Monthly Archives: May 2005

New Extract — Fitzger­ald House, Part One

I’ve pos­ted the first install­ment of a new, two-part extract from The Last Monk, which intro­duces the hot­test young tea-cosy in mod­ern Aus­tralian lit­er­at­ure. As always, feel free to hand it around, com­ment on it or print it for use as the raw mater­i­als of a com­plex ori­gami moose. 

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Weight: 85kg. Cigar­ettes: 0. Still no call from Mark Darcy.

The fol­low­ing post will con­tain no trans­it­ive or intrans­it­ive verbs. Any resemb­lance to an extract from Brid­get Jones’ Diary is purely the res­ult of massive holes in Helen Fielding’s education.

Posted in editorial consultant, not writing, sloth | Comments closed

One false move and the space-time con­tinuum gets it

I’ve always wanted to start a post with a line that could have fallen from the mouth of Jane Eyre.

Posted in whiteboards, writing | Comments closed

The White­board Dun­geon of Semi-Formed Ideas

And then, of course, in the second week the nov­elty wears off and the lazy blog­ger begins to post lacklustre mater­ial with decreas­ing punc­tu­al­ity, los­ing what few read­ers he had to the Her­ald Sun web­site, where Andrew Bolt can always be trus­ted to edify.

For­tu­nately for the reader, I am not that blogger.

Posted in not writing, severed heads, whiteboards | Comments closed

Here be dust bunnies

I’ve reached an inter­est­ing point at the end of my first week of full-time writ­ing. I’ve writ­ten much more than I thought, so much in fact that I’ve writ­ten myself out into unknown territory.

Posted in The Last Monk, whiteboards, writing | Comments closed

Whatever’s about to hap­pen, I was there

And then, in my mind, a guy walked past selling t-shirts. On the t-shirts was prin­ted ‘WHATEVER’S ABOUT TO HAPPEN, I WAS THERE’. From him came a flood of other ideas, from the out­break of civil war in a march­ing band to the exquis­ite, lib­er­at­ing sen­sa­tion of push­ing a stilt-walking jug­gler off a pier.

Posted in The Last Monk, fairy-floss, writing | Comments closed

Trench-coats. Trench coats. Trenchcoats?

Some days aren’t that news­worthy: the most inter­est­ing thing to hap­pen today was a ten-minute search of vari­ous ref­er­ence texts to answer the ques­tion: ‘trench-coats’ or ‘trench coats’? Although I found the answer, I think it’s safe for me to leave you hanging over this one. You’ll simply have to buy the book to find out.

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158 words — nobody panic

The more mathematically-inclined reader will have been per­form­ing some basic arith­metic dur­ing my open­ing pan­handle and come to the ineluct­able con­clu­sion that my novel is now a mere 158 words longer than it was yesterday.

Posted in The Last Monk, writing | Comments closed

Day Zero

There’s a com­mon mis­ap­pre­hen­sion about writ­ing that it is a mod­ern form of alchemy. With the excep­tion of the odd long, miser­able day when it appears noth­ing will con­vert this lead to gold, writ­ing resembles alchemy only as far as its prac­ti­tion­ers enjoy mak­ing it seem arcane. Writ­ing is less sci­entific, and tends to work some­thing like this:

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