Hiatus

Thanks for visiting...

Owing to the vagaries of life, I'm on something of a lack-of-time-and-energy-induced hiatus from blogging at the moment. I have high hopes of being back regularly a little later on this year, after I get my life back...

Musings on the End of a *Busy* Year

Okay, okay. I know I said that I probably wouldn't be blogging again until sometime in January but, to be honest, the alternative is getting up on the roof to clean out the gutters of the house and, after having spent a couple of hellish hours up there the other day doing some other work, I'm really not at all enthusiastic at the prospect. (Also, I haven't finished my coffee yet...)

So instead, here we are. Time for that traditional 'Year in Review' type post (though, in my case it's more traditional to do it sometime around Feb 25...)

Looking back at 2012, I can't help but notice that I've only managed to put up a grand total of 14 blog posts here, including this one. This is a significant drop on the previous three years, but not without reason.

That reason being simply this: 2012 was completely bloody insane. I can't remember a time in my life when I've been more constantly busy, or exhausted.

But, that said, it's also been a year of highlights, which is far preferable to the alternative.

Said highlights would include:

• Signing up 'The Hunter' with my new agent Cheryl in NYC (who has since made me do three rewrites across the intervening months. Feedback on the most recent one still pending, but I'm looking forward to it. As I am to writing the next three books in the series*)
• Getting the 2012 ACLAR conference organised, and then running it (with lots of assistance from lots of lovely people). In a lot of ways, this was probably the professional highlight of my year, even though I didn't blog too much about it. Seeing two years of solid work come together over three seamless days was a really unexpected thrill. Which was followed by...
• Spending time in Vietnam and Indonesia with various elements of my family. THis last year has been a big one for family type things. Min and Toby and I spent a couple of weeks in Vietnam with her mother, plus my sister and brother in Law, before travelling down to Indonesia for a week with my sister and brother-in-law and their kids, and my parents. And it strikes me how terribly lucky I am to have such a close extended family in both directions. We even managed to all travel together without killing one another...
• Developing that theme - Vietnam was amazing. I just completely fell in love with the place. Also..
• Pho. Best. Breakfast. Ever.
• Back at work, second semester was similarly crazy, but the good kind. I got a good wrap up in my annual review, a teaching award plus an invitation to apply for a national award next year, had lovely classes, worked with great sessional staff, my honours students all did really, really well, and my PhD students hit a few home runs too at various conferences. Plus at the end of it all I got promoted to convener of writing for next year. In the middle of all that...
• Attending and speaking at the inaugural 'Celebrate Reading' annual conference run by the Literature Centre in Fremantle. This was another complete highlight, not least because it was effectively three days of hanging out with some of my favourite writer people: Jim Roy, Isobelle Carmody, Gary Crew, Matt Ottley, Shaun Tan, Jackie French, Lucy Christopher and Julia Lawrinson. The final session of this conference, which involved all of us on stage telling our favourite 'War Stories', was one of the most side-splittingly funny hours I've ever spent at a writing event.
• Helping my clever wife get her PhD finished and submitted. In my last post, I referred to this, but didn't go into detail. Suffice to say that it involved three pretty insane days during which Toby more-or-less stayed with his grandmother while Min and I set up camp in her office at ANU. Her thesis is amazing! And I'm not just saying that because I'm her husband. I'll admit that I went into the proof-reading process expecting to find it a bit of a slog (not being an expert in International Law, and all that...) but was blown away by both the central argument, and the weight of support for it. Really amazing. It was also, in it's own odd way, quite a 'fun' couple of nights. You haven't lived until you've scrounged dinner from a law school vending machine at 2330 on a Sunday night.***
• Finally, just to round out the year, (and as mentioned last post) we got ourselves a new house. All going well (and it is, at the moment, touch wood...) we'll be moving early february**** Which means that I'm spending my summer holiday valiantly attempting to get about 12 months worth of house repairs and renovation done in roughly 3 weeks. Today the skip bin should arrive so that we can start pulling out carpets. Before then, though, I've got to clean those gutters I mentioned earlier. Plus go to the gym.
• On top of that, there's the random stuff: learning to play Ukelele (which has, in turn, gotten me back into more regular playing of my other instruments) Judging the ACT Chief Minister's Literary award, which meant that I got to read an awful lot of really good writing, hops up to Sydney and down to Melbourne for various academic and masterclass gigs, having an abstract accepted for a big conference in Maastricht next year, plus lots of other stuff that doesn't occur to me right at the moment.

