A Quick Word

Hey you! Yes, you! You with the rich parents who have made sure...

Mon, 21 May 2012 18:41:00 +1000

Hey you! Yes, you! You with the rich parents who have made sure you had everything you ever wanted! And you, with the powerful parents who got you into the right school, the right university, and the right job, no questions asked! ALL OF YOU!

Guess what? My mum sent me a letter today containing a little mutant from the inside of a Dalek that she had knitted herself. So consider yourself trumped, because in the three seconds it takes to open an envelope my week was made.

That’s what love is people. It’s making a squishy thing with tentacles from a sci-fi show you don’t even watch because you know it’ll mean the world to someone else. It’s not what you have by circumstance, it’s what you give by choice, and I’m incredibly lucky to be surrounded by givers.

My kaled mutant agrees, and suggests you obey (he says that a lot).

Thanks Mum!

Things Unswept: An ENO Mini Opera

Sun, 20 May 2012 15:16:00 +1000

This is a piece I have written for the ENO Mini Opera Competition. It is a response to Neil Gaiman’s ‘The Sweeper of Dreams’, which you can read here. The writing phase of the competition closes tomorrow, but you can read more about the musical and video parts of the comp over at the Mini Operas website. My Mini Opera is called ‘Things Unswept’.

I hope you like it.

SWEEPER:

At first all the dreams were the simplest of things,

Colours and sunshine, and children with wings,

They would swoop down to greet her and wish her good day,

And before she had woken I would chase them away.

They drifted like clouds as I broke them apart,

And returned her mind’s canvas from the end to the start;

I replaced all the memories which slid from the seams,

I continued my work on another soul’s dreams.

LUCIA:

The book said The Way and it promised at last,

That it held in its pages an escape from the past,

I had bought, cracked and crinkled the companion of truth,

And in just twenty chapters could escape from my youth.

So I read the tome slowly and I sucked up the words,

And I let them float round me for hours like birds,

Which I watched in the rafters: in the pillars and beams,

And the one I liked most was the bird that crowed: “dreams”.

SWEEPER:

But the ferris wheel sank, and her nights became dark,

The sticky dank dancefloor held no gentle spark,

There were just grinding bodies and a great wall of sound,

And I took extra pleasure when I tore those dreams down.

I would walk to the centre and scream out my name.

“Sweeper” they’d whisper, all voices the same,

I would chase them away to the dark of the sea,

For the young are no trouble, they do not scare me.

LUCIA:

Dreams are the canvas and you make the art,

The book made its promise and it gladdened my heart,

For the night brought great terror and it left me in fear,

So my dreams had grown frightening with each passing year.

Yes! You control it! the manuscript said,

You can build castles and worlds in your head!

Just no matter how truthful or honest it seems,

You should simply remember: It’s only a dream!

SWEEPER:

And then there were visions that were just walls of pain,

Where she stood in emotion like a child in rain.

And the feelings they stuck her; they scoured and scolded,

So I took great relief when the dreaming was folded.

I have seen many things as a sweeper at night,

I have seen babies die, I have seen soldiers fight,

But I mostly remember how I stood in that storm,

And marvelled in silence at her fragile form.

LUCIA:

Well it took nights of practice to master the skill,

To break through delusion and strangle the thrill,

To recognise pretence and see through the lies,

To know this was sleep even with open eyes.

But when I knew I was dreaming I soon took control,

Pushed my odious demons to the depths of a hole,

And I brought back the dead, I made lost lovers stay,

I found all the sadness and I ripped it away.

SWEEPER:

As soon as I saw it I knew it was wrong,

The dark had returned to a childhood song,

It was all far too bright, it was huge and obscene,

Some gross fantasy world of which she was the queen.

LUCIA:

Though I never had met him I felt like I had,

I had not myself made him, so I knew he was bad,

And I said: “Who are you to intrude in my keep?”

He said:

SWEEPER:

“I’m the sweeper, and I’m here to sweep.

The demons that live in the depths of your head,

They cannot be vanquished if you hide them instead,

And while I know that your nightmares are the worst kind of curse,

I swear if you hide them they will only get worse.”

LUCIA:

I told him to go but he said:

SWEEPER:

“I will stay.”

She turned her guards on me.

LUCIA:

He swept them away.

