But I've got a blank space, baby...

I have vivid memories of judging the novice section of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story competition in 2013, from refusing the offer of a pre-reader to the boxes and boxes of physical stories arriving at my house, reading them all, picking a winner and recording my video for the awards event as I was in Iowa by that time (sweating an ungodly amount in the four seasons conservatory because anywhere else and I'd wake up my 7 month old daughter), and then the quibbles about whether the winner was actually a novice as she'd had a lot of non-fiction (columns and journalism) published previously.

And then today I was looking for any new reviews of Offshore Service (hold that thought), and a picture of me I couldn't remember seeing caught my eye (->). It was from a Stuff article in 2019 calling for entries into the annual Sunday Star Times short story competition, for which I was the judge of the open category.

And I was like: Was I?

I went back and checked my writing CV - which I only update periodically - and it doesn't mention the SST gig in 2019, but includes judging duties before and after.

I searched online some more and went back through my emails. And I can confirm that yes, I did judge this comp in 2019.

Part of the memory hole was due to the fact I wisely took up the offer of having pre-readers select a short list, so I received around 20 stories and then six days later I advised an SST editor of the winner and two runners up, with little commendations for each and an overall comment.

As an aside, I think my overall comment, which wasn't published as far as I can tell online, is still solid advice:

"The entries this year displayed a high level of technical competence. We have a lot of writers who know their way around a sentence and can create and sustain an engaging tone for the duration of a story. The next thing is what will you do with this skill? Where will you take your reader? The short story form does push the writer to extremes, particularly towards the darker side of life. Death, poverty, despair. This year there were very few writers who fought against this undertow. It’s a fine line between being deep and being maudlin. Humour, irony, joy – these things will take you far in life and elevate your stories, too. Your readers will thank you for it!"

But yes, I was essentially a judge for six days, which pales in comparison to the weeks and months of involvement for things like the BNZ Katherine Mansfield or the Ockham NZ Book Awards.

The other factor is: I was cracking up back then (late 2019). The whole reason I got asked to be the judge was Penguin Random House was the sponsor of the prize and I'd had a new book released by Penguin Random House that August, so it was a way to raise my profile (psst, guys, that shit never works). 

But, as I've written about in the Q&A on my website, I started having panic attacks just after the book was launched. So even if I was fully compos mentis at the time of my judging, the temporary disintegration probably took some of the memories either side of the collapse with it.

I don't recall ever encountering any entrants in the 2019 prize in real life, and hope I've never blanked on one of the people whose stories I liked... I see that Susannah Eliffe, whose story I chose as a runner up, has a book of stories called Patron Saints of Roadkill published this year. How awesome. I must seek it out.

***

Anyway, there was a new review of Offshore Service today. This one is by Siobhan Harvey, published by Kete Books. It says nice things like, "In all Offshore Service is tender, visceral, poignant and penetrating. Not only for its authentic, sensitive and emotional portrayal of contemporary man, but also for the significant things it tells us about modern life." It talks about writing the New Zealand pākehā male, Frank Sargeson and intertextuality, but I especially like that it acknowledges there are feminine perspectives too, and communal ones.

What's neat, but also funny, is Siobhan wrote a review of A Man Melting back in 2010 (this time for The Listener), which also mentioned Frank Sargeson and intertextuality (I can recall most of my initial reviews clearly, LOL). 

And... Siobhan has a new memoir out this year called, What We Remember, What We Forget.

This is all to say even someone as self-absorbed as me can't keep a handle on their own biography. 

***

Speaking of one's own biography... In going back through my emails, I was also reminded that my story, 'Connective Tissue', which is told in the form of an author's biographical notes as his career sputters out, was highly commended in the 2018 SST competition, and the SST asked to publish it in the paper and I asked them not to (despite the Ts & Cs saying they could) as I wouldn't get paid and I'd rather place the story elsewhere... They graciously honoured my request.

In the end (with some improvements, bien entendu), the story was published in Landfall Tauraka 249, which opened the door to my second collection being released by OUP as part of the Landfall Tauraka Short Story Series... So, yeah, it worked out in the end.

Recording this all here now for the next time I forget.

Consumption Diary August 2026

MUSIC

 

BIOGRAPHICAL INTERLUDE #1

My fourth book, Offshore Service & Other Stories (OS&OS for short), is out in the world.

The launch on the 19th was fun. Here's the abbreviated version, including a reference to the reviews on this here website, LOL.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Craig Cliff (@craig_cliff_)

(I gave my daughter my phone to film the speeches, but we neglected to get much footage of the before and after, but I was happy with the turnout and John at the book sales table was kept busy.)

More on OS&OS's life out in the world in the next interlude further down...

BOOKS

[I read one non-fiction book from NZ in a physical format, but will reserve comment on that as I'm reviewing it for Landfall Review Online]

Sophia, Standing There by Meg Mason (novel, audiobook, NZ, 2026)

Yeah, she did it again. Sorrow and Bliss was the favourite book I read in 2021. A good indication of that book's impact is I can't believe that was five years ago, it still feels like it's a part of my short term memory.

S,ST is the right amount of similar and different from S&B. The protagonist of S&B is a big personality who leave chaos in her wake, and suffers from a genetic, mental illness referred only as "--" (or verbalised as "x" in the audiobook). Sophie, in this new novel, is working hard to be the opposite, a character vacuum that avoids notice and doesn't cause any one fuss. The unnamed part is "the author" that Sophia becomes fascinated with, then obsessed. But, thankfully this unnaming trick is only maintained for some of the book, because we actually meet the author in the flesh, wherein she is given a name, Lilac Dunn. Dunn is in some ways like Martha Friel in S&B as they both seem to be incredibly intelligent and insightful about other people, but at heart suffer from an acute lack of empathy.

Glyph by Ali Smith (novel, audiobook, UK, 2026)

I felt like I needed to re-read Gliff again to get more out of Glyph. And maybe audiobook wasn't the best way to consume both. But I think I enjoyed Glyph more than Gliff (sorry to anyone using a text-to-speech app to consume this post).

