Craig Cliff's Blog, page 9

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 blogEssays 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 booksShort stories: one completed (and submitted) story, one half-finished first draft, one quarter-finished first draftA 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!

The Best Books I read in 2017

I last did one of these best books posts for 2014. 

What can be said of 2015 and 2016? The less the better. Fatherhood and middle-management and riding my bike in Wellington traffic (no way you can listen to an audiobook while riding in the capital) meant I didn't read enough to make such a list meaningful.
But 2017 was different.

2017 by the numbers
In 2017 I read at least 66 books (40 novels, 15 non-fiction, 7 short story, 2 poetry collections, one graphic novel and one play-as-an-audiobook). 
This isn’t counting the story collections I binge-read/re-read to research my paper on the moves in contemporary NZ short stories, or podcasts that closely resemble audiobooks (S-Town, The Butterfly Effect, Missing Richard Simmons) or anything else that didn’t self-identify as a book.
Of these 66: 47 (71%) were consumed as audiobooks, 17 were physical books and 2 were e-books I read on my phone (a first).
The earliest published book came from 1927. 13 of the books I read came out in 2017 – probably a record for me. The average year of publication was 2003.
In terms of authors:32 (48%) were from the US, which is way too many, followed by the UK (22%) and NZ (9%). Other nationalities read: Italy, Australia, German, Ireland, France, Canada.45 (68%) were male, 21 were femaleOnly four authors were non-whiteOnly six books were works in-translation (4 by Elena Ferrante)
(In)Digestion
This is the part where I castigate myself for myopic reading and make excuses like it’s hard to find books by authors outside of the US/UK as audiobooks...

But I could have tried harder if I was really paying attention. I wasn’t. I was happy to be getting through more than one book a week and biting at whatever took my interest.
So for 2018 I’m imposing one hard, ALL CAPS rule (No Physical Books By White Dudes) and a some of softer guidelines:# a 50/50 gender split would be fine in the context of 2018, but more females would be a better start in redressing what has surely been a longstanding deficit.# more variety in terms of countries and work in translation (it wouldn’t be hard)
I’ll try keep track of this in my monthly consumption diaries so I don’t revert to type.
(This isn’t about saying you should never read a book by a white dude, but you’re missing something if that’s always the bulk of your reading.)
Anyway, here’s my top nine, headlined by a white dude.


The best time I had between two covers in 2017: 

The Ask – Sam Lipsyte (novel, US, physical book)
What I said about it in July:

Or, as my wife would put it, this is a “ranty” book. Which means it keeps company with Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, the fun half of every Jonathan Franzen doorstop, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Martin Amis – so, just the swinging dicks of the last 75 years. Not bad company. Not for everyone, but definitely for me in certain moods. This is the kind of book I wanted to write when I started writing seriously (...stops to do the maths…) fourteen years ago, when all I really knew were the swinging dicks. Now? I think it has definitely challenged me to ensure each page of my current novel is funny. Is tight. (So much of the humour comes from the concision.)

Autumn – Ali Smith (novel, UK, e-book)
What I said about it in October:

The second book I read on my phone, and hey, this was great. Better than Lincoln in the Bardo (sorry Booker judges).
Smith’s staccato prose and frequent paragraph breaks really suited the format. And it felt right (in an oh-so-wrong way) to be reading a post-Brexit novel on a phone. That early scene in the post office, trying to get a passport renewal form pre-checked, sheesh!

The Neapolitan quartet – Elena Ferrante (novels, Italy, audiobooks)
What I said about these four novels in June:

Did it hook me? Well, I finished all four books (none of them are particularly short - the audiobooks are 12.5hrs, 19hrs, 16.5hrs & 18.5hrs long respectively; 10 hours is kind of standard for a novel) in just over two months...  

I can’t decide if the quartet is the result of incredible ambition or incredible restraint. Is it complexly simple or simply complex?...  

Having freshly finished the books, I haven't gone back and read much writing about them, but I'm sure there's another four books worth of stuff on the question of authorship within the novels (let alone the 400-books worth of dross on the elusive author herself... All I can say is, if anyone had read all four books and still wants to track down the real Elena Ferrante, they're beyond dense).

A Game of Thrones – George RR Martin (novels, US, audiobook)
I’m cheating again, as GRRM gets this high on the list on the strength of the first two books in the Song of Fire and Ice saga, which actually come as four audiobooks, each 16 hours or longer.
What I said about A Game of Thrones Pt II in November:

I think I’ve found the perfect kind of audiobook to race through: one you know the main plot points but are actually interested in the minutiae or being reminded of things you may have once known.

This may seem kind of high for some swords and sorcery doorstoppers, but the most recent season of the TV show (where they are well and truly ahead of the books) demonstrates how important the books were to the success of the show. I like the show and I liked the books I’ve read and I’m not snooty about giving props to someone who has entertained me for hours and hours.


Time Travel: A History – James Gleick (non-fiction, US, audiobook)
What I said about it in April:

Gleick's book was really good. Like one of those popular histories for people who like to think they're too smart for popular histories. Most of the recent time travel books/films I thought about during the earlier sections were mentioned later on in the book - but by then Gleick has abandoned literary criticism for theoretical physics and philosophy. Which is fine. This is the guy who wrote a book about chaos theory.

But I think there's another book (or at least a few decent chapters) on what people are doing with time travel after a century of the genre, and dismantling this from a predominantly literary perspective.

Honorary mention to The hidden life of trees by Peter Wohlleben, which I read soon after Gleick’s book and is about another kind of time travel (life at a different speed).



Thank You for Being Late – Thomas L. Friedman (non-fiction, US, audiobook)
What I said about it in July:

Oh man. I don’t know how Thomas Friedman gets so much (the rapid pace of change of technology, the nightmares of climate change, demography, economic and political destabilisation) and yet comes out the other end as an optimist. I mean, I follow his logic every time, but it takes some fricken fortitude to stare into the omni-headed monster and prescribe the right dental regime to tame the stank and calm the beast.  

I fear I’m becoming one of those middle-aged, middle-income, white dudes who loves non-fiction and wants to foist the latest book they’ve read on other people as it’ll explain the way the world is now. Because I had such thoughts with Thank you for being late. But then, when I was all in on fiction, I never went around foisting novels or story collections on people. 

So maybe it’s just this book / this moment? I do think, if you’re going to read it, read it now. 2018 will be too late. The world will have moved on, and I fear Friedman’s optimism may be even harder to comprehend.

Anything is Possible – Elizabeth Strout
What I said about it in September

Anything is possible is certainly closer to Olive Kitteridge in scope, and the fact it picks up where My Name is Lucy Barton [which I read in August] left off might make it even more ambitious. I got the sense, mid-way into the second book, that both MNiLB and AiP had been originally conceived as a single book of connected stories, but the Lucy Barton section grew too big / had sufficient exit velocity to become its own thing, while the gravity of it still influences the stories/chapters in AiP.

The Animators – Kayla Rae WhittakerWhat I said about it in August:

…I’d recommend this book to most anybody. Whittaker not only gives us two memorable protagonists and embeds the creation of not one but two feature length animated films within the text, but totally gets inside the process of creating something other than a novel and the way an animator might see the world.

4 3 2 1 – Paul Auster
What I said about it in September:

...Auster’s two key weapons in sustaining interest and momentum over such a long book are prolepsis (telling us what will happen ahead of time) and ellipsis (leaving things out). I’m particularly fascinated by prolepsis – it’s a move a lot of writers don’t pull. And Auster isn’t a virtuoso like Muriel Spark in the way he uses it – he’s more plodding, more deliberate, less playful. But it’s still fascinating, especially as you need to keep straight which version of Fergusson's future we've been told... 

But then, in the novel’s final movements, Auster attempts to tie things up in a way that befits the Master Metafictioneer he showed himself to be with books like City of Glass. But here it only served to unravel what had come before and leave me reluctant to defend his book in online comments sections. Maybe it was laboured and worthy? I mean, I wasn't listening to the same book as Auster was reading [the audiobook was read by the author].

To which I say now: Yeah, the ending still bites, but for everything that came before, I’m squeezing it into my top nine.

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

The slightest wick remains: Fortnight 24 of the Burns

Unboxing
This box arrived a few days before Christmas...

These are the copies my US Publisher, Milkweed Editions, sent my Australian Publisher, Penguin Random House, who then sent them on to me (I'm not sure if they kept any for themselves), even though Milkweed has sent me at least one copy directly (though I told them to send it to Wellington).
So yeah. Not only is the old girl out there in the world again, I now have physical proof.
One side effect of having a "new" book arrive is that my son (2.5) asks to see my picture inside of any book he catches me reading. I'm not sure if he thinks I write ALL THE BOOKS, or that grown-ups get personalised copies with their own picture inside the front cover, as if the reader was the most important person involved in the grand production of a novel...
Maybe he's onto something.
*
Fortnight 24 wordcountsTotal words: 9,337 (68% on the novel, 28% on this blog, 4% on book reviews)1stweek: 8,1422ndweek: 1,195
Christmas came at a bad time for work on the novel. 
I’d gotten almost everything in order so that I could break new ground (the existing chapters are now somewhere between 2nd and fifteenth drafts) and coast the rest of the way to a completed manuscript.
But I find it nearly impossible to write at my in-laws in Christchurch, where we spent seven nights.
(Almost impossible, because I did work on this novel way back in August 2015 while in Christchurch, getting up at 5am and working until someone else woke, not knowing how short-lived that window of both kids sleeping would be…)
So I read books and ate and did family things like visit Orana Park and the Air Force Museum (and eat some more) instead. 
It’s a hard knock life.
*
Well, actually…
[This is where the 500-word rant about how Slingshot cut my internet three weeks early and am still waiting for it to be reinstated used to sit... but you don't need all that.
Cliff notes: Slingshot suck. Boo Slingshot. Woe is me. The end.
PS - I’m posting this using my phone as a hotspot and churning through data I’ll probably need when I actually move out… Wah!]
*
Daily centuries
Yesterday I outlined my project to write something in daily 100-word increments in 2018. 
Day two is in the books and the manuscript stands at 200 words. Hurrah. 363 days to go.
I know this is actually about Fortnight 25 but 'tis the season for repeats and rookie newsreaders, so go easy on me.
*
Prolepsis