Finally, of course, one of the very big highlights of 2012 was watching my little boy continue to grow, and turn from being a toddler into a boy. And, importantly, moving from Duplo to proper Lego. I've been waiting for that moment for quite some time... 

So, that's been my year. Pretty crazy, absolutely exhausting for the most part, but reward-filled. And 2013 seems to be heading down a similar path. But hopefully with more than 14 blog posts...

Thanks everyone for your patience during this very sporadic year of posts, and do keep popping by. Have a great and safe New Year's!

* Says the man who swore at the completion of the Darklands books that he'd never, ever, EVER sign up to a multi-book narrative ever again**

**Aplogies to Taylor Swift.

***Though the less said about the 33,000 words of footnotes which I individually checked against the bibliography and thesis references, the better...

**** At exactly the same time as I'm starting teaching for the semester, and stepping fully into my new course convener role. Go me.

Just When You Thought I'd Given Up Completely...

Remember January? That halcyon, golden summer last year, when I committed to blogging here every single week during 2012? No? Good. I don't remember it, either.

So it's been a busy* semester. And next year is looking similarly frantic, but there are a lot of good things happening.

Probably the biggest one is that our little family is on the move! Okay, we're not going too far, just across Canberra, but a week or so back we found a lovely house in one of the suburbs that we've always looked at and sighed wistfully. Just for good measure, it was exactly within our (recently much improved) buying capacity. So we bought it. Looked at it for the first time at 2 O'clock on a monday afternoon, put in an offer at around 2.45, and had it accepted just after 3.15. By 5.30 we'd signed up to sell our existing place with the same agent (she's nice. We like her...) and by 6.00 we were sitting on our couch, rather dazed, saying things like 'Well. That was unexpected.' to one another.

Now we're having fun trying to sort out our finance during what is, effectively, the christmas shutdown for most of the financial industry. But it's all looking very positive, anyway...

Other news: My clever wife also submitted her PhD last week. (Yes, you're correct. We did go and buy a new house just 7 days from her submission date. If you're going to put yourself under pressure, you might as well go the whole hog, we figure...) This meant that the two of us spent most of last weekend editing and proofreading furiously. I personally checked every one of just over 33,000 words of footnotes, including thousands of individual references and case citations. Took roughly 16 hours. We finished up at 3.00am monday morning, nipped home for a refreshing 4 hours sleep, then got back to the finishing touches and printing so that Min could hand it over at 2.30. Then we went and had a drink.

So now it's just a horrible wait for the results.

And, come the start of next year, I'll be writing again, too. My plan is to knock out books 2 and 3 of 'The Hunter', hopefully by mid-year. (book 1, in case you're interested, is still with my Agent in New York. Fingers crossed I'll have some news on that front sometime early in the new year...)

After that it'll be time for some academic writing, preparing for a conference I'm off to in Holland next year in August. I'm also editing (and contributing) to an academic book on questions of truth and honesty in Children's and YA literature.

Plus, of course, next year I'm going to get back into blogging more seriously. Really. Proper blogging, too - not just these newsy posts that nobody except my mother has any real interest in.

In the meantime, though, I've got a bit of last minute shopping to do, so I'm going to sign off here. Chances of me signing back on anytime before mid January are pretty small, to be honest (I've got about 18 months worth of house renovations to do in roughly 3 weeks!) so I'm going to thank all my readers for their interminable patience with me this year, and wish everyone a Happy Festive Season - however and whatever you celebrate - and hope you all stay safe.

Cheers. T

*Busy [v / adj] bizē: full time teaching load, revising next draft of next book, supervision of 5 Phd and 3 honours students, presenting keynote addresses at 2 conferences, helping wife prepare and submit her PhD thesis, organising and running a birthday party for 15 sugar-loaded 4-year-olds, buying a house, selling a house, grading and moderating roughly 350,000 words worth of student work, marking 2 PhD thesis, running masterclasses in sydney, occasionally exercising, being father to an increasingly-energetic little boy, re-discovering Lego.

Yes, Still Alive...

Two months. A new record, I suspect.