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy (novel, audiobook, Australia, 2025)

I mean, yeah, okay. It's got all the constituent parts. Plants are amazing. Climate change is an existential threat. The subantarctic islands are fascinating. A mysterious woman washes up on Macquaire Island, I mean whatever its made-up name is in the book. She uncovers mysteries of her own relating to the father and his three kids that remain on the island tending to the global seedbank that will be abandoned due to rising sea levels...

But the plot and the characters never really seemed to be operating on the same plane of existence. The sexual/romantic entanglement felt perfunctory and unearned. The madness of the [redacted] character was convenient, not convincing. 

Oh well. Reece Weatherspoon liked it! 

Operation Bounce House by Matt Dinniman (novel, audiobook, US, 2026)

I tried with this one. I also tried reading Dungeon Crawler Carl as a ebook on my phone through the Libby app, but that's like trying to eat soup with a sex toy.

I can see why people like the DCC series, but I'm gonna use the 'p' word again: PERFUNCTORY.

Climate Wayfinding by Katharine K. Wilkinson (non-fiction, US, 2026)

I struggled with this for a different reason. Like, shame on me for thinking this book would incorporate aspects of Polynesian maritime wayfinding, which has been adapted to other uses through the work of Spiller et.al. in Wayfinding Leadership -- a book I return to often in my life as a climate / sustainability professional. 

Instead, this version of wayfinding is like some kind of vision quest with all the white American cultural appropriation vibes that brings with it. 

The subtitle - Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home - should have tipped me off.

BIOGRAPHICAL INTERLUDE #2

There's only been one review of the collection so far (a very positive one from the legend Paula Morris in the Listener, with a longer version promised on the Academy for NZ Literature's website one day soon). Hopefully there's one or two more.

In terms of media coverage so far, we've had:

• Two short stories from the collection republished: 'The Waikato Farmers' in Newsroom and 'The Kick Inside' in Sunday Star Times
• Two radio interviews, with Emile Donovan on RNZ and Jeff Harford on OAR
• Two print interviews, one in the Sunday Star Times to accompany 'The Kick Inside' and one in the Otago Daily Times.

I also did one of those Book Confessional things for The Spinoff, which I haven't seen appear yet. When I wrote my responses I was about to start Sophie, Standing There, so this blog is officially more up-to-date that the big ol' Spinoff.

FILM & TV

Colin From Accounts - Season 3 - normally, I love when TV shows make a huge leap in time between seasons (final season of Parks and Rec ftw), but the payoff of this leap petered out quickly and felt more like a way to pad out the will they, won't they phase. Still had some good laffs.

The Dark Wizard - Season 1 - I possess neither the strength, the courage or the desire to rock climb, but this was fascinating. Alex Honnold comes across as a sociopath, which on some level he must be. 

Monsters of God - Season 1 - I see what you did there... Are the monsters the reptiles or the people? (It's always the people).

One Battle After Another - I read Vineland some time in the early 2000's, but looking for any connection between that novel and the adapted screenplay made me feel like the baked-ass present day Bob Ferguson in the movie... Maybe if they'd kept his name as Zoyd I would have liked the film more.

It's weird to be left cold and unentertained by films like this, Sinners and Weapons, which seemed to get the average moviegoer hyped and also did well with the Academy. Like, on one level it's cool that there's some overlap between what both sides think is cool... but it'd be better if I also thought these things were cool, rather than... passable. Another P-word!

Offshore Service - the playlist

The wait is over. Here it is. The playlist for Offshore Service & Other Stories, which comes out on 13 August and has its public launch here in Dunedin on the 19th.

(You can find my playlists for previous books here: A Man Melting, The Mannequin Makers, and Nailing Down the Saint).

As with the playlist for my first story collection, I've picked one song per story. Here's a little about each selection.

1. 

The story: My Yale and My Harvard

A man reflects on his childhood in Brisbane where he spent his evenings in the passenger seat of his father's cab (solo parent, economic necessity). He later moves to Auckland for the first America's cup defence, only returning home when his father becomes ill.

The song: Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away) by Deftones

A classic from Sacramento's finest (sorry Cake). In my head, this is the soundtrack to the narrator when he returns to Brisbane and leaves the Mater Hospital in a stranger's cab. That blend of quiet and loud at once. Sadness and anger.

2. 

The story: Offshore Service

A kiwi engineering grad heads to the mines in Queensland in search of easy money but winds up crewing a helicopter that services the coal ships waiting off the coast. "Service" has a few meanings.

The song: Hanging in the Wire by Dave Dobbyn

You can already tell from the first two stories that people hoping from one side of the ditch to the other is a bit of a theme in this collection. So it's important this playlist features some acts from either side of the Tasman. It's funny that in Australia, Dobbyn is considered a one-hit wonder (Slice of Heaven), whereas in Aotearoa he's more revered. That gulf is part of what these stories explore.

This track comes from the 1998 album, The Islander. I was asked to write a story for an island themed issue of the Griffith Review, and it became 'Offshore Service'. 

I don't think Dobbyn is singing the lines, 'Whatever you need for your redemption / Anything you want I can supply' ironically... but he is for the purposes of fitting with my story.

3. 

The story: Parents in Decline

'Everything is fine and then one day it isn't...' 

Starts in the first person plural 'we', as if all the calamities affect the whole community equally, but eventually an 'I' voice emerges - posing the question: was he just projecting the whole time?

The song: I Me Mine by The Beatles

Is there a better song about selfishness and pronouns? 

4. 

The story: Recessional

Amelia is a twenty-something Kiwi working in Perth on the cusp of the next recession. She's invited to a colleague's annual ANZAC Day barbecue, wherein differences between how they each perceive of ANZAC Day become clear.

The song: Holy Grail by Hunters and Collectors

One of Amelia's gripes is that the barbecue's playlist is exclusively Australian bands. Many are name checked in the story, but 'Holy Grail' gets the nod here for the way it was later co-opted by the AFL (and maybe the NRL also...) and skirted over all that religious crusade stuff to focus on good old Aussie mateship.

5.

