This post covers the period 1-14 Jan. Over that period, I had a birthday, my daughter 'graduated' from pre-school (gown and mortarboard and everything), and we left Dunedin (but only got as far as Christchurch).
The leaving part was hard. Not least because we were renting a large house which meant a lot of cleaning!
Our stuff got picked up by the movers on 8 January, and as of today (27 Jan) it still hasn't made it to Wellington. Last I heard it was in Chch, waiting for more people's stuff to fill a truck. ETA: This coming Frida.
Ho-hum.
Anyway, not a lot of writing took place that fortnight...
Fortnight 25 wordcounts
Total words: 6,088 (41% on the novel, 33% on short stories, 26% on this blog, 26% on this blog)
1st week: 5,388
2nd week: 700 (that is, 7 days worth of 100 word chunks, as per my 2018 project, while travelling)
Meanwhile, in the land of the free and the home of the microwave burrito
The Mannequin Makers got a bit of coverage during Fortnight 25, including:
- Featuring on BookRiot's 10 small press books from the end of 2017 that you'll want to read
- An excerpt ran on Lit Hub (an early chapter from The Carpenter's tale). It was more than a little cool to see my book feature the day after Robert Coover's (and on a day the homepage was all about J.M. Coetzee on Samual Beckett.
- A review in the Chicago Review of Books, titled: New Zealand Gets Creepy in ‘The Mannequin Makers’: On Craig Cliff's tragic American debut. That "tragic American debut" could be taken the wrong way, right? I know I had my trepidations when reading it.
- Book Browse also did this cool thing: Beyond the Book: Castaways on the Antipodes Islands.
Before you leave
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| Port Chalmers |
Before packing up my office at the university, it looked like this (note the post-its still hanging in there from back in Fortnight 1).
After cleaning, I printed out THE NOVEL as it stands. 90,000 words, 260-something pages, one title I'm still not sure about (hence the spoon).
Roadward hometrip
We left Dunedin on the tenth (a year to the day since we departed Wellington) and stayed two nights in Naseby. We then drove to Twizel via Clyde & Cromwell, and stayed there for two nights, before sliding back down the plains to Chch and the in-laws.
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| Naseby Indoor Curling Rink. Te kids were fascinated by curling (I got bored way before they did) |
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| Blue lake, St Bathans |
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| Clyde Dam |
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| Lake Tekapo |
And just like that, we were done with Otago (*sob*) and my penultimate fortnight as the Robert Burns Fellow was over.
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