When I was in my second year of university we studied Hotel Sorrento, a play by the Australian playwright Hannie Rayson that was later turned into a film. One of the themes running through the play – one of many – was an exploration of melancholy, and two lines in particular remained with me some fifteen years after I first read it.

The first was a female character asserting that men do not feel melancholy, that it’s a particularly female emotion. The second was the definition: a sweet and pensive sadness.

A sweet and pensive sadness.

I mean, fuck, how do you go past that, eh? It’s a beautifully expressed idea when you hear it at nineteen, and I was immediately smitten. I don’t remember how it happened, or where it happened, but I fell and I fell hard, in a very, melancholy, fuck yeah, that’s the stuff for me kind of way.

I still have my copy of the Hotel Sorrento script, long after I’ve thrown out or given away the vast majority of the play-scripts I studied at university. I haven’t read it in over a decade, but it comforts me to know it’s around.

Whose Going to Drive You Home?

When I was in my second year of university — or perhaps my third — I discovered the Paradise Motel. They’d done a cover of The Car’s Whose Going to Drive You Home, transforming a preppy pop hit into four and a half minutes of string-laden heart-ache and darkness, and it got played on the Triple J a couple of times despite the fact that the cover is one of the least radio-friendly songs I can imagine once you get past the surprise that is recognizing the song they’re covering.

Still, it was beautiful. I don’t know what I was doing the first time I heard it, but odds are I stopped. I still stop when the Paradise Motel version of Drive comes on my MP3 player, because it’s that kind of song.

It’s hard to describe the effect of the cover if you’ve never heard it. It starts with slow strings, perhaps some kind synthesizer or keyboard underscoring it. There’s nothing pop about it at all – instead it’s got the slow, aching pace associated with a sound track, the kind of thing that plays when the movie reaches its penultimate moment of profundity.

It’s twenty-five seconds into the song before you get the first line, delivered in Merida Sussex’s throaty whisper: whose going to tell you when…it’s too late…whose going to tell you things… aren’t so great…you can’t go on…thinking nothing’s wrong.

Whose going to drive you home…tonight.

I mean, Jesus. The whole damn cover captured something that’d been at the heart of the Cars hit the whole damn time: a sweet and pensive sadness.

I fell and I fell hard.

Pit Stops

I’m not exactly sure when, or if, I’ll post this. I started writing this because I’ve blown out my internet bandwidth only two weeks into the month, dropping me down to the snail-like speed that comes from exceeding your limitations, so blogging and other internet-related activities have become somewhat untenable. I wouldn’t be writing this at all except that I’m stuck, unable to progress on the current story, and my brain is making insistent noises about the lack of blogging that’s happened in recent weeks.

Right now it’s twelve thirty at night and I’m wittering away on Fritz the Laptop, putting down words because it’s the putting-down-words time of the evening and there’s no other words coming. It’s been raining, on and off, for most of the evening. The air crisp and cold, but not in a vile and bone-chilling way, just in that pleasant late-winter way that says spring is coming but it isn’t quite here yet. I’ve turned off all the lights and dragged Fritz to bed, working by the pale glow of the screen.

The flat is still, my neighbors are blessedly quiet, and there’s a new Paradise Motel album playing. It’s titled Australian Ghost Stories and it came out in 2009, but somehow I managed to miss it until an unexpected pit-stop at the Logan JB Hi-Fi unearthed two new Paradise Motel albums that I’d never come across before.

This happened about a week ago. I was driving down to the Gold Coast and I’d forgotten to pack some CDs for the trip, which wasn’t a huge deal except for the fact that I’d lose radio reception about halfway through the hour-long trip and I’m not a fan of listening to the noises my car makes while I’m driving.

And so there was a pit-stop to pick up CDs, a rarity in my world these days, and in the back of my mind there was a nagging voice saying that a new Paradise Motel album was coming after a long, long delay.

Scenes from Movies That Never Got Made

It’s taken me seven days to get around to listening to the two albums. There’s a very simple reason for this: The Paradise Motel aren’t road-trip music. Their albums are lush soundscapes, almost cinematic in their approach. The vast majority of their songs make me imagine films that have never been made, slow-moving atmosphere pieces that are equal parts anarchy and beauty, with the Paradise Motel providing the pivotal track that appears in the penultimate moment of realization when the protagonists have lost all there is to lose.