The story: Processional

Picks up right where 'Recessional' left off, but has a very different approach to time than the first story (which covered a week or so). Here we get the rest of Amelia's life, from marriage, children, infidelity, empty-nesting in the space of a few pages.

The song: Distant Sun by Crowded House

Crowded House is one of the few truly Australian-New Zealand bands Amelia can come up with in 'Recessional' for a more appropriate ANZAC playlist. It's also the name of a hostel on the Gallipoli peninsula that Amelia visits in both stories.

'Distant Sun' is paddling in similar waters to 'Recessional' - thinking about what you might change, the process of time, and putting things into an astronomical scale - while still being a love song.

6. 

The story: Connective Tissue

Told in the form of 24 author bios from the British writer Terry Voss, moving from early in his career through the literary successes of his wife (and then children) and other family dramas to the eve of publication of his potential magnum opus...

The song: Sigourney Weaver by John Grant

Like 'Recessional', there are lot of songs/artists namechecked in this story, from the cook at his estranged father's house who liked to sing 'Da Doo Ron Ron', 'Do Wah Diddy Diddy' and 'Let's Spend the Night Together', to a full list of songs to play at his funeral for his kids... which is where 'Sigourney Weaver' crops up. 

It's such a weird song, lyrically, which vibes well with Terry Voss and his novel about Tim Berners-Lee and the members of One Direction fighting a zombie apocalypse.

7. 

The story: The Waikato Farmers

A numberless, nameless group of farmers from the Waikato try to find purpose while on holiday in Fiji. They get excited when a tropical cyclone looks as if it may wreak havoc on the island, as they might finally be allowed to make themselves useful.

The song: Hurricane by Kyuss

Okay, so you don't get hurricanes in the  South Pacific, but that hasn't stopped a Super Rugby franchise from the lower North Island rocking that name for the last three decades. 

I think this Kyuss song manages to capture the drive and excitement of a cyclone/hurricane/typhoon, while lyrically it's more like a panic attack, or at best: a dog chasing its tail.

8. 

The story: Ranger Ranger Ranger

Sierra is a sustainability-minded high school history teacher in a small Otago town. She keeps getting cut-off on her bike by utes. Her partner drives a ute. Life is peachy.

The song: A Change is Gonna Come by Sam Cooke

This is the song Sierra sang to herself on her socially-isolated walks during COVID lockdown. Unfortunately, the new normal isn't much better than the old normal... 

9. 

The story: The Pits

This is actually a sequel to the story 'Copies' from my first collection. In 'Copies', Angus was on the cusp of becoming a father, but unfortunately we find out in 'The Pits' that his son did not survive infancy, triggering a period of self-sabotage and his partner leaving him. Angus moves back home to Palmerston North to regather himself and figure out what next. 

The song: Oh! You Pretty Things by Harvey Danger

I chose Harvey Danger's song 'Diminishing Returns' for 'Copies' in A Man Melting' playlist back in 2010, so it seems appropriate to pick another track from them (albeit a cover, so I can echo the echo motif).

10.

The story: Robinson in the Roof Space

Robinson has taken time away from paid employment to finally write his novel, but must resort to extreme measures (writing in the roof cavity above his garage, with the ladder only replaced by his wife after enough time has elapsed) to actually get some words down.

The song: Stayin' Alive by Bee Gees

At one point Robinson feels taunted by the flashing cursor in his word document and wonders if matched the beats per minute of 'Stayin' Alive'. But he can't Google it because he deliberately doesn't have internet access while in the roof space.

There's something manic about both the beat and the falsetto ah ha ha ha's (and all the background stuff Barry - I think - does in the latter half of the song) that matches poor Robinson's overactive imagination and underactive fingers.

11.

The story: 30 Ways of Looking at Marumaru South

Actually, it's thirty 100-word micro-stories, all set in the fictional South Island town of Marumaru South (which featured in my historical novel, The Mannequin Makers, but everything in '30 Ways' is set in the present.

The song: Eleanor Rigby by Aretha Franklin

Okay, I realise this the second Beatles cover, and third song written by The Fab Four. But things are connected.

This version is explicitly referenced in the section: The Karaoke Queen, which was one of the two most worked and reword sections (the other was The Dieter). It feels like the kind of song you could really go to town on in a TV singing competitions (in this case: Homai te Pakipaki) - at the risk of a televised train wreck.

12. 

The story: Kia Kaha Ōtepoti

A refugee family rocks up on some dude's doorstep and manages to wrangle their way inside, and slowly it becomes clear that this is not an isolated incident. Families across Māori Hill and Roslyn now have 'house guests'... all of this prompts a shift from the individual to the collective. 

(So basically, the opposite to 'Parents in Decline', here we start with 'I... I... I...' and then move to 'we', which become more inclusive with every utterance).

The song: Heavenly Pop Hit by The Chills

Gotta be a Dunedin band for a Dunedin story. This might be Martin Phillips' most upbeat song (maybe that's not saying much) - but I love the way it works in different perspectives (the sun setting on five billion faces / 'we swoop low on trees, or we sweep under carpets' / 'I find it hard to believe'), and the gift economy.

13. 

The story: Paper Universe

Jared moved back to Wellington after pulling pints on his OE in the UK. He moves in with a friend from high school, Daniel, who is still working towards his doctorate in astronomy and hasn't ever had a proper girlfriend. Maybe Jared can help with that...

The song: Resident Evil by Friendship

While 'Paper Universe' is told from Jared's perspective, it's really Daniel's story (or a story about why Jared's not the right narrator). So I like pairing it with this great song of Friendship's 2025 album Caveman Wakes Up. 

I imagine it's Daniel singing the lines 'New roommate moving in / Guess this is how some people live x2 / Some shithead in my living room / Playing Resident Evil / Playing Resident Evil', reflecting on what a fuckup Jared is (yet the chicks seem to dig him).

(It's also valid to interpret Dan Wriggins' lyrics as a kind of dissociative moment, where the singer is looking at himself playing Resident Evil, but my story is definitely not a Fight Club / Shutter Island / Secret Window / The Machinist / Nabokov's 'The Eye' scenario... because there's enough of those already, eh?).

