By Mat | Published:
November 13, 2006
The LaTrobe Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria is possessed of such a tranquil, scholarly ambience that, in order to remind the reader of the perfect serenity he or she is privileged to enjoy, it has had to be randomly seeded with unoiled chairs which scream at the lightest touch like a bed full of climaxing banshees.
By Mat | Published:
October 8, 2006
Outside the window, through the girlie grey steam, the autumn weeds are waving in a distinctly springish wind. I think I could almost qualify as a perpetual motion machine, infinitely running a distracted loop between the untended garden and the untended computer, if it weren’t for the midpoint between the two, which is the television and which is being tended just fine.
I stopped doing creative things three months ago. What happened?
By Mat | Published:
June 29, 2006
People are asking me questions.
“Yes,” they say, “it’s all very well, all this business with burgling and urine portage and the lesser-known works of Danny DeVito, but didn’t you used to be an unrequited novelist?”
“Well – ” I say, but they interrupt me.
By Mat | Published:
June 6, 2005
Welcome to the latest in this continuing series of instructional guides to the sandwich-making art. Today’s recipe, the Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato Grill for Novelists, was learned during a six-month study tour of the finest sandwicheries of Paris, from a traditional French sandwichier whose great-great-grandfather claimed to have received the recipe from Victor Hugo in 1831 after a particularly messy bender during the early drafts of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
By Mat | Published:
May 16, 2005
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:
