June, July, August 2023 consumption diary

MUSIC - JUNE

Maybe it's more appropriate to call this three-month update an emissions diary, as my family of four flew to Europe and back in June and July - perfectly timing our stay with family in Italy to coincide with the heatwave (what were we thinking?), then got a puppy (what the fuck were we thinking?).

As I said in my last post, I rationalised the trip as it stacked business travel for my wife to the UK and Portugal with downtime in the the Algarve with our friends, then said family time in Northern Italy. My daughter (10) hadn't been overseas since she was 11 months old (coming back from our semester in Iowa) and my son (8) had never left the country. And we aren't planning on going anywhere else anytime soon, financial and environmental limitations being aligned in this respect.

But I still felt fuckin' bad about it.

And then we're over there and people are fainting in the heat and getting burns from the footpath and the next day it's hailing and ice floes are careening through Milan and people are spouting conspriacy talking points about the 15 minute city and not believing cows contribute to climate change until they see the research (fuckin' LOOK) and the there's fuckin' Dubai, where we spent a couple nights on the way back to break up the trip home, which is like Total Recall-style, massive infrastructure spend to support life and luxury in an inhospitable place, built on the back of the fossil fuels that (ruminant animals aside) have fucked the rest of us... And so I get back to my desk at the University of Otago as the Net Carbon Zero Programme Manager, trying to get our 30,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent in 2022 (down from 49k pre-pandemic), down below 20,000 by the end of the decade, and keep these gross tracking down and down beyond 2030, while connecting with others so that what we're doing can have a ripple effect and maybe 10x our impact, or 100x, but whatever-x we do, others are probably going to take advantage and choose growth over justice, profit over planet, now over next. 

And then I'm supposed to pick up by doctorate, looking at sustainability cultures within government organisations and how they response to the dictates of the Carbon Neutral Government Programme...

And I think maybe writing a pissant short story isn't such a daft thing to do while Rome approaches melting point.

And maybe as we approach melting point it's time to finally let the walls between booky-me and worky-me dissolve and coalesce and just do what feels right at the time.

Maybe.

BOOKS

Cousins - Patricia Grace (novel, audiobook, NZ)

Flux - Jinwoo Chong (novel, audiobook)

A Thousand Ships - Natalie Haynes (novel, audiobook)

Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You - Lucinda Williams (memoir, audiobook)

Getting Lost - Annie Ernaux (memoir, audiobook)

Everything is Beautiful & Everything Hurts - Josie Shapiro (novel, audiobook, NZ)

Golden Days - Caroline Barron (novel, audiobook, NZ)

Lioness - Emily Perkins (novel, audiobook, NZ)

Nothing to See - Pip Adam (novel, ebook, NZ)

Audition - Pip Adam (novel, physical book, NZ)

Poor People with Money - Dominic Hoey (novel, audiobook, NZ)

Sellout: The major-label feeding frenzy that swept punk, emo, and hardcore 1994-2007 - Dan Ozzi non-fiction, audiobook) - the rightful heir to Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life, which was a foundational book for the failed novel I wrote during my MA in Creative Writing about an indie band that all individually want/need to become famous but can't admit it to each other and thus must connive their way to infamy behind each others backs... This book slots in between the pre-Grunge alternative scene of Azerrad's book and the late-90s/early00's slacker indie (think Pavement) of my manuscript (written in 2006). I can't say Ozzi's scene is my favourite musically speaking (At the Drive-in, Jimmy Eat World and Green Day were the only bands that get full chapters I've ever had much time for), but it's a great book.

MUSIC - JULY

Film & TV

The Bear - Season 2 - sometimes who and how you watch a show has a big influence over how you react to it. Season 1 I watched with my wife who really dislikes shouty shows. Season 1 was A VERY SHOUTY SHOW. (She also dislikes ranty books, an example she'd give is Phillip Roth). So I watched Season 2 myself (sometimes on the TV while she was doing a puzzle, sometimes on my phone in bed while we took turns sleeping downstairs in the first fortnight of having the puppy and needing to be handy if it needed to pee in the night). I was swept up in the feast of the seven fishes (ep.6). I cried at the end of Richie's episode (#7). I listened to The Watch podcast's 3-part breakdown of the series as I made it through each chunk, then their interview with co-showrunner Christopher Storer, who spoke about how Season 2 needed to be lighter (incl. visually) and less shouty than Season 1. I communed with the content. I loved it. I might go back and rewatch Season 1 then get my wife to join me next time through Season 2 (maybe closer to Season 3, whenever that may drop).

Colin from Accounts - Season 1

Black Mirror - Season 6

Alone - Seasons 7,8, 9 (all those available on TVNZ+, though I just noticed Season 5 is on Netflix...) - the TV version of whale song or ambient rainfall while I make the kids' lunches in the mornings

Quarterback - Season 1

Muscles & Mayhem: American Gladiators - Season 1

The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin Keystone Collection and Chaplin (biopic starring Robert Downey Jr) - there was a Chaplin collection on Emirates in-flight entertainment

Inside Man

John Wick 4

Dune

Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond

David Brent: Life on the Road

The Brothers Grimsby (abandoned midway)

Champions (Woody Harrelson bball coach flick)

Taskmaster NZ - Season 4 (eps 1-4 so far)

The History of the Minnestota Vikings (Dorktown) - eps 1-5

MUSIC - AUGUST

Third Age Vacation

Wanaka

In May I went down to Wanaka to talk to a branch of the University of the Third Age. They were running a four week 'course' on NZ writers. One writer a week, two hours per session (with a tea break in the middle). Cilla McQueen kicked off, discussing poetry. Paula Morris was next, covering fiction and teaching creative writing, then it was me, and Carl Nixon went last.

My talk was titled 'Career? Calling? Hobby?' and covered everything I've done in the last fifteen years, from writing the first draft of a novel in 28 days as a 21 year old, to my third published book that drops in August, along side the places I've lived, the jobs I've worked and the kids that have joined team Cliff.

The answer is you can't consider writing a career, at least in the financial sense, nor a hobby, in the emotional sense. And a calling seems to highfalutin for something that, so far and to my knowledge, hasn't changed anyone's life.

Writing books, having a family and paying the bills: it's all a juggling act. You can only persist so long if you don't have passion in all three aspects.

I also explained the geneses of The Mannequin Makers and Nailing Down the Saint, how my novels take-off when I see the connection between two bad ideas. A father raising his kids to be living mannequins and a shipwreck around Cape Horn. A levitating Franciscan friar and modern movie-making.

After the tea break there was time for almost an hour of questions and we could have kept going a  longer. The crowd was around 130-140 people and they were really engaged. Lots of retired school teachers and university types.

My family came down south with me and we spent two nights in Wanaka and two in Queenstown and did lots of touristy things (and spent a lot of money)...

Arrowtown

Queenstown from the top of the gondola

...the kids highlight was the motel in Wanaka because it had a trampoline (typical)...

but those two hours with the University of the Third Age was mine.

Return to Fire Island: Fortnight 26 of the Burns

I'll have you know, this is NOT the end of my Burns year. I'm still on the university's payroll for another three days. As such, I must refrain from doing any number crunching, graph making or sweeping generalisation until at least 1 February.

Biggest new first...

My book got reviewed in the New York Times yesterday!

New Zealand art has always been shaped by distance and the isolation it breeds. A new novel finds surprising ways to cover this territory. https://t.co/SKVcgnF0Jt

— New York Times Books (@nytimesbooks) January 27, 2018

Pull-quote:

In his debut novel, the New Zealand writer Craig Cliff adds to the canon, but with such ambition, creativity and sheer energy that he shows there’s still something new to say about a national narrative that can seem, at times, to hold no surprises.

I tend to agree with everything in the review (apart from the bit about Marumaru being in the North Island, and maybe the way it makes it sound as if The Mannequin Makers follows on from The Luminaries, when TMM was launched in New Zealand a handful of days before Catton's book in 2013). It is "almost Shakespearean in scope" (emphasis on almost) and ambitious (see first point) and the final part probably is the weakest (oddly, some American reviewers have struggled with the third part, which is clearly the greatest extended epistolary subantarctic castaway yarn by a mute Scottish woodcarver in the history of the printed word).

So, yeah, I was happy to be reviewed in the fricken' New York Times, and doubly so that it was strongly favourable (I've spent too much time on review aggregator sites!), but I think it would feel different (more immediate?) if this was happening in 2013 or 2014. Right now, I can't help thinking about my location scout/levitation saint novel (how I need to finish it; how a good review in the NYT might help it find a publisher and a readership).

My US Publisher (Milkweed Editions, an indie press based in Minnesota) - who've been fantastic the whole way - have been extra excited the past 36-hours. When you see your editor's mum congratulate her on Facebook for a review of your book, it reminds you how many other people it takes to get your book out there, and how each of them stake their reputations on you. 

At some point this year I'll be putting my next novel out there with agents and publishers and I'll try remember all this when the rejections come. 

Better to be loved late than strung-along early.

Fortnight 26 wordcounts

Total words: 6,620 (40% on this blog, 60% on other non-fiction - book reviews and judges comments)

1st week: 0 (travelling)

2nd week: 6,620

My 100-words-a-day story hit a snag somewhere around Christchurch. It was boring me, and it was turning into something that would need around 5,000 words to complete it, which meant more than another month doing something I wasn't feeling in tiny chunks. So I took a breather to reconsider. I'll hit restart again for February with a different story.

Roadtrip continued...

Mapua

Following on from the end of Fortnight 25... after two nights in Christchurch we drove to Nelson for three nights, then Picton for one night, before catching the ferry back home (?) to Wellington.

We rented our house out while we were down south. I inspected the place back in August and it was looking good, but it was depressing to return for real this time and find they hadn't cleaned inside very well (like, trail mix on the carpet in one of the bedrooms), the fabric softener part of the washing machine was full of washing powder (so they'd been washing their clothes with plain water all year) and the outside (not the renter's responsibility) was going to take A LOT of work to wrestle back to respectability.

Every time I went out my front door to bring in another box, I was greeted with this young flax growing from the garage gutter.

Oh, and that room I built in my garage to store the stuff we wouldn't need in Dunedin (beds, books, toys, suits) and save the cost of a storage unit? Half the stuff was moldy. Not incredibly moldy - the room stayed dry, it's just whatever moisture or spores were present when the stuff got shut away last January had been trapped there for a year. So there have been many loads through the washing machine (putting the washing liquid in the drum!) and kitchen stuff through the dishwasher and everything else wiped down by hand and left in the sun's life-zapping rays.

After four days of this (and weeding and keeping the kids from killing each other), I was well and truly missing Dunedin.

So I flew back to Dunedin...

...for this guy's birthday. 

Fittingly, January 25th is when the prizegiving is held for the annual Robert Burns Poetry competition, for which I was one of the two judges for this year.

You can read about the winners in the ODT article.

I landed mid-morning and had time to kill before the ceremony at 5pm, so I went back to my bare-looking office at the university, procrastinated, got a haircut and spent a bit more time with the Gordon Walters exhibition at the Art Gallery.

Gordon Walters: it's not all about the koru.

The ceremony itself was a treat - getting to hear the poets read their work aloud, especially the ones written in Scots, really brought them to life.

And afterwards, judges and winners were given free tickets to the Burns Night Dinner at Toitu.

Those brackets on the "(and woman)" part were a bit weird. Especially if you've already clicked on the ODT link and read Jill O'Brien's winning poem from the published category ('Reply from the Lassies') or read about the current debate in Scotland about whether the bard was a "sex pest". 

Whether it was the impact of #MeToo or simply a coincidence, the night became a kind of conversation about the role of women and what should and should not be celebrated about Burns.

For the first time in the 157 year history of the Dunedin Burns Club, a woman, Ayrshire-born Donna Young, delivered the 'Address to the Haggis' (and did so splendidly). 

#abouttime

Peter Sutton reading his winning poem from the unpublished category

Jill O'Brien, winner of the published category

Donna also sang Jill's poem (which was written to be performed), and local writer Lisa Scott excoriated Burns and resuscitated his reputation over the course of an hilarious (and at times hilariously uncomfortable) ten minutes, before the toast to the lassies.

Everything was taken in good spirit and I felt proud to be there as the Burns Fellow (and that I whakapapa back to Scotland - Clan Ross represent!), but also to be knocking around in 2018 when dumb reverence or pregnant silence is so passé.

The next day it was my farewell morning tea at the Department of English and Linguistics. After that, I knocked around in my office for a few more hours, graffittied the desk, then caught the shuttle one last time to the frustratingly distant airport, and back to Wellington.

But but but

As I said, I'm still technically the Burns fellow for another three days!

Maybe I can finish my novel in that time?!?

Um. Alright.

But, my daughter starts school and my son goes back to daycare on Wednesday. I don't go back to the Ministry officially until 12 Feb (though I will be popping in and out before then) and even then I'll only be 0.6 of an FTE, which means I'll still be a writer two days (and whichever early mornings I can scrounge) a week.

This last week, it's been frustrating to be home and not working but not have the time to touch my novel, after travelling for a fortnight and not touching the novel (after cleaning and packing and not touching the novel).

I had four books to review when I first got back to Wellington (I'd read them but hadn't written the reviews, having run out of time in Dunedin), which soaked up a good many evenings. (And the review I did of three books for NZ Books will probably close more doors than it opens... oh well.)

Former Burns Fellows inform me there's a thing called the Post-Burns Blues... But hopefully I'll be too busy to notice. 

Like, I've got three more blog posts to write (best books of 2017; January consumption diary; graphing my Burns Year productivity). How could I possible have time to get depressed!

And I'll be back in Dunedin in September for the 60th anniversary of the fellowship.

And I have something to aim for fitness-wise: being the spritely elder statesman at the  100th anniversary of the Fellowship in 2058.

Pass me my running shoes!

Extinguished gentleman: Fortnight 25 of the Burns

Hi-ho campers!

This post covers the period 1-14 Jan. Over that period, I had a birthday, my daughter 'graduated' from pre-school (gown and mortarboard and everything), and we left Dunedin (but only got as far as Christchurch).

The leaving part was hard. Not least because we were renting a large house which meant a lot of cleaning!

Our stuff got picked up by the movers on 8 January, and as of today (27 Jan) it still hasn't made it to Wellington. Last I heard it was in Chch, waiting for more people's stuff to fill a truck. ETA: This coming Frida.

Ho-hum.

Anyway, not a lot of writing took place that fortnight...

Fortnight 25 wordcounts
Total words: 6,088 (41% on the novel, 33% on short stories, 26% on this blog, 26% on this blog)
1st week: 5,388
2nd week: 700 (that is, 7 days worth of 100 word chunks, as per my 2018 project, while travelling)


Meanwhile, in the land of the free and the home of the microwave burrito

The Mannequin Makers got a bit of coverage during Fortnight 25, including:

• Featuring on BookRiot's 10 small press books from the end of 2017 that you'll want to read

• An excerpt ran on Lit Hub (an early chapter from The Carpenter's tale). It was more than a little cool to see my book feature the day after Robert Coover's (and on a day the homepage was all about J.M. Coetzee on Samual Beckett.

• A review in the Chicago Review of Books, titled: New Zealand Gets Creepy in ‘The Mannequin Makers’: On Craig Cliff's tragic American debut. That "tragic American debut" could be taken the wrong way, right? I know I had my trepidations when reading it.

• Book Browse also did this cool thing: Beyond the Book: Castaways on the Antipodes Islands. 

Before you leave

Port Chalmers

We still had some downtime (read: needed to get the kids out of the house to stay sane) amid the cleaning and packing. We went to Orokonui Ecosanctuary (sorry birdlovers, my camera is on the moving truck, so no photos today), Port Chalmers, Brighton and our favourite haunts closer to home (the elephant park on Highcliff Road, the dinosaur park and St Clair beach).

