Gillian Polack's Blog, page 279

gillpolack @ 2010-12-23T23:00:00

My keyboard suddenly took ill. I'm using a very old one I couldn't bear to throw out five years ago. The question is, do I even try to catch up on work tonight?

gillpolack @ 2010-12-22T12:54:00

I've been doing sums of various kinds. My finances for next year are pretty grim*, but I should get through it. The health is still not there, too, so I shall be working on getting extra money to live on and pay for July and pay for medical expenses.

Apart from this, 2011 is looking fabulous. Seriously, lots of good things. As long as I can keep sorting the health and keep finding more bits of income, it should be an awesome year. And I have coffee...



*No Melbourne during Passover and my 50th. No Swancon. No Continuum. I'm working to find ways of still having a 50th birthday party, but it will be very communal in nature. If anyone is thinking of presents for my 50th, then money or gift certificates (JB HiFi or Dick Smith) would be most welcome - I can buy things I need with them - luxuries are not on the cards for a fair while. It's a shame, because I was looking forward to the lovely surprises one gets with a major birthday.

gillpolack @ 2010-12-22T00:01:00

I forgot to post today. I wonder what else I forgot to do?

gillpolack @ 2010-12-20T19:43:00

I'm spending a bit more time on the cookbook tonight (because I can, mainly - and I so want it finished so that I can move on) and I looked up the head chef from The Marque so that I could put a word or two down about his background. The Great Wisdom of Google has two types of page under his name. You can find him as a creature of Nordic folklore, or under the term "ninja kangaroo." If I were Beat, I would be very unimpressed with this.

gillpolack @ 2010-12-20T13:46:00

My new BiblioBuffet piece is up - it's all about another set of steampunk vampires.

"Another set"? - yep - this means that Angry Robot and Pyr are both publishing steampunk vampire serieseseseses (they say add 'es' to create a plural, and both series are full of dramatic goodness, so I had to turn them into multiple plurals - also, it annoys people and annoying people is my grand goal of the day - I created the perfect line for my novel this morning, nay, it was the perfect paragraph and I bet I am persona non grata with physicists should any read it.)

To return to steampunk vampires (though my need to annoy folk was a good detour), if I could find a third set that's as much fun as the first two, I would write an article purely on steampunk vampires and annoy Charles Stross *and* those who think that vampire novels are over-rated. It's not just a matter of knowing the books exist, though, it's a matter of getting hold of them - I was lucky with the first two sets of steampunk vampire goodness, because the publishers themselves provided me with the volumes.

I wish I wrote the sort of work Pyr publishes, just because I love their cover choices. This isn't the first time I've said this about a publisher. I now have a secret list of artists I wish would do me a cover. I guess I need to move to bigger press to achieve any of them. I guess this means that maybe/perhaps I need to send stuff out. Not right now, though. Right now I'm still drowning in food history and in the stuff of PhDs (at the same time, even though the projects don't overlap - this is probably not a good thing.)

gillpolack @ 2010-12-19T16:24:00

This weekend, people keep wishing me a happy Hanukkah (or Chanukah). While I do appreciate that the gesture, I keep wanting to remind them that it's all over and gone. My decorations are still on my mirror wall, but that's only because the guests who put them up are taller than I am and the decorations will remain there until I grow six inches or so.

In other news, we still have stormy weather. This is the third week and it's reached the stage where I feel very sorry for myself, large chunks of the time. Also where I forget things. Matthew - I still can't remember what we talked about doing this afternoon! This is just as well, given we're due more Weather.

In still other news, I've done much cookbook work. I'm about 1/5 of the way through my first clean draft. Only 4/5 to write! Except I've already written most of it and it really needs tough editing and much careful formatting. If the weather stops misbehaving, I can finish my first draft by New Year. If anyone has a need to read in the first week of 2011, let me know: I'll have a full week for beta readers to sink their teeth into it.

In yet more still other news, I commented to the universe that I had almost no coffee. I now have coffee and more on the way. Also season 2 of the original Superman TV series. Also other yummy stuff. I like presents!

In still more yet other news, there are some documents that are best done on the computer and there are some that really need printouts. I condensed a week's thinking into an afternoon by scribbling and writing lines and making rude comments about the state of my brain when I wrote the original.

In the universe of curiously absurd news, I was watching 70s SF and saw a soccer ball cleverly masquerading as an alien eye. It may not have been a soccer ball - I was wearing my reading glasses (on stormy days I get very confused about which glasses I wear for what).

And the the world of minor relief from small anxiety, Australia didn't lose the cricket. This means I can hold my head at a reasonable height next year in the UK. By 'a reasonable height' I mean at a height somewhat lower than other peoples' heads, given I am so short. I am reminded of this whenever I look at that mirror wall, with its once-seasonal decorations.