14. 

The story: The Kick Inside

David visits his dying mother in hospital. The narrator intrudes a lot to tell us about his middle name and warming to Kate Bush and his love of Robert Lowell...

The song: Pigeon Camera by The Tragically Hip

I could have picked a Kate Bush song (the story shares its title with a Kate Bush album) or even Bush or Soundgarden who get namechecked... But it wouldn't be one of these playlists without at least one Hip/Gord Downie song (I actually had one Hip and one Gord Downie solo song for The Mannequin Makers playlist).

The intrusive narrator, on one of his tangents, says the story of Robert Lowell watching his mother bathe when he was young reminds him of the lines in 'Pigeon Camera' about a brother and a sister with something they could no longer contain.

Plus it probably has the best guitar solo in the entire Hip catalogue.

---

Consumption Diary: Sept-Oct 2024

MUSIC - SEPTEMBER

PARA-LITERARY INTERLUDE

I came 2nd in the Sargeson Prize with my story 'Robinson in the Roof Space', which was subsequently published at Newsroom. I wrote the first half of this story in my first month of the Burns Fellowship in 2017, alongside two other stories, when I was loosening up for the novel that would eventually become Nailing Down the Saint. I wrote the second half of the story in my last week at the Michael King Writers Centre in Devonport in June this year (alongside one other story). There's clearly something about the figure of Robinson that appeals to me when on a writing residency...

In terms of the composition of the story itself, it follows George Saunders' approach of building a story sentence by sentence, and though I hadn't read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain when I wrote the first part. It does have a Saunderian vibe, though. And adding each new sentence so that it was adding to the story, making it better, like a bricklayer building a wall, made it pretty easy to pick up and finish seven years later.

In other publication (non)news, the agent I pitched both the novel and short story collection I worked on while in Devonport didn't want anything to do with short stories and was lukewarm on the novel sample. It helped clarify how I was feeling about the novel manuscript: it still wasn't wholly what it wanted/needed to be. So another draft is on the cards, when I can manufacture the time/headspace/roofspace. 

A university press also passed on the story collection, citing the horrors of the marketplace. Oh well.

So for now this turtle has pulled his head right back into his shell. It's nice to have some things in the chamber when I feel like pitching again or the Universe comes knocking.

READING

The Nix by Nathan Hill (novel, audiobook, US, 2016) - I read Hill's sophomore novel, Wellness, earlier this year and reading his debut cemented a few things for me. Wellness wasn't flawless, but it's felt more unified than The Nix, and will definitely be in my end of year top 10. When you add Hill's two novels to the two Paul Murray doorstoppers (Skippy Dies and The Bee Sting), and possibly also Gabrielle Zevin's novel (see below), I think these are the sorts of books my novel manuscript is wanting to become. Bigger. Polyphonic but in a more sedate way. Timelessly topical. 

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (novel, audiobook, US, 2022) - I liked but did not love this one. But having read Sam Brooks' ludicrous review for The Spinoff, suddenly I'd die for this novel. The references thing in particular - I thought this was well-handled. Just to pick the first from Brooks' list, Metal Gear Solid isn't a throwaway line, but a long passage about stealth games, the game's designer/publisher deciding to rebrand the series to appeal to an American audience - all of which was germane to the characters' own decisions about their games AND hit that nostalgia dopamine release for the days of the original PlayStation.

Companion Piece by Ali Smith (novel, audiobook, UK, 2022) - The great Ali Smith keeps on being great in uncomfortable ways.

Say's Who? A kinder, funner usage guide for everyone who cares about words by Anne Curzan (non-fiction, audiobook, 2024) - Cliff Notes version: languages evolve, go for it.

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood (novel, audiobook, Australia, 2023) - The adjective Woody, in this case, refers to something intimate and yet bone-cold. 

Murder at the Museum by Alasdair Beckett-King (novel, audiobook, UK, 2023)

You Don't Have to Have a Dream by Tim Minchin (non-fiction, audiobook, Australia, 2024)

BBQ Economics by Liam Dann (non-fiction, audiobook, NZ, 2024) - I left this particular BBQ early.

The Mires by Tina Makereti (novel, audiobook, NZ, 2024) - So great to have NZ books available as audiobooks, even if they aren't all to my tastes (see above).

Above the Noise: My Story of Chasing Calm by DeMar DeRozan with Dave Zarum (non-fiction, audiobook, US, 2024) - So great to have DeMar DeRozan on the Sacramento Kings.

Chosen by Geoff Cochrane (poetry, physical book, NZ, 2020)

Conventional Weapons by Tracey Slaughter (poetry, physical book, NZ, 2019)

MOVIES & TV

Severance, Season 1

Slow Horses, Season 1 & 2

Ted Lasso, Season 3

Presumed Innocent, Season 1

Starting 5, Season 1

Reform, Parts 1-3

Mr McMahon

Anyone But You

Late Night with the Devil

Knock at the Cabin

Inside Out 2

Holiday on the Buses

MUSIC - OCTOBER

March & April Consumption Diary (with writing update)

MUSIC - MARCH

WRITING

On the 4th of March I started work to expand my short story, 'Ambient Ecstasy', which I wrote late last year and was published in The Listener as part of their summer reading series, into a short novel. By short, I was picturing 40,000 words. The short story was about 1,200 words.

On 25 April, I finished the first draft, which clocked in at 32,180 words.

Disclaimer 1: I was on day three of testing positive for COVID, so the final days of drafting were a little cloudy.

Disclaimer 2: I knew at the time that there were some additional scenes/chapters I'd need to write as part of the 2nd draft, but I'd made it to the end and would need to go back to the start to figure out where these additional bits went. The second half has a different narrative form to the first, with multiple narrators, so there'll be quite a bit of moving chunks around between now and settling on the final form.

Right now, I'm mid-way through a full read-through. This involves noting down things to add in, or sections that need to be sped up, or spruced up, or made consistent with later chapters, and also making some quick tweaks as I go.

