Wet matches: Fornight 20 of The Burns

I did some graphs back at the end of Fortnight 10, and should probably do some again now, but it's already Tuesday (I had the day off yesterday to spend with visitors) and I don't really want to diddle round with Excel right now.

Better to open with Dunedin and its surrounds!

All photos from the last fortnight.

Yellowhammer in the gorse, Tunnel Beach

Fur Seal, Aramoana

Sheep, blocking the way to Cape Saunders, Otago Peninsula
(no metaphor intended)

Fortnight 20 wordcounts

Total words: 11,034 (60% on the novel, 26% on this blog, 14% on other non-fiction)

1^st week: 5,524

2^nd week: 5,510

Two equally disappointing weeks, symptomatic of the slough I’m in with the novel. For weeks I’d persisted in moving forward, trying to get a first draft done before Christmas, but as the section in San Marino continued to grow, I could feel the tension and interest (mine and the imagined reader’s) trickling away. Something was wrong back at the beginning of the Italian section, but I wasn’t sure what.

So I printed out the 84,000 words I had and read through from the beginning.

Last time I did this (about two months ago), I was pleasantly surprised how much fun it was to read. This time, the first section remained unproblematic, but the laws of diminishing marginal returns had sapped the fun from it.

I managed to find a number of things at the start of the second section that were sapping the potential of the later chapters (and promised to unbalance the whole shebang).

As always, it boils down to a protagonist being too passive, or his/her intention not being clear enough or believable.

I’m in the midst of rewriting these early chapters now and the process will take weeks for me to get back to where I was mid-October.

It’s a pain in the butt, but I think it’s far more efficient to do this work now than keep rambling toward an unsatisfying and ultimately arbitrary finish line.

As for the ending of the book, I see that quite clearly (it’s a shorter section, maybe 10k words, set two years ahead of the rest of the novel) and it hasn’t changed since I dreamed it up back in July.

So it’s really just the large middle section that’s causing all the problems. But nothing is fatal.

Just more work/rework/binning/recycling.

Onward!

Hoopers Inlet, the peninsula

Short Story Club

Last Thursday, my short story, ‘Manawatu’ was discussed as part of Jesse Mulligan’s Short Story Club on Radio NZ National.

From the files I have with me in Dunedin, I can only ascertain that I wrote the story before July 2008 (when I submitted it to Sport). I’m pretty sure this is one of two stories in A Man Melting that I wrote before I did my MA in 2006 (the other being ‘The Tin Man’, though it had a different title). Around the same time, I moved from Hotmail to Gmail, so the trail goes cold in my online archives then, too.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure ‘Manawatu’ is it at least 10 years old. It definitely bears the marks of being written while I lived in Australia (and by an angst-ridden twenty-something).

Re-reading it now, and hearing it be discussed, I’m pleased with how it goes about its business (that very interior, very analytical beginning, carried on to the point it feels confronting, to then have some external action, which is only fully explained when the interior is understood). Not bad for someone a year or two older than the protagonist.

It’s the story I’ve thought about the most this year while writing my location scouting/levitation novel. In part it’s to do with the incredibly close 3^rd person narration, and in part the fact my protagonist is a year or two younger than me and there’s that tension between loading him up with autobiographical elements and letting him realise his true (and truly different from me) character.

So ten or twelve years or whatever it is later, I’m back where I began, angst-ridden and uncertain.

Yep, feels about right.

Mist on the water, Kaikorai Estuary

Creative Cities Southern Hui

I was on RNZ National myself on Sunday, along with Nicky Page, to spruik the Creative Cities Southern Hui which takes place in Dunedin at the end of the month.

Details about the hui here. (It’s a pretty cool lineup when I follow [alphabetically at least], Hera Lindsay Bird and Shayne Carter).

And on my bio page for the hui (and in the radio interview above) I hint at what I’ll talk about. For now the working title is: ‘We are all storyteller: analogue and digital perspectives on narrative’. It basically takes some of the deep thinking I’ve been doing about NBA 2K18 and similar games, and looks at the crossover between writers/readers and game designers/players, and what we could learn from each other.

For the birds

Shags and gulls, Andersons Bay inlet

The raw materials of a short story set on the Andersons Bay inlet and adjacent playing fields are slowly gathering. I seem to add to the store every time I bike passed.