We're leaving Dunedin on 10 January and will take our time heading north, getting back to Wellington on the 20th. So Fortnight 25's post might be a week late and full of photos from Central Otago and Nelson and hopefully the pristine state my house has been left in by my wonderful ex-tenants.
After a few days of unpacking and totally not spending anytime on the phone with my ISP, I'm flying back down to Dunedin for Burns Night (haggis!!) and a couple other final acts as the outgoing Burns Fellow.
Then it's back to Wellington to watch the clock tick down on Fortnight 26 of the Burns, at which point I will crunch the numbers, make pretty graphs and see what that tells us about my year of being paid to write that maybe my fortnightly downloads and monthly consumption diaries haven't comunicated.
Oh, and I'll have to write up the best books I read in 2017. By the end of Jan, I promise!

2018: the year of 365 hundred-word chunks

Andersons Bay inlet at low tide, November 2017It’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 unlinkedstories?
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. 

December Consumption Diary

MUSIC


Albums from 2017 to add into consideration for my top ten, if I hadn't already posted it:

Jane Weaver - Modern KosmologyThe Surfing Magazines - The Surfing MagazinesJay Som - Everybody Works
And I might've bumped Protomartyr up further after getting excited about seeing them in Wellington in February and listening to them a lot in recent weeks.

(The list of good things about moving back to Wellington is growing, but the ledger is by no means level.)


BOOKS

Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse (novel)

I picked this up from the bookshelf of my Island Bay holiday home at the end of November. It transported me back to my undergraduate days of reading “classics” (though not this particular book): the love of multiple frame narrators, the unabashed passages of philosophy, the unapologetic return to fiction.

This was the kind of book I might have loved at 19, though I responded to differently at 34. Even though I didn’t read it at 19, it felt a little like time travel, or a time travel experiment gone wrong where I was both 19 and 34 at once, both falling for the façade and seeing the sadder side to the tale of the wolf of the steppes.

Maybe I should re-read it in another 15 years?

Alright, pencil it in!



Other minds: The octopus and the evolution of intelligent life by Peter Godfrey Smith (non-fiction, audiobook)
I enjoyed this. Since finishing it, I've been tempted to refer to something covered in the book (most often how far back you have to go to find the common ancestor of humans and the octopus, and how incredible it is that intelligent life could evolve in parallel...) about a dozen times, though I've held my tongue.

Better to be THAT GUY on here, than I.R.L.

Clash of Kings (parts 1 and 2) by George RR Martin (novel, audiobook)

Like the first novel in GRRM’s Song of Fire and Ice saga, this book is split into two audiobooks (each over 16 hours long).

I didn’t get as hooked into the listening experience as I did with A Game of Thrones, partly because of the way the second novel – necessarily – spreads out its focus, introducing new perspective characters and expands the map.

After two books in the series, I have a greater appreciation for the challenges, successes and (rare) missteps of the TV show.

Will I listen to the next book in the series? Should I? Those are questions for 2018.


Waking up by Sam Harris (non-fiction, audiobook)
There’s something about vehement, aggressive atheists that brings out the contrarian in me and makes me want to believe (I don’t, but).

There’s some good stuff in here, but the book is poorly structured. At various points I wasn’t sure what it was trying to be. Having finished it, I'm still not.

I listened to one of Sam Harris’ podcasts (one about the Heaven’s Gate cult, which quoted from a short section of Waking Up) and found it more rewarding that this whole mishmash of a book. So go there, if you must.


Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (play, audiobook)

An experiment to see what listening to a play would be like after so long consuming audiobooks.


Way back when I started listening to audiobooks, when I was living in Brisbane (so 2004-2007), I went through recordings of all of Shakespeare’s plays I hadn’t read/studied or seen performed. And I found it rewarding – and not that challenging - though my retention of most of those plays is pretty poor a decade or more later.

(The same can be said for many books I read or listened to in that era, so...)

Listening to Beckett, however, was more of a struggle. I thought a play so interested in language would suit being denied all the other senses but hearing, but I grew frustrated. This wasn’t someone reading a book into my ear, it was a reduction of something quite different.

So yeah, plays, like kids (?), should be seen and not (only) heard.


AND...

Three physical books (NZ novels) I read for review ( The Necessary Angel, Our Future is in the Air, Salt Picnic ) so I won’t discuss them here.