The aim is to be done with the 2nd draft by mid-May... and we'll see what's left to do when I get to that point.

16 days into the first draft I released what needed to happen in the second half, and stopped to write a short essay about the realisation and how I'd reconceptualised the book. I'll have to return to that, too, when the book is a little closer to its final form.

It feels good to be writing again, even if it is in 500-700 word chunks every morning before the kids wake up and my days get hectic. And writing through COVID (my daughter caught it first, then my wife, then my son, and I was almost done with my 7 day isolation as a household contact before I tested positive). Day two was the worst: body aches and it felt like I was going to run a big fever, but then day three I felt almost normal, only to get a massive head cold that lasted the next three days. I just have a dry cough now. My brain is slightly muddled, but I figure that's 2 weeks of house arrest with other sickies, while working in between the stat days.

BOOKS

Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson (novel, audiobook, 2021)

Classic Stephenson.

A big, glorious, only-slightly-ludicrous (giant hogs vs meth gators!) examination of what might happen when certain low-lying territories take climate action into their own hands. Goes deep into the science and doesn't do the same for the morality, though this isn't completely shirked. 

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (novel, audiobook, 2021)

Another long, hard-leaning sci-fi that I just lapped up. Similar to The Martian, but also different enough. Which do I prefer? Maybe this one?

Loop Tracks by Sue Orr (novel, phys/audiobook, 2021)

I started reading this as a physical book but anyone whose read one of these consumption diaries knows I struggle with physical books these days. The act of reading sends me to sleep, regardless of the content.

So I restarted this as an audiobook when it appeared on Audible and man, it was so great. 

Lot's of the coverage focussed on the early section of the novel when abortions were illegal in NZ but not Australia, but the later sections, set amid the first nationwide COVID lockdown in 2020, were a triumph in their own right. I think in twenty years, it'll be interesting to see which parts people focus on.

As an aside, man I wish more NZ books were available as audiobooks!

Halibut on the Moon by David Vann (novel, audiobook, 2017)

Oh, what's this? Another NZ book? Well, it qualified for the Ockhams in 2020 and made the fiction short-list, by virtue of a) Vann being an NZ resident and b) the book being crazy good. It didn't win (Aue by Becky Manawatu did), and probably wasn't a great look for our biggest book prize to go to something set in the US by a US national... But as I say, it's very, very good.

David Vann has written this book a few times. From the amazing story collection Legend of a Suicide to Caribou Island and I think a few others (honestly, I got a bit tired of it all for a while there)... but Halibut manages to traverse the same ground (retelling the author's father's suicide, this time sticking only to the father's perspective) in such a sharp, manic way. He feels like Thomas McGuane or Barry Hannah protagonist. And knowing how this story has ended before, and the rug that was pulled in Legend, there's an incredible extra-textual tension.

I still probably rate Legend higher, for the way it plays with the story collection form, but if you prefer novels, you might want to start here.

Clothes clothes clothes music music music boys boys boys by Viv Albertine (memoir, audiobook, 2014)

Really enjoyed this. I remembered The Slits cover of 'Heard it Through the Grapevine' but that's about all I knew of Albertine's career in punk. It was facinating how connected she was with acts like The Clash and the Sex Pistols, and what happened after the Slits broke up, and her return to music after the housewife interregnum.

Great stuff.

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff (novel, audiobook, 2015)

I wanted to like this more than I did. Maybe I just don't have much love left for the kind of epic, smartypants American novels (think Donna Tartt and Jonathan Franzen)? So much of it just felt false. Sometimes I like false. Even inside the book, the falsest part (Lancelot becoming a famous playwright) was the most interesting. But as a whole... 

Your Ad Could Go Here by Oksana Zabuzhko (short stories, audiobook, translated, 2018)

Yes, I thought I should read a Ukrainian book and landed on this after some research. And maybe it's impossible to be that book people go to for the wrong reasons. Like, say NZ was invaded by Chile (sorry, Chilenos, just an example!), which book should people read? That's the kind of question that can power a decent podcast, but it's not something that actually has an answer. The answer to which book is always the next and then another and then another.

Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen (short stories, audiobook, 2021)

Didn't pick this to read a Chinese novel (someone recommended it to me), and I kind of forgot it was short stories at first. The first story feels like the start of a novel, but not a particularly good one. And then it ends in a non-good way. The next couple of stories are much stronger, but whenever the stories get too journalistic, I lost interest.

The Fell by Sarah Moss (novel, audiobook, 2021)

Really interesting to compare this lockdown-UK-style novel to Loop Tracks. This is the third of Moss's novels I've read after Ghost Wall (2018) and Summerwater (2020), in part because they are short and audiobooks are readily available. I'm in love with the idea of short novels (see "Writing" above) but none of these quite hit the mark for me. The further removed from Ghost Wall, the more I think it'll end up being my favourite of hers.

Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler (novel, audiobook, 2021)

Meandering and dull. Felt like the first draft. The get it all out, all the stuff that actually happened and the big thing I invented to make it fiction, so I can then unearth what the true point of it is.  

How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie (novel, audiobook, 2021)

Really disliked this book. And it's not the sort of thing you want to Google. Just keep moving.

MOVIES & TV

Our Flag Means Death - Season 1

Biography: WWE Legends - Season 1

Winning Time - Season 1 (ongoing)

Abbott Elementary - Season 1

Moon Knight - first 3 eps of Season 1 before abandoning

The Bubble

Nightmare Alley

Heat

Motherless Brooklyn

Soylent Green

Parks & Rec - started re-watching from Season 2 (ongoing)

Lost - first 2 eps of Season 1 (thinking of rewatching - never watched all the eps first time around...losts of hints of Damon Lindelof's later shows, but also lots of network elements... and 25 eps a season... Season 1 is almost as long as the full run of The Leftovers!)

MUSIC - APRIL

April Consumption Diary

MUSIC

INTERLUDE

I started writing a short story yesterday. I took my laptop to a different building at lunchtime and wrote for 30 minutes surrounded by studying students. It felt good.

Now I woke up at 6am on a Saturday to continue working on it, but instead I'm doing this consumption diary.

