So. Here we are.

Surprise!

Bet you didn't expect a notification from this blog, did you?

Actually, let's be honest. The chance of there being anyone actually left out there to read this must be pretty minimal but, whatever. Let's pretend, shall we?

So. What the hell am I doing back here?

To be honest, I'm not sure. Last time you saw me it was 2016 and I'd just set up a professional 'Writer' blog over at Wordpress. That one is still there, if you're interested. Though I wouldn't bother going to look at it. I've not posted anything there in six years, either.

Part of it is the whole Twitter debacle. I've been watching the increasingly sad decline of the birdsite into anti-semitic, RWNJ hell and, I guess, I got kinda nostalgic for the days when social media was... I dunno... not easier (Let's face it, the fact that I got down to about two posts a year here is a pretty clear indication of the ease of keeping up with things). But more fun. Less fraught. Less depressing.

So I decided to see if Musings... was still here. And it is. Then I decided to see if my login still worked. And it does. And so here we are. Just me and you*

So let's update then, shall we?

Looking back at this thing, I couldn't help but notice that my third-to-last post, from 2014, was this one here. Well. Here is that same child about a week or so ago at their school fun run:

Millie, now 8 years old, wearing sunglasses and covered in paint powder.

So yeah. Time has flown. She's a bit bigger now. For the record, her first words (and this was a number of years ago now...) were "Millie do self", and that has pretty much been the state of play ever since. And her brother - who also featured pretty heavily in the early years of this blog - is currently out out in our back studio, twitch streaming The Cult of the Lamb,  so things have changed a bit there, too. My partner Imogen is also doing amazing things in the world of International Law, including publishing Large And Important books and getting cited by important international bodies and winning large grants and being just generally brilliant. The four of us have muddled through the last few years of pandemic-induced awfulness relatively unscarred, all things considered. I mean, it hasn't been fun by a long shot, and we've had the usual grab bag of stresses and worries, but we have it a lot better than many people, so can't complain.

And me? Well.

I turned fifty a few months back and, I won't lie, it's been weird. It's safe to say that, so far at least, I'm not a fan, but it's early days yet so we'll see how it goes. I'm still at UC, still teaching YA and children's writing and lit studies, plus a few other things. I've been supervising PhD students, doing quite a bit in PhD research leadership, have taken on the management of a couple of decently sized research projects in the Creativity and Wellbeing space, and have generally just been flat out keeping things ticking over. On the non-work front I've become the hopeless-but-enthusiastic coach of a girls under-9 soccer team**, I occasionally surf when my back/shoulders/knees allow it, and I've gotten very into gardening.

And I've done some writing. Three books, to be precise.

Two of them are unlikely to ever see the light of day, for various reasons which I won't bore you with. I've got hopes that someone will pick up the third, but tbh it's probably the weirdest, most commercially unfriendly thing that I've ever written, so I'm definitely not pinning all my hopes and dreams on it. But that doesn't matter because - and this was something of a revelation for me - I actually had fun writing it. Which was both unexpected, and refreshing. 

Let's not get into all that now, though. Perhaps if I build a little momentum back into this thing then we can revisit it down the track. I gather that one of the keys to success in the current internet age is something called 'content planning', so we'll call it that.

Also, by rights, I should probably be putting that stuff up over at my 'Writer' blog. It could probably use a shot in the arm too. We'll see.

So anyway - that's where we're at. Life continues on, in all its multifaceted glory. The news is full of the war in Ukraine, the floods in rural Australia, the heating planet and the rising seas. But outside today is a rare (for this year, at least) glorious Canberra spring day; the sun has just popped out from behind the clouds, the flowering gum out the front is alive with bees and wattle birds, there are a pair of crimson rosellas perching on the party lights over our back deck, a bunch of sulpher-crested cockatoos are screaming at something a few blocks away, and our garden is green and alive. I've got an idea for a new book in my brain - a good idea, about which I'm really excited - and so I'm going to take my writing journal outside, sit on the front porch in the sun, listen to the warm quiet morning, and make plans. 

I hope you're all well. I hope you also have a patch of sun in which to sit, and birds to listen to. Perhaps we'll talk again soon.

*and, as already established, 'you' most likely don't exist anymore. So if someone is actually reading this, I've got no idea where that leaves you, existentially speaking...

** Anyone who knows anything about my abilities with both team sports and ball sports will realise how terribly funny this is.

A New Virtual Home for me...

So... those of you who've been following my writing career with interest (hi Mum!) will know that I was, until quite recently, the proud owner of the anthonyeaton.com URL. This was where I hosted my website which had links to my books, awards, that kind of stuff.

But, to be honest, the website was a bit difficult to maintain. Without having the requisite CSS and Webdesign skills to update it myself, it meant outsourcing it, which posed problems for all sorts of reasons.

So I kind let it... lapse.

Then, a little while back, I started getting confused emails from readers. Generally they wanted to know why I was really into Thai football. This came as a surprise, until I discovered that my website had been gazumped from under me.

This is entirely my fault, and I feel kinda dumb about it now...

On top of that, this little blog here (and the lack of any activity on it) has also been hanging over my head for a while now. With one thing and another, I've let it rather slip into inactivity and despite the best of intentions, haven't been able to find the time or energy to get back into blogging in any serious way. Plus, looking over it, it occurred to me that over the years it transmogrified somewhat from a blog about my writing and academic life into one that was mainly about my family. Which is fine. But not overly useful in a writerly sense...

So I've solved both problems by putting up a new combined website / blog over at wordpress. It'll deal exclusively with my books, and the blog will deal only with writing. Any family or personal blogging I decide to do will still pop up here in Musings from an Outer Spiral Arm from time to time. But for all book-related stuff, please visit me at Anthony Eaton, Writer

In a few weeks, after the two or so people who still follow this blog have had time to adjust their settings, I'll be switching Musings... into a more locked down mode, for family and friends (and, of course, any existing followers who are still even vaguely interested in my occasional musings...)

So thanks to anyone who does still check in here, and I hope to see you over on the other side soon!

Popping my head above the parapet...

Was going to go for my whole 'one blog post per year' average, but just thought I'd pop by (on the off chance that someone out there still occasionally swings by and might be interested) to point you to a guest post I've just done at my wife's blog. This might also explain the long nothingness here at 'Musings from an outer spiral arm…'

:)

So, Uhm… Yeah...

Well. Two posts in 12 months.

That's gotta be some kind of record, surely?

So then, let's start with the apologies.

Sorry. You know. To anyone who still bothers to occasionally check in here. I'm going to do much better next year, promise. This is primarily because next year:

1. I've done my 2 year sentence stint as course convener, so can go back to not having to deal with mountains of admin that serve many useful purposes, but which primarily suck the joy out of life.

2. We won't be having a baby. (more on that later…)

3. I've also managed to divest myself of a big unit, which generally pulls in about 300 students, so will have more energy there too. (though to be honest, I'm slightly torn about that…)

4. I've got study leave for the second six months of the year, so will have