--

And that's it. My top ten books from 2017's reading will be found among my monthly consumption diaries. I have Elif Batuman's The Idiot and Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad queued up as the next audiobooks I listen to, and had been hoping to squeeze them in before 1 Jan to give 2017 as rich a crop as possible, but it's considered rude to walk around with your earbuds in during the holidays. Go figure!

FILM + TV

Easy - Season 2 - a kind of anti-TV, thrilling in it's ability to be contemporary without using it (eg being an Uber and stand-up comedian) for a joke, but never quite getting to the dramatic bits either. 

Dead Man Down – this is the kind of movie I watch with my in-laws, and as far as those sorts of flicks go, I really enjoyed it. I’d never heard of it, and was surprised to learn it wasn’t liked by critics when it came out in 2013. I didn’t find the twists all that implausible, and I liked that they were laced throughout all of the acts, not withheld until the final one.

Suicide Squad – another one with the in-laws. God almighty. I’d heard it was bad, and was in the mood for a trainwreck, but it was worse than that. Somehow Margot Robbie managed to be compelling among the other wreckage. But sheesh.

The Great Wall – yep, in-laws again. Matt Damon isn’t in yellow-face (instead he put on his best Liam Neeson voice – go figure) but it is sad that a huge number of people can only watch a movie if the protagonist is a white dude.

A Night in Casablanca – Classic Marx Bros flick. Full of dad jokes and creepy uncle jokes.

The Lobster – Dead Man Down reminded me that I watched Colin Farrell in the Lobster earlier in the year and never put it on one of these diary lists…

Gary of the Pacific – abandoned before the end. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t smart. I just wanted the islanders, especially Gary’s sister, to tell him to stop being a dick but I couldn’t give them any more rope.
The Meyerowitz Stories – Someone decribed it as a more mature Squid and Whale – I didn’t like that movie and I disliked the first half of this one even more. Somehow, the inevitable dad-in-hospital, siblings-unite plot kept us watching and we made it to the end, but I’m so over Noah Baumbach.
And a lot of Disney’s Moana (the kids’ current fave and probably better than everything listed above).

Smouldering: Fortnight 23 of The Burns

Today is my daughter's fifth birthday. Thanks to Christmas, she doesn't start school till the end of January, so I'll be whacked again by that Tempus Fugit feeling soon enough.

Speaking of time flying, we're already 20% of the way through fortnight 24, so time for some numbers...


Fortnight 23 wordcounts
Total words: 14,563 (56% on the novel, 37% on this blog, 7% on other non-fiction like rejigging the Q&A on my blog)
1st week: 6,533
2nd week: 8,030

A 111% increase on Fortnight 22, though some of that is inflated by work on my (long-but-not-that-artful) end-of-year music posts. I'm going to hold off a similar review of books until the year is properly done.

The first week of Fortnight 23 I really got back in the flow with the novel by NOT starting where I left off before all my speaking engagements and sick kids. Instead, I found myself writing a historical section (San Giuseppe in Naples) that I'd skipped when pushing ahead with the contemporary action a couple of months ago.

And I knocked out that chapter (three or four pages) in a day.

The next day I wrote the next historical section (San Giuseppe getting kicked out of the Capuchins in Martina Franca) which will slot in after the contemporary chapters I've left hanging.
The third day, drunk on all this completion and achievement, I put off returning to the contemporary mire and worked on the final section of the novel, which jumps ahead two years. I wrote half of that (the other half involves a perspective shift which I'm not sure about). But what I did complete has helped me go back to the 2017 chapters and ask questions of it like:
Should I move you from May/June 2017 (when I did my research roadtrip) to Oct/Nov 2017, when the Harvey Weinstein/#MeToo stuff started blowing up? Because how can you write anything about Hollywood in 2017 that doesn't address the pre- and post-Weinstein world (I don't like those terms but others have started using them and I can't think of a different shorthand right now)? But you don't have to depict the exact moment when the pricks started to fall in order to deal with the subject of sexual harassment and unfairly retarded careers in Hollywood (and other walks of life). In fact, I'd already built all of this into my story - the way male characters tend to have female counterpoints who operate under a different set of rules and expectations. By jumping from June 2017 to sometime in 2019, as has been my intention since before October, I'm able to allude to the fate of both male and female characters, and let them rise or fall based on what they did in 2017 (and the years preceding it)...

/internal monologue
There were other knotty questions too. And for each I've come up with answers, or at least diagnosed which bits need to change and will figure out how when I reach them.
So I started going back through from page one again, and I'm about 90% of the way through the manuscript as it stands.
Maybe tomorrow I'll get back to the next blank page in the 2017 section...

Judge... 
Fortnight 23 also saw me don my judging hat for the 2017 Robert Burns poetry competition. Together with my fellow judge, Elena Poletti, we've reached our verdicts.

There's a prizegiving on 25 January, which, funnily enough, is Burns Night. Looking forward to some haggis in one of my last acts as the Burns Fellow...


... and be judged.

U.S. reviews 3 and 4 of The Mannequin Makers have appeared. The one from The Arkansas International was enthusiastic. The other, from Minnesota daily, The Star Tribune, was not. It was a bad review in at least two meanings of the word (a poor use of 550 words - too much plot, factual errors...; and unfavourable).

I'm more frustrated by the quality of that review than its conclusion.

Maybe it's the fact I'm in the process of reviewing four other novels.

Maybe it's the fact my novel is ancient history to me (I wrote it before my daughter was born!) and I'd do some things differently now.

Maybe I'm deluding myself.

But it's useful to be reminded how varied the responses to a book can be while in the midst of writing another. I can sometimes fall into the trap of trying to write for everyone / not offend or 'lose' anyone.

That way pallid mush lies.

Better to work until the novel is wholly what I intend it to be (or as close as I can manage with my capabilities at this time).


Speaking of reviews

I came across this tweet late last week and it got me very worked up:

It's sad to see such attention spent trying to sever delight from the world. Perhaps the review genre should be preserved as a space for gratitude?— no(ah) (@noahbaldino) December 15, 2017

If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all? 
Fuck that!

Reviewers must be bold enough to be honest and smart enough to back it up with evidence.

Some context: The tweet was in response to a less-than-favourable review of Kaveh Akbar's poetry collection:

John Ebersole @waveofpanic on Kaveh Akbar's Calling a Wolf a Wolf https://t.co/AymvCL3Yd0— Tourniquet Review (@tourniquetrview) December 14, 2017

A lot of people felt it was mean-spirited and ad hominen. But some of the griping felt like people who didn't know how to take criticism, even when it isn't directed at them.

And then came that tweet about the review genre being preserved as a space for gratitude... Way to kill of any serious discussion about books and the thoughts the are able to squirrel away. Way to misunderstand everything about.

To @noahbaldino's credit, they clarified this statement the following day:

& to frame celebration as something that doesn’t exlude generous critique. when we bring rigor-via-attention to our readings, & when like Ross gay says the critique emerges from love, it’s going to beget more attention, more rigor, honest love, better community, etc.— no(ah) (@noahbaldino) December 16, 2017

Hmm. That's better... but it still presupposes that every book is worthy of our love. I can think of plenty of examples, either the ranting of evil men or the blather of bland one, that do not.


What use Fiction?

While I'm discussing random tweets, here's one from Ben Goldacre:

Wasted a 45 minute reading window trying to cope with fiction. It's all people people, boring people, the facts and ideas are buried like they're embarrassing or so wildly uncontainable they can only be communicated implicitly. Bloody story books.— ben goldacre (@bengoldacre) December 16, 2017

That cut pretty close to the bone, as someone trying to talk about skepticism and the limits of the rational materialist world view, but doing so with what amounts to a bunch of sock puppets.

But when I read non-fiction books on the subject (I just finished Sam Harris' Waking Up after getting it out of the library twice and not making it more than a few pages), I realise why it can only be done the way I'm doing it.

Because I don't have answers, only questions.

Better to read Steppenwolf, with all its narrative frames and ropey elements, than Alain de Botton or David Mills.

At least, that's how I am built.

The mop up: more from the This Fluid Thrill music awards

Yesterday I went on about my top ten albums of 2017. But to solely talk about a year's music based only on that format, a hangover from the days when there were only so many grooves they could fit on a spinning plate of shellac, is missing a lot of the point of why we listen.

Also, there's the fact no one (NO ONE) lives solely in the present. No one catches everything they might love the instant it drops. So let's start with stuff that never crossed my radar until this year...

(You should listen as you read this time.)


Discovery of the year: Hamell on Trial

Ed Hamell has been releasing music as Hamell on Trial since 1989, apparently. I first wrote about him in August.

Back then I likened him to an unplugged Dave Wyndorf (Monster Magnet). Sometimes I think he's like the guy that turns up to the poetry jam with a guitar... and no one -- not the finger-clicking devotees of p-jamming (which no-one calls it) or the salt of the earth types whose bar has been overtaken by these quote-unquote poets and are trying to down the last of their drinks and slink out -- NO ONE wants to hear from the guy with the fucking battered acoustic guitar... but the barman and the two people who stay are like, HOLY FUCKING SHIT! Is he playing a one-man, acoustic version of the MC5's 'Human Being Lawnmower'? Yes and no.

No: he's playing his own material.

But yes, in a way, he's putting Detroit Rock City on his back and hauling into the age of Trump with his 1937 Gibson L-00.

I liked his 2017 album Tacklebox, but it featured too many kid songs / oddities. It felt a bit like a rap album with skits. My brain could not compute. But in terms of individual songs, there's a strong and memorable backbone of acoustic vitriol ('Safe', 'She ride it',  'Not Aretha's Respect (Cops)', 'Mouthy B').

His 2017 live album, Big Mouth Strikes Again, is a better entry point, especially for those of us not within Ed's likely touring circle.