These aren’t popular movies. They’re the awkward, under-funded pieces featuring stars like Johnny Depp who are there as a favour to the director, putting in the hours between more successful films (back before their successful films were things Chocolat rather than Pirates of the Caribbean). They aren’t films that are universally beloved, but they’re films that are fiercely loved by the small groups of people who enjoy them, inspiring the kind of passion that lasts for decades.

Every shot that the Paradise Motel is used for takes place between midnight and dawn. They are universally scenes featuring characters staring at empty beaches, or wandering drunk and lonely through empty Parisian streets, or engaging in sweet and pensive lovemaking that makes you wish you were more in love than you are right now.

There’s no way to listen to that kind of music when you’re driving down a highway at a hundred kilometers an hour. I paid ten bucks for a third CD – the Best of Roxy Music – and spent the trip singing along to Virginia Plain instead.

Flight Paths

So me and the Paradise Motel, that was love at first sight. Or hearting, whatever, you get the picture. That doesn’t mean it was easy to become a fan of the band. This was the days before the internet had solidified into its current form, before youtube and iTunes, possibly even before Napster was a thing and record stores started going the way of the dodo.

It took over a year to track down the Flight Paths album that contained the song. For starters, I’d managed to forget the name of the band after hearing the song the first time, so it became one of those things I kept listening out for on the radio, hoping like hell I hadn’t missed the back-announce telling me who it was.

Secondly, I lived on the Gold Coast, which was hardly a Mecca for independent music stores likely to stock Paradise Motel albums. Plus I was a uni student, which automatically meant I subsisted in the wage bracket known as ‘single, broke, living on two-minute-noodles, and utterly lacking in political capital’.

I found a copy of Flight Paths in a small, second-hand record store that resided in a Southport attic. It was a pretty cool place, all things considered; the same store that eventually sold me copies of Smiths LPs, a vinyl copy of the Love Will Tear Us Apart single, and more band t-shirts than I’m really comfortable admitting too. The fact that such a thing existed on the Gold Coast probably kept me living in the city for about twelve-months longer than I would have otherwise, ’cause by twenty-two I was largely sick of the place.

My copy of Flight Paths cost me $12. I didn’t have the money the first time I saw it there, but I cut back on cask wine for a week and scrounged together enough to get it the next time payday rolled around.

Then I took it home and listened to it, repetitively, for six weeks straight. It’s still the best $12 I ever spent on a CD.

But yes, I forgot I bought books. It’s been that kind of week.

On Monday I went up to Rockhampton for the day job, meeting with people and seeing places that are part of the project I’m project-officering for the Queensland Writer’s Center. I’ve known a few people who grew up in Rockhampton over the years, most of whom speak of their former home with the lack of affection that comes from being a teenager growing up in a smallish-city/largish-town, but it turned out to be a lovely city that utterly deserves to be overrun by a steampunks. Lots of glorious old buildings and very wide streets and a surprisingly good sushi place in the CBD.

My favourite part of the trip, however, was the ride home. We had some technical difficulties prior to take-off, the kind that see you go the tarmac and sit there for a while before the plan returns to the gate. There were appologise from the pilot and frustrated passengers and messages sent to the ground crew.

Then they turned the plane off and turned it on again, and apparently everything worked just fine.

Technical support is the same everywhere, I guess.

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I’ve been reading China Miéville’s Kraken at the moment, which is a somewhat surprising book. I’m used to Miéville’s books being good – even when I don’t particularly enjoy them, they’re always an engaging reading experience – and I’m used to them being interesting, but this is the first time I’ve read a China Miéville book and thought, wow, this is fun. There’s weird cults and giant squid and a reference to Pauley Perrette within the first fifty pages.

I like it when writers surprise me.

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On Thursday there was write-club at Angela Slatter’s place and I did a bunch of words on Flotsam and a slightly lower number of words on Claw and a handful of words on a short story. I’ve been writing the last five stories in the Flotsam series as a single, novella-length thing rather than five individual stories, mostly as a way of ensuring that I get everything done that I want to get done by the time the final story hits in December.

Chapter 1/Flotsam 8 is more or less drafted, which means there is rewriting and editing and figuring out of a title, but there’s at least eleven days before it’s submitted and that’s more lead time I’ve had for a Flotsam installment all year. I find myself opening up the draft and looking at the file with suspicion, rather the same way you glare at the sunlight when you come out of a movie cinema in the afternoon expecting it to be night and it isn’t.

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Every now and then people send me links to flash games, and I almost immediately wish they wouldn’t because flash games are the kind of evil that keeps me from doing anything for several hours. Angry Birds ate most of the twenty-four hours, Sushi Cat devoured an entire week while I played and replayed, Dice Wars continues to be far more engaging than any game that simple deserves to be.

Occasionally people ask me to join them on MMOs, and I mostly just laugh and explain there’s no way in hell. The closest I ever got was spending two weeks playing Champions Online, ’cause it was free and it was super-heroes and OMG there are some things that shouldn’t be allowed to exist, and after I tore myself away from that experience I vowed not to go back for fear that I would never do anything else again, ever.

This is not an invitation to send me links to flash games. More a plea that people stop.

Naturally, my first response was sweet, free books, cause books that arrive in my PO Box are always free books by virtue of the fact that I’ve already paid for them and forgotten about it. It’s one of the more pleasant aspects of ordering books via the internet, especially if you have the same inclinations towards pre-ordering things that I do.

Except this time they actually were free books, I think, presumably because I was tangentially involved in the workshop put on for the finalists in the One Book, Many Brisbane’s competition, where, basically, I showed up and talked about writing for an hour or so with Cat Sparks and an editor for Overland whose name currently eludes me

Every now and then writers like to talk about how writing is a remarkably poor career choice, or at least a remarkably hard one, but the plus side is that every now and then someone will pay you to show up, talk about something you love, meet some new people who are generally interesting, and then hang-out with your friends for a bit afterwards.

And very occasionally you get sent free books, which is the sort of thing I’d hoped actually happened to writers back when I was ten and decided writing seemed like an interesting sort of job to spend the rest of my life pursuing.

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Today is my last class out at UQ. Given that the assignments are all done and the class was remarkably small to begin with (7 people), I have a small bet with myself regarding how many people will actually show up for a Friday afternoon writing class on the last day of the semester.

I will be sad that the writing classes are done for the year. I rather miss teaching writing, for a variety of reasons, but the last few weeks have really brought home how useful it is to go back to basics. It’s no coincidence that we get to the tail end of the semester, with the marking and the what-do-you-do-when-this-story-is-done style questions, and there are suddenly stories being submitted again.

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There is no third part to this entry.

Edit: Actually, no, just remembered, there is – Happy Birthday to JJ Irwin, who is one of the more talented writers I know who continues to not be published enough by virtue of the fact she goes off to do things like getting Master’s degrees. I recommend going back a few years and rereading her story, Still Living, over at Strange Horizons. Or checking out her story, Haniver, in the latest issue of Shimmer.

Tonight I shall make the most un-Moroccan Moroccan chicken imaginable, given that it will consist primarily of pumpkin soup with chickpeas and bits of chicken in it, spread over a layer of couscous. The couscous, by and large, is probably going to be the best bit. Possibly also the only bit that qualifies as Moroccan.

It will, at least, be healthy un-Moroccan chicken, if the Australian Heart Foundation website is to be believed, and that’s probably a good thing after the week of pizza that occurred when I was last chasing a deadline.

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There’s a rather nice review of both Horn and Bleed over on the Living in SIN blog, which is  not the kind of blog you’d expect it to be from the title and entirely safe for work. I keep meaning to point people towards reviews of my story in Eclipse 4 as well, but every time I think about it I’m writing a bit of the blog during a coffee break at the dayjob, far away from the bookmarks where I group such things together and keep them handy for linkage.

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I kept trying to disappear into the bunker over the weekend, but somehow events conspired to ensure I never really made it there. I kept being distracted by, say, dinner with my sister and our friend VillainousMog who was visiting from London for the first time in two years and made for some excellent company.