SWEEPER:

I said: “Banish me, and I won’t do as I should”

Coldly, she looked at me, I heard her say:

LUCIA:

“Good.”

SWEEPER:

So I left her that night and I never returned,

She was building too quickly, and I knew she’d get burned,

When the worst of her dreams, coming back to the fight,

Would unswept haunt her daytime as well as her night.

LUCIA:

In the darkness I dream a world bursting and rough,

And I try to build bigger, but it’s never enough,

So when crowded my mind then awakes from its bed,

I can feel my creations still turn in my head.

The pain now it taunts me as much as the pleasure,

The demons they haunt me as much as the treasure,

And sometimes through screaming I can hear myself say:

“Please, won’t you come and just sweep them away?”

To think that I wondered how sweet it would seem,

To escape from the world…

SWEEPER:

…And to live in a dream.

Chinese Checkers and Grapes (Artist In Residence Blog #3)

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 22:00:54 +1000

“Lyndon, do you know what the meaning of life is?”
“I’ve got an idea of what makes me happy mate, but I don’t think anyone knows the meaning of life, do they?”
“I do. It’s Chinese Checkers. And grapes.”

Whenever one of the students says something like this to me - something wild and surreal and impossibly funny - I write it down. Now I’ve got pages and pages of these hilarious anecdotes, some of which I could easily explain to you, like the Grade 2 who was mortified to find when playing a (very uniquely ruled) game of chess that his king had been taken, before he yelled triumphantly “OH YEAH? WELL I’VE STILL GOT ALL MY PRAWNS LEFT”; and some of which I could never paint a funny enough picture with words, like the two grade 4/5 girls doing their impersonation of The Voice, and slamming their desks to spin around on their chairs with huge dorky grins on their faces.

I have my suspicions that the kids have spotted me writing these things down, and sometimes - to their teacher’s frustration - are deliberately hamming up their behaviour because they know it gets my attention. But as a visiting writer I can’t help but get sucked in to these performances. While I’m here, these are my characters. And who could resist dialogue like this?

“I know! We should all get guns and shoot all the parents, and then we could take over the town!”
“I don’t know that I could shoot my parents. Could you?”
“Well they only gave me half a piece of toast this morning, so yeah…”

“…What I’d need is an army of me. Like, a million mes.”

“What would you feed them all?”

A pause.

“I suppose they’d have to be cannibals.”

It’s no wonder that shows like Kid’s Say The Darndest Things can survive as long as they have with little more in the way of content than children just talking. Kids see the world in a way that socialised adults have long forgotten how to comprehend. I’ve now started my first classes in the secondary area of the school, and while the comedy is different here - devious, organised, and more challenging to authority - the comments are no less funny. When the 9’s and 10’s were told that as a “special treat” they could sit on the floor to work if they wanted, they exploded into sarcastic cheering and adoration. One boy cried out: ”Oh Miss, thanks so much! That’s the best treat EVER!”

It would be tempting to think that the teachers are desensitised to this, with their chiding comments about ‘behaviour’ and ‘maturity’, but actually I suspect just the opposite. You can hear them occasionally turn phrases and comments that have been picked up from their students in everyday conversation, and the staffroom itself is not vastly different from the wider schoolyard - it is a playground of its own, and the stories that turn up there are no less dramatic or amusing. It’s been interesting to discover this side of St. Helens. I remember when I was at school that even the worst teachers seemed like figures of infallibility. I couldn’t imagine any of them with a life outside of the classroom walls - let alone homes, friends, families and the occasional hangover. But now that I’ve had a chance to sit, observe, and watch everyone in the school more closely, I realise that all of them have a part to play in its story.

The vision statement for St Helens is to be “a supportive community where learning flourishes, confidence grows, and difference is valued.” I love this statement, because I think that it’s actually acted upon here. These are no cookie-cutter children, and individuality is not stamped out of them in the name of obedience and simplified learning. They are who they are.

And as I fill up another page of my notebook with the scribble: “The thing me and tortoises have in common is that once we lie on our backs we can’t get up again”, I realise that simply being allowed to be themselves is exactly what makes them worth listening to.

AIR2012 is an artist in residence program developed and managed by arts@work in partnership with the Australia Council for the Arts. You can find out more about the program here.

It Will Be Sunny One Day...

