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I’ve spent most of the afternoon rushing around the house, MC5′s Kick Out the Jams buzzing through my head. I imagine it’s going to be something of a theme song during April – it’s certainly what I plan on listening to every morning this week (although I’ll probably cheat and cycle through the innumerable cover versions out there for variety). I’ve been looking forward to April since the start of the year – one way or another, it’s been the month where I get to try and reclaim my groove as a writer of fiction rather than theory.

The current plan for the coming month:

Do a whole mess of rewrites that have been piling up, then get the stories submitted
The problem with coordinating thesis writing and everything else isn’t finding the time to get drafts done – it’s finding the time to do the polishes and redrafting that transform those first drafts into something worthwhile. Over the last five months I’ve stacked up about six stories in this state, just waiting for me to revise and submit them.

Finish Claw…
Because there’s lots of stuff happening on Horn at the moment, so it makes sense to try and finish the next Miriam Aster novella while I’m all excited. Besides, it’s talking cats, a hard-boiled detective, a burned out actress from an eighties SF cop drama, and a oozing puddle of cat foetii in embryonic fluid – every time I look at the notes I sit there thinking “My god, I want to write this now,“ so it’ll be nice to actually, you know, be able to do that. 

Finish the next chapter in the thesis
Because work needs to continue, even if I’ve got the space to do other writing now.

It’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting here listening to Chibo Matto and Regina Spektor, trying not to regret last night’s culinary adventure. This is what I ate:

Actually before I start, it’s probably worth pointing out that I have this obsession with bad fast-food from places that do their best to try and replicate the fast-food experience of a McDonalds but just don’t quite get it. Show me someone’s random idea to try and revolutionise the franchise fast-food industry or a local take-away doing something odd and I’m there with a couple of bucks in my pocket and a desire to see their worst. It’s a sickness, I know, but it’s mine and I’ve come to grips with it. It’s like those people you know who are obsessed with bad movies and love them for their flaws – I’m obsessed with bad fast-food and love it despite the stomach pains and added kilograms that result. Call it a desire to savour the culinarily camp. 

Which brings us, then, to Snitzl - a fast-food restaurant I discovered while driving home yesterday built around the theme of doing very bad things to the chicken schnitzel. How bad, you ask? Well, alongside such traditional meals as the schnitzel with gravy and cheese or the schnitzel with salsa, they also offer such delicacies as the Thai Schnitzel (Schnitzel with coconut curry sauce, Thai vegetables, cheese and sweet chilli sauce), the Swag Schnitzel (BBW sauce, bacon, fried onions, cheese), and the Chine-eze (mixed vegetables with sweet & sour sauce, plus pineapple and the inevitable cheese). I’ll leave it to your imagination as to which I was eating above (suffice to say, it bore only a vague resemblance to what I was expecting).

There’s more, of course – pick a nationality and they’re adopting their cuisine to schnitzel form, plus the inevitable variants on the meal deal, happy meal, and seniors meal. The best part was, of course, discovering that they home-delivered – you could get schnitzel abominations delivered to *to your door* if you were sufficiently interested. As dodgy fast-food places go, it was a veritable cornucopia of awesomeness; they had the flashy logo on the outside, all polished up and well-lit to suggest their legitimacy; they had the weird and wonderful mix of gimmick foods; and they had the lingo down as you walked in. Someone had put thought into the appearance and marketing of this. Sadly, however, it ended there – once you actually got inside it looked much like your local fish-and-chippery and thus the temptations of their exotic schnitzel variations was something to be met with suspicion rather than joy.

I’d like to say this ended well, but that goes against the spirit of trying such places out. Mostly you go to them to revel in the complete cognitive dissonance of seeing the basics of marketing and the capitalist impulse go awry, and in that respect Snitz doesn’t disappoint. I mean, I can now have a schnitzel covered in satay sauce, carrot, onion, coriander and cheese delivered to my house (dubbed the Indo D’Lite, though I’ll lay even money on the fact that it’s neither) and that’s worth more than little things like taste. In fact, wereit not for the Styrofoam containers used away, I could almost come to like the place. Compared with previous experiences, it’s actually okay. I’ve definitely had worse – South East Queenslanders who were out late on a Saturday night a lot in the 90′s may remember the short-lived 24-hour Brodies chain, which remains the lower echelon of such places I’ve experienced (and in recent years I delighted to discover that one still existed out in Warwick, and I immediately ate there upon discovering its existence).

Tonight, though, is devoted to recovering to yesterdays experience - I’ll steam myself a chicken breast with ginger and a handful of vegetables and eat like a sensible person. And I’ll dream of the upcoming trip to Adelaide in June, upon which I will be convincing Jason to take me in search of a Pea Floater.

I found myself oddly obsessed with this clip this week. The naughties, they are time for clips where singers dance on travellators and treadmills.

