Man, I don’t know where I am this week. That holiday on Monday was always going to put the zap on my head, but I think I made it much worse by working through the weekend. Both Jane and I were on deadline, so we just pulled normal workdays on Saturday and Sunday, and then had Monday off, which was nice.
I enjoy flicking through Substack Notes of a morning, looking for an essay I might enjoy. Occasionally I’ll find something like ‘Light Travels at the Highest Possible Velocity’, a Sherman Alexie story I read one Sunday morning in bed which delayed my getting up by an hour.
You will have to walk down the hill in the hot sun and pay a strange man four and a half thousand dollars.
It sucks.
No, I’m not talking about street cred. My mum says I will always be cool. But as the temps climbed inevitably towards summer, my long-faithful air conditioner breathed its last. A circuit board died, and this thing was so old that there was no way of replacing it. Thankfully, you, the generous taxpayers of Australia, stepped up and covered the expense, since the aircon was in my office, where I work daily to accrue legitimate deductions to my pre-tax income.
Three or four times a week I drive past a barbecue joint on the edge of the Gabba, tucked in under a freeway on-ramp, as all of the best barbecue joints in the world are. I’ve always meant to get in and check it out, and with Sir Havoc visiting Brisbane yesterday, I finally achieved my dream.
Dating apps post-date my dating life by many decades, so I’ve never paid them much attention. All I really know is that you swipe left or right, and this has become such a big deal it turned into a global meme. (I’m still not sure which is best, left or right.)
The other day, though, I read that one of the big apps—Bumble, which I assume is big because I recognize the name—is offering, or planning to offer, “friendship” matches.
Used to be I couldn’t be bothered with print-on-demand for most of my indie-published stuff. It was way too difficult to manage the content management systems, and there’s no economies of scale with a print run of one, so it was also super spendy.
But the CMS, especially at Amazon, got better, and as trade published books got more expensive (thirty-five bucks for a trade paperback, are you fucking kidding me!?) the numbers started to line up.
I hate clogging up people’s inboxes with junk email, which is why I post 99% of my nonsense directly to the web.
Apologies then for that last email about my Story Bible process for the World War series. Most people don’t care how the sausage gets made, they just wanna eat it.
In my defence, I had done a lunchtime workout and eaten a very large chicken curry and I was quite sleepy when I hit send, instead of publish.