Baby steps.

BOOKS

A Short History of the World According to Sheep by Sally Coulthard (non-fiction, audiobook)

I view these topic-specific history books are as a kind of palatte cleanser between books. A way to reset and may learn a thing or two in the process, or see things in a different way. This was okay in that respect. The second half is very Anglocentric. Oh well.

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (non-fiction, audiobook)

Written during the first half of Trump's first term, when the spectre of a second was very real (as was impeachment or implosion before the election). Pretty spot on in it's diagnosis of the authoritarian traits of Trump and a reminder, as Biden pushes through some pretty good policies on things like climate change, that we are no longer on the darkest timeline.

Two Stories by Sally Rooney (short stories, audiobook)

Should I count this as a while book? Probably not. But I have a 20+ hour Kim Stanley Robinson novel queued up for next month so I will, so there.

The first story was so good. The second less arresting. Hard to judge without another six or so stories to bounce off.

A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet (novel, audiobook)

I will always love Millet for the jolt her novel Oh! Pure and Radiant Heart gave me when I was letting my dream of writing seriously slip away as a twenty-something living in soulless Brisbane.

A Children's Bible takes just as bold risks, but is completely different. It'd be interesting to read this after Parable of the Sower, rather than before. I think I would have enjoyed this take on climate-induced partial apocalypse even more.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (essays, audiobook)

A collection of previously uncollected essays, reviews and columns from across 5 decades of Didion's writing. Didn't feel bitsy. I enjoyed it.

Islands of Decolonial Love by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (short stories, audiobook)

Wow. This book is exciting. It starts out with short stories in a recognisable, North American mold. It felt a little like a first nation's Jesus' Son - and then the stories lean more into Nishnaabeg modes and language. Another bad comparison: it felt like the bait and switch in David Vann's Legend of a Suicide where the death (the dyer?) in the second half is unexpected and makes you re-evaluate everything. This time, it's like: where those first stories good on their own terms or were they bait to lure me in.

Lots to mull over. Lots to learn from.

A Complicated Love Story Set in Space by Shaun David Hutchinson (novel, audiobook)

YA romance notable for two things:

1. How absolutely unremarkable  it is within the world of the novel that the romance is between two male sixteen year olds. Literally unremarkable: no one bats an eyelid that person A is gay, or person B is gay, or that A and B would be a couple. It's cheering that there's these representations out there and that LGBT youths might experience total acceptance from the get go - in some spheres / at some point in the future.

2. How badly this thing falls apart in the second half. It felt a bit like taking the set up from an early season of the Simpsons and resolving it with in the many of recent seasons (or Rick and Morty). 

Oh well.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (novel, audiobook)

If this is Science Fiction or Fantasy, then they need to build a bigger church, because a bunch of stuff written by dudes that manages to avoid the SFF label definitely deserves it. From the The Road to anything by Michael Crichton, and even Lawrence Wright's The End of October.

But who cares for labels, anyway?

I really enjoyed Parable of the Sower and am looking forward to reading the follow-up, Parable of the Talents. I did feel frequently wrong-footed by where I thought the novel would go and where it went. Again, approaching this from an SFF perspective is partly to blame.

And it's hella prophetic. See: How Democracies Die, et al.

FILM & TV

The Gulf - Season 1

Cremerie - Season 1

Last Chance U: Basketball - Season 1

Defending the Guilty - Season 1

Shtisel - Season 1

Juliet, Naked

Instant Family

Bad Neighbours (yes, that's 3 Rose Byrne movies in a month)

The Merger

Love and Monsters

Sisters

The Blue Max

Bill & Ted Face the Music

Production diary: September 2018

Kowhai season, Dunedin Botanical Gardens

September was a busy month. So much so I'll defer my usual Consumption Diary for another day and just cover what I got up to.

*Spoiler alert* There's no major news on the novel front.

As of Monday, the manuscript is back with my NZ publisher, after working through a useful set of comments over the past few months.

I feel better about the whole process than I did at the start of August.

Pretty much from then on (with the exception of my Dunedin-Feilding Writer-in-Public long weekend, see below) I got up at 5am seven days a week and every day I did at least one small thing to make the manuscript better.

That incremental betterment leads to a funny kind of high. Maybe it's the lack of sleep, or the lack of free time, but I felt I was riding a wave of dopamine to this latest finish line. Not the kind of offshore break you'd see Kelly Slater ripping back and forth on. More like the glorified ripple on a lake from a dingy with an outboard puttering by in the distance. But when there's not a lot of other excitement knocking around, it's noticeable. And now that I've sent the manuscript back and I'm faced with three months of deferred life admin, it's sorely missed.

What am I going to do next? Well, life admin aside, I'm working on a pitch for a 33 1/3 book because #lifegoals. The pitch window closes at the end of October and I have to submit a sample chapter and a whole bunch of other peripherals.

What album am I writing about? You'll just have to wait and see.


Young Old Writer / Old Young Writer

Earlier on in September, I went to Dunedin for the 60th anniversary of the Robert Burns Fellowship.

It was weird being back in Dunedin eight months after I left: it felt both longer and shorter at various points over the weekend. I also felt like maybe every time I go back it will make me sadder and sadder because the place will be so tied up with my 2017 experience, when my kids were 4 and 2. And even now they're just 5 and 3 and it's ridiculous to feel time slipping away, for the first time I did understand the impulse to have more children: it's nothing about the children per se, it's just your own devious plan to never grow old, or at least, never stop being the parent of preschoolers.

When I wasn't totally overthinking life, mortality and fatherhood, I had a blast.

It was cool getting to hang out with such a distinguished bunch of writers as was assembled for the Burns thing.

A freshet of Burns Fellows

It's not often that many writers get together outside of writers festivals, and even then its only the writers with a new book to shill (and who festival-types deem bookable). But there was no need to shill anything this time. Very little ego involved. A lot of generosity. The dinner on the Friday night was such an uplifting experience. It got me wondering if a true writers' festival (emphasis on writers and that possessive) would ditch the punters completely...

