Tag: University Days

Big Thoughts

Everything is Artifice

Years ago, when I first started my never-to-be-finished PhD, I had one simple belief: everything is artifice. I suppose it’s a natural enough conclusion to come to when you’re twenty-two years old and reading Lyotard’s theories on the post-modern condition during the bulk of your waking hours, and it certainly seemed to explain an awful lot about the things I didn’t quite understand about the world. That any attempt at authenticity was but a carefully constructed stratagem to create the illusion of authenticity made sense to me. After all, I lived on the Gold Coast. Trying to deal with the concept of authenticity on the Gold Coast is fucking confusing, since the whole damn city embraces artifice as its default state.  You make sense of it as best you can, or you get the get the hell out. These days I’m older and dumber and I have about thirteen years of additional experience to process, and I’m still not entirely sure that my

Journal

Two things, with a final statement (Actually, three things, I’m just forgetful)

Yesterday I went to the PO Box and discovered three copies of the latest One Book, Many Brisbanes anthologies waiting for me. 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

Works in Progress

Lost at Uni & Sad News about Clarion South

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 was trying to work out where I was going to go to university and UQ was my more-or-less second choice due to the lack of an actual undergraduate writing program and my parents informing me that I’d spend my first year living in an all-boys Christian college. I went back once again for a friend’s art show, but that only required me to find a building very close to the car park, right on the outskirts on the campus. Apart from that, it was unfamiliar territory. Turns out it’s quite big, and they’re very fond of stonework. Also, when printed, the campus maps have very

Works in Progress

Shadows

So there’s a  shortlist for the 2010 Australian Shadows horror awards available online, which includes Bleed in the Long Fiction category alongside such brilliant works as Angela Slatter’s The Girl With No Hands and Other Stories and Kirstyn McDermott’s Madigan Mine and a handful of books I haven’t yet come across but I’m sure are excellent ’cause, really, once you start with Madigan Mine and The Girl with No Hands I’m inclined to just trust the judges tastes – those books are freakin’ great. So it’s a happy sort of day, even if it feels a bit odd to be on the short list because Bleed isn’t really a horror story. The complete short-list looks something like this, and it’s full of names that I’m very happy to see on short-lists. Congratulations to all who made it. LONG FICTION Madigan Mine by Kirstyn McDermott (Picador Australia) The Girl With No Hands by Angela Slatter (Ticonderoga Publications) Guardian of the Dead by

Works in Progress

i guess that i could get crazy now baby

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

Journal

The things you forget

First real day of classes today, which basically meant I spent seven hours running around like a mad rabbit trying to explain things without a break. Am now thoroughly exhausted and good for nothing, but feeling that warm accomplished glow that comes from returning to work. But, oh god, I forgot exactly how tiring first year classes are. I shall do very little tonight that is not television, reading, and picking up a meal from Subway.

Works in Progress

The Thesis March, an update

Yesterday was the last full day I’d get to spend on the thesis for over a week, and by the time I collapsed into my bed in the wee hours of morning I remember feeling upset by how little I’d achieved. Today I feel pretty good about it; frustrated, to be sure, but object enough to recognise that yesterday’s wordcount was actually pretty good by my standards. The reason I stalled out around three AM is because I realised that while I could identify the function genre plays in the process of editing work, I wasn’t yet doing anything with the realisation except pointing out that it’s there – it’s an example in need of practical application and I’m not yet sure how to do so without actively editing a piece within the exegesis itself (and, I’ll be honest, I’ve already played that trick in the preface when addressing the genre of the exegesis). While I’m not quite at a

Works in Progress

Thesis Update

Just dropping in with the following reports: The official wordcount (aka words actually in draft documents, rather than random notes) just topped 10k. I have, for the first time since I started the damn thing, actually finished a chapter. I have, for the first time since I started the damn thing, actually got a plan for proceeding that seems workable. This, of course, just means I have to get 20,000 words written between now and Wednesday evening. That’s a far worse thing than it sounds, incidently; I could probably get 5000 words a day done in a pinch, but I’ll be utterly useless for anything else afterwards and that’s not a luxury I’m going to get anytime soon. I suspect there will be some measure of begging for mercy in my near future.

Works in Progress

Because this is all my brain is up for today…

The good thing about trying to hit a deadline and being behind: you start to figure out ways to fix stories and ideas that are broken, potentially unsaleable and not on deadline. Yesterday I took an hour away from the books to write up a plan of what I could do to transform all my second-person-present-tense-vaguely-cyberpunk vignettes into a solid-ish mosiac novella. I just spent the last half-hour writing notes about the way to expand and fix the problems on the zombie novella I wrote as part of the AHWA mentorship in 2007. It’s all distraction to draw me away from the work that really needs doing, but at least the notes will be waiting for me once I get the thesis draft down.

Works in Progress

The theory of relativity as it applies to writing

The difference between a good days work and a bad days work can depend entirely on how close you are to meeting a deadline. Or, in other words, 1500 words of thesis draftage today. A month ago this would have been cause for celebration; today it is met with the soul-crushing knowledge  that I haven’t yet done enough to earn myself a few hours sleep 🙂

Works in Progress

Oh baby, here comes the fear again

It starts with what may well be the most dangerous question in the world right now: “So Peter, what happens after you finish your thesis?”  Were I the melodramatic type, or at least the type in the mood for a different kind of melodrama than I’m running on right now, today’s entry would consist entirely of a you-tube clip of Pulp singing The Fear in answer to the question. It may yet come down to that – it’s been that kind of day, and The Fear is feeling very soundtrack-of-my-life right now, but with brave abandon I’m going to press on and risk letting some of the gloopy inner workings of my paranoia seep onto the web. The answer: I don’t know. It scares the hell out of me. That’s probably why I’m procrastinating. It’s not entirely true – I know, more or less, what I plan to start writing the day the thesis is off the plate. Hell, I know what I

Journal

January is almost done

Congratulations to Elena Gleason, whose story Erased picked up the chocolate in Fantasy Magazine’s  best story of 2008 reader poll. Congrats also to my Clarion South peep Michael Greenhut, whose story Watermark finished in the top-five, and thanks also to everyone who put in a vote for On the Finding of Photographs of My Former Loves – to my surprise, it snuck into the top five as well. The temperature seems to have dropped to reasonable levels here in Brisbane – today I walked into my office and saw the temperature was below 30 degrees for the first time in weeks. That probably explains why the last twenty-four hours have been more productive than usual, although that could also be because I’m now loaded up with projects again after giving up January to the thesis exclusively (I suspect I’m just not built for the singular focus approach, especially not when I’m fretting about the things I’m not doing. There is still thesis work