No blog post this week, I’m afraid. Yesterday and today saw us moving our entire lives and ourselves out of our home of 8 years, the culmination of a hectic month of packing; I fully intended to keep blogging throughout, but my backlog has run dry.
Thankfully that ordeal is over now – I’ll be back with something more interesting (probably involving snails) next week.
For the last few years, I’ve been a slush reader for Aurealis speculative fiction magazine, and it’s done wonders for me as a writer.
What is a slush reader, you ask? Simply put, open-submission publications like Aurealis receive hundreds, possibly thousands, of submissions every year – far too many for their editors to read through every one when choosing what to publish. So they rely on (usually) volunteers to sift through this virtual mound of unsolicited fiction – the slush pile – and figure out which stories are of high enough quality to pass on up the chain.
I joined the team at Aurealis on a whim, but haven’t regretted the decision for a minute. In fact, slush reading been integral to improving my abilities and confidence as a writer.
Here’s why:
Continue reading “Improve your writing – become a slush reader”
Something I’ve become really aware of, as an asexual person in Western culture, is the weird way that sex is both hyper-visible and constantly hidden away.
I’m hardly the first to comment on this unhealthy dichotomy in our society. But it takes on a different (though equally damaging) significance from the point of view of someone who’s completely uninterested in sexytimes.
Continue reading “Sex is everywhere, sex is nowhere; observations from an ace perspective”
This isn’t the blog post I thought I was going to write today.
I have a whole thing started about asexuality and the simultaneous prevalence and absence of sex in Western society that I though I was going to finish. But when I woke up this morning, I knew it was going to be one of those days: my gut hurt (something bad I ate yesterday? Or just my old friend, referred stress?), and I had a long list of things I needed to get done hanging Damocles-style over my head.
I didn’t even want to get out of bed, let alone write something pithy and thought-provoking about how our society treats sex.
Continue reading “How to get things done when you’re struggling: start with the easy parts”
And I’m back!
I hope your Christmas season (if you celebrate) was a happy one or, if your circumstances mean that’s a hard ask, a resilient one.
Christmas for me is bittersweet, for reasons I might write about some other time, but the new year is a good time to stop and reflect on where the old year has taken me. I’m not a fan of new year’s resolutions – I’m always working towards goals and trying out new strategies for achieving them, regardless of the time of year – so here instead are my new year’s reflections: