Woopsie. I missed a fortnightly post because I was all messed up after someone yanked my wisdom teeth out. This update will therefore cover a month of my writing shenanigans.

So, this month, I got a revision request from an amazing publication for my story The Menticider and wrote an artist statement for my friend Dylan, among other things.

Fiction

Okay, so I’ve sunk literally hundreds of hours into my fantasy story The Menticider since January 2021, on and off. It has been rejected by a few mags, and I’d sort of given up on it. Sort of.

But a few weeks ago, a highly prestigious magazine (which I shall not name) got back to me about my submission and said, while they were interested in it, it needed some polishing. They told me they’d reconsider it if I fixed A, B, and C, which isn’t a guarantee of acceptance, mind you.

But damn, this news hit me like a truck. It was a true “mum’s spaghetti” (one shot, one opportunity) moment, and I put maybe another 70 hours into it before I submitted it yesterday.

I honestly don’t think I’ve worked so hard on anything before. Because this win, if I were to get it, would be a huge leap forward for me.

I could have gone on and on editing it, but no, it’s great and it was ready to go. Ready for abandonment. Because “art is never finished, only abandoned.”

Wish me all the luck. All of it. But either way, I’m proud of the story. I’m also so, so grateful for my wonderful friend Katie, who helped me with the edits. Thanks again, you legend.

Anyway, here are this fortnight’s stats:

Pending: 7 (4 stories)
Submissions: 3
Rejections: 4 (1 revision request)
Withdrawn: 0
Acceptances: 0

Oh, and I’m thinking about writing a small interactive fiction story in Twine, even though I said I’d never do it again after the literal years I sunk into interaction fiction for largely no gain, except RSI. There’s an online publication called voidspace that takes IF, so I reckon that’s enough of an incentive.

I’m thinking I’ll do something set in a D&D-esque dungeon, with simple puzzles and some tough relationship choices involving your dungeoneering partner. We’ll see.

Copywriting

My friend Dylan from Djanmich Fine Art hosted an art show this month—called A Strange Land Down Under—and I helped him with his artist statement for the event. You can read the statement below.

Of all the pieces on display, I liked this one the most. It’s tiny, too, like the size of a hand if I’m remembering properly. I mean, there were free beers at the event.

A river doesn’t think. It doesn’t plan. If a boulder falls in its path, the river flows around it. It takes the path of least resistance.

I apply this principle to my art.

When inspiration strikes, I go immediately to the canvas, try to tune out my analytical mind, and tune in to my intuitive one. Not wanting to waste any time, I’ll take jars of paint left there from previous projects and get to work.

My objective is simple: to paint until there’s no blank canvas left, then walk away.

These pieces are always my most imperfect, and my most beautiful. To this day, I’ve never been able to recreate these “effortless” paintings when trying to. I can’t bend the river to my will. I have to let it carry me. I have to allow for happy accidents.

But inspiration doesn’t always strike out of the blue. Sometimes, I need to help myself achieve a flow state.

Often I’ll find inspiration in simply viewing the natural world. When I study a landscape, I look to isolate the layers — the building blocks — that make up the whole. I then reconstruct the image in my mind, but how I would render it in paint. This mental image is what I work from when I’m in front of the canvas.

At other times, music drives me. As a former electronic musician and DJ, I’m comfortable expressing myself through music and I take great inspiration from music in turn. Sound becomes colour and shape in my mind, and I transfer that to the canvas.

A Strange Land Down Under is, strangely, a marriage of effortlessness and perseverance.

Take from it what you will.

While I’ve stepped away from writing for Frontier Media’s YouTube channel The Front (I’m still editing scripts), some of the videos for which I wrote the scripts will still trickle through from time to time.

Here’s one of them:

Thoughts

It actually worked out that I missed a fortnightly update. While my achievements were big ones, I didn’t have all that much else to share with you.

Except for that I’m rewatching Game of Thrones. While it’s awesome (to a point), it’ll never be as good as it was on that first watch-through, when the whole bloody world was hyping it up and you had to wait between episodes and seasons.

Thanks for reading 🖤

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