Before packing up my office at the university, it looked like this (note the post-its still hanging in there from back in Fortnight 1).

After cleaning, I printed out THE NOVEL as it stands. 90,000 words, 260-something pages, one title I'm still not sure about (hence the spoon). 

Roadward hometrip

We left Dunedin on the tenth (a year to the day since we departed Wellington) and stayed two nights in Naseby. We then drove to Twizel via Clyde & Cromwell, and stayed there for two nights, before sliding back down the plains to Chch and the in-laws.

Naseby Indoor Curling Rink.
Te kids were fascinated by curling (I got bored way before they did)

Blue lake, St Bathans

Clyde Dam

Lake Tekapo

And just like that, we were done with Otago (*sob*) and my penultimate fortnight as the Robert Burns Fellow was over.

Fortnight 19 of the Burns

Fortnight 19 summary

Total wordcount: 14,660 (65% on the novel, 29% essays, 3% on the blog and 3% on poetry)
1st week: 9,251
2nd week: 5,409

That Thursday (19 October)

1)

I woke to news that Gord Downie had passed away.

I wrote about Gord's brain cancer and The Hip most recently in my April Consumption Diary. It's the tip of the iceberg, really. The Tragically Hip have been an obsession of mine for the last 15 years; their music has underwritten so much of my creativity over that time.

One nice thing: Gord managed one last album (a double LP called Introduce Yerself) which comes out on the 27th of October. I'm working on something to accompany the album dropping, and hopefully it'll find a home somewhere online...

2)

The fates (or the editors of the Otago Daily Times) chose that same day for the publication of my profile in the local paper, a full two months after the interview and (very brief) photo shoot.

(I'm so over thinking about my writing (and being written about) in terms of juggling paid employment, family and writing. One of the great things about this year is writing and money have been pretty well merged. But IT IS temporary. So I guess I'll just have to run the risk of looking like a part-timer until I have another book to speak on my behalf.)

3)

In the afternoon, the Sacramento Kings played their first game of the new NBA season. There are zero expectations in terms of winning or the playoffs for the squad this year, but half the roster have one or fewer years experience in the NBA, and it's going to be fascinating how the young guys develop.

Against Houston, they delivered the expected 'L', but the game was great to watch and the young guys who made it onto the court played well. I noted in Fortnight 11 that I was sceptical about D'Aaron Fox, but so far he's proving me wrong.

4)

I went to a talk at 5:15pm on 'Fake Religions, Fake News and the Allure of Fiction', by Carole M Cusack from the Universtiy of Sydney. As I'm writing a book that features a fictional cult (which touches on but is not the sole representation of a kind of alternative spirituality), this was very timely.

After a bit of academic calisthenics, Cusack provided an interesting survey of new religions that have appeared since the 1960s, predominantly those inspired by works of fiction (the Church of All Worlds, Jediism, Matrixism, Dudeism, Bronies, etc).

It was fascinating, if a little superficial (such is the nature of surveying such a proliferation of movements in an hour).

During the Q&A, Cusack mentioned the 4 million Americans who claim to have been abducted by aliens, and how she was looking into ufology: was there something in it, or was it a case of cascading mindsets?

I probably asked questions in about 2% of Q&As I attend - I just don't think of questions, and if I do, they're so niche I feel no one else would benefit from hearing the answer. But in this case, surrounded by a lot of Religious Studies academics and students, the whole talk was probably too niche, so I thought what the hey.

I asked what is it about new age, syncretic religions, like Damanhur in Turin (and now elsewhere), that do a really good job of selecting good aspects from the religious pick'n'mix that's available to them, but then they go and overreach by believing in something like UFOs or, in the case of Damanhur, time travel? Is it that they feel that to be a religion they need something beyond human comprehension? Or is it, more cynically, a marketing thing: to cut through the noise of the other movements, they need something to hang their hat on?

Both were likely, according to Cusack, who also noted that in many countries, in order to be acknowledged as a religion (and thus receive favourable treatment in terms of tax etc) the legal process definitely privileges those with out-there beliefs.

5)

When I got home and switched on the news, Winston had finally made up his mind and went with Labour (and, implicitly, The Greens).

My Twitter bubble was going bananas.

It'll certainly be what 19 October 2017 will be most remembered for around these parts... But my wife told me Downie's passing was on the list of most read articles on Stuff.co.nz earlier in the day, and I'll cling to that.


Tales of Chip Pnini

The week previous, The Spinoff published my piece called: 'Everything wrong with NBA 2K18’s MyCareer mode and one possible solution'. It doesn't cover everything, but it gives you a good idea of my take.

And reader, I'm still playing.

Taieri Gorge Railway

On Saturday, we (wife, two kids and in-laws) went on the Taieri Gorge Railway to Pukerangi, then got a shuttle to Middlemarch, biked the first 5kms of the Central Otago Rail Trail (enough to know it was not enough; but more than enough for the two pre-schoolers).

On Sunday the train ran from Middlemarch, so we caught it back to Dunedin. Another great wee trip. Bless you Otago.

Debris from the flood a couple months back

Last for a reason

How's the novel going? Let's just say I read a takedown of Dan Brown's latest book this morning (as if he hadn't been taken down in all the ways you might approach literature a hundred times over; like, the only reason I read it was to see why anyone would go through that effort in 2017, but I'm still none the wiser) and found myself thinking: shit, a reviewer could say these things about MY NOVEL!! 

I tell myself that, even if that was true about what on the page (or some of the pages) at the moment, the manuscript exists as an incomplete first draft. I can get rid of the Brownisms and make scenes that aren't working work with a bit of elbow grease on the next go round.

But far out. Can I get to the end of this thing already so I can spend my days making it better rather than making it feel worse?!?!?

Aloe Veritas: Fortnight 18 of the Burns

LBNC - Long Beach, not California

18 is a scarily high number. I mean, there are only 26 fortnights in a year (or as I’ve begun to visualise it, carriages on a gravy train). With late December and most of January’s writing time severely compromised by family time / the dreaded return to Wellington, the last few carriages are about to leave the station!

(We’re going on the Taieri Gorge Railway trip on Labour Weekend, which might explain the trainish bent to my metaphors).

*

Fortnight 18 total words: 11,429 

(novel: 72%, blog, 14%, non-fiction: 10%, short stories %4)

1^st week: 7,051

2^nd week: 4,378

*

I went up to Wellington last Tuesday to meet with my boss (and my boss’s boss, quite by chance) to talk about what I do, and how many days/hours I work next year. 

I put forward my first and best offer, which should provide an okay balance on income and output (both for my employer and my own writing).

It has yet to be shot down (or accepted). 

We shall see.

*

The publication date for the US version of THE MANNEQUIN MAKERS has been pushed back to 12/12/17, which is trickily close to Christmas (not that I’m expecting it to go Danielle Steele) but avoids any confusion between NZ and US readings of the date.

On the positive side, the old battler received a starred review in Publishers Weekly last week. Abridged version:

New Zealander Cliff makes a stunning American debut with a story about obsession gone horribly wrong… [plot description] This is a spellbinding and original tale, rife with perilous journeys, fascinating historical detail, and memorable characters.

As I am in the midst of another novel, it’s hard not to read in some ambiguity in that first sentence (it’s the novelists obsessions that go horribly wrong).

Together with a similarly positive Kirkus review (“A grim and glorious meditation on the cruelty of fate”), I’ve at least got decent US pull-quotes for my website (when I get around to updating her).

I was approached by an agent in the US who’d read the PW review and wondered if I was working on anything else. So nice to be a cold contactee for once (!) but very early days on that front. Like, maybe I should finish this new fricken novel, eh?

I also carved out time to write an essay about writing THE MANNEQUIN MAKERS (as if I wasn’t self-concerned enough) for my US publishers to pitch to various online outlets. 

We shall see what becomes of it.

We. Shall. See.