On Sunday I was distracted by sleep and goodreads and the search for a good hotdog and the usual Sunday night gaming session, which meant I hit the end of the weekend feeling oddly relaxed and socialised and in possession of about three thousand words to account for two days work.

Which isn’t bad, I’ll grant you that, but isn’t really the stuff of a heroic effort in the word-bunker either. Still, the novel has a shape forming that’s actually novel-like, and the short story I’m working on hit a point where I figured out what it wanted to do, and I suspect that this afternoon I’ll get back hitting 2,500 words in a day, if only because I’ve run out of distractions and large portions of my house are now clean.

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I started reading China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun over the weekened, which was going swimmingly until such time as I hit one of those things that makes me go “oh, really? We’re doing that? Okay, I guess,” and then suddenly be much less interested in the book.

It’s the sort of thing that happens to me and books all the time. I’ll be enjoying myself immensely and then, out of nowhere, there’s be a parenthetical aside in a third-person narration, and I’ll find my enjoyment deflated and listless from there on. Un Lun Dun doesn’t do the parenthetical aside thing, but it introduces a concept and bit of wordplay that’s distracting enough that I can’t get back into the story.

It’s like that moment when you’re at a party, having a good time, then you realise that you’re actually quite drunk and you can’t get your equilibrium back once that realisation happens.

Still, I persevere, slightly less enthused than I was before, but still enjoying myself. And because The City and The City was brilliant and full of words that didn’t alienate me, and so I’ll trust in pretty much anything Miéville does after that.

And because, more often than not,  Miéville manages the opposite thing, where the right word or concept is introduced at exactly the right time, and thus there is a moment of joy to be had.

Usually there’s something painful about the proofing process, mixing, as it does,   a multitude of how-could-I-be-so-stupid typos and syntax errors with the larger, more consuming fear that the story itself isn’t any good because so-much-time-has-passed-since-you-submitted-it-and-you’ve-become-a-better-writer-than-you-were-and-would-do-things-so-very-differently-now.

The latter part didn’t really happen this time around. I’m still fond the story and think it does all the things I wanted it to do, and the bits I’d do differently I probably wouldn’t do that much better, so they don’t bother me quite so much.

I’m not sure whether this bodes ill for the story or not, once it’s out in the world, but I guess we’ll see next week when it’s sent out to Daily SF’s subscribers.

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Last night’s writing? The skeleton for the first half of Chapter Three for Black Candy – I know how the scenes begin and end, I just have to write the middles – and some more work on Waiting for the Steamer on the Docks of V—, which is heading off in its own little direction and getting longer every time I work on it. About 1,500 words of writing all up, which is less than I wanted by more than I expected given I didn’t get home from work until 8-ish.

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This morning I woke up an hour or so before my alarm, and it was cold and dark and I wasn’t all that sleepy anymore, so I stayed up and idled away the time for a bit, just enjoying the warmth of my bed and the slow shift of light on the curtains and the occasional checking of email on my phone.

Eventually the world woke up around me, so I climbed out of bed and went into the routine. I danced around the bedroom to the Sisters of Mercy’s Temple of Love. I showered and I shaved. I ate breakfast and ironed a shirt to wear to the dayjob. And since I was up early, and more awake than I generally am, I finished all those things much earlier than expected, so by seven thirty I was standing around my living room trying to work out what I’d do to fill the next three quarters of an hour before I drove to work.

So I started reading The Girl With No Hands and Other Tales, since it’s one of the things that was handy on my living room shelves  that I haven’t also read in its entirety, largely because I’ve read a large majority of the stories in other locations.

I’d forgotten just how good Angela Slatter actually is. I mean, obviously I’d remembered that she’s a very, very good writer and I’ve recommended her to people constantly, but I’d forgotten that moment where, say, you read Bluebeard for  and go “oh, sodding hell, this is  brilliant” and go give up on writing for a while because there’s no chance you’ll ever manage something that precise and intricate and resonant. I know this because, the first time I read this, just after Angela and I met and before we were actually friends, I wandered off and tried very hard to do what she did in that story and ended up somewhere very different and nowhere near as good.

But that’s one of the ways writing works, I think. You just keep having conversations with writers who are better than you, except you do it through  fiction because telephones are scary and you’re too damn lazy to email people you don’t really know.

And now I go to talk about writing with undergraduates, whereupon I will try to explain writing in a far less esoteric - but potentially more useful – manner.

Yesterday I had a phone call from my father which started along the lines of “yes, well, I can see how PJ Harvey would wake you up in the morning.” Apparently he googles bands when I mention them on my blog, just to get some idea of what I’m listening too.

So, for my dad and anyone else following my music taste online, I’m going to recommend *not* googling Peaches while at work. I mean, you can if you want, but I’m taking no responsibility when you find yourself singing Fuck the Pain Away beneath your breath while other people are in earshot.

Should you not wish to take my warning, I recommend Youtube. The clip for the song is awesome.

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Every time I hear someone banging on about sexism being erradicated and feminism no longer being necessary, my first impulse is to turn and start ranting about billboards. I mean, being white and male and loaded with middle class privilige, I’m hardly the most astute feminist commentator around, and even I walk past billboards going “seriously, dude, WTF?”

Yesterday I came across one of the worst offenders I’ve seen in a long time. I was doing deliveries out in the southern suburbs of Brisbane, stuck at an intersection, and from a distance spotted something that looked like a billboard where the only thing that was visible from a distance were the silhouettes of three women who were in the oddly-contorted “sexy” poses I’ve come to associate with the billboards for one of Brisbane’s most over-promoted strip clubs.

Turned out it was a billboard for a local hardware store. The ad text, nigh invisible from the original distance, made it 100% obvious that the sexualised poses weren’t accidental. It read, basically, “can’t imagine these three together? We can.”

Twenty four hours later I’m still bothered by the billboard’s existence. I sincerely hope it’s losing them business, if only so people will one day stop saying “sex sells” when talking about advertising things that have nothing to do with sex (unless, of course, this is a sex shop for those with a hardware fetish, but somehow I doubt it).

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I wrote a bunch of emails yesterday, largely just saying hello to a bunch of people I haven’t seen in a while. Most of them were people I knew pre-email and aren’t really email type people, but I figured there wasn’t much to lose and tried it anyway.

Afterwards I sat down and wrote. About a twelve hundred words on a story titled Waiting for the Steamer on the Docks of V—, which will probably not be the final title, but amuses me for the moment because I like it when older stories use an initial and an em-dash instead of an actual name, even if I’ve never precisely understood why it happens. I’m somewhat fond of this story, already, and I have not been fond of any story I’ve written in its nascent form for quite some time. Because of this, I shall engage in WIP excerptery:

Patrick chooses the café where we eat breakfast. We walk up a narrow flight of stairs and sit on a terrace balcony, looking down the long street filled with cyclists and porters and beggars clustered around the alleyways. The café has glass tabletops that are damp with morning condensation, the droplets of water still touched with the brown of the river. There are streaks of dirt on the red tile floor. The café was recommended by a friend of Patrick’s back in Brisbane. I wonder if we too will recommend it once the distance of hindsight banishes the horror of eating there.

Afterwards I wrote a beginning to Flotsam 6 which actually felt like a beginning, rather than an action sequence which didn’t quite fit, and then some more tinkering on Black Candy, whereupon I realised that one of my many beginnings would actually make a fine end to the first act if one of the random-characters-who-never-actually-appears-again becomes one of the important-characters-who-doesn’t-appear-enough. Once again I am the victim of novel-flail.

Honestly, I really would like to write books for a living, if I could but figure out how to write books instead of stories. I shall get there, I’m sure, but it takes so very long and there are so many foolish mistakes.

It wasn’t quite a full day’s quota of writing, but it was in the zone that I’m happy with between 2,000 and 2,500 words total, and I didn’t feel too guilty about packing Fritz the Laptop away and going to bed a little early.

I suspect there will be very little writing tonight. There are classes, and there are proofs to proof, and I don’t finish the classes until late. At some point in there I should make myself chili, for I shopped and bought real food, and it requires cooking.

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There was something else I was going to mention, but I appear to have forgotten it.

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I’m preparing to disappear into a writing bunker for the next few months, squirreling myself away behind a barricade of unread books and manuscript drafts with naught but Fritz the Laptop and the Spokesbear for company.

My plan is to read things and write things and emerge only for food, dayjobbery, roleplaying games and the occasional offer of coffee when the absence of real conversation becomes to much. Beyond that I shall practice the exquisite art of saying no to things. Preferably before people finish their invitations, lest I be tempted into whatever coolness they’re offering. I shall leave aside any plans for my career or thoughts of branding and professionalism in writing or pondering whether I should be doing the ebook thing (which I would, if I wrote faster, but I don’t at the moment), and I shall write. Like a demon. For ninety days.

And I shall do this because it’s fun, and everything else will take care of itself.

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One of the most intriguing things about living in the future, such as we do, is that there are now writers who I love and admire that have been maintaining weblogs for a decade or more. And while it’s very easy to start thinking of the internet as a place where things happen now now now, it’s actually remarkably useful to go back and look through several years worth of journal entries or blog posts, noting the changes in style and the shift from being a writer who sells short stories to Asimov’s or Strange Horizons, into a writer who strides across the publishing world like a colossus.

Writers grow up in public now, the vagaries of their careers charted and commented on and posted for the world to see. And that stuff sticks around, for years at a time. It’s the sort of thing you only used to get by, say, reading a collected edition of a writer’s letters, or the occasional writer’s diary.

I say again, as I often do, fuck the flying cars. They may be the flashy side of the future, but the ease with which we can access the history of other people’s thoughts is a far more subtle and impressive feat.

There are certainly worse ways to start your day, even if it does mean you’re five minutes late for work and the chaos that entails. Here’s hoping your day started just as well (and if it didn’t, I can recommend dancing to PJ Harvey to start your day tomorrow).

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I mentioned this on twitter when I first read it, but I’m posting a link here because its just that good. If you have any interest at all in fantasy, writing, fairy tales, or just general awesomeness, please go take a look at Catherine Valente’s Confessions of a Fairytale Addict over on Tor.com.

There are many writers of fiction who double as excellent writers of essays, and Valente is easily one of the best I’ve come across in recent years. In a fair and just world someone would probably go and pay her to write a book of essays, which would be smart and cutting and ultimately brilliant, but since we live in a capitalist culture where essays are an undervalued form we take what we can get.

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So yesterday there was writing. A thousand words on Flotsam 6, a thousand words on a short story, and some writing of new scenes for Black Candy since I’ve officially given up on rewriting the bastard book and just started redrafting it from the beginning so I can make it story shaped without doing my head in.

By ten o’clock I’d done my 2,500 words for the day and stopped, since I’m trying to get out of the binge-writing habit and back into something that resembles a work ethic. Being done by ten o’clock is slightly odd, since it meant there was still an hour to go before I usually collapsed into bed, half-dressed and fretting about not being done.

So I had a cup of tea and read for a bit, working my way a little deeper into Charles de Lint’s Dreams Underfoot, and then I went to sleep.

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I’ve typed the title of the de Lint collection three times today, and every time I’ve typed it Dreams Underfood, which is weird because I’m not entirely sure why my subconscious is latching onto that particular mistake and repeating it over and over.

I find myself suddenly tempted to write about the existence of a magical, dreamlike land that exists at the bottom of the pantry, waging wars with the goblins who live in the nightmares that occur when eating cheese too close to bedtime.

Or, you know, not. There are some ideas that aren’t quite worth pursuing.

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I find myself, inexplicably, missing a number of people I used to know. It’s happened a few times this week, and it’s quite bothersome, because I’m not terribly good at keeping up with the people I currently know, let alone the friends who have gradually drifted away over the years. I imagine things would have been easier if something like Skype existed ten years ago, but I suppose we had email back then, and that doesn’t seemed to have helped.

I suspect this will result in stories. It usually does, for some reason. Stories are the way things get worked out in my head.

What I’d like it to result in is a whirlwind trip to Melbourne, say, or Adelaide, and places even further afield, with lots of surprise visits and bottles of wine and interesting arguments, but at the moment the logistics for a whirlwind trip to the grocery store is really more my speed.

One day I will remedy this, really I will, but today I will content myself with spicy tomato soup and a nice thick slice of crusty bread and some quality time with Fritz the laptop where I get today’s 2,500 words written.

I do, however, have several pages of notes I put together in preparation for the panel I didn’t make it too, and since I’m a waste-not, want-not kind of guy, I figured I’d torture the rest of you with a more formalized write-up of the argument I would have made. Turns out I had rather a lot of material once I started writing things up, so it’s probably going to happen in three or four posts over the next couple of days. Consider yourselves warned.

Emotion, Attachment, and Video Games
Part One: The Confession of a Computer Game Tragic

I live in fear of computer games. I am, at my core, one of those gamers – the kind who lacks the self-control to say ‘now is the time to walk away.’ Once the game is started, I have about half an hour to turn it off and get back to my real life; beyond that, I’ve committed. I want to figure out how to win, or how it ends, or even what the next cut scene might be, and then it’s three days later and I haven’t slept and I’ve burned through the bulk of my sick leave in an attempt to try and stop the dark spawn from taking over Ferelden. The game itself doesn’t seem to matter – I can spend three days trying to figure out how to beat an online flash game like Dice Wars or take my promotion to the top in my favourite wrestling sim just as easily as I’ll get sucked into high-profile, gaming wonders with state-of-the-art CGI and thousands upon thousands hours spent in development.

My only defence against this obsessive impulse seems to be refusing to play in the first place, so for the last seven or eight years I’ve refused to let computer games into my house. Mostly this is pretty easy, because I control the technology around me. My computers are low-budget machines, utterly incapable of running state of the art games; I’ve refused to own a gaming consol since I picked up an original NES system at an op-shop in my twenties and lost six weeks to beating the original Super Mario Brothers games; my despair when I upgraded my mobile phone and it came with computer games was considerable, but I found the resolve to delete the ones I liked and now play the ones I don’t when stuck in an airport.

Yet despite my best effort, technology creeps forward. Computers die and get replaced, and suddenly all those games I would have played a few years back if the technology had been up to it are available to me. And occasionally I’ll slip. I’ll break out the copy of Blood Bowl, which I justified as an online game that has a set time-limit to prevent me from going overboard, or I’ll fire up my favourite wrestling sim, which is by nature unbeatable and therefore unlikely to set off my need to achieve.

These are, of course, convenient lies I tell myself because I can’t quite kick the computer game habit, but at least I’ve grown familiar with the cycle of playing both games over the last few years. After a day, maybe two, I’ll realise that my promise that I’m just firing it up for an hour or so is shot and pull myself to a halt.

It would be easier if my friends gave up gaming as well, but they don’t. People will rave at me about their new favourites from time to time, rattling off the cool features, and I’ll find myself tempted. Very occasionally I’ll break and ask to borrow their copy, and I now thank the digital gods that most people now have Steam accounts and aren’t in a position to loan me their actual discs. With the delivery of games via disc becoming outmoded, I am safer from computer games than ever before.

Except when the games are cool enough that people really want to make sure they never lose their copy to hard-drive failure or power surges. Apparently there are still some games worth picking up, old school-like, and thus remain available for being left out. Which is how, six months ago, I found myself playing Dragon Age: Origins. Before I began, I was told three things: play it all the way through, once; play all the introductory stories; be prepared to spend the majority of your time talking to people in the camping site.

While I never managed to reach the end of the game – it’s crack-like qualities were sufficient that after the first week of playing I gave the discs back and asked that it never be leant to me again, for fear I’d stop writing altogether – I did play several of the introductions and the camp proved to be the most fascinating part of the game-play. I also know how it ends – my frustration with the gameplay interrupting the narrative led me to checking out walkthroughs and cheat-sheets, which ultimately led to me shrugging and realising that I was less interested in the game as a game once I knew all the alternative storylines.

This is not the first time this has happened. Many years ago, back before I realised me and computer games didn’t really mix, I started playing Starcraft. My interest in the game ended the moment a friend said “you know, I have this DVD full of cut scenes”, whereupon I promptly watched the story without the game and went on with my life.