Not that there wasn't a bunch of things put on for the public. There was a big lunchtime reading and two different exhibitions were launched that related to the Burns in some way (one at the Hocken, the other in the Uni Library's Special Collections).

NZYWF workshop

I ran a workshop/AMA session with some third year writing students and did two events that were claimed by both the Burns festivities and the NZ Young Writers Festival, which was running at the same time: a workshop about writing machine-assisted poetry, and chairing a panel on the scariest children's books ever.

It wasn't that hard to jump between the older, more distinguished world of the Burns Fellows and the younger, more ragtag world of the NZYWF - I'm used to not really fitting in. Too square, too edgy, too young, too old, too rich, too poor, too white... too conscious of whiteness.



Too Wellington, too Manawatu

On the Sunday morning I flew from Dunedin to Wellington and drove straight up to Feilding as I was appearing on a panel at the Manawatu Writers Fest at 4pm.

(My two outings as a writer this year just happened to be on the same weekend. I didn't realise until after I'd double-booked myself, but it all worked out.)

My panel was about getting your manuscript to the finish line and I managed to make it to the starting line with an hour to spare. The next day I ran a workshop about how to write short stories that stick with a reader.

It was disappointing to learn, in the days leading up to this year's festival, that their efforts to have a sizeable Maori component of the programme fell through, and as a result the remaining sessions did look overwhelmingly white.

The whole thing seemed to be run on a lot of goodwill and volunteer commitment. Organisation didn't strike me as a strong point throughout my engagements, so I can see how the whitewash happened. But as I boarded my flight from Dunedin I did strongly consider not even driving up to Feilding. At one point, the tougher decision seemed to be whether I'd say something online about why I pulled out or if I should just keep it to myself and be comfortable with that choice.

Because there's no excuse for a festival to be that blind/that naive in 2018.

Okay, so you wanted to have a half-day hui on Maori lit, and yeah, maybe it was a bad idea to just have one person responsible for organising that part. But surely Maori writers shouldn't have been ghettoised in their own panels outside of the hui. And what about the Pasifika writers, the Asian New Zealanders, the immigrant and refugee writers? Where were they? (If you want to play that game, there were a couple non-Pakeha writers on the programme, but really, you want to die on that hill?)

But in the end I did go. Because I wanted to see what it was like, and I wanted to see my mum, who lives in Palmerston North. And from what I'd read, the festival had tried and had admitted its failure and committed to do better next time, so what would me acting all superior have achieved? Bupkiss.

The festival was as lax as I'd supposed, organisationally. But the audiences were incredibly engaged (and pretty diverse). And the vibe wasn't fraught. There was an energy you don't always get a literary events. Avidness? Voraciousness? They seemed to be savouring every minute, and drawing links between what people had said in different sessions, like the secret to great literature had been broken up and tiny fragments given to every published author and the secret to joining their ranks was to gather as many fragments and arrange them into your own cogent structure... Which doesn't sound that ridiculous when you think about it.

My short story workshop probably had 40 people in it and we managed to make it work.

And it all made me feel a little bad for wishing for a Writers Festival without the public.

Maybe I'm just over Wellington and how self-important everything is here...

Or maybe there's something special about regional arts initiatives, where events are low-cost or no-cost (everything at MWF was FREE), and they don't get things right but they try, and so long as they learn from their mistakes and are better next time, maybe we shouldn't get all Wellington on them.

My Burns Year: By The Numbers

Like I said when I did this after the first 20 weeks: "What follows is, on one level, meaningless. It doesn't matter how many words I write, or how quickly. All that matters is what ends up getting published."

But I'm gonna do this anyway.

Let's start with the biggest number:

243,493 

That's how many words I wrote towards things I deemed meaningful enough to record in my almighty spreadsheet from 1 February 2017 to 31 January 2018 (a.k.a. my Burns Year).

Just how were these words expended, you ask? 

Why, here's a pie fresh from the Excel oven:

Or put another way:

• Four-fifths of a novel manuscript (more on this later)
• Blog: 26 fortnightly updates and 12 monthly consumption diaries on my blog
• Essays about NBA2K18 and narrative, the moves in contemporary NZ short stories, the end of the world, Recurrent Neural Network poetry, Chris Cornell, writing my previous novel and a review of three books
• Short stories: one completed (and submitted) story, one half-finished first draft, one quarter-finished first draft
• A handful of poems produced used a recurrent neural network trained on Dunedin Sound lyrics.
• Other: pitches for articles/essays/conference papers, responses to journalists, preparation for talks delivered.

All of those bullet points beneath the first one fall into the category of nice-to-have. They're what made my Burns Year fun and varied. I said YES to many, many things, and I sought out even more side-projects. Sucker. Glutton. Dope.

Because it's all for nought if the novel I set out to write isn't finished.

And it's not. Not yet.

But it's getting there!

By one measure -- the raw tally of words I added to the manuscript each day -- I wrote 142,436 words towards my novel about a dude sent to scout locations for someone else's biopic of San Giuseppe da Copertino.

Taking these numbers and plotting them against time, you get a worm like this:

What happened in those flat patches? Mostly travel. And my deliberate decision to start my Burns year bashing out short stories before resurrecting the novel. And all the nonsense that happens when Christmas and moving back to Wellington and roadtripping collide.

But this count of 'added words' oversells the total size of the manuscript I printed out in early January. 

That manuscript stands at only 90,090 words.

So a better indication of my year's work on the novel looks more like this:

I can't bring myself to go back through my working versions of the manuscript to see exactly when I 'lost' large chunks of the text. In broad terms, these were times when I realised I was going off-track, or stumbled upon some change that needed to happen...and went back and changed it.  

I'm not one of those writers who can bash through to the end of a first draft with BIG THINGS left to change. I've tried that before and I couldn't unpick just one thing without the whole thing falling apart.

So my 90,090 words is four-fifths of a first draft that'll be 110k-120k words, but most of that 90k is a fourth or fifth draft. 

