Twitter flail / Anniversaries / Spotify

Why I suck at Twitter

It’s a combination of lack of nerve and a lack of anything interesting to say.

To illustrate, here are some tweets that I drafted and crafted into the requisite sub-140 characters but thought better of actually publishing:

Just described a dead boy's penis, from the perspective of a skua gull, as a "bonanza grub" then thought better of it. #amwriting

There’s nothing like walking smack into a ranch slider to suggest you’re a little distracted.

On the thinness of rejection letters. #essaysleftunwritten

I just bought a pair of grey trackpants from the warehouse. I look like a PE teacher and I feel like a slob. A comfy, comfy slob.

(I actually turned this into a 500-word column, which means I’m more worried about sounding dumb to 269 twitter followers than c.50,000 subscribers to the Saturday Dom Post).

Sometimes I just have a word or phrase stuck in my head and I want to tweet it but chicken out.

Katabatic winds. 

Messerschmidt 

Sometimes it’s more of a note to self or what might be the title of a short story

Reindeers eat their own antlers

Invitation to Meddle

Operation easy sandwich

Tusk to tusk 

This is why we can't have nice things 

So what do I actually tweet? Not a lot.

'A to Z' by Kumi Yamashita
(heaps of cool stuff on her website)

Momento Mori

It’s two years and four days since my first and only book was published, which means its two years and five days since my book launch and two years and six days since I proposed (and that proposal was accepted). I’m working on an epitaph along the lines of: Highlights cluster once the work is done.

Perhaps that’s A Man Melting’s epitaph. Perhaps it’s every book’s.

In one last gasp at relevance, shortly before its second birthday, A Man Melting got a mention on some Canadian’s blog under the headline ‘A MAN MELTING: I REALLY LIKED THIS ONE, BUT I STILL DON’T LIKE SHORT STORIES’

Money-quote: “I suppose my complaint is one I hold for most (if not all) short story collections and that is that I wish it was a novel.”

Please explain.

“... these characters were so swiftly introduced and then denied me.”


Okay. Any advice?

“So hear this, Mr. Cliff, write me a novel, okay? Because you’re one bang up writer with heaps of talent.”

Cool. Well, I’m almost in a position to do an Alison Holst (‘Here’s one I prepared earlier’). Maybe this time next year.

Spotify - an update


I raved about Spotify back on 30 May. Since then, I signed up for the free 30 day trial and neglected to read the fine print (or any print). If I had, I would have read that after 30 days you automatically get rolled over for another month and your credit card or paypal account will get charged $12.99.

Fair enough. So I have another month of Premium Spotify left. It'll come in handy next Friday when I host my work's mid-winter party. It's Friday 13th themed and I don't own 'Monster Mash' or 'The Devil Went Down to Georgia' and whatever music the youngins will want to hear at 11.30pm when all the managers have gone home.

Thanks to Spotify I've been listening to a lot of new (to me) bands. Said The Whale, Django Django, Hey Rosetta!, Margot & the Nuclear So and So's, Immaculate Machine... It kind of ruins you when making a party playlist coz chances are no one else has heard any of these bands and you'll get that 4 mins and 24 seconds lull when everyone looks at you and their eyes say, 'Why'd you have to go and do that?' and my eyes say, 'But it's Django Django!'