Bonus discovery: Life without Buildings - Any Other City


This band only put out one studio album in 2000, but it sounds so current.

If I was an A&R man, I'd be signing bands that sounded like this and saying they were the future of rock'n'roll (or maybe just rock).

And for a year like 2017, or the final third, which seemed to be about people finally paying attention when the dirty laundry of powerful white dudes was aired in plain view, and the slow but persistent trickle of individual stories of (mostly) females whose artistic life was made miserable, if not untenable, by industries of blind-eyes and abusers, to have this album, centred on the frenetic, clipped  vocals of Sue Tompkins, as a standalone item, a forgotten gem, something from the 'If only' file, seems sadly fitting.

This ignores, of course, the real reason the band split up after one album (?) and the fact Tompkins is a practicing visual and sound artist. So maybe the 2017 narrative can't be painted directly onto Life without Buildings, but Any Other City sure sounds like the soundtrack of the Northern Hemisphere's Fall to me.


Song of the year

What a meaningless category... so let me add some meaning.

I've disqualified songs off any album that appeared in my top ten, as those folks have already got some glory.

I'm looking for black sheep. The sort of song you anthropomorphise, giving it a heart and mind that may be nothing like the organs of those that went into making it.

The songs that sound like they wrote themselves.

Earworms, in many respects. Songs where the artist's inner editor / better judgement might have killed it in utero.


In previous years I've tended to key in on catchy songs with nonsense syllables (eg You Won't 'Ya Ya Ya'; BRONCHO 'Class Historian'), rather than the subversive piano ballad that is clearly brilliant but my preschoolers will throw food at me if I slip it into a playlist (eg 'Horizon' by Aldous Harding).

The contenders:
Cumberland Gap - David RawlingsWhitewash - Lee Bains III and the Glory FiresBaby Please - Actual WolfTotal Entertainment Forever - Father John MistyThe Night David Bowie Died - Lily HiattSugar for the Pill - Slowdive (immediately disqualified because I think the whole album should have been in my top ten but it somehow slipped through the gaps of my totally watertight, totally scientific system)Hell - SmidleyGirls on TV - Tashaki MiyakiAnd the winner is... none of the above.

It's

.

.

.


'Only Grey' - Cool Ghouls

It doesn't even need nonsense syllables to be the catchiest song of 2017. It's all hooks. The riff, the tambourine I imagine is stomped on by foot, the repeated half-lines where the band chimes in on vocals.

They sound as if The Troggs have stumble into Electric Ladyland while Hendrix is there, though Jimi is too spaced to get up off the couch, so they start mucking around, leaving the catchiest answering phone message in the history of telecommunications.

And I think it's about something. Like: the lyrics seem to cohere.

Not that my son cares. He just pokes his tongue out when the song starts, pumps his knees and does the butter churn with two hands.

So that's two votes at least. Motion passed. 'Only Grey' is the SONG OF THE YEAR.


Disappointments

If you said to me on New Years Eve that 2017 would see new albums from The National, Cold War Kids, Big Thief, The New Pornographers, Destroyer, Father John Misty, Queens of the Stone Age, The Horrors, TORRES, Fleet Foxes, The War on Drugs, LCD Soundsystem, Waxahatchee... and a supergroup featuring the lead singers of Frank Ferdinand, Midlake (!), Band of Horses (meh), Travis (um) and Grandaddy (!) (BNQT), and none of those albums would compete for a top ten spot, my reactions would be:

i) For real?

ii) I guess that means it was a good year in music, then, right?

iii) But, or real?

To call any of the albums I listed above disappointments is probably harsh (I listened to them all multiple times), but when I see some of them popping up in end of year lists (yeah, I've started perusing), I'm like, 'Have you even heard of Lost Horizons?!'


Departed heroes

All through 2016 people kept talking about the number of legends that were passing (Bowie, Prince, um, George Michael...). None meant more to me, or hit me as hard, as Bowie, right back in January. In second place was the news that Gord Downie, frontman of the Tragically Hip, had terminal cancer. But he made it through 2016 and was still knocking around when Chris Cornell took his own life in May.

I wrote about Chris and Microsoft Encarta and whatever vibrations left my fingertips the day I heard the news (the day before I flew to Italy for a fortnight).

On that day I said there where only three musicians who meant enough to me "that I'd push everything else aside and write about them": Dave Wyndorf, Gord Downie, Chris Cornell.

(Wyndorf nearly died of an overdose eleven years ago, but it seems he's part cockroach, in addition to being part space lord).

And then Gord finally passed away in October and his final solo (double) album dropped less that two weeks later. I mentioned a few times that I was thinking about writing something, or actively working on it, but the truth is I didn't know what 'it' was. There wasn't that same 'to hell with it' feeling as on the day Cornell died. Downie had been on borrowed time. It wasn't a surprise. And to have the album on its way, it seemed premature to write anything. And then I listened to the album, liked it, perhaps more than any of his other solo albums. Maybe I even loved it. 'Bedtime' still breaks me in three (frustrated father, loving father, sentient being).

