Try a little self-validation (TM)

The bad news is it's not Christmas yet. The good news is that come Christmas, I'll be even more chilled than Dylan due to an injection of funds from the Australia Council. Yes, that's right, after having played the grant game for about six years I've finally been lucky enough to receive one (the success rate is about 15%). I'll be using the time and money to put together a manuscript of poems. That means about 100 poems/pages at least. I've been working on an MS for about a year and while it's currently got that many poems in it, most of them are a) crap b) old or c) crap and old. So hopefully I'll be inspired to write some new ones too. In other news, my Masters thesis Marzipan: a Confection has been given the thumbs up by the examiners. This is a huge relief for me, as I have been writing this particular story for approximately seven or eight years. Now comes the hard part: what to do with this MS? It's only 30,000 words at the moment but could easily put on some more bulk, and could even possibly be worth submitting to a brave publisher (any of you out there?). In any case, despite these two pieces of news, I feel like the last thing I want to do right now is write poems or fiction. In fact, all I wanna do is have some fun. And I hereby announce my intention to do just that. As you were.

Comments

David Prater said…
it's a grant to write poems joe, not to publish a book.
10/29/2004 10:28:00 am
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Before ... and ... after!

Image
I got my haircut just before leaving Australia on July 1 and, until last week, hadn't had it cut since. Okay, so it's only been four months but as you can hopefully see from the image above it was developing nicely into a Steve Winwood style, with a touch of bogan at the back. Normally I keep it pretty short however and the major question was whether I would be able to stop myself from getting it cut before returning to Australia, presumably looking a little more like Tom Hanks in Castaway . I needn't have troubled myself worrying about it. Last Thursday night I got a call from an American friend named Sean, with whom I share quite a few musical tastes, and with whom I had some great conversations that night in the suitably-named Ho Bar in Hongdae, including one where we assigned 1970s bands to colours of the rainbow. Six shots of tequila, five beers and two gin and tonics later, I asked him whether he had a pair of clippers. Answering in the affirmative, he led me ba
Read more

Tram Recovery Vehicle

Last night I was walking along Queens Parade when along came an old green tram. I think it was of the kind that they refer to nowadays as "W-Class": like the City Circle trams, only green. The tram was going very slowly, heading along Queens Parade towards Westgarth. I began to worry for the tram, due to the huge hill just the other side of the Westgarth shops. I could just picture the tram chugging all the way to the top, only to slide back down again. Then I saw a truck coming along behind the tram. Unlike the tram, the truck was all white. On its side was painted in black letters: "TRAM RECOVERY VEHICLE". My first instinct was to ask why the truck was behind the tram instead of in front, pulling it up the hill. Then I saw the huge bulldozer style front bullbar on the truck and understood: the TRV's job was to push , as well as (presumably) "catch" the tram should it lose its brakes. Kind of like a parent pushing a child on a swing. Well, not rea
Read more