*

Tourism in Brief

In the middle weekend of Fortnight 18 I took the family (including in-laws) to the Port Chalmers Seafood Festival (worth it) and Long Beach (crib me!).

*

In addition to keeping the novel moving, I’m working on a piece ('essay' seems too hifalutin) about NBA 2k18 (as mentioned in my September consumption diary); I entered the Sunday Times short story comp in the UK with one of the stories I wrote in February; and I’m giving a reading tonight (Monday – technically Fortnight 19’s achievement) at the University Book Store as part of the NZSA’s regular salon.

Candle in the Wind: Fortnight 17 of The Burns

Spring on campus

I set myself the goal of writing 15,000 all-purpose words this fortnight.

I failed. (If only I could have stung this blogpost out a little longer)

Total wordcount: 14,543 (52% on the novel, 34% on essays, 13% on this blog and 1% on short stories [editing one I wrote in Feb])

• 1^st week: 6,109 words (4 writing days)
• 2^nd week: 8,434 words (6 writing days)

*

I lost a writing day on the first week because I was doing parenting things one morning, then met with the Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature Collaboration Group in the afternoon. I was invited to tell them about what I’d been up to as the Burns Fellow, for which these fortnightly posts proved VERY useful. I’ve parlayed my notes into some text for the University’s website, which should show up here in the next week or so.

*

Has anyone else’s September been especially slippery? Like: it’s almost gone?!

*

The novel? Well. It’s a bit like my life story – it gets longer every time I tell it.

And while the climbing pagecount of the first draft is good – I need something to which I can apply my scalpel to create drafts two through twenty-six – right now it feels like dangerous territory. Like this is the part of the novel where readers will feel I lost the initial thread, where it was written too quickly and no matter how hard I try to unify the whole and fulfill the promises of the back cover, the first quarter, first half, I won’t be able to unwrite the wrong turns I’m writing now.

But ask me again next fortnight and I’ll feel different. Hopefully better different.

*

My wife went up to Auckland on Friday and was due to arrive home around 8pm tonight, but her plane couldn’t land in Dunedin because it was too windy (!) and they had to land in Christchurch. The earliest flight from CHC to DND isn’t till 4pm tomorrow, so they all flew back to Auckland and she should land in DND 9:30am tomorrow.

Fuel crisis? What fuel crisis?

The upshot of this is that I have another evening to my own devices.

(I’m secretly glad I’m due another one of these update posts as three-nights/two-days of solo-parenting 2 kids (4 and 2) means I’m not really up to writing fiction (especially when I feel like what I’m writing in the best possible physical and mental situation isn’t cutting the mustard). So, lucky you.)

*

I'm one of two judges for this year's Robbie Burns Poetry Comp. Entries open now. Winners get cash money; judges get, um, interviewed by the ODT about judging.

*

At least one of my offspring shares my interest in container shipping.

(The kids have been great, by the way, and I've had a blast. I just didn't leave a lot in the tank for tonight/tomorrow morning.)

*

I took the kids to Doctors Point on Blueskin Bay yesterday. It only took 30 minutes to get there, but it made me think how many places there are around Dunedin that are kinda like Halfmoon Bay on Stewart Island, except for the BEING A HELLISH FERRY RIDE AWAY FROM THE MAINLAND. 

I'll admit, while on Rakiura I had the odd romantic thought about moving there. Simpler, more rugged life, etc.

But you can have that in Blueskin Bay or Long Beach or Bull Creek or Kaka Point.

People who move to Stewart Island are basically elite hipsters, like the ones who eschew fixie bikes for penny farthings, or write their cafe poetry ON A TYPEWRITER.

Doctors Point (my kids enjoy my company, honest)

*

Let’s not talk about the election.

Next week, after one or two beers, then we can talk.

It's just a little weird that I've been a public servant since 2004 (starting in Queensland, with a 2 year gap while in Edinburgh) and have never gone through a change of Government. Maybe 2020? Or maybe Winston does Winston-things?

Sorry. Not talking about the election from: NOW. 

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.