Birds play a big part in this not-yet-story. There's a grandson and his grandpa. And the grandson twenty years later watching his son play cricket, which is to say, not really watching his son play cricket. And birds. Did I mention birds?

The photo above was taken on a cold and rainy day last fornight. It was rare on that account (the weather last week was AMAZING, and though the temperatures have tailed off since Friday, it's still been suitable for outdoor adventures). And perhaps because of the weird, icy late October downpour, the inlet was alive with dozens (possible more than 100??) shags and a similar number of gulls (both black-backed and the smaller red-billed). Based on the group feeding and appearance, I'm 90% sure the shags were Otago aka Stewart Island Shags, most likely from the population that breeds at Harrington Point. They're stunning birds and seeing that many after some kind of feed in the inlet, and being pestered by the gulls, was quite a sight.

My tally of other species seen on or around the inlet in recent weeks includes: grey duck/mallard hybrid with nine ducklings, paradise shelduck, royal spoonbills (up to half a dozen at one), white heron, white-faced heron, white-fronted terns, sparrows, chaffinch, goldfinch, blackbirds, starlings, welcome swallows, variable oystercatcher, spotted and little shags (far more common than the Otago shags). 

Completists only

The video from the Meet the Fellows Event in August is now on YouTube.

Or you could go for a walk!

Tunnel Beach

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Blazing skies: Fortnight 16 of the Burns

Bathing Beach, Rakiura

Fortnight 16 wordcounts

Total words: 8,633 words (70% on an essay, 21% on this blog, 9% on the novel)

• 1^st week: 8,633 words (4 day week because I left for Invercargill on Friday morning...)
• 2^nd week: 0 words

That essay was my thing on 'The Moves in Contemporary NZ Short Stories', for the conference I talk about more below, and it'll be posted online in due course. Some of that wordcount includes the work I did cataloguing every move in two short stories as a proof of concept for what a more data-driven analytical approach might entail. 

Dan Davin Short Story Conference

This was the first conference focussed on the short story in NZ in decades. I think everyone involved (and hopefully some of those who were not) feels the experience should now be repeated - whether it's annual or bi-annual, there's plenty to be said for, and lots to be gained from, bringing together writers, academics and readers who are passionate about the short story.

Things kicked off on Friday night (1 Sept) at the Civic Theatre in Invercargill with the prize-giving for the Dan Davin short story competition and a keynote from Janet Wilson.

Saturday was wall-to-wall presentations (including mine), keynotes and panels. You can read more about who talked about what here.

Me, presenting
(This photo and the ones at Stirling Pt and the marae courtesy of the Southland Express article here)

Sunday we all boarded a bus and went to Te Rau Aroha Marae in Bluff (via Dan Davin's childhood home, Stirling Point and Bluff Hill). 

Conference folk, Stirling Point, Bluff

The wharenui was designed by Cliff Whiting, and the wharekai was also decked out with the fruits of collaborations between Whiting and local hapu. Bubba Thompson was there from day one of the project and he was there for us that day to share all the knowledge and whakapapa that went into that amazing place.

I've spent 30+ hours in the marae on the top floor of Te Papa in Wellington, which was also designed by Whiting, thanks to all those Writers on Mondays sessions over the years, and there's always something new to look at.

But being there in Bluff, in a living, breathing (not to mentioned the world's most southernmost) marae, it was next level.

When Bubba explained how the wharenui demonstrated inclusiveness (each of the tīpuna were females who'd married Pakeha, with the whalers and sealers depicted in some of the friezes), and there was a wall dedicated to people who'd come to Bluff on any of the four winds so that there was somewhere for everyone find themselves.

 

The start of Day 3, Te Rau Aroha Marae, Bluff

Two more papers were presented in the wharenui and then Cilla McQueen put the perfect bow on proceedings by reading a Dan Davin story set in Bluff (in which the protagonist muses about relations between Pakeha and Maori).

After a great lunch, it was time to leave Te Rau Aroha and Bluff, so we swung back to Invercargill, checked out the Basilica that Davin's family attended, then headed on to Riverton. I left the bus there and joined my family (more on this part of the trip in a sec).

I'm really glad I made the effort to attend, and present at, the conference. It left me with a half dozen ideas, some of which I can achieve alone in front of a computer but many focus on ways to bring more of us together, to expand conversations, dive deep into ideas, and push the short story forward here at the edge of the world.

