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But it's where to read what I'm up to these days.

The title isn't so cryptic if you've been noticing a lack of updates here on this page of late.
While I fully intend to start a blog sometime soon that will solely focus on my writing (and possibly a second one on my extra-curricular hobbies), I'm almost entirely using Twitter now to communicate in general as my micro-broadcast.

I'll keep my account here for now, primarily so I can read my friend's list.
That and post links to actual blogs when they eventuate in active existence.
But for now I'm not using Livejournal - Moscow (where Livejournal is currently based) loses (me) to San Francisco (where Twitter is based).

Not a lot of detectivework is involved in finding me on Twitter.

I have no idea what that means.
What I do know is that I'm doing a lot more this Easter than in previous ones.
I do miss country life and what the Whitsundays had to offer.
And the Whitsunday SES crew - that goes without saying.

There's a lot more to do in SEQ culturally.
But socially it's like dance of the viciously inept.
From bickering and in-fighting among supposed peers, through to near constant tail-gating on the roads and insufferable poseurs lurking at every bookshop and cafe I'm reminded there's plenty about city life that I haven't missed.

Mum is up and she's already taking over the Beach House.  Mostly using proxy units.
Soon the place will be ready to receive my brother and his family, as well as my own father.

A full house a week before Easter.

That's the working title of my new work, emphasis very much on the working part of that.
So far the story outline is unfolding well.  Finding the right voice for the story using third-person is proving much more challenging.
Still I don't think it's a story that could be told in first person - unless the narratives of the two main characters competed.
And I dread how I'd express the inner life of the second character in the third act.

Having a nominally and normally integrated human psyche and all.

It's a full house at the Beach-house next week.
So in preparation for this event I'm migrating my temporary office to my bedroom.
While I know this fact might be exciting some of you, it's doing not a lot more than irk me at the moment.

I'm beginning to tell my next tale later this morning, right after I finish settling in.
And getting used to the power drills a few doors down.

It's a good thing Prue took the day off work sick!
I'd not have ended up at the Doctor's otherwise and had fifteen minutes to sit in a waiting room and think.
I've got a cracking new idea for a novel as a result.

It's about a 65-70 thousand word idea, one that in retrospect (in other words: an hour after I've penned the core idea out) is the accumulation of my thoughts on a few related subjects over the last few months.
But marrying those ideas together in this way looks on paper a winning formula.
It's a tricky idea, one that I'll not be spoiling you with here.
However, here's a sneak preview...


So yes, some character ideas do start with names as simple as "A" or "B".

I'm seriously considering a revamp of how I handle my online communications.
Primarily I need to refocus my blog writing towards my career and less on nattering, Twitter and other online communications tools seem to better handle the more frivolous side of things.

Does anyone have any experience with WordPress?  I'm thinking of starting my new blog there.

I've decided - unless a publisher waives a cheque in front of my nose Rules of the Road is done.
It's a pretty dense text as it stands, if I attempt to edit or re-write the last few chapters any more I suspect I'll end up resolving the story in a less satisfactory manner.

And hey, the last chapter itself is golden.  Right up there with that chapter with Alec, Jack, that lost soul of a child care worker and a basement full of dead children.
Those two chapters are so profoundly disturbing, I dare not touch them.

Tales from the Road isn't necessarily my next writing project.  It is however my next Road project.
There's always as much Road as you need.

My thanks, as always, to Jack Solomon for becoming Jack Solomon.
And Alec Jacobs, for becoming someone I both recognise yet also feel a little distant to.

To visit another country is to revisit my novel writing from five and more years ago.
As much as I love Rules of the Road as a work, I'm just not the same person who wrote this.
For better or worse, I suspect the better.

I admittedly experience with this with almost everything I write - it always reads as if another person, not myself, wrote the work.
I suspect this is the work standing on its own without my support.

Best laugh I've had in awhile.
Still it explains why the town hosts so many 'secret' meetings eh?

Just a quick update today:

1.  Oiljimba is no more, thanks to the Sunshine Coast City Council and no-thanks to the EPA.
2.  Grappling with pre-existing naming conventions is harder than it sounds.
3.  Listening to a Raynd adovcate interviewed for the ABC's Book Show?  Like fingernails across a blackboard.  Randroids ability to coherently state their point falls apart when it confronts any other philosophy or anything other than slavish acceptance.  Truly the mark of an intellectual cult.
4.  Writing a short piece of writing for my old SES outfit is taking longer than I'd hoped it would but hopefully it'll be worth the wait.
5.  The local SES controller here doesn't seem to believe in the use of SMS.  Shall have to call him in person later today.
6.  Prue is starting to get her groove at her new job, she's become quite the career woman.
7.  I'm still looking for three more children of Gygax, or those potentially looking to be exposed to such horrors.
8.  Luck be a Lady tonight.

That is all.

We've gone to the dogs it seems with the shooting of the new K-9 series here.
Note that good swathes of the site are password protected, most likely as its meant to be mostly for crew to get themselves organised.

It look like they're at least 2-4 weeks into production itself, certainly they're beyond pre-preproduction, location sorting and such.

Fort Lytton as a location?  I suppose why not, it's close to Brisbane yet no-one really goes there.
Gunanaba I had to search for but it's unsurprisingly in the Gold Coast hinterland.

So much for being "the dead center of the Universe"!
(I guess the character of Teegan needed to find the Doctor to be no longer 'stranded, far from home, stranded on my own'...)

So it's official, South-East Queensland is now officially part of the Doctor Who universe again.

I've just come back from a long walk, part of which I took along the beachfront here.
For those who have never visited me at this location before, I am currently living within a few hundred meters of the Pacific Ocean.

Mudjimba beach is as of today stained with oil.
It's not as thick as what I saw yesterday on the television news for Moreton Island but its there and very black in the foam of the surf.

Technically Marcoola and Mudjimba is part of the Northern end of the Sunshine Coast, certainly Noosa is so I just have to wonder at this 'only on the southern end' nonsense I keep reading about.

I'm strangely not struck angry by this nor overly surprised, this is the sort of 'accident' I've been expecting for a few decades now.
It is amazing that given the high volume of shipping traffic to-and-from Port of Brisbane that it's taken this long for such a disaster to occur.

The Council does have teams of men with earth-moving equipment on stand-by, I walked past two dozen of them on this same walk.
Best of luck to them in cleaning up the mess, I say.

I'm going to go as far as to say now that this might just tip the State election result a little back towards the incumbent Bligh, who perhaps will be helped out from under her metaphoric bed by a dope-smoking Green Man to protect her (for at least one more term) from the pitchforks and firebrands of Queensland voters.

It's either that or we become assimilated!

Just a quick post for today - I'm in the midst of putting together ideas for my re-entry into the satisfying but time consuming hobby of roleplaying.  That game with Elves, Dwarves and the Flumph in particular.

Okay, perhaps the Flumph isn't making a personal appearence at my own table.
But if you're reading this there's a good chance you know what I'm talking about.
Currently Mister Raboczi and my reluctant wife are 'in'.
So I'm in the hunt for three more players.
Anyone out there reading Livejournal, who lives in South-East Queensland interested?

Cyclone Hamish schlonging his way down towards South-East Queensland.

I really should put the call into the local Maroochydore SES group here and volunteer my services.
Just in case.

Today I paid homage to the man alleged to have "known the score" in the late eighties and early nineties by trekking off to the multiplex.
I saw a film that was promised to be unfilmable, much as Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was touted as an unfilmable novel series for so many years.

Today I watched the Watchmen.

Having read the original comic series when it first did its graphic novel incarnation in the early 1990's, I can say that this film is a pretty solid adaptation of that story.  Some things have changed, most of the core of the series however remains the same.

This was a film I could admire and indeed love, even though paradoxically I felt very dispassionately removed from it.
It is however a very long film, almost three hours in length.
I suspect that when the DVD of this is released I'll watch this film with self-imposed intermissions, by the third act I was struggling to concentrate on the story as I'd done in the first act.

I'm officially giving this my own two-thumbs up.

Just a quick shout-out to my North Queensland readers (all two of them!) and to my former SES mates who are battoning down the tropical hatches in preparation for a possible cyclone that could hit that part of the coast Sunday.

Or it could all be a fizzer - wet season is a lot like that.

So good luck to you all Whitsunday SES.  Hope it all blows over!

Given the hotter temperatures here earlier this week, the relative cool of the breezes today is a welcome change.
Most of the day so far has consisted of online article reading, listening to Radio National and the occasional spot of writing.
I'm getting back into my work routines, slowly but surely.
Hopefully I'll be back on track next week to start outputting more works, sooner.

After all - 2009 is supposed to be my year!

Given that I'm no longer on the mountain, I've changed the journal's look and title to reflect my new surroundings.
It's very upmarket, bourgeouis suburbia.  But suburbia none the less.