The bad news is it’s not Christmas yet. The good news is that come Christmas, I’ll be even more chilled than Dylan due to an injection of funds from the Australia Council. Yes, that’s right, after having played the grant game for about six years I’ve finally been lucky enough to receive one (the success rate is about 15%). I’ll be using the time and money to put together a manuscript of poems. That means about 100 poems/pages at least. I’ve been working on an MS for about a year and while it’s currently got that many poems in it, most of them are a) crap b) old or c) crap and old. So hopefully I’ll be inspired to write some new ones too.
In other news, my Masters thesis Marzipan: a Confection has been given the thumbs up by the examiners. This is a huge relief for me, as I have been writing this particular story for approximately seven or eight years. Now comes the hard part: what to do with this MS? It’s only 30,000 words at the moment but could easily put on some more bulk, and could even possibly be worth submitting to a brave publisher (any of you out there?).
In any case, despite these two pieces of news, I feel like the last thing I want to do right now is write poems or fiction. In fact, all I wanna do is have some fun.
And I hereby announce my intention to do just that.
As you were.
joe says:
The term “vanity publishing” springs to mind.
On a very similar topic, I too have completed a manuscript. It’s about a bloke who lives in a boarding house in Brisbane. He drinks a lot and has a series of failed relationships as he tries to figure out the meaning of life. It’s a cracking read and my provisional title is “Praise.”. Let me know if you’re interested – maybe we could do a split single type of deal.
29 October 2004 — 10:20
David Prater says:
it’s a grant to write poems joe, not to publish a book.
29 October 2004 — 10:28