Though in my defense, I've been busy. Very, very busy. And doing some writing, too! In fact, just a few minutes ago, I (finally) shot off draft #5 of 'The Hunter' to my agent Cheryl, and now I've got my fingers (and toes, and...anything else that'll help) very tightly crossed hoping that she likes it.

This last rewrite was a particularly big one, added another 10,000 words in, including two new chapters, plus a *whole lot* of character reworking for the protagonist to try and make him a little more appealing to a broader readership. And I've had to lever that in between the semester-from-hell (only in terms of workload, not students, just to be clear). I'm also frantically reading the entries for the ACT Chief Minister's Literary Award (I'm chairing the judging panel this year), have marked 2 PhD thesis for another uni, and signed a contract to put together an academic-y type book for Cambridge Scholars Press in the UK (which will feature all sorts of cool people and will draw from the ACLAR conference we ran here in Canberra back in June).

Oh, yeah, and we bought a kayak.

I've wanted to get a kayak pretty much since we moved to Canberra. A nice big 2 seater that we could take out on the lakes (of which Canberra has a multitude) or down to the coast for a little sea kayaking. Something we could pack up with a picnic and head out on the water for the day. Something I could just get out in on my own occasionally and paddle, and make bookish plans.

Unfortunately, the fact that our car is a Peugot 307 hatchback, with no roof racks or towbar made the reality of owining a 15 foot boat a little problematic.

Or at least, it did. Until Imogen pointed THESE out to me...

Now, I'll admit, I was a little sceptical at first. I mean, an inflatable kayak couldn't possibly be any good, could it? It'd be just like a big blow up toy that you play with in the swimming pool, surely.

Really not. After a bit of homework (a lot) of homework, we got online and ordered our AE convertible from the US. Then, a week later, three big boxes arrived on the doorstep and, after a couple of practice setups, Toby and I (poor Min, couldn't come. She's got this little PhD due any day now...) went for our first hit out on Lake Gininderra. And it was great! We paddled 7 kilometres, saw all sorts of cool and interesting things, and both decided that we LIKE our boat. It doesn't paddle or feel like a blowup toy at all - once it's inflated, it's rigid and stable, and cuts through the water just like a regular hardshell kayak. It's also received a fair bit of attention and interest from some of the local kayaking fraternity.

Since that first trip, we've been out every weekend. Last Sunday the three of us loaded up and paddled down to the Governor General's place in Yarralumla. She has her own jetty, which I argued was basically an invitation to morning tea, but I was outvoted. Still, it was a lovely couple of hours.

I'm now hatching plans, when I get a bit more paddle-fit, to try to paddle the length of lake Burley-Griffin, and do a kind of 'Canberra from the Water' blog post. Might take a while, though.

So that's what I've been up to. Just the usual, really.

God Canberra is Cold. Anyone else notice that?

This time last week I was on a beach on Bintan Island  in Indonesia. Today (sigh!) I'm back in my office, gradually working my way through a really quite stupid backlog of e-mails* And I can't help noticing that Canberra is a lot, lot colder than both Vietnam and Indonesia.

Still, in many ways, it's nice to be home and back into work**

 In case you're wondering, we had an absolutely lovely time while we were away. And because it is traditional on these occasions I'm pleased to present (Ta Dah!):

TONY'S HOLIDAY PHOTOS!

To start with, here is my son, somewhere on the streets of Hanoi


Min and I have an idea for the producers of 'The Amazing Race' - next season, all teams should have to run the race with a 3 year old in tow. It would make things a lot more interesting for all concerned. As you can tell from the expression on Toby's face, he's not particularly happy in this shot. There were a number of reasons for this. One of them was that as a born and bred Canberran, he's not overly used to 35 degree days with 89% humidity. Another was that he's at the perfect height for having his face and head patted and touched by pretty much every person we met. The Vietnamese are lovely people, and they really loved Toby. Sadly, after a few hours, he began to get just a little, well, tetchy from all the attention.

Still, in actual fact, travelling with a toddler was fantastic, and meltdowns aside, some of the most memorable moments of the whole trip involved Toby. One good example was on our final day in Hanoi, when we emerged into the hotel foyer to find our son, the doorman, the hotel manager and one of the receptionists all on their hands and knees in the foyer, playing with the set of toy cars that the manager had just given Toby as a goodbye present.

