The Art of The Very Hard Book
I wrote this as part of the teachers’ notes for The Very Hard Book I was asked to contribute to. I thought it’d be worth sharing them here as well: The art for The Very Hard Book draws heavily on surrealism, a movement that dealt intensely with philosophical ideas, questions of perception, reality, paradox, memory and mental imagery. The cover page is a direct reference to M.C Escher’s Waterfall. Its themes deal with illusion and paradox (the structure depicted is not physically possible) and infinity (the water runs seemingly in...
read moreWriting tip #51:
1. Get a teapot. 2. Get a packet of Lapsang Souchong tea. 3. Make a pot of Lapsang Souchong tea and sit down to write. You may add a bit of milk but no sugar allowed. 4. Write, drinking the tea as you proceed. Lapsang Souchong, with its distinctive strong, smoky flavour, is a fighting tea. It gets you poppin’. 5. Crucially, however, cold Lapsang Souchong tea is just horrible. Therefore, the longer you sit, the worse your tea will taste. This acts as a powerful productivity stimulant. Work quickly or suffer the consequences. 6. Hey, it...
read moreTimed out
While working away at a book draft, I formed a new theory about why writing is so riddled by procrastination. What I’m doing as I sit down to write is trying to communicate with myself from the future, who is currently holding the finished book in his hands and trying to save his past self all the trouble. “How’s it looking?!?” I shout up the timeline. “It’s looking great!” He shouts back. “It has cute squirrel fuzzmonkingy ambluitions and lots of ploghome esparities!” ...
read moreListed
Argh! has recently been longlisted for the 2020 Australian Book Design award. It’s also made the CBCA 2020 Notable books list. So I’m happy.
read moreSex.
In both of the books Julian and I have made together, there are no human or animal characters (with the possible exception of the reader, who plays an active part in the proceedings). The first book consists of an all-microbe cast, the second features only aliens. If it were up to us, we’d dispense with the notion of the characters’ sex/gender altogether. It plays no role in the stories we wanted to tell. However, linguistic conventions sometimes forced us to assign a pronoun to a character. We didn’t want to go down the...
read moreHappy accidents: observations on making music
On definitions: I’ve been playing the guitar since I was a teen. I’ll be the first to say I’m no good at playing the guitar, but that’s no surprise – I’ve had no formal training, and I have never really practiced properly, so I am technically very limited in what I’m able to do. Here’s an odd question, then: Am I a musician? If it’s a question of profession, I’m obviously not. I haven’t made a penny from music and am not expecting to do so in the future. Likewise, I have no...
read moreI have a website now
I feel terribly grown up. It’s at www.idanbb.com . Still unpolished and needing work – a first draft of a website rather than a final product – but a website nonetheless.
read moreThe Tragedy of the Comma.
I found that I was actively avoiding using the printer in our office at work. Because of a comma. I’ll explain. When I send something to be printed, it goes over to the communal printer. So I rock up to it and press the appropriate buttons, at which point it prints the document (I cannot fault the printer on that count), while displaying a short message. The message is the problem. I think it should’ve said “please wait”. What it actually says is “please, wait”. I know that many of my fellow humans...
read moreA brief note on the importance of having crumbs and socks and stuff scattered all round your workspace
Rule #1 of doing practically anything is that your first draft will be rubbish. Maybe there are exceptions; I don’t know. Maybe Picasso or Da Vinci could whisk off a completed work from a standing start, but we mere mortals usually can’t. Do you concur? Beautiful, thanks. Moving on. For me, whenever I sit down to do anything even remotely creative, I immediately get jittery. A part of me seems to expect that whatever half-baked notion I had when I started is now supposed to reveal itself in its full glory, emerging from its cocoon of the mind...
read moreCompetence and competition….and community
This Tuesday I’ll be hopping over to Sydney to attend the launch of a science writing anthology, The Best Australian Science Writing 2015. It should be a great read, from the few pieces I’ve been able to track down before I get my hands on the anthology itself. By all means grab a copy for yourself at your nearest book-dispensing entity. But that’s not exactly what I want to talk about. Here’s the thing: My piece, an excerpt from my immunology book, is on the shortlist for the Bragg science writing prize; the winner...
read more
Recent Comments