Non-literary tourism

Riverton from up More's Reserve

Me and the whanau spent two nights in Riverton, then caught the ferry from Bluff to Rakiura/Stewart Island and stayed in Oban for four nights. My brother joined us for this stretch.

My kids, my bro, kaka

Ulva Island

The kaka joined us on the deck every afternoon around four. The weka and robins on Ulva Island were equally friendly (although the weka tipped over to annoying when we tried to eat lunch on the beach). I saw a flock of about a dozen mohua/yellowhead making their way through the bush, tomtits doing acrobatics on the sand (presumably in pursuit of unseen insects), brown creepers being brown and creepy. I forgot to bring my proper camera on this trip, which I only use these days for snapping birds, so you'll have to take my word for this, eh?

Inside the Oban Presbyterian Church

My brother and I went on a gonzo kiwi spotting trip one night but came up empty. He went out the next night in pursuit of the Aurora Australis, which was supposed to be flaring up, but the cloud cover/drizzle did him in.


In non-bird/celestial matters, we managed to see quite a bit of the area around Halfmoon Bay (but still only a fraction of the island) despite having a two-year-old and a four-year-old in tow, thanks to the day we rented electric bikes (one for each adult) and a two-seater kiddie trailer which was attached to my bike. E-bikes are fun, and when you add in the hills, the sections of unsealed roads, the sudden icy downpour just before lunch and the fact I was towing 35 kgs of preschooler, the e-sistance was VERY welcome. We managed to get out to the lighthouse at Ackers Point, Deep Bay, Butterfield Beach, Horseshoe Bay and the start of the Rakiura Track at Lee Bay - and get my son down for a nap in the middle of the day.

I definitely want to go back and do the track when the kids are older (they did pretty darn well with the walk to Golden Bay to catch the water taxi and then bossing it around Ulva Island for 3.5 hours, though a fair bit of that was spent with one or the other kid on my shoulders).

Bikes, Horseshoe Bay

Ackers Point Lighthouse

Bathing Beach

Windswept, Lees Bay

On our last night the five of us hung out at the South Seas Hotel, had a few jugs (well, the adults did at least) with the locals and had a decent pub feed. Message to Lorde: try the onion rings - best I've had!

Ominous rainbow before the ferry crossing home

The ferry ride back on Saturday was rough.

Like: 5 metre swells.

Like: that scene in The Wolf of Wall Street where Leo DiCaprio's luxury launch is pounded by a storm and the only way that could be fun is if you were coked out of your mind.

Like: my wife threw up four times, me once (we both took SeaLegs the night before and that morning) and my son was sick too (I thought two was too young for motion sickness) before being rendered unconscious by the rocking.

My daughter spent the middle 30 minutes of the voyage hunched over a sickbag, groaning/whining, but never actually spewed (which meant she was the slowest to recover when we got back on land).

So yeah, total nightmare, but kinda to be expected when crossing the Foveaux Strait.

Tom Sainsbury reading his crack-up GoT fan fic

NZ Young Writers Festival

My trip way down south was planned before I knew the dates for this year's Young Writers Festival, so I missed all of it except for the last session, which was a Fan Fiction event hosted by man/snapchatter of the moment, Tom Sainsbury.

Tom read some Game of Thrones fan fic (small quibble: he said his protagonist was a White Walker but the way he was described he sounded more like a wight). Jack Vening read some Benjamin Button fan fic (very niche, very dark) and Rhydian Thomas did a very NSFW/R18 mash up of Beckett and Secret Diary of a Call Girl, featuring Bill English.

The only bum note was a piece about George Bush written by some dude who didn't show up but sent his friend to deliver his pages of A4, which Aaron Hawkins, Dunedin City Councillor and a driving force behind NZYWF, read out admirably.

So yeah, it was odd, a bit ragged around the edges, but funny and warm, too, which is exactly what this kind of lowkey, free, non-ticketed festival should be.

