Breaking from the usual self-indulgent tomfoolery to write an equally self-indulgent personal update – for no other reason than to keep writing. The writing is coming easy. The reading is going terribly but I’m writing a lot. Apart from a few lit journals (which seem conducive to my condition), I have returned to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, my favourite book by David Foster Wallace. It’s the only thing I’ve been able to read with any sort of ease of late and I’m not sure where to go next; money for books is low, so revisiting things also serves a practical purpose.

But the writing. I’ve written a handful of blog posts, a few short things, a critical thing. I’ve got some ideas for some kids books that, if nothing else, amuse me. I’m putting some work out there and relegating other work to the back corner of the portable hard drive I keep in my desk’s bottom drawer. I’m writing a novel. I’m always writing a novel, but this time it’s almost done. It sort of is done, but the last edit became a re-write and I did some things in the second half that will conflict with things done in the first, and so on, and so I need to go through it a few more times before I do whatever it is you do with these things. Sometimes I think it’s good, sometimes I think it’s bad. Some of it has been a lot of fun to write, the ugly parts, the parts about an element of Australian culture that I fear is endangered, especially. I hope it gets somewhere just so I can show off the ugly parts.

I also have a novella written. Once the novel is in a state I’m happy with I want to go back to the novella and see what exactly I did there. Ideas for it rose and converged and I wrote it in a frenzy at the end of last year and the result was unlike anything I’ve written before. I’ve got a page in Evernote detailing all the references/influences in the novella which in itself is a weird document. I thought it was good – we’ll see about that.

As for definites, I’ve got a couple of short stories being published later in the year, both of which I’m very excited about.