A lot of my two-steps forward, three-steps back moments occurred in the second half of the year. I still haven't properly cracked the section in San Marino - which is at once the most important and potentially the most extraneous. I would write a couple of pages, or a scene, or a whole chapter, then realise it had to be handled differently a day or a week later.

This is part of the natural process, so it's only fair those thousands (THOUSANDS!) of futile words count towards the blue line alongside those that make the final cut. 

Most productive day

Friday 15 December: 3,426 words (1,758 on the novel, plus work on my best albums of the year blog post and answering questions on the NZ short story from a student in Sweden)

In second place:Monday 13 February: 3,215 words (923 words on a short story - the one I actually finished and the rest toward my first fortnightly blogpost and consumption diary)

No other day cracked the 3,000 word mark all year.

Most productive day on the novel: Friday 21 April, 2,500 words (a suspiciously round number, but there you have it).

The next two most productive on the novel were  4 April and 28 March, so I must've found a sweet spot around then... before my trip to Italy fricked it all up (boo-hoo!).

Lessons in productivity

Here's something I was surprised by: 43% of the days during my fellowship, I didn't write a single word.

Eek.

Okay, 84 of the 158 non-writing days were Saturdays or Sundays, and I made a deliberate effort to spend weekends with my young family and exploring Otago and beyond. When you add in my various trips (see above) and the days I spent in conferences and the like, you get 158.

The days of the week with the fewest goose eggs were Thursdays and Fridays (12 apiece). Monday (18) was the weekday upon I was most likely to leave the keyboard be.

If you take the total words written by weekday and divide by the total number of those days during my Burns year (there were 53 Wednesdays and 52 everything-elses), this is what my average productivity by weekday looks like:

So Tuesdays are King, trailed slightly by Fridays. Okay. 

And Wednesday sure looks like hump-day.

When you get rid of the non-writing days and divide only by non-zero writing days:

Monday and Tuesday are virtually identical. Friday drops back into the pack. But Wednesday still looks sluggish.

This is pretty similar to the picture after 20 weeks... so there's clearly something about Wednesdays that weren't doing it for me.

Back at week 20 I thought blogging dragged up my averages for Monday and Tuesday and this held true. I also said I hoped to get my average writing day above 1,000 for Monday to Friday (Wednesday was standing at 740 and Thursday 788), and I did this comfortably, breaking the 1,100 word barrier for all five and even getting Sunday into four figures.

(I'd forgotten completely about this goal, so there's no way I wrote something last Sunday to make this one graph look better).

Takeaways and targets

My clear goal for this first part of 2018 is to knock the bastard off and get my novel into the hands of publishing types. 

To that end, how about a completed first draft by Easter Monday, 2 April?

I'll be in paid employment three days a week from the week after next, with Wednesday and Thursday as my allocated 'writing days'. 

(I'll be treating Wednesday as my 'writing Monday' to get that productivity boost, rather than falling into a midweek slump.)

That gives me 14 'writing days' between now and the end of Easter. Assuming I do nothing on the novel outside of those days, and I have 30,000 words left to write (I could be way off, but), 

I'd need to write over 2,000 words a writing day - and all of it must count! 

If I waste a third of what I produce like I did in my Burns Year, I'll need to aim for more like 3,000 words, which I did twice all year and never on the novel alone.  

So I'll have to make progress on 'non-writing' days, too. 

Which is fine. I want far fewer goose eggs than in my Burns year, and should have fewer excuses (I've already explored Wellington; no one is gonna ask me to do anything).

Ideally I'd write in the 5am-7am slot every day -- though this relies on two kids sleeping until 7. My son (the problem) has been doing better lately, but he's one bout of sniffles away from completely changing his sleep cycle again.

But this process (a 1,400-word blog post and a few shitty graphs), which might seem the height of writerly onanism or nerdy procrastination, has helped me shape what the path to completion (no pun intended) will look like.

Now, to deliver on that plan!

2018: the year of 365 hundred-word chunks

Andersons Bay inlet at low tide, November 2017

It’s ten years (fuck me) since I set out on my quest to write a million words in a year. I only wrote 800,737 words, but I wouldn’t be where I am today without setting myself that audacious goal and giving it a darn good go.

To commemorate, I’m going to do another of my constrained wordcount experiments (see here, here and here), but this time keep it up for a full year rather than just a month.

So, yeah: every day this year I will add exactly 100 words to a brand new manuscript.

I haven’t planned anything, so I don’t quite know what the end product will be. A single 36,500 word novella? A series of linked short stories? A procession of unlinked stories?

All I know is this will be fiction. And I don't want the final form to feel chunky, at least not a consistent bit-size chunky. The rhythm will vary with what's occurring in the story. The finished product(s) should just read like normal prose, though perhaps a little more condensed than my normal style.

Also: the 100-word chunks will be separate from my location scout novel (which hopefully is done and dusted by mid-year) or any short stories I begin writing in a more traditional (get it done quick) way. This isn't meant to be my BIG THING for the year, just something to make sure I write every damn day, especially with the end of one novel in sight and no idea what I'll do after that (beyond write some short stories).

I only decided what I’d write about today when I attacked the blank page an hour ago. (It's based on a cluster of thoughts I’ve had while biking past the Andersons Bay inlet in recent months... I've the sense of a character, the setting (obviously), two time periods and a lot of birds, but nothing you might call structure or drama).

I’m leaving it incredibly vague because I know from past experience with this sort of SLOW WRITING that you spend a lot of time thinking about what you will write that day (or the next), and how it might work, that solutions abound, and I don’t want to close too much down.

I’m NOT going to post every daily century here, but I will post today’s one, just to give you a taster...

The inlet

There are many ways to pass the three or four hours it takes to complete a game of schoolboy cricket on a Saturday morning. You can be the husband-and-wife one-two-punch that lingers in back of every team huddle, every harmless conversation, to pull up mono-gendered terms – you guys, next batsman, schoolboy cricket – while coddling and cajoling their right-arm off-spin daughter as if this was Soviet-era gymnastics or tomorrow’s UFC pay-per-view. You can be one of the parents who talks to other parents about everything but cricket. You can be one of the parents who talks only about cricket. 

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

-->