This is not a drill: Fortnight 15 of the Burns

Fortnight 15 wordcounts

Total words: 11,247 words (60% on the novel, 32% on non-fiction, 8% on this blog)

• 1^st week: 6,799 words (4 day week because I spent a long weekend in Chch for a 90^th birthday party, whoop!)
• 2^nd week: 4,466 words (4 day week because of Hamilton…) 

Poetry reading in The Link, NZ Poetry Day, 25 August

A Popular Boy

Last week, in the span of two days, I:

• spoke to a 300 level Modern and Contemporary Poetry class about my Google Translate and Recurrent Neural Network poetry (the stuff I covered in this post from May). 
• took part in the NZ Poetry Day lunchtime event at The Link at the university

• gave a talk about my novel-in-progress as part of the English Department’s Friday seminar series. I talked about why I’m writing about a levitating saint and making movies in the age of VFX, how I’m writing it, and read from two early chapters. This was the first time I’ve read from it. My wife hasn’t even read any of it yet – except maybe the half a page excerpt I included in my application for the Burns.

A poem I chalked outside The Link for NZ Poetry Day

Smoove moves

A lot of this fortnight has been spent working on my paper for the Dan Davin Short Story Conference that kicks off on 1 Sept in Invercargill. After reading a bunch of NZ short story collections without any kind of framework/scientific rigour, I created my own framework for cataloguing the ‘moves’ a writer pulls when executing a short story and did a proof of concept (it took 4 hours to catalogue and analyse the 80 moves in the story I picked). And now I’m in the midst of writing it all up.

You can read a slightly outdated spiel about my talk on the Conference’s website here (final papers will make it online eventually too, I think).

Anyway, it’ll be really interesting to have so many people talking about the short story – and being down in Invercargill. There’s a marae visit and an afternoon in Riverton on the last day, and then I’m taking my whanau to Stewart Island for four nights. Here’s hoping the Big September Storm doesn’t happen till after we’re back in Dunedin!

Hamil-yawn

I also went to Hamilton for a day/night last week for a thing that’s more to do with getting myself sorted for life after the Burns than writing. Everything about that trip in one word: meh.

Localised fog over the Taieri Plains that kept me on the tarmac for two hours.
But, like, who really wants to leave Dunedin? Or go to Hamilton?

Tactical Procrastination

With all this other stuff on the go, you might think progress on the novel would have slowed. 

But, so long as I was in Dunedin, I found myself plugging away at the next scene, and the next, and the next, partly as a way to put off writing my ‘The Moves’ thingy, or preparing for my talks. 

I experienced this when working on The Mannequin Makers, at some point after passing the midpoint when the work had enough momentum that it wasn’t a matter of procrastinating from writing it, but I'd often use writing it to put off doing other things.

It’s cool to have reached this point of fulcrum on this year’s main project, but it’s too soon to take the foot of the gas completely – I can’t coast to the finish line in angel gear, that’s for sure. In fact, I plan to go back to my story-boarding/cue-carding ways this week to make sure the story doesn’t sag in the middle and readers are happily being pulled along to the climaxes they expect, and those they don’t.

I should probably also be mindful of life beyond the novel over the rest of the year. I was in bad shape physically after finishing The Mannequin Makers, in no small part due to the continuous, concentrated hours I could happily spend on the manuscript. (After being a slack writer for a couple of years, I lost the prescription glasses I needed after finishing TMM and haven’t replaced them coz my eyes kind of came right by themselves. Let’s see how they are when this next novel’s put to bed!).

Bird life

Kereru at the uni

Kereru, closer

Nth Degree: Fortnight #6 of the Burns

Milford Sound with rainbow

Wordcountz

I was going to do some graphs and trends-after-12-weeks stuff this time around, but I've got a bunch of other things to cover and post. So I'll leave the maths for another fortnight when I find myself less interesting.

As for fortnight #6, here it is, by the numbers:

• Total words for the fortnight: 7,395 words (cf 12k last fortnight)
• 1st week: 3,955 / 2nd week: 3,440
• 89.6% of these words were on the novel

Going to Fiordland for Easter took a chunk of time of out the end of week 1 and the start of week 2. 

The plateau that I mentioned last fortnight persisted longer than I'd hoped (not so much in terms of total words, but how far into the story I managed to proceed). I resorted to alternative means of generating content (see cut-up chapter below), and managed to get something or somewhere.

With recent opportunities (see below), I'm still trying to figure out how much I try and get my location scout moving through time, or if I need to pull back and get things planned out better...