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:48:00 +1000

It Will Be Sunny One Day...:

Letters of Note collects Stephen Fry’s remarkable letter to a young fan suffering from depression.

limmynem: by Budi Satria Kwan

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 12:15:04 +1000

limmynem:

by Budi Satria Kwan

The Ultimate Guide To Writing Better Than You Normally Do

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 15:20:37 +1000

The Ultimate Guide To Writing Better Than You Normally Do:

This article by Colin Nissan on McSweeney’s, is both incredibly funny and incredibly true:

Mark Twain once said, “Show, don’t tell.” This is an incredibly important lesson for writers to remember; never get such a giant head that you feel entitled to throw around obscure phrases like “Show, don’t tell.” Thanks for nothing, Mr. Cryptic.

Tom Lehrer has made it to 84. How wonderful to think that we...

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 10:39:22 +1000

Tom Lehrer has made it to 84. How wonderful to think that we still live in a world with him in it. Happy Birthday, Tom.

The Poetry Prizes (Artist In Residence Blog #2)

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 11:37:00 +1000

I’ve been attending all the K-5 assemblies while I’ve been in my residency at St. Helens, to give me a chance to look at what the kids are doing, and to celebrate their achievements with them. In these assemblies the teachers give out a couple of certificates to students who cannot be awarded academically. I suppose you might call them ‘citizenship awards’, usually for un-instructed kindnesses of one kind or another.

I decided at the most recent assembly that I would hand out a couple of awards myself, to celebrate the efforts of two boys who had really stepped out of their shells during the program, and – regardless of quality – had worked really hard to produce something in the short time that I had with them.

But I didn’t want to just hand them an arbitrary piece of paper. It had to be unique: ‘Artist in Residence’ style. So I wrote both boys a poem each, drawing cartoons around the edges, and signing both of them with a dedication. The poems suited the boy’s interests. One had written a story about a dragon war, so he got a poem which imagined him as King of the dragons, struggling to train a dragon who will not fly straight. The other boy was well known in the school for calling everything ‘epic’. When I had him in a group one day I told him that I had been working with the Grade 2s, and he said: “Oh man! Grade 2 was epic!” I cannot know for sure that his Grade 2 was not vastly different from mine, but I am pretty confident it wasn’t THAT different. The Lord of the Rings is epic. Grade 2 is not epic. Knowing his fondness for the word, however, I wrote him an ‘Epic Poem’, which I am told contains no less than eighteen uses of the word ‘epic’, beginning:

“There was an epic boy,

Who kicked an epic ball,

And didn’t see the epic robots,

In the epic hall…”

These were really treasured by the boys, and were fawned over and coveted by their classmates. One of them said goodbye to me at the end of the day clutching his to his chest, and it was a real highlight of the residency to see this self-identified maths boy take so much pleasure in something from outside his discipline. My only regret is that I can’t do it for every student, though they’d certainly like me to try. At the end of the day several students attempted to force me into story-producing slavery like Kathy Bates in Misery, even going so far as to try to give me ideas for the poems that they wanted. One boy got on his knees.

I don’t have any doubts, but if I ever did have any doubts about whether my role at St. Helens is meaningful, important, or successful, I need only picture that young boy, holding his cap out like Oliver Twist’s bowl, and blocking my path out of the school, eyes wide, yelling:

“I’m begging you, Lyndon! I’m BEGGING YOU! Please! I just want a story!”

A.I.R is an initiative of arts@work. You can find out more about the program here.

"Suppose, instead of waiting for a job offer from The New Yorker, suppose next month, you go to your..."

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 11:04:39 +1000

“Suppose, instead of waiting for a job offer from The New Yorker, suppose next month, you go to your living room, sit down, and just do what you love to do. If you write, you write. You write a blog. If you shoot, find a friend, someone you know and like, and the two of you write a script. You make something. No one will pay you. No one will care, No one will notice, except of course you and the people you’re doing it with. But then you publish, you put it on line, which these days is totally doable, and then… you do it again.”

- Robert Krulwich (via Discover)

(via gracebello)

The Most Important Y.A. Novel of 2012: John Green's The Fault in Our Stars.

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 12:07:00 +1000

This post was written for the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Tasmanian branch, of which I am currently acting as judge. The organisers of their official blog have kindly allowed me to reproduce the post. You can find the original here.

A few weeks ago I received a package from America. I was rightly ecstatic, because it came from an independent bookstore in North Carolina, and it contained - amongst other things - two books: Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler (a man who occasionally masquerades as the unparalleled Lemony Snicket) and John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. Both had been signed in a recent author visit.

Let’s leave Why We Broke Up for today, which, for the record, remains a worthy and wonderful addition to Handler’s canon, and is gorgeously illustrated by Maira Kalman, who he collaborated with previously on 13 Words. Let’s get back to the other book. Because I have a confession to make. Not only was this not my first copy of The Fault in Our Stars, it wasn’t even my first signed copy. If you count the audiobook, which I purchased as an author-read limited edition box set (they only made a thousand copies of that one), I now had three copies of Green’s latest.

So why TFiOS? (Yep, the acronym is out. Let’s get heavy.)

Well, I think John Green is the best writer of Young Adult fiction alive today. When I first read Looking For Alaska I was - once the tears dried - nearly driven mad by its eloquence. John can achieve that - so often impossible - feat; he can write teen literature with intelligent characters that don’t sound like adults pretending to be children. Too often Y.A. writers leave their characters lifeless and vapid in an attempt to make them sound ‘street’, and they become an idiotic stream of text-speak and pop-culture gags. It’s a cut above but no small crime too, to go the other way, and leave your teens speaking in bizarre adult voices, like children dressing up in their parents clothes and playing their own farcical version of adulthood.

Green gets it. His characters in this novel are brutally intelligent without being ridiculous. On top of that, he’s hit a killer plot as well. TFiOS is your average boy-meets-girl love story, with a crucial twist: both its main characters, the narrator Hazel Grace Lancaster and her love interest Augustus Waters, meet in a cancer survivor support group. They live on borrowed time. It takes everything you know and love about Y.A. and turns the intensity up to eleven.

There is also no denying that John’s a great guy. Dismayed by the amount signed copies of his books went to desperate buyers for on the internet, he signed every single copy of the initial print run of TFiOS to even the odds - a mere 150,000 scribbles. His philanthropic work with his brother Hank as the YouTube duo VlogBrothers and the founders of ‘The Foundation to Decrease WorldSuck’ also leave plenty to be admired. I may come back to those on here another day.

In this book though; this remarkable, funny, heartbreaking, existentially fraught, wonderful, emotional and intelligent book, there is everything that could be hoped for from Green, or indeed any other author. I have a habit (I would suggest knack, but truthfully a habit) of announcing that a book is the next big thing, and waiting and watching as the movie rights get sold, the hype builds, the film gets made, and the book explodes into something more than words on a page in the hearts and minds of its captivated audience.

I’m calling it, folks. The Fault in Our Stars is the next big thing. Read it, borrow it, or steal it, but make sure you get a copy.

I might even get another one myself.

Small Town, Big Deal (Artist In Residence Blog #1)

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 21:57:00 +1100

“There are no secrets in St. Helens,” I was told, and I didn’t quite believe it.

Shopping for my first meal and finding teachers and students lining the aisles, however, I soon realised that the tightness of this school and its community were unparalleled by anything I had seen before. I don’t mean to be critical or dismissive of the school’s smallness, but instead want to give a sense of the closeness of a place like St. Helens. It is both a challenge and a prize. It is not easy to enter a community like this without some pretty intense reservations about being seen as an outsider. But there are some major advantages when you finally feel welcome. Shrinking a community like this, bringing it close to you, it intensifies. If I’m sick of being alone down here in my unit, I just go for a walk. I’d put good money on the odds of seeing someone I know.

And the experience of being Artist In Residence so far has been incredible. I love working with the kids, and the kids appear to love working with me - some teachers expressing minor frustration that their ‘opt-in for working with Lyndon’ sessions are seeing almost the entire class ready to jump up and leave them childless for the afternoon. It’s exhausting, but equally invigorating. There are very few male teachers that the kids have contact with in the age group I’m currently focussing on - Kinder to Grade 5 - and so for some of the boys my entry into the school has been a rocket boost for their creativity. Sometimes, it seems, it really can be as simple as a perspective shift. Every good story I hear about one of these young guys telling their parents that my visits have them excited to come to school again, I realise how important this is. Right now it feels like university is getting in the way of me being here at the school, which is a dangerous state to be in. But its nice to hear the siren call of teaching, and to love the work I’m doing.

As I was riding my bike back from Binalong Bay today I saw yet another business sign with a surname I recognised. I immediately thought of the boy I had taught in class only the day before, and how his parents must run this business, concocting pictures of the entire family in my head. That’s what its like in St. Helens. The puzzle pieces don’t stay apart, and interlock whether you ask them to or not. One story becomes a second story, which becomes a third story, and all of them intertwine, with recurring characters and a living postcard of setting, with streets named for the heroes of myth, and characters of a Dickensian vividness on every second corner.

If I was a visitor, I would call it a coincidence.

As a writer, I call it a gift.

A.I.R is an initiative of arts@work. You can find out more about the program here.

A Quick Word... On The Harry Potter Alliance

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 08:04:00 +1100

When Andrew Slack finished the Harry Potter books he felt, like most of us, a little disappointed. Not because the story was bad, but because it was kind of awesome. And now suddenly it was over, and all that magic was gone from his life. Why couldn’t the real world be more like Harry’s, with forces of evil and darkness to be overcome? Why couldn’t we be in Dumbledore’s Army too, fighting for our schools and friends and values?

Following this line of thought, he realised pretty quickly that actually there was no reason. After all, weren’t depression, illiteracy, climate change and child slavery some of our own, equally evil dark forces? Why couldn’t we form an army against them? The Harry Potter Alliance was born.

For me the H.P.A has an advantage over other charities because its members share something more than a cause. They also share a passion. As the planes that the Alliance sent to Haiti were loaded with food and supplies, each had a name: Harry, Hermione, Ron. It was more than just a victory for charity and goodwill, it was a victory for one of literature’s greatest heroes. As you guys might remember from my Walk To Mordor Fitness Challenge, I’m really interested this year in the point where books stop being books and become something bigger. As such, I’m fascinated by the H.P.A.

So I offered to take charge of their movement in Tasmania.

If you want to do some good in the world, the H.P.A is a great place to start. What has really impressed me about joining their ranks is the way that they use their organisation as a piggy-back to give you the launch from book fan to activist. I was appalled when I heard about SOPA being put forward in the U.S. but I didn’t know what to do, or even if I could do anything at all. The H.P.A showed me how I could add my name to the list of those in opposition. At the moment they are about to start a Hunger Games campaign called ‘Imagine Better’ which will encourage fans of Suzanne Collins’ books to support charities like Oxfam who are working towards fighting issues such as water scarcity and the disempowerment of women. The theory that fans of books care deeply about the message in those books is spreading. And it’s making a real difference.

So what can you do? Well, it wouldn’t hurt to watch Andrew Slack’s presentation at TEDx about why he started the Alliance. Importantly though, your first step would be to join my Dumbledore’s Army Tasmania (DATAS) Facebook page (you do not have to be Tasmanian to join!). I’m keeping that updated with everything I hear, so it’s the best place to keep in the loop. DATAS is still in its infancy, and from here its goals are largely what you guys want. If you want to meet up in person, we’ll do it. If you want to hold events, fundraisers and charity drives, we’ll do that. If it’s more online activism that interests then we can do that too. I only ask that you get excited about it. And tell your friends!

Welcome to the Harry Potter Alliance. Let’s go fight the evils that no-one else will name.

Is The Hectic Glow a real band?

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 18:19:00 +1100

Seems like you must be referring to this post! I am afraid that no, The Hectic Glow - awesome as they are - are not a real band. What they are instead is a fictional band loved by one of the main characters in John Green’s latest novel The Fault In Our Stars, which you should definitely read if you are a person.

Here’s the great thing about The Hectic Glow though - they have ticket stubs to their concerts. They have wristbands. They have t-shirts and a Facebook fan page. All made by their fans. They are the ultimate indie supergroup - so unknown and underground and perfect that no-one has even heard any of their music, and could never be allowed to either. I know this might seem weird and dumb, but just think about it for a second. The Hectic Glow will never ruin their career with an overtly commercial second album. The Hectic Glow will never storm off stage at one of their concerts because a roadie put the mic lead in a place where they tripped on it. The Hectic Glow will never betray the trust of their fans by appearing in a video supporting the most appalling Presidential candidate of the election.

The Hectic Glow will never let you down.

Perhaps tomorrow you will scribble ‘The Hectic Glow’ in box letters in your exercise book. And perhaps someone will ask you what it means. You will say something like: “I liked their old stuff better than their new stuff, which is weird, because I LOVE their new stuff”. And you’ll leave them Googling away, maybe even eventually finding this post.

You think a band has to actually be real to be fun to follow? You’ll be delighted to find how wrong you are. Congratulations, you just became a fan of The Glow. Maybe even their biggest fan. Enjoy.

Oh, and if you buy their first album, make sure you have space around you to dance before you hit Track 5. Trust me, you’ll need it.

Happy Birthday Charlie D

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:20:00 +1100

I can still remember my first experience of Charles Dickens. I was at the Palladium Theatre in London, aged 5, about to see my first ever live theatre show. It was a massive revival for the musical Oliver! which had been out of circulation since 1983, and was being brought back in grand style and to much acclaim, with a young Sam Mendes as director, and a killer performance by Jonathan Pryce as Fagin.

I was terrified. The show started with its classic opening of “Food, Glorious Food”, but before that there was the thumping and grinding of the workhouse, explosive flashes of thunder and lightning bringing in the musical with a bang. My Dad had placed his jumper between us on the chair’s armrest, and I quickly pulled it over my head, refusing to watch.

Within a minute though, I had peeked just a little over the corner of the neck hole, and I stayed like that for the rest of the nearly two-hour perfomance; just my eyes peering over the top of the jumper, ready to pull it back up, but not ready to look away.

We listened to a tape of that performance all around England, and in the many years that followed. The story of Oliver Twist, in its intense sense of adventure, social justice and characterisation, remains a favourite to this day.

I was hooked on Charles Dickens.

* * *

Fast forward to this morning, and the bi-centenary of Dickens’ birth.

Over the summer I asked mum to keep an eye out for cheap Charles Dickens books at the op-shop. We actually got most of the way there. She would go with friends and trawl the shelves, and I have about ten of his works so far, all in different shapes and sizes, belonging to various sets and decades of publishing.

Then about a week ago we got a call from one of Mum’s friends, who had been trawling through an old shed of her late-husband’s things.

“I’ve got something for Lyndon,” she said.

The picture above is mine, taken of what she has given me. A complete, 26-volume set from the early 1900’s, of Charles Dickens’ complete works. It is simply a beautiful collection, and I am so privileged to have been given it.

Charles Dickens it seems, by providence or luck, has never quite been able to leave me alone. From age five to now, like his Ghost of Christmas Past he haunts me, a comforter and guide in the best of times and the worst of times. Running my fingers along the bevelled edges of this complete set I wonder how different things will be in the world that he has left behind fifty years from now, a hundred years from now, and even many centenaries into the future.

Yet while there is poverty, injustice, and the weak and defenceless fighting to be noticed, it seems unlikely that this impeccable man of letters will ever be far away. While there are still Scrooges, Mr. Bumbles, and Gradgrinds, we will continue to need his stories to comfort and right us.

We still need Charles Dickens. I think perhaps we always will. And for that, God bless him. Happy birthday Charlie D.

"More than ever we need to recognise the worth of our own fiction that tells us what might become of..."

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 15:21:57 +1100

“More than ever we need to recognise the worth of our own fiction that tells us what might become of us, that offers a vision from within as well as without, a fiction that is of our hopes and our nightmares. And those novels will necessarily be as diverse as sand in their forms, in their playfulness, in their invention. Australia remains a dream that we might yet make our own, if only we have the courage and wit to imagine it so.”

- Richard Flanagan (from “Sheep Management” in And What Do You Do Mr. Gable?)

The Seemingly Obligatory Birthday Blog 2012 (Part 22/100)

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 21:48:00 +1100

22. Mum calls it the two little ducks.

And after turning 21 the year before, 22 feels like a funny number. Like it doesn’t mean anything, or maybe just means less. But of course as much has changed about my life in the last year as any year that has preceded it. And the 12-months ahead promise to be some of the most exciting (and busy) yet. I’ve picked up a scholarship to work with the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery on my Creative Writing thesis for Honours, and to have access to materials that very few have the privilege of exploring. I have been hired as Writer-in-Residence at St. Helen’s District School, where I will spend 25 days of the first half of this year engaging in an artistic and social experiment, the magnitude of which not even I fully understand yet. I will, for 2012, be a writer. Full time. And making money from it.

On top of that there is my new position as judge of the Tasmanian Children’s Book Council, and as head of the Tasmanian Chapter of the Harry Potter Alliance (more about that last one in another blog post soon). It seems inconceivable that I will be able to juggle it all. It seems inconceivable not to try.

And here I am, on my birthday, kayaking across the sea with my closest friend in the world. I am glad that James is here, and that the sun is shining and the water is crisp and sparkling like glass. For a while we swim, for a while we paddle, and for a while it is like we are two little ducks.

Later I go home, tired and happy, and I have dinner with my family and then I walk to the top of the hill. There is scaffolding from a building site and I climb up to get a better look at the sunset. The sky is lit up like embers.

I notice that people on Twitter are talking about ‘Page 31 of 366’. I don’t understand it, until I realise that today is page 31. And this year is 366. And it seems so far into the book already, and like it will be over too soon. Perhaps it will be.

But page 31 was an excellent page, and no matter where the story goes from here, page 31 will be a page I return to. Many times.

I love every single song by The Hectic Glow, and I am so happy I...

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:46:21 +1100

I love every single song by The Hectic Glow, and I am so happy I got to to see them in concert.

Honestly, listening to their music is like being somewhere else. Every morning I wake up to their first album playing on my clock radio, and I lie there in disbelief that I live in a world that’s so awesome that a band like this could even be allowed to exist.

What is LSATWQ.com and why should we be scared? Or elated? Or simply baffled?

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:07:27 +1100

What is LSATWQ.com and why should we be scared? Or elated? Or simply baffled?:

I submit myself to the demands of this VERY FAKE DOSSIER.

This is me, showing my face on YouTube for the very first (but...

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:20:46 +1100

This is me, showing my face on YouTube for the very first (but hopefully not the very last) time.

For those of you who have asked about the poem that I took to the National Final of the Australian Poetry Slam, this is it. And I was really scared in Sydney, with a big crowd that I didn’t know, standing on a stage amongst the ghosts of some of Australia’s greatest performances. (A poster out the front explained that both Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush would be back on the stage soon.)

But you know what? It went well. And I’m happy losing to such great and intense competitors. Here is my poem, called ‘Jehovah’s Witnesses’. Hope you like it.

Walk To Mordor - Fitness Challenge 2012

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:10:00 +1100

I recently bought a Jawbone UP fitness band, and since buying it I’ve been excited about the idea of doing a fitness challenge for 2012. I thought about trying to walk the equivalent distance from one city to another, or around the world, but then thought: Wouldn’t it be interesting to walk somewhere I could never go in real life?

Within a minute, the Walk To Mordor challenge was cemented into my head. The goal is simple: walk (or run) the equivalent of the entire distance from Hobbiton to Mordor (2224km) before Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit comes out on Boxing Day 2012. The challenge starts tomorrow, Monday the 9th January 2012, and if you can maintain an average of 6.5 kilometres a day, you should get there without any trouble.

To sweeten the deal, I have calculated various landmarks and key events in the novels, and which kilometre of the journey they occur in. So as you go, you can enjoy the precise moment when the fellowship enter the Mines of Moriah, or when Gollum reveals himself and is kidnapped by Sam and Frodo. Using the official hashtag #WalkToMordor, we’ll be able to compare our progress in real-life by following key moments in the books, and, hopefully, encourage each other to make it through.

I’ve written a 7-page guide to my version of Walk To Mordor which will tell you absolutely everything you need to know to join in. You can find that here:

http://dft.ba/-WalkToMordor2012

And I’d love to hear if you’re going to join us! You can contact me through the comments here on Tumblr, and through Twitter or Facebook. The more people we have, the more enjoyable the experience will be, so I do encourage you to give it a go! And feel free to tweak my ideas and make it something that works for you!

If there is one thing to learn from The Lord of the Rings, it is that the road goes ever on and on, and it is company that makes it worthwhile.

Thanks so much for reading, and I hope to hear from you soon that you’ll be participating in 2012’s nerdiest fitness challenge!