Category: Stuff

If my email and messages are to be trusted, we’ve hit the point of the year where a bunch of students are sitting down to analyse To Dream of Stars and discovering they have questions. I’m not in a position to respond to people one-on-one due to deadlines right now, but for those of you who have found your way here looking for more information, there’s a whole FAQ post about that story that might be useful. Then again, it might not. The interesting thing about writing fiction is the way other people see things in the work that you don’t, and that’s been particularly true for To Dream of Stars since I sent it out to my beta readers and they started pointing at interesting-things-I’d-done that I was completely blind too.

The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them). After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all. Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here). MY CHECK-IN What am I working on this week? I’ve got my eye on

Many years ago, I worked a shift at dayjob where shit well-and-truly hit the fan. We were preparing for one of our busiest periods of the year–lots of incoming calls from lots of panicked writers looking to double-check a big opportunity™ deadline, while simultaneously trying to prep for other big projects that were coming up. Big opportunity™ deadline days weren’t fun days at the best of time, but within the first hour of this one kicking off shit started going wrong. One staff member’s flight home had been delayed by twenty-four hours. Another staff member called in sick (from memory, they were heading to hospital). Our then-CEO was incomunicado for the day (for reasons I don’t recall), and the two other staff members on deck were both relatively new to the organisation. On top of that, i was relatively new to the role I was working and the projects I was working on. It was a time of transition, new

When I moved in with my partner, I moved in with a pair of guinea pigs. For a while this felt like a considerably bigger deal that living with another person, as I’m generally not a pet person and never really wanted to be. My partner specifically adopted boars when she decided to live with guinea pigs, since they’re harder to find homes for than females pigs. The current two don’t get along well–when spending time in the same pen they’ll get into an ongoing contest for territory–but guinea pigs are social creatures, which means they like being able to talk to one-another so long as there’s a fence between them. They’re also ravenous little buggers, prone to wheeking for snacks and demanding attention the moment you walk into the room. On the days when I work from home, I walk into that room an awful lot.  Which probably explains a good chunk of my instagram over the last twelve