But life marched on. And I never let myself properly process what it means to have loved an artist like I loved Gord in all his guises, and to have lost him, with only the scantest of personal connections.

And I still haven't processed what it means or what I feel.

And until I sit down to write something -- something other than a flippant blogpost about a year in music -- I won't really know.

This Fluid Thrill End of Year Awards: Top Albums of 2017

Newcomers: here are my lists from 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 & 2012.

And there's a playlist of one song from each of my top ten albums from this year at the bottom of the post if you want to listen while you read... and aren't worried about spoilers.

---
It took me until the last day of February 2017 to wrap the best albums of 2016.

And yet here I am, midway through December ready to put a bow on this strange old year we've had.

Spotify tells me I listened to over 7,500 songs in 2017 and only skipped 116, which makes sense as I listen while I write and I've been writing full-time this year.

Screencap from my Spotify Wrapped, featuring Willy Nile(The only other time I use Spotify is for impromptu dance parties with my kids (Lia is 5 later this week and Caio is 2), so my top tracks include most of the Moana soundtrack, 'Shake it off' and 'Can't Stop the Feeling').

My process this year has been more organised than in the past, but is still haphazard. I chuck stuff I want to listen to in my 'Working' playlist. If I like a track, I put it in my monthly playlist, which I include in my consumption diaries on this blog. If I like the whole album (and it came out this year), I put it into my best albums of 2017 playlist.

At the start of this month I went back and listened to everything in the best albums playlist, and rated them all.

In the end 32 albums were in the running for my top ten. I haven't gone through all the reputable top ten lists, so I may have missed something great and will kick myself next week, but I'm staying true to the process.

So here, in some kind of order, are my top ten albums from 2017:


10) The Big Moon - Love in the 4th Dimension


Maybe there was some recency bias (I only came across this album in November), but this album won the tussle with a bunch of solo - or soloish - dudes (Stephen Steinbrink, Lee Bains III, Gord Downie, Mathew Logan Vasquez, A. Savage) for tenth spot.

I mean, Downie would waltz into top spot on sentiment alone, but it was a double album, and it seems I will not even allow impending death as an excuse for insufficient editing.

But enough about the guys (sheesh).

My first impression of Big Moon was they sound like Du Blonde (a fave from 2015... Message to Beth Jeans Houghton: more music, please), but this is a an all-female rock group from London, who happen to also play on the album in at #9.

Their lyrics maybe lack the bite of Du Blonde or *spoiler alert* Marika Hackman, but I can't stop spinning Love in the 4th Dimension.

Check them out!


9) Marika Hackman - I'm not your man



Another recent discovery. The opener, 'Boyfriend', is so great, the rest of the album can't help feel like the tail of the comet.

I mean, just listen:

You came to me for entropy and I gave you all I had
He makes a better man than me
So I know he won't feel bad 

It's fine 'cause I am just a girl
"It doesn't count"
He knows a woman needs a man to make her shout

And compared to her earlier, folky output, I'm not your man is like it's own big bang. Hackman goes electric! And acerbic.

To all the part-time readers who thought the short story 'Cat Person' was great, and all those who said it was terrible, I think you can both agree this album is better.

(What did I think of 'Cat Person'? I liked it. Parts of it felt brave. Parts felt fresh. The end was a little obvious. But it hit its mark. People are talking. Go the short story! ... Actually, the most troubling thing has been the amount of times in subsequent coverage it has been called an article or an essay. FFS!)


8) King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Flying Microtonal Banana



2017 may well be remembered more for KGatLG's outlandish ambition and quantitative output rather than its quality.

This album is the best of the four. A rock version of UMO's Multi-Love.

And I'm a sucker from the microtonal guitar. Obviously.

While I'm on strange tunings/instruments and Aussie musicians, the 2016 album I took to long to discover and thus omitted from that year's list: Xylouris White - Black Peak.


It would probably slot in at #2 on the 2016 list. So great.


7) Arboretum - Song of the Rose



A new discovery for me this year. Their back catalogue is tight, but this year's album is their best to date.

How to describe their sound? A bit like pre-2017 Strand of Oaks - slow and apparently simple - but somehow more epic and RAWK. Like Rooks-era Shearwater. Like Low. Like a lot of the best bits of a lot of great bands.

The sort of music you should listen to while reading Icelandic sagas.

Folk-metal? Oh, I don't know.

I just love it.


6) Nadia Reid - Preservation


How fucking assured does she sound on this album? How great is she with a band behind her? Both on record and live!

2017 was the year Aldous and Nadia's paths well and truly forked musically, both for the better, and both are enjoying incredible success.
I loved Harding's track 'Horizon', but Preservation is the better, more consistent album. My second-favourite New Zealand album of 2017, in fact.