Here’s the brutal truth of my relationship with computer games: I’m interested in their narratives, but can’t engage with the narrative because of the game play. As soon as you establish conditions of victory or submission, I’m hardwired to try and win. This, more than anything else, kills my interest in the game the moment it becomes apparent that victory will take days or weeks to achieve.

Computer games aren’t stories, and in this respect their attempts to manipulate emotions always feels like a bit of a cheat.

To be continued…

The last few days have settled into a comfortable kind of routine – I get home from the dayjob, I don’t turn on the internet, I read a book until five o’clock or so, then I eat dinner and force myself to write 1000 words before I go to sleep. My brain’s resisting the latter – last night I wrote the first five hundred words with ease, then scrambled for the last four hundred or so for hours before admitting defeat and collapsing into bed.

Tonight there is teaching, which means I’ll have to forgo the reading, and the 1000 words will be an even bigger challenge. It needs to be done, because at this point 1000 words a day is pretty much the line between me and wholesale insanity, and I’d prefer not to be going into guilt-induced craziness as the year progresses. I am far too fond of drama, after all, and I really need to get over that.

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In my spare time, at the dayjob, I’m trying to figure out how to sculpt a horse out of paperclips. Not a terribly good horse, for I’m not that artistically inclined, but something that’s satisfyingly horse-like. I’m currently struggling with the tail.

So if anyone knows any good sculpting-horses-out-of-paperclip type tips, I’d be happy to learn them.

And now that I typed that, man, I really miss working from home. At least there my time-filling exercises were things like cleaning the bathroom or baking cupcakes.

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I did make chili last night, and it was quite good. Unfortunately, I left out the bacon. Fortunately, this means I’ll be eating bacon and eggs for lunch today, which is one of those side-effects that make me happy.

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I’m listening to the Prodigy a lot this week, which is kinda weird. It’s been years since I last plot-danced to Voodoo People. We’re talkin’ the fricken’ nineties.

I would imbed the video, but apparently that doesn’t work for this site anymore (which means, I suppose, there’s a redesign in the works somewhere in the future). I guess you’ll just have to make do do-do do doo, do do-do do-do sounds yourself, then whisper the words magic-people-voodoo-people yourself to get the right effect. Or you can follow a link.

Somehow people neglected to mention that I was having a truly dire bad hair day yesterday. I managed to ignore it myself, right up until I got home from tutorials, caught sight of my reflection, and thought “hmmm, that’s not a look I want to continue with, is it?”

For a while now I’ve been aware that I’m hitting the decision point where I either shave my head again, or settle in for the process of growing my hair out. These are, by and large, the only real options with my hair – genetics have essentially eliminated all other possibilities due to a weird series of cowlicks and a tendency towards ringlets.

I used to think it came from my mother’s side of the family, largely because my dad has maintained the same hairstyle since I was, like, four, but after his brief experimentation with forgoing the regular haircut earlier this year I learned that it may well have been the male half of my DNA that’s causing problems.

Still, either way, I’m destined for either short-haired spikes or long-haired scruffiness. They’re the only two approaches that have ever really worked for me (for a certain value of “works” which mostly includes being better than the alternatives), and I’m still not entirely sure which I want to head towards.

Expect I will flip a coin over the weekend.

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Two good days of writing in a row. Not great writing, but that’s fine, I’m writing first drafts and they don’t have to be great. But good writing, stuff that feels like it’s heading in a direction I like, rather than being written for the sake of writing wordcount.

Either way, I suspect I’m done with my attack of distemper. If I’ve been scaring you off with the attack of the grumpy pants this week, it’s probably safe to return.

Probably.

You know, like, 90% safe. Or maybe 85%, if we’re giving ourselves a buffer.

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I am behind on email again. This, too, will be rectified over the weekend.

And I really need to start remembering to bring a snack to the Dayjob on Fridays, because the sprint from the dayjob offices to the university tutorial room doesn’t exactly leave time for eating. This is how bad habits start forming, much like the late finish on Thursday nights is turning into a bugger it, I’ll just eat take-out habit on the way home.

My life, I tell you, the glamour and wonder.

See you all monday.