No more news - there is none. Still waiting on emails that were urgent when I last commented. My life refuses to stay orderly and manageable.

gillpolack @ 2010-12-19T00:30:00

This morning was dedicated to pretending I was a student and this afternoon and late evening, to the Conflux cookbook. Tomorrow morning first thing is pondering desserts for the 2011 Conflux banquet and after that the day will be split between studentstuff and cookbook stuff.

I had an awesome break this evening and the very strange weather gave me some forced breaks during the day. The very strange weather has also led to my capacity to write interesting prose being significantly diminished.

I know it was the weather and not the 3 glasses of alcohol I drank when I visited friends, because I discovered the loss when I was working on the cookbook earlier. I switched from writing to editing and work was completed and I am happy. I hadn't prewritten the blog, though, so you're just a little bit stuck with whatever state my wordbrain has ended in.

In the meantime, the weather has gone from interesting to plain bizarre: it's less than 7 degrees outside. We're almost up to the summer solstice and the temperature is almost frosty and the near-frost will be chased by a thunderstorm.

Anyhow, I've done the bulk of the cool work on the Regency Gothic dinner chapter and all that remains is persuading the recipes that they're all allowed to be in the same format and should be alphabeticised. This latter is slow and tedious and very, very worthy. Tomorrow afternoon is the time for the slow, tedious and very, very worthy, I think.

Forks and hope

I mislaid my lists. I'm sure there were other things I had to do today, but I worked through piles of paper in lieu of those lists. Someone consulted with me about a writing project. I dinner partied (before desperance asks: chicken and pinenut and spinach sausages, silverbeet from a friend's garden sauted with garlic and lemon, salad, pear and rhubarb icecream, malmsey, Louisianan coffee and chicory - it was a night for simple food).

Mostly, though, I worked my way through about thirty articles and interviews and two small books. They didn't advance me much, but at least I've read them. I added about ten notes to my new pile of notes and realised that this weekend I can finish with all my piles of outstanding books and papers except the historiography ones (for which I'm simply not ready yet) and the close studies (which don't need to be finished until the end of January. I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, because I keep reading and thinking and my research doesn't seem to progress. This is just a stage things are at and it will get better, but it's chosen a week to happen where life is a bit stalled in general. Life imitating the structure of a novel, really.

Also today (part of having dinner) we watched the most recent Indiana Jones movie. I was full of snark. This fullness of snark is why I'm merely philosophical about thirty articles and interviews and two books producing such a paltry number of notes.

I have five other movies in a stack, all of which are unlikely to produce anything less than vast snark, just waiting for other days when a lot of hard work seems to produce nothing. I'm perfectly happy to share the watching of movies and the snark and feed friends coffee and alcohol (though I'm now out of malmsey) - just ask and I might even reveal the five other movies I consider snarkworthy.

It's days like this when I realise that I've done this before. I borrowed those six movies from Donna and piled them ready, in the knowledge that such days were very likely at this stage of my doctorate. It's not just that I've done it before, though. It's that I know so many people who've done doctorates and novels (and even doctorates with novels). Some of the stages apparently have graven themselves deeply enough into me that I prepared for the need to be snarky.

Last time round, from memory, I did it by annoying folks with Lewis Carroll recitations - the truly unlucky were forced to listen to stories of boojums. The victims of my recitations were international students and I had convinced them that this was important to their cultural understanding of Australia. My understanding of snark has obviously developed over time.

Way back then, I could recite Jabberwocky in French and the first stanza in German (Martin Gardner was required reading in my family when I was a child). I carried both French and German versions with me for most of AussieCon, in the expectation that I would have much time alone and could remind myself. The papers ended crumpled and forlorn until I gave one away in a moment of boldness. That's another story, and an unfinished one, too, because this year has been so very odd.

gillpolack @ 2010-12-17T00:12:00

Today was a bit frantic. A series of storms, starting with one overhead and ending with one in a friend's life. I'm calming down by reading articles. Somehow my notes are spinning off into two groups. Some are for my dissertation and some are for an article. This is only amusing to me and even then, only because I wanted to work through this folder of articles for a quite different part of the dissertation. Still, it won't hurt to be done with them.

gillpolack @ 2010-12-15T18:46:00

Today was the last day of Wednesday class until February. We hied ourselves to the Botanic Gardens and had a picnic. I got to meet a bunch of the regular staff from the other offices. It was very funny. So many of them were Canadian! To most of them I was "the Creative Writing tutor" but one of them turned out to be the ex-wife of someone I knew. We had a nice chat.

My main contribution was to give everyone ten yen pieces and to tell them they had to buy their entertainment. Writers bought stories from each other and non-writers bought stories from writers. The stories were written on the spot, with textas and on the most lurid paper I had been able to obtain. One of my students made many yen, but another bought so many stories that he had to do extra renditions of his own to stay afloat.

In the middle of all this, other students were singing Christmas carols. They kept forgetting the words, and I somehow became the Christmas Carol Consultant. At one stage I was dictating to a student (so that they had the words) and explaining the meaning all at the same time. I kept footnoting my explanations with "You do know I'm Jewish" and they kept laughing at me.