• Off to the Gold Coast again today, in order to learn how to be a PhD student. One might think that after so many years I’d have worked out how by now, but one would be mistaken (said without snark – there’s been a gear-shift in the process recently, and I’m the kind of driver who grinds gears until someone points out the various ways that’s a bad idea).
• Finally made it to the post-office during work hours yesterday, which meant I could pick up some of the packages of awesomeness waiting for me (a copy of Couch, courtesy of Ben Francisco, and copies of both Cory Doctrow’s Overclocked and a collection of Hugo award winners courtesy of Jason Fischer – thanks to both of you, for they were awesome things to discover).
• Reason my thesis leaves me a funk #29: I haven’t actually finished and submitted a *new* story (as opposed to resubmitting something that’s already been out) since November of last year.
• Fortunately I have a half-dozen stories that have gone through multiple drafts and critiques just waiting for me to have the time to work on them. I feel the need to do something about that, rather powerfully. This evening I will come up with a plan, pending possible distractions following the PhD workshops (to whit, I need to mark some assignments at some point).
• If I promise wit and lucid commentary on the world tomorrow, would you think me a liar? Yes? Well, that’s very wise of you…

For a week now I’ve been sitting down at the computer thinking “must write a blog post soon” without ever getting around to it. I open a post, stare at it for a few seconds, then put it off until later. I can see only two ways out of this deadlock – youtube or lolcats. Thus, I choose youtube and Gilmore Girls references:

Just dropping past to say a very public thank you to all the folks who wished me a happy birthday via the internets yesterday (and to say a big happy birthday to Ben Francisco, with whom I share the birthday).

Sadly, I wasn’t much for the interwebs on the day itself. I did something wonky to my shoulder sometime on Tuesday (probably a pulled muscle while lugging two bags of hardcover text books back to the library) and circumstances conspired to ensure that things to progressively worse over the following 48 hours. I spent most of yesterday propped up at a 45% degree angle watching Life on Mars & My So-Called Life and going through the supply of ibuprofen.

Be back on schedule tomorrow. See you all then.

A very cool open-call for a fiction anthology, put together by clarion-peep Chris Lynch:

This year marks 200 years since the birth of Charles Darwin, and 150 years since the publication of The Origin of Species. To mark the anniversaries, submissions are invited for The Tangled Bank, an e-anthology of speculative fiction, artwork, poetry, and comics exploring the legacy of Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution.

Illuminate — or obscure — the line between the real and the fantastic. The fiction may be of any speculative genre or cross-genre; demand to be included by the quality of your submission. Artwork and poetry need not be strictly speculative in nature, but must engage with Charles Darwin or evolution.

Submissions for The Tangled Bank open May 1st and close June 30th, 2009. The Tangled Bank will be published by Tangled Bank Press in late 2009, and an advance on royalties of 20 per cent will be paid to all contributors. For submission guidelines and more information, visit http://thetangledbank.com/

Not a writer? Then allow me to distract you with the view of yesterday’s brewing storm from my study window, around sunset:

You know, for a person that doesn’t really like photographs (whether I’m in them or not), I’m starting to dig having a digital camera handy.

There is something about getting up early and writing that always makes me feel virtuous. I like the way it gets the guilt of not-writing out of the way early, the way it sets the tone for the rest of the day (in which I think about writing in moderation, rather than obsessing about the fact that I’m not writing to the exclusion of all else), and the excuse to drink inhuman amounts of coffee. If only I didn’t have to pay for these early starts later (say, around 3:30 when I crash out and need a nap) or actually wrote productively (this week, getting up at six and working for two and a half hours has netted me a paragraph of thesis work a day) it’d be an awesome habit to get into; sadly, I am not built for mornings and it’ll fall by the wayside once I have absolved myself of my latest bout of writer-guilt. Which I’m slowly starting to do in relation to the thesis – today I got past the big mental block that stopped me finishing chapter two – but there’s plenty more hiding up the back of the novel/novella/short-story slacker variety.

And now I dance off, clad in my green shoes and least-salacious unicorn shirt, to collect first-year assignments and start marking them. Will probably spend tonight kicking around the Gold Coast and being a slacker, so I’ll catch you all tomorrow.

Jack Dan gets interviewed for Flycon and says a bunch of useful things about being a writer. He also names a list of writers to watch in 2009 which includes such oft-mentioned to peeps as Angela Slatter and Jason Fischer as well as, well, me. Which is both cool and moderately terrifying and a great reminder about how much of this year is being swallowed up by things that are not writing.

One of these days I’ll get around to writing a full post about how odd it is to think that stuff I’ve written is read by strangers (or distant acquaintances, or even people I only know through writer-type activities), but suffice to say that it’s still something that comes as a nice surprise when stuff like this happens.

Allow me to introduce you to the great redundancy in my flat:

The redundancy, for the curious, comes in couch form (and possibly the desk in the lower foreground since I’ve already got two others, but the desk is awesome and thus excused from such considerations). My lounge room can seat six or seven people, yet it’s rare that I’ll ever have that many people in my place. I’m a little weird about letting people into my space at the best of times, and I’ve filled all three couches only twice in a two-year period (and that was for gaming purposes, the one exception to my I don’t invite people around weirdness). Therefore the primary purpose of having three couches is so I can do horrible things to my back while falling asleep in front of the TV – swapping between the two-seater and the three-seater on a daily basis keeps the kinks from settling in one part.

I’ve spent a large portion of today wandering around my flat and wondering why I really have things. Realistically I could move my TV into the bedroom and replace the couches with a nice dining room table without any real loss of functionability (in fact, the dining room table would see more use, being more convenient for eating and table-top gaming than the couch/coffee table combo). And yet I remain oddly attached to the couches. It’d feel odd not to have them around.