Travels (with Tomtit)

Misty ol' day in the Sound

Waterfall with seals, Milford Sound

Tomtit

Lake Mistletoe

Lake Manapouri

Mug

From Fortnight #1:

So I’m still using the dinky little Arcoroc cup I found in the dinky little kitchenette and having to make too many trips to make tea during my day and maybe I will end up ordering something in another moment of weakness.

And so it came to pass.

It depicts scenes from Monty Python's Holy Grail in a Saturday morning cartoon mode, which is kinda sorta exactly what my novel will turn out like if I'm not careful.


Outings

Octagon Poetry Collective

Last week I went to a reading at Dog With Two Tails. The feature poets were Sue Wootton (above) and Victor Billot. There was also an open mic for the collective members - it was an incredibly well oiled machine, each poet getting briskly to the mic, reading a single poem (some with patter, some without, but never more than necessary) and blending back into the crowd.

After an intermission, the chair came to me and lightly twisted my arm, so I read a poem ('Transition', with a rambling preamble that did not do justice to the preceding efficiency). While I've published quite a few poems, sporadically, I think the last time I read one of my poems in public was in 2006 at the Museum of City and Sea in Wellington.

It was a fun night and Sue and Victor were great too.

Town Belt Traverse

After going 11 years between public poetry readings, the next gap was five days. And instead of reading one poem, I had two and a half hours to fill!

The event was the annual Town Belt Traverse, organised by the Dunedin Amenities Society. As the Burns Fellow, I was positioned at the 5th and final station in Prospect Park and asked to "recite some verse" (people who talk about reciting and/or verse tend to think of poetry as they might dinosaurs or unicycling).

These first arrivals were the hardout walkers who hadn't really mucked around at any of the other stops and weren't going to lower their heartrate for a spot of poetry. Fair enough.

After about half an hour the stream of people became a bit more steady and in less of a rush, and I found my groove. People we much more comfortable stopping to listen if I was already reading, so it helped to have some longer pieces. (I learnt quickly that starting a poem as someone past made them feel as if they'd triggered a security light). In addition to about 20 poems of my own, I read some others' (Emma Neale, Geoff COchrane, Alice Oswald), and two short stories that are bitsy and poetic ('30 Ways of Looking at Marumaru South' and 'Parents in Decline').

I was joined in the middle span by one of the PhD candidates from the English Department who read Owen Marshall's 'The Divided World' (great choice) and two of my own poems (a weird experience). Thanks Damien!

Despite some awkward moments, I really enjoyed it at times, and had some good chats with people in between pieces.

The long and blinding road

A selection of 40 or so fake quotes from my fake famous director
 in the process of being ordered and rationalised before
being incorporated into the novel

TBH there are times when working on a story or a novel when it can get scary. 

Scary because suddenly what you are working on becomes clear and there’s a bigger meaning to it, or a bigger question underlying the work, that you didn't quite know was there when you started and are confronted with the task of being the one to see this through. 

Am I really fit to be asking this question? 

Can I really write a novel that dramatizes this particularly big thing that I didn’t know I was even grappling with until ninety seconds ago?

In time the feeling fades. You mock yourself for your self-importance. That's the only way you can proceed, or at least that I can.

One does not sit down each day and produce work of genius. One might come upon it, in the course of one's work, and if one is careful not to look directly into its eyes, might encircle it, once, twice, thrice, each revolution claiming a little more of its power for your own...

Or not. Probably not.

Internet Explorer

I mentioned last fortnight that I was spending a lot of time looking at places in Italy on Google Street View. At the risk of turning this place into selfie-central, I bought this t-shirt to embrace the desk-bound nature of my research/creativity.

HOWEVER...

Things move quickly in these here parts. 

Next month, I'm off to Italy and, after fulfilling some non-novelistic duties, I'll have the chance to 'scout' locations in person.

This is good news. Great news, even. Except, it does mean a lot of this next month is gonna be spent playing my own travel agent, trying to squeeze as much into my time on the ground, and preparing for the primary reason for my visit (education business). 

A welcome spanner in the works. 

Perhaps I need a new t-shirt?

Is it wrong that I really, really like Gore?

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We goin’ Sizzler: Fortnight #5 of the Burns

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There is pleasure in the work
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Words this fortnight: 12,320 (cf 8,702 the previous fortnight)
(Week 1 - 7,956; Week 2 - 4,364)

Still a case of the first week of the fortnight being the more productive (65 percent of the fortnightly tally this time) but not as pronounced as some previous fortnights.

