On being mixed up

Every now and then I make a vain attempt to organise myself. Like that time I thought I'd give myself three email addresses, one for theatre, one for writing business and one for other. That worked really well: the glowing vision of beautifully organised mail turned out to mean in reality that my feral inbox simply tripled itself. Reimkennar was one of those bright ideas: let's do a blog that's just about the novels! Well, partly because I'm writing a novel, partly because I'm now regularly blogging for the newly launched superschmick ABC Arts Online, on top of my regular poetry reviewing and columnising for Overland Journal, as well as various random essays and other things that come my way, I find I don't have much to say about the novels. What I say about the novels, aside from the odd adventure into blog tours, is pretty much said in the novels. And sometimes I do get bored with my own news.

Though I should tell you that Black Spring was listed as a 2013 Notable Book by the Children's Book Council of Australia. Which was cool. And that at the end of May I'll be at Reading Matters, the upcoming youth literature shindig at the State Library of Victoria, with some of my favourite colleagues, including Garth Nix, Morris Gleitzman and my old mate Paul Callaghan, who used to run the independent gaming festival Freeplay. So if you're coming too, do come up and say hello.

Also, Black Spring's US release, through Candlewick Books, is coming up in August. So I'll no doubt be posting about that. I have ARCs, but I can't wait to see the final book.  I think that's all my novel news. Oh, I'm still plugging away at Cadvan, that stand-alone prequel to the Pellinor Books.  I'm probably about two thirds through, though it's hard to tell - it depends how long the book is, and, unusually for me, I'm still not entirely sure. It will be as long as it is.

Anyway, for this blog, I've decided to embrace the confusion. See those books up there? They're all my books. Some people might be interested in some of them and not at all interested in others, and some people might not be interested in any of them at all. This is perfectly okay. (However, the best and most fascinating people are interested in all of them and will want to buy them straight away). Some of them are poetry books. One of the poetry books has several plays in it as well as a kind of essay. (That confused the poets). One is an experimental novella. Quite a lot are fantasy. This is why someone asked me once if my "brand" was "confusing". My "brand" - I suppose I am branded, if that means that in the hour of my birth a demon appeared in a puff of scarlet smoke and smote me with a red hot iron that said THOU SHALT BE A WRITER - is confusing. It confuses me. I simply can't talk about what I'm doing as if I do one thing, because that's not how my life works (that is, if it works at all, which at this point is dubious.)

According to all the experts, this kind of confusion is highly inadvisable, but what can I do? My brain is very disobedient and just keeps running off and doing stuff, often without my permission.

So. Hello. I'll be posting different kinds of stuff here. It may be confusing, but it may also be interesting. That is all I know.