5) Protomartyr - Relatives in Descent

I liked 2015's The Agent Intellect but kinda forgot Protomartyr even existed until Relatives in Descent dropped.
There's something in Joe Casey's low, growly-but-not-screamy voice that just gets to me, in a good way.

It's like, how could Post-Punk be cool? Well, here's how: take the heavy bits of Nick Cave and the soft bits of Swans and Fucked Up. And there's something about the imagery and doomish sound that  makes me think of it all as some elaborate charade, like the Misfits (another band whose vocals get to me) and their horror schitck.

And this sense of being on the edge of my seat, of being on the look-out for reasons to disavow this band or flip out even further, makes listening to them compelling.


 4) Lost Horizons - Ojala




Another November release, but I'm confident there's no recency bias unduly bouying its placement. In fact, I think this could be two or three spots higher when all is said and done.
The one problem with this album, the first fruits from a collaboration between Simon Raymonde (Cocteau Twins) and Richard Thomas (Jesus and Mary Chain), is that it's so strong and varied across its 15 tracks, and the host of guest vocalists so impressive (Tim Smith from Midlake, Ghostpoet, Marissa Nadler... read this for the full list), that it feels like a really great mixtape rather than a traditional album.
But, I mean, what is an album anyway, when you listen to all your music as one giant Spotify playlist or incidental music when tending a barbeque? 
Don't answer that.
Just... next time you're at a lost for what to throw on when you want to defeat the silence (or the sound of your neighbours bickering), spin this album. Spin it and thank me later.

3) TW Walsh - Terrible Freedom


This might be my 2017 version of St Lenox. As in: music that probably spent most of its gestation in one man's bedroom; and over top of this laptop's worth of beats and blips: just the greatest lyrics.
But whereas St Lenox goes for an abrasive distortion of Adam Levine's vocal stylings, TW Walsh's singing is laid back and inoffensive, which tends to obscure the content of his words until you stop and LISTEN.
Take the opener and strongest track, 'My Generation', which reworks Snoop Dogg lyrics in a series of lines that connect the first and second verses, in what is otherwise a soft-spoken, walking-beat rocker. I didn't pick it up on this on my first or fifth listen, but I still loved the song. And when I finally did notice, it unlocked this whole John Grant / Father John Misty vibe.

2) Lorde - Melodrama


I thought it would be good. The kind of pop album a 34-year-old might appreciate without being compelled to listen to it again. But crap. There's some really interesting, challenging stuff happening here, while also banging when it's supposed to bang and breaking your heart when its phasers are set to 'shatter'. 
The ability to take weirdness and make it relatable is her superpower. 'Liability', 'Green Light', 'The Lourve', 'Writer in the Dark'... all might be my favourite song from the album (or even the year) depending on my mood. You can read whatever you want into the fact I've chosen 'Liability' for the playlist at the bottom.
Ms Yelich-O'Connor (and probably the fact I've got a daughter who now has opinions about music) has helped usher this old fogey into a new appreciation of contemporary pop music.
And I fully expect (and trust) her to take me somewhere completely different on album number three. 

Howeverlong that takes, it'll be worth the wait.

1) Ryan Adams - Prisoner

This is one I could have buried around number eight, or dismissed along with the other guys on the cusp, because there's so much about Ryan Adams in 2017 that isn't cool. The fact he's being doing this thing so consistently for so long, with only slight variations. 
The fact I've never considered any of his previous albums as anything more than fine. Certainly not Top-Ten-worthy.
And then to go and release a single like 'Do You Still Love Me Babe', which sounds (sonically, if not lyrically) like something that might have been played at the inauguration of the first George Bush.
And for it to be a break-up album. And for that break-up to have been with a pop star-actress ten years his junior. 
How could it be worth your time, your attention and ultimately the vulnerability needed to truly get a break-up album?
Well...
Clearly, it is worth it. 
Clearly, it worked its magic on me.
'Do You Still Love Me Babe' has its heartfelt arena rock cake and eats it too. 'Prisoner', 'Shiver and Shake', 'Breakdown'... why am I listing songs? They're all perfect. Probably too perfect.
I listened to Prisoner a lot this year while writing my novel which isn't about heartbreak at all. 

And then I listened to Prisoner B-Sides a lot when that came out. And I loved songs like 'Where Will You Run', and 'Hanging onto Hope' and 'You Said' and 'Too Tired To Cry', which are rougher and in their roughness I was reminded of what lay behind this whole project.
If given all 29 tracks from Prisoner and the B-sides album, my final twelve would have been different, but I'm eternally grateful this wasn't released as a double album. Adams edited, and refined, and released a concise (and possibly overpolished) statement, and allowed it to be supported by the release, some time later, of other products of the breakup. Because wouldn't it be strange, for such a prolific songwriter, only to produce 12 songs from the end of his marriage?
Without the B-sides album, Ryan Adams wouldn't have been my most listened to artist on Spotify in 2017. Without the B-sides album, Prisoner wouldn't have been my number one. But it's existence, and perhaps more importantly its separation, was enough to convince me.