Hanoi itself was just wonderful. It had interesting shopping:

Interesting wiring:

And it's monsoon season there at the moment, so every afternoon the clouds would roll over, and the streets would go from chaotic to this:

There was also some amazing food and eating*** and plenty of walking around.

From Hanoi, it was a quick hop down to the ancient city of Hoi An**** where we stayed at a lovely little homestay establishement, just a little out of town. The family running it were incredibly welcoming, and it quickly became our little refuge from the touristy madness of Hoi An.

Hoi An itself is beautiful - just a stunning place, especially at night when the whole town and river is lit by paper lanterns.

Evening in Hoi An

It is, however, very touristy, with more touts and pressure than anywhere else we visited in Vietnam. The biggest industry by far is Tailoring, and we all had some lovely clothes made up, but I couldn't help the feeling that the tourism was something of a double edged sword for the town; as well as becoming the main driver for its survival, it has also really had an impact upon the overall feel of the place.

Still, it is stunning. There's no denying that:

Hoi An Countryside

From Hoi An, we flew down to Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh City, as it's officially titled). We only had three days here, and barely scratched the surface of this amazing, growing, cosmopolitan playground. I especially enjoyed just wandering around the city, soaking in the site of so much history. On our second last day, I booked a car and guide to take me out to the Chu Chi Tunnels, where some of the bloodiest and nastiest fighting in the Vietnam war took place. The tunnels themselves were amazing - they've been expanded to fit large western bodies, but I still only managed to get through 40 of the 100 or so meters that are open to tourists. And I've never suffered from claustrophobia in my life. Just as interesting was chatting to my guide (who asked not to be named in any reviews of the trip) about life in modern Vietnam. We talked about the reality of re-unification, the differences between the north and south that still persist to this day, and the long shadow of the war, which still touches most Vietnamese lives in one way or another. It was an insight into the country that I didn't get anywhere else, and one of the most valuable parts of the trip for me.

Then it was on to Indonesia, to meet with my family for a week at Club Med*****

This was my first experience of Club Med. And Min's. And, I hate to say this, it was - in its own way - kinda fun.****** It was particularly good for Toby who got to play with his cousins from Holland for a whole week:

There was a lot of swimming. Kyacking. Eating. More swimming. Archery. Elephant rides. And swimming.

Oh, and there was also a trapeze school:

While we were at Club Med, my brother and sister-in-law, who live in Perth, managed to complete my parent's collection of grandchildren with their first child, a little boy named Kalvin Nicholas, who turned up a month earlier than expected, but in excellent condition. Even though he didn't know it, his birth was big news in northern Indonesia, and was roundly celebrated.

And then, sadly, it was back to reality. And Canberra. We got home last Thursday night, very tired and jetlagged after about 24 hours on planes and in airports. We picked up our very happy puppy from the kennels, reclaimed our very ambivalent chickens from the neighbours, unpacked, washed up and got ready for the working week ahead*******

Which brings us to now, really. In the weeks ahead I'm going to launch back into my writing, knock over the (hopefully) final draft of The Hunter (I'm thinking of changing the title to 'The Hunter Games' - what do you reckon? Catchy?), plus a very busy semester ahead.

And, of course, some blogging. Occasionally ;)


* which is the price you pay for resolutely ignoring your e-mail for 3 weeks while having fun.
** I'm fairly sure that UC monitors this blog :)
***Actually, eating tended to be something of a theme on this trip
****That is, it would have been a quick hop, if not for the 4 hour delay that Jetstar managed to impose on our departure.
*****Please, don't judge me.
******But also kinda like joining a cult for a week.
*******In my case, this involved spending 4 hours making an enormous pot of Vietnamese Pho for breakfasts this week. Pho has become my latest obsession. And, trust me, it's a good obsession to have. 

A quick one. Very Very Quick....

Hi all...

Conference last week went well. Swimmingly so, in fact. Lot of happy little campers and a very exhausted (but also happy) me. In fact, I can't believe it's a week already since things wrapped up. Highlights included all three keynotes, Shaun Tan's evening event (after which he signed books for something like an hour and a half - consumate professional that he is!), and getting through my own paper with some vague sense of coherence, despite the fact that I'd had three hours sleep the previous night (Thanks, Toby and every cat in the neighbourhood!), no lunch, and was effectively running on pure caffeine and nerves.

