Giant Squid Creations

So, one year ends and another begins. A pragmatist might say it's just the changing of a digit on the calendar, or time to buy a new one I guess, but for the rest of us it is a good time to reflect and to plan - and in planning to hope. This has been a good year for me, bought a townhouse with my wife - first calendar year of marriage too - started this website; met Neil Gaiman , Kevin Anderson and Marianne de Pierres ; saw Muse, Amanda Palmer and Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen; discovered some great music and read some good books. Work was fine too, got to do some more writing there too which may not be my type of thing but it's experience and money. There were downsides too of course but I won't go into them here. What this blog is really about is the position I'm in for the New Year. Managed to finish a rough draft of Prometheus Rebooted with hours to spare before 2011 bid farewell, which was a goal and gives me something

For most of high school I planned on being either a cartographer or an environmental scientist who dabbled in writing. Then came Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and it all seemed like a lot of work; whereas writing was just natural. Still, I wasn't convinced and had no particular focus. So it was as a weary and directionless teenager that I came upon Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead , one of the texts for my HSC English course. It was then I knew what I wanted to do - write plays. I had no idea theatre could be so … well, nuts. Yes, I had been somewhat sheltered to come to that conclusion, something I've been well stripped of since, but that play remains one of the cleverest, wittiest and most entertaining I've encountered and if I had not read it at that point in my life I firmly believe I would not have followed the path I did. So it's not really exaggerating to say Tom Stoppard changed my life. Imagine my excitement

Last week my ears were firmly up against the wall taking in as much of ABC Classic FM's Classic 100 countdown as possible. The theme this year was nominally the 20th century but in practice it was anything from 1900 to today. For me the countdown was a culmination of a process of discovery; not that the journey is by any means finished it's just not so firmly focussed on one time period any more. Going into the voting I had some absolute favourites, but I wanted to find out more about what my options were. It wasn't all that long ago I put aside the idea of all classical music coming from a bygone era and all composers being roughly contemporary. So finding out what happened in the last hundred or so years was really interesting. I won't bore you with all the details but classical music is more than you might think and worth trying out. I was lucky and grew up with it, but if you haven't given it much of a chance I encourage you to. The countdown itself raised

I figure it's about time I started this blog and what better place to start it than the time I met Neil Gaiman ? Of course, by meet I mean I handed him a book and he signed it and handed it back, but there was a moment and it deserves a blog. First some back story. Six months before this fated meeting I'd barely heard of the man. I knew the name, I knew he was an author and someone at uni once told me I should read something he wrote. That was about it. Similarly, I'd heard of the Dresden Dolls and knew Coin-Operated Boy, but Amanda Palmer was a mystery to me. Then my wife, who at that stage was my fiancee and already a big fan of Amanda Palmer, bought and read Neverwhere because someone had told her she should. She wasn't even halfway through when she told me I had to read to it too. So of course I did; six months later I'd read it and American Gods and was collecting his other books as quickly as I could. This stuff was gold, solid gold. So, when Amanda Palm