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 ...