Some blogging in week one distorts the figure, slightly. When looking just at what I added to THE LOCATION SCOUT, it's 5.4k vs 4k, figures I'll happily take for the next forty weeks, please and thank you.

I had two days of 2,000+ words twice this fortnight, one in each week (both Tuesdays). These were my first days over 2,000 (on just the novel) for the year.

I did strike a plateau with the manuscript around 18,000 words. It's the transition from the first act to the second, from what was known to what's much less fixed in my mind. So: a few days of casting around the internet, staring at Google Maps, watching YouTube videos, and then a bright idea in the shower and voila, someone has turned the word tap back on (just in time for another 2k Tuesday).

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If there is no pleasure in the work

what chance have others of finding it?

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Birds!

Chilly bike ride this morning but the Royal Spoonbills were loving it on Anderson's Bay inlet. pic.twitter.com/qUTe9Ywdkz

— Craig Cliff (@Craig_Cliff) April 3, 2017

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There is pleasure in the work (x2)
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The Dunedin Writers Festival programme is out and I'm appearing in two events:

• The End of the World (panel topic set before the subject of Eleanor Catton's next novel was announced) 
• Found Poetry

It looks like it'll be a great few days in May, which is rapidly approaching.

In thinking about what I might do for the Found Poetry session, I've become VERY interested in Recurrent Neural Networks and their potential to generate text. I met with someone from the university's Computer Science faculty, who put me in touch with some of his colleagues. I'm working slowly towards a collaboration, though I'm not quite sure what the final product might be.

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If there is no pleasure in the work, down tools
------

My location scout in THE LOCATION SCOUT has landed in Italy and is scouting locations I've never been to. It's an interesting experience, wedding imagination and Google Street View images. There's a chance I might be able to get to Italy before the book is finished, but I'm treating that as a nice bonus rather than a necessity. Believe it or not, the book's not really about location scouting!

So for now, the internet and I will suffice.

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There is pleasure in the work (x2)
-----

Me and my motley crew are off to Milford Sound and Te Anau for Easter. So expect next fortnight's update to be photo-rich and wordcount-poor.

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There is pleasure in the work (fade out)

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Scorched Earth - Fortnight #4 of the Burns

Waves, The Catlins

One: Status report (textual/confessional)

How do I feel about my novel after four weeks of solid work (and a good 18 months of sitting on the first 7,000 words and all the research that went into getting that far)?

Well, I'm not glad you asked, but I'll try and answer anyway. I feel pleased to be where I am (actually working on it! Go the Burns!), but the novel itself, the 30-odd pages it comprises right now, it feels flabby. That's okay, I guess. I can put it on the treadmill once the first draft is done and I know what's really important. But I have to get to the end (the first end of many).

One problem is I think this flabbiness might be part of what I'm going for, in this first section at least. The risk of doing a book about people who make art (in this case: film) that you expect the reader to take seriously, and also bringing in historical and religious aspects, is that it gets very po-faced, very quickly. So my protagonist is actually a bit of a fuck-up, and we meet him in the midst of this moment in his life that feels more like a Judd Apatow movie than something slicker and smarter. And Apatow's stuff is all pretty flabby. It must be part of the formula. The way recipes require a certain amount of fat for flavour. But I'm still figuring out how this works on the page within my particular concoction.

Forest walk back from Curio Bay

The other problem is I feel as if everything I read or watch is somehow talking to me, talking to the novel, and needs, needs, to find its way onto the page. (Look out for my March Consumption Diary toward the end of the week if you want to read between the lines a little further).

It’s not a new experience. Call it extreme narcissim or first draft solipsism. It's happened before and it'll happen again. I know it passes. I

The task is to:
a) resist the urges in the first instance
b) expunge the extraneous material that makes it through the first line of defense in my daily read-throughs
c) expunge the persistent extraneous elements in intensive edit of 1^st draft 
d) repeat c) for 2^nd draft, rinse and repeat until deadline has passed and you throw up your hands and say, I’m done.

Knowing this, I’m able to keep perspective. 

I’m able to be genuinely happy with making my manuscript grow by 1,000 words a day for a string of days, even if I know the net remnants of that week may be far far smaller when the book is finished. 