This week has been a blur of post conference wind up; finalising the budget, cleaning up office etc... plus catching up on backlogged uni-related emails and student matters, before getting ready for...

VIETNAM!

Yep. This time tomorrow, Min and Toby and I will be in Singapore. After an ungodly early start tomorrow morning, we're off for THREE WHOLE WEEKS!

I might try and blog a little bit while we're away, but I'm not sure what my internet access will be, or my energy levels. Either way, the bags are packed, the dog at the kennel, the chickens accounted for, and at 6.25 tomorrow morning, we're outa here.

So if you don't hear from me again for a while, have a lovely winter. I'll be thinking of y'all ;)

Okay. Here we go...

Righto. So tomorrow morning, after two years of work, the 2012 ACLAR conference begins here in Canberra at the National Library of Australia. We're opening at midday with a keynote address from a scholar I've long admired- Deakin university's Clare Bradford. On Thursday we have Shaun Tan keynoting, and then on friday Professor Kerry Mallan from QUT - another incredible thinker and scholar, and just a perfect fit for this particular event.

Plus, of course, we've got a whole range of other interesting and exciting papers from scholars, writers, students and interested parties from all points of the children's literature compass.

We've got 75 ish delegates, from all over Australia, New Zealand, the US, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia and (I'm pretty sure) a few other places.

We've got a function on Thursday night, with Shaun's academy award winning film The Lost Thing being screened, followed by an in conversation with Genevieve Jacobs, one of our fantastic ABC Canberra presenters, who is generously giving up her evening to help out.

At this point, I've got delegate bags done, running sheets and checklists organised, catering ready to go, a little gang of brave volunteers prepared to run the length and width of the NLA to make sure that all goes according to plan, I've done the first airport run, followed by some of the worst navigating I've done in the five years since we moved to Canberra (Poor Clare got a tour of all of the most 'exciting' parts of the parliamentary triangle while I attempted to track down her hotel*)

Oh, yes, and I've also written my own paper, which I'm delivering tomorrow afternoon in the second concurrent session**. I'm talking about American author John Green's most recent novel The Fault in Our Stars. I'm not sure how it'll go down, actually. Because JG - who I've met, like, and admire tremendously as both a person and a writer - has a spectuacularly devoted fanbase, and while I'm not being gratuitously critical of his book***, I am looking at it through a specifically academic lens, and calling a couple of aspects of it into question. But nicely. So I'm hoping nobody will get upset. It's part of the difficulty of being both a children's and YA writer and a children's and YA literature scholar. Even though the two jobs have, in many ways, a really lovely synergy to them, the latter often requires you to adopt a very different perspective on books and writing, and to look at them through a quite specific theoretical and critical focus. It's not always the most comfortable situation to be in. But it is what we do. And it's important - and I really believe this - that scholarly discourse be fearless and objective, so that it is able to make a really solid contribution to the cultural life of a society.

But enough of me on that particular bandwagon...

In any case. I am (touch wood) organised. And it's only taken 24 months!

And to take my mind off things, before I go home tonight, I'm going to a party! Actually, I'm speaking at the party. I'm launching the debut book by one of my colleagues here at the Uni of Canberra - one of our masters students and tutors, Ben Stubbs. Any regular readers of the Sydney Morning Herald will probably recognise Ben's name, because over the past few years, he's become one of their more prolific travel writers. But he's also been working on 'Ticket To Paradise' - the story of his hunt for the descendants of the Australian colony of Cosme, which was established in Paraguay during the early 20th century, by a group of disaffected Queensland shearers, who set off across the Pacific intending to establish their own socialist utopia.

It's an incredible read - Ben has infused every page with a real sense of place and adventure, and paints such vivid portraits of the people and their lives today. It's just fascinating. It's also a work backed up by formidable research, lending it a wonderful sense of authenticity.

So congratulations Ben! I'm so honoured to have been asked to officially send Ticket to Paradise out into the world.

Speaking of which, I'd better go and iron my Tux in preparation.**** 

*(which I've actually stayed at twice!)
**Doing a paper at my own conference seemed like such a good idea. In February.
*** Which I enjoyed a great deal.
**** Joke. I don't actually own a tux. And if I did, I doubt I'd ever wear it.