earth does a garden store mean when they claim they have exotic staff?

Under the Milky Way Tonight (The Church — Best of The Church)

25 May 2009 @ 20:31 | 6 Comments

i promise to check more often in future

I just discovered a few questions had been sitting in my FAQ queue for who knows how long. Perhaps foolishly, I expected my FAQ plugin to send me an alert, either by email or through the dashboard, when it needed my attention. So if you've been checking the FAQ, wondering why I was ignoring you, my apologies. It was not deliberate; I'm simply a touch inattentive and forgetful at the best of times. And clearly I put far too much trust in "lite"1 software programs.

By way of apology, I offer up a link to goodies:

Katerina Down Photography

My cousin has been learning everything she can about photography in recent years, and has just set up a site to sell some of her prints. My favourite of those she's offering for sale (at least so far) is Playtimes Past.

  1. Incidentally, am I the only one driven to grinding my teeth by this word? [↩]

22 May 2009 @ 18:54 |

stop living so fast already

Question of the Week: But don't you want to get married? have kids? settle down?1

Yes, that's right, settle down. Because it's just party central over here in Debville. I don't know what gave it away. Perhaps it was the fact that, when a work colleague asks about my weekend, my answer is inevitably, "Oh, I met up with some mates at the State Library. We have this thing, where we get together every Saturday and sit in a room where we're not allowed to talk to each other, and we don't let ourselves leave that room until we've written something. It was great!"2

Or maybe, just maybe, it's the fact that, shockingly, I am not desperate to put an end to my single status, despite having turned 30 some years ago. Clearly, internet, I am a brazen hussy and I need to just STOP IT NOW. Because the overpopulated world is depending on my uterus. I mean, we won't be able to eat the planet dry of all its resources unless I breed, and now, dagnabbit.

If you'll excuse me, there's some youth I need to go out and corrupt.

  1. Posed to me, not by my mother, who is far too cool for such outdated attitudes, nor by anyone born in the decades preceding the first world war, but by a lad in his twenties. [↩]
  2. This weekend gone we really shook up the plan by going to see a movie afterwards. Because nothing is better than sitting in a brightly-lit room where you're not allowed to talk, except perhaps following it up by sitting in a darkened room where you're not allowed to talk. That's just how we extreme partygoers roll. [↩]

Hysteria (Muse — Absolution)

19 May 2009 @ 18:20 | 16 Comments

felicitous moments

one:

At work on Friday, during fraud and ethics awareness training, I discovered an amusing editing artefact in the Code of Conduct. Apparently, all employees "must treat everyone with respect and with harassment."

Now that, my friends, is one hell of a code of conduct. Licence for polite savagery: issued. I don't care what the manager says about mistakes, I have written evidence.

two:

Sitting on the tram on Thursday, I was listening to the conversation of two nearby school girls, who want to be writers.

Bless 'em.

They were full of enthusiasm and verve, laughing and chatting about how their ambition is received by others. Friends are excited, and want to read their work; parents and teachers, on the other hand, are always asking what sort of real job they're going to have. What outdated attitudes! Maybe in their parents' day, writers needed a dayjob and then pursued their dreams at night, but that's not the way the world works any more. They won't need to bother with any of that.

I nearly choked trying to hold back gales of laughter.

Poor children. The world will set them straight plenty soon enough.

Bella's Lullaby (Carter Burwell — Twilight)

17 May 2009 @ 16:34 | 4 Comments

i've paid my money, i'm here to stay now

I have a cold1 and I cannot breathe and I'm not particularly happy about this development. Breathing, dear internet, is not overrated in the slightest.

The cold has struck just in time to ambush my Victorian licence photo, which consequently features me complete with soupy eyes and bleary expression.

But never fear: I know what conquers colds. Alcohol! Tomorrow I launch a retaliatory strike, with my good friends the ethanol army.

  1. omigod it's swine flu we're all gonna die, run, save yourselves, it's too late for me… [↩]

14 May 2009 @ 20:39 | 7 Comments

hour upon hour of motivation fail

Today I mailed in my electoral enrolment details, officially changing my address to the state of Victoria. On Thursday I have an appointment to transfer my licence from a NSW one to a Victorian one, and to transfer the car's registration likewise. This is it, people: after Thursday it's official. This is no longer just some kind of cheap version of an international working holiday visa.

I had a visit from my family over the weekend, which resulted in the greatest steady consumption of alcohol I have enjoyed since arriving in Melbourne. (My family: we drink to survive each other's company.) Clearly I'm going to have to step up my game when it comes to socialising down here. Do you know, I still don't know the location of (m)any watering holes? That's an appalling lapse of judgement.

The new plan for the writing routine, namely dropping into the library after work, has hit the week-two snag. It's always week two that trips me up. (Sometimes week two is actually week three. As in this case. But I'm sure my point stands, provided you define week two as "the novelty has worn off, but the habit hasn't quite worn in". Which, I'll grant you, is very different to the standard "the second week" definition normally applied to week two. Yeah, my head. I don't make the rules, I just live inside it as best I can.) This week I have hit the I-don't-wanna's, and it's a bit of a slog to convince myself on leaving the dayjob that I really do want to walk to the library and sit down and start working on something else instead of going home and sitting in front of the tv and doing nothing. Meh. Here's hoping the habit wears in quickly.

Still, I got my words and change today, in time to go and see an evening session of Wolverine, which … yeah. About that.

Citywide Rodeo (The Weepies — Say I Am You)

12 May 2009 @ 23:11 |

in the interests of entertaining you all

Last night, I got lost in a corridor.

Before you assume I'm joking, or exaggerating, let me assure you that your faith in me, at least in this instance, is utterly undeserved. Not only was it a corridor, it was a section of corridor small enough to be referred to as a closet.

It was not a particularly tricky corridor. There were quite a few turns involved, but no real options involved in said turns (except for that open door halfway along the corridor I thought might be my destination, namely the toilets, but in fact was the kitchen. Luckily I self-corrected quickly. That one was easy.).

By the time I actually found the real door to the toilets, I was dazed and confused by all the turns,1 so that when I pushed open the door and found myself confronted by a blank wall not even one foot2 from my face … I got lost.

The solution was blindingly obvious: I should have turned right, at which point I would have found the next door, and wiktory. Instead, I stared at the blank wall directly in front of me, searching for a door handle, wondering if the door was perhaps the sliding type.

And when I couldn't find anything on what was clearly a wall, not a door, what did I do? That's right: I turned to the left. And found another blank wall. At which point, increasingly bemused by my inability to FIND MY WAY IN A TWO-FOOT BY ONE-FOOT SECTION OF CORRIDOR, I seriously contemplated turning back. Luckily, the section of corridor was so small that in order to turn back, I was quite literally forced to turn right and what do you know? There's the door I need. In pale colours, which should have been quite bright and obvious in contrast to the dark plain walls. With a handle with PULL written above it.3

Note to self: you fail.

  1. not to mention the dessert I had just consumed, which shall henceforth be known as the diabetic coma on a spoon — seriously, I have a high tolerance for sugar, and I have never eaten so much sugar in a single bite before [↩]
  2. sadly, I am not exaggerating even mildly. One foot. [↩]
  3. Oh yes, I pushed. In my defence, even after I got back to the dinner table and regaled everyone with the story (which is even better when told in person, because then you get the extra-special bonus features of my re-enactment, complete with hand gestures and confused expressions), and they all had to go see the corridor which had nearly defeated me, they all pushed instead of pulled as well. [↩]

9 May 2009 @ 10:05 | 7 Comments

like finding shapes in the clouds

So far, the new plan appears to be dropping in to the local library after work. It's survived first contact, but then my new writing routines rarely hit a snag in the first few days. It's the second week that gets tricksome, usually. Oh well. We shall see.

I've been sitting through a fair few classroom-style lectures of late, as part of the training for the new dayjob. To keep my mind ticking over and listening actively, I draw while I'm listening. Some of these absent-minded little drawings are getting quite elaborate.

This is one of the first ones:

20090421

I can see an echidna, curled up around its own stomach, at the left of that one. And I'm quite fond of the warped smiley face towards the right.

4 May 2009 @ 20:16 |