Or, shock horror, that this thing about a bit of Apatovian flab being necessary is a massive error of judgement and the first 30 pages wind up on the cutting room floor.

Oh well. It’s part of the process.

Truth is, I love editing the most. It’s easy to see the book getting better, hour by hour. But you gotta have something to edit. And gosh, weeks like the one before the Catlins will get you there (see part 3 below).

And the Catlins trip was work related, too...

Two: Catlins teaser

Hector's dolphin inside a wave at Porpoise Bay

Three: Status Report (numerical)

Total words: 8,702 (novel 7,450; blog 1,092; poetry 141)

* Week 1: 6992 (with an average of 1,180 on the novel Monday to Friday)
* Week 2: 1,710 total.

Why the massive drop-off?

On Saturday of Week 1 we headed down to a house in Waikawa in the Catlins, and got back in Dunedin late on Tuesday, by which time me and my son were starting to feel sick. Wednesday we both were write-offs. I improved, but stayed home Thursday and Friday as Caio was still not up to going back to daycare (double ear infection, fever, general clinginess, a touch of conjuctivitis... y'know how it is).

Four: But the Catlins!

The view of Porpoise Bay from the Curio Bay campground

Looking at Curio Bay and it's petrified forest (partially submerged) from the campground

My son learnt to photo-bomb at Cathedral Caves, bless him

Five: Birds and Boatmen

Apart from seeing the Hector's dolphins cosying up to swimmers at Porpoise Bay, the other notable wildlife sighting was my first Tomtit (actually, multiple) on the 30 minute walk (perfect for with the kids at Waipohatu. I didn't take photos as I had Caio on my shoulders and my camera was in my backpack both times, but I'm sure there'll be other encounters with the South Island's version of the robin over the next 10 months, so you'll live.

Also of note, the Waikawa Museum, with it's trove of family photos and trinkets. All its signs and captions are handwritten - which is both charming and somehow depressing, as if this history is less permanent, less valued, will have a shorter shelf life. I dunno. There was a sign saying don't take photos (not sure I understand the motivation), but I had to take a snap of this father and son (Captain Wybrow and his son David) and the wooden grave marker for Wybrow's wife Temuka (Temuc according to the engraving).

There's lots I could write about these things, and one day I might.

Six: Interlude

Sitting and writing means I eat a lot. I must have some kind of oral fixation. Maybe it’s like ACHOO syndrome, where sudden increase in brightness makes me sneeze. Maybe making shit up makes me hungry?

Maybe I should try gum.

Seven: But was it research for the current novel?

Yes! My trip to the Catlins was fruitful. I'd been casting around, trying to come up with an idea for a low budget NZ film my main character could have made that kinda kickstarted his career, got him on the festival circuit, before it all goes pear-shaped.

I'd had this image of a Western set in the Kaimanawa Ranges, a kind of adaptation of Nigel Cox's Cowboy Dog, but there was a film that was actually made like this (Good for Nothing, filmed in NZ though purporting to be the US) a couple of years ago, so I felt I needed to come up with something else.

So I did. Hoorah.

What's the idea? I can't tell you. But the (imaginary) film is called Curio Bay, at least for now.

Eight: Dunedin institutions

I went to Forsyth Barr stadium for the first time Friday before last. It was for a Warriors game, rather than the Highlanders, because I'm dumb enough to actually support the Warriors. What a bunch of schmucks. But an interesting stadium and an interesting crowd.

This Friday, I'm off to see Nadia Reid at the Port Chalmers Town Hall, which should be cool on many levels.

Fire at will - Burns Fortnight #3

Detail, Otago Muslim Association, Clyde Street

1. Fellows Welcome

This fortnight started hospitably, with an event at the Hocken Library to welcome the University of Otago's five Arts Fellows (visual arts, dance, music, children's writing and, uh, just writing).

Here's the write-up from the Uni's website.

As you can see from the pic attached to that write-up, it was a gloriously sunny late afternoon (last fortnight's good weather stuck around for another week). It was nice that my wife and kids got to come along for the first bit (before bedtime beckoned).

When the Pro Vice Chancellor was reading out the bios of the Fellows, my daughter, Lia (4), turned to me and said, excitedly, "That's you!". But I was quickly forgotten when the bio of the dance fellow was read out. "Ballet! Daddy, he said ballet!"

When it came time for the Fellows to say a few words in response, my wife had to disappear with my son for what turned out to be a toilet false alarm, so I ended up going on stage with Lia. She casually held my hand the whole time and declined the opportunity to say anything, so I thanked the people of Dunedin and the university on behalf of the both of us.

2. Productivity (& spectatorship)

Total words this fortnight: 9,121 (4,896 on THE LOCATION SCOUT, the rest on this blog)

It was a fortnight of two halves again. The first week was solid. I felt comfortable with where I'd gotten my short stories, and was itching to start my novel before February was over, so I started (techincally restarted, after last working on it in earnest in 2015) a day early.

The next four days I made good progress, averaging an additional 933 words to the manuscript per day. That's passable for any point in the novel, but pretty darn good for the first ten or so pages. This reflects the fact I had a fairly decent (7,000 words) false start behind me, and 18+ months to mull over what wasn't quite right. Oh, and in the last week of Feb I had story-boarded out the first three scenes/chapters. So, really, why shouldn't I be productive?

Then came the weekend, and my brother came down from Wellington, so I had to show him around and generally have a great time. See part 3.

Later in the week, I tried in vain to resist the combination of sunshine and test cricket occurring a 5-minute bike ride from my office. So productivity suffered. But, as I told my wife, watching test cricket by yourself is great thinking time. I think it set me up pretty well for fortnight #4 (at least the first week... I sure hope this won't be a pattern!).

I'm off to the Warriors vs the Bulldogs at the stadium this Friday. Probably won't be as much deep thinking going on there!

3. Tourism

The Mole at Aramoana (the black line across the path is a fur seal)

Looking back from the end of The Mole, with terns and gulls

White dots = albatross (including parent with chick if you zoom into the 'dot' that's just right of centre),
Harrington Point viewed from the end of The Mole at Aramoana

Fur seal and Harrington Pt Lighthouse

The view from Signal Hill

Snack at St Kilda Beach

4. M.O.R.

Something that happened in Fortnight #3, but I only properly reflected on afterwards:

People talk about two Dunedins. The students and the locals. Or maybe it's Dunedin during term time and Dunedin during the holidays.

Before Orientation started, I felt young. As in: below the median age in town.

After Orientation: way old.

That influx of 20,000 18 year olds (okay, they aren't all that young, but...) sure is noticeable. Of course, working (I'm trying hard to leave off the inverted commas) at the university means I'm at Ground Zero for the change.

What influence will being around so many people born when the Y2K bug was a thing to fear have on my writing / me? These young people fall into my generational blindspot - too young to be siblings or cousins (or direct reports, just yet), too old to be kids of mine or my peers. What interaction will I really have with them, beyond reading Critic and trying not to run over them on my bicycle?

Time will tell.

5. Open to the universe

One good thing about having had some halfway decent productivity to start my fellowship is that I feel I can start to say YES to things that pop up.

Event formation seems to be quite organic down here. At the Fellows Welcome I was asked if I want to take part in three separate things (a theatre thing, a library thing, a creative writing thing). No firm dates. No firm anything, really, but I said Yes, because that's part of why I'm down here.

(I also found out one of the University's leadership team is reading my blog - though maybe he was just cyber stalking me in the lead up to the Welcome and will stop now - and got invited up the clock tower in the iconic admin building. I said something about that being a great setting for a murder mystery. Who killed the Vice Chancellor? Quick, barricade the stairwell. Now I'm not sure if that invite still stands.)

Doing a stonking job with a novel manuscript is my primary objective, but doing things that make me feel like a writer again (or, heaven forbid, a thinker) should help with the novel and life beyond it. Because, hard as it is to conceive of right now, there will come a time when I need to move on to other projects. If I keep adding to the reservoir this year, I should be spoiled for choice in 2018 or 2019 or whenever I finally put THE LOCATION SCOUT to bed.

Since the Fellows Welcome, I've said yes to two events for the Dunedin Writers Festival in May, and another thing for the Dunedin Amenities Society. (Next fortnight I might share with you my theory about why it's better to live in a town that's seen better days than one that's still growing, but suffice to say one reason is things like Town Belts and Amenities Societies exist)

I still feel like I have capacity for more. In fact, I have an idea for something that I'll probably need to drive if it's to become a reality.

And I like surprises. So hit me up, universe.