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I’m in NYC this week on a belated honeymoon with Mrs W. My ‘in progress’ impressions of New York are, in no particular order: noisy; delicious; overwhelming; fattening; loose; engrossing; uncensored; unfair; loud and disorientating.
Having grown up with a steady diet of US television, there is something intensely familiar about NYC. Though populated with people doing the same kind of ordinary things that people do in every other city – walking dogs, buying groceries, trudging to and from work – there is the feeling that some grand American story is taking place behind the scenes.
It’s as if America has become so good at telling stories that the edge between reality and fiction is often hard to make out and is even perhaps largely irrelevant (this is particularly evident when you watch the ‘news’).
The New York I came to find is really just another carefully orchestrated fiction, and when I leave, I’ll become just another truncated plotline in this massive mini-series.
But in the meantime, this is a chapter well worth reading.
It’s been a little quiet on the blog over the last month as various planets of distraction move into alignment.
To start with I’ve been lucky enough to score a gig over at milkbarmag.com writing the monthly literature events round-up. The mag is still in its infancy, and it’s great to be on board to help it bloom.
Second, I’ve hooked up with a talented and enthusiastic bunch of collaborators on a new video project. Watch this space for more news later in the year.
More recently Skyrim entered my life and promptly knocked me senseless with a dwarven staff of obsession. For the last two weeks I’ve been hiking icy mountain paths in search of equal parts night thistle, skeever tail and troll fat – no stone left unturned.
I’m fairly sure that the thin line between fantasy and reality will soon unspool, but until that happens, Skyrim and I are kindling a fine, and unexpected, romance.
I recently read Alan Jacobs’ The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, which I’d recommend to anyone reaching a kind of impasse in their reading habits (as I was).
Jacobs prescribes a… Read more
A few words from me over at Spineless Wonders – a new independent publishing imprint dedicated to the short form.
I’ll be a little quiet over the next week as I’m taking a sabbatical at Varuna Writer’s House in the beautiful Blue Mountains.
Having spent the last year cramming writing sessions before and after work hours, I’m really looking forward to seven uninterrupted days of quiet, solitude and hopefully, a little creative spark. All fingers and toes crossed.
This time I’ll be completely distraction free (ie no camera), so there’ll likely be no sequel to last year’s effort (above) anytime soon.
Feel free to leave me lots of comments so I’ll feel missed…
One of the biggest challenges facing writers in 2011 is choice.
Almost as loud as the voice that asks are we going to write today? are new accompanying (and irritating) voices asking who are we writing for?, what format should we write in?, which word processor?, what genre is this?, how should we publish? and finally: do we have the right font to start with?
This saturation of choice can be debilitating at any stage of writing, as it often feels that it’s no longer as simple as deciding to bunker down and ‘just write’ (as if that were easy to begin with!).
Increasingly, the craft of writing is linked to the business of writing, with new pathways to success and collaboration open to writers able to diversify away from ‘just writing’ and instead acquire skills such as HTML coding, search engine optimisation, video editing and social media. Skills that no writer would have likely ever heard of prior to a few decades ago.
At times this new state seems daunting. The expansion of choice can add a new layer of weighty, and potentially useless, overhead to the more primal task of getting words to the page.
But understanding the landscape, checking your compass (choose the more appropriate metaphor), can be just as… Read more
The 2011 Emerging Writer's Festival made a solid case this weekend as "the writers' festival for writers", with a solid two day lineup of workshops and conversations with local, national and international writers.
With topics ranging from podcasting to typecasting, there was plenty to digest and way too many sessions for a single person to sample everything. Luckily, the EWF11 hashtag was pumping all day, featuring a healthy lineup of tweeters chiming in with highlights of each session.
The ultimate value of a writer’s festival is often greater than the sum of its parts – and a large part of EWF is the interaction between writers, both on and off the panels.
So rather than a personal summary of the events I managed to attend, below is a curated view into some of the best tweets of the weekend, stripped from the now rather lengthy #EWF11 stream. Full credit goes to all the authors mentioned.
My main thought bubble from EWF11 was to realise that it is a great time to be a writer, as now more than ever writers’ have the agency to influence their futures and the futures of their industry, whatever ultimate shape that may take.
Such agency comes with responsibility, and hence to earn our voice writers’ need to continue to work collaboratively, inside and outside the familiar creative spheres, to reach and develop new… Read more
I may not have mentioned it yet, but this week I'm extra excited to be posting as part of the 2011 Emerging Writers' Festival blogging team.
The festival opened last night with the gala First Word event, which featured songs, comedy and readings from a bunch of writers featured in the festival including Meg Mundell, Alan Bisset and Anna Krien.
For those who couldn’t attend last night, the EWF crew were kind enough to let me bring along my camera, above is the condensed 1 minute version of First Word.
The exhaustive (in a good way) festival program is a real boon for writers in and around Melbourne, featuring workshops and panel sessions that span pretty much every angle of the writing and publishing life.
The festival weekend pass is a bargain at just $49, available online through the Emerging Writers’ Festival website.
Hope you enjoy the video, and if you’re at the festival, please say hello.
You may have noticed it looks a bit different around here today. Well, that'll have something to do with a new website design which went live overnight.
The new design realises my original purpose for starting a writing blog: to create a space for readers and writers to locate my work online, and a way for me to kindle a return conversation.
There are lots of other reasons why writers start a blog, and I’ve found over the last two years that it’s very easy to get distracted from your original purpose by all the opportunities and audiences available online. You can quickly find yourself broadcasting more than creating, and end up working for your blog, rather than the other way around.
So this new design brings me back a few notches, with a more focused and usable base from which to write from.
In the new Stories section you’ll find excerpts and full versions of all my published stories, and easy options to help you share them with your friends, loved ones, enemies and so on (go on, you know you want to).
Stories is where you’ll also find my first ever audio story which will hopefully soon be joined by many others (based on the amount of hate mail I get following the first). Check it out and let me know… Read more
A short story of mine, Without Country, is included in this year’s Griffith Review 2nd Annual Fiction Edition (launches October 28th). To mark the occasion, I’ve tracked back through all my drafts and diary entries to give you the story behind the story.
I’ve tried my best to summarise the journey from idea to print, but still, I should warn casual readers that what follows is a pretty long post, so go grab a cup of tea before you begin.
Those that do make it through, I would love it if you dropped a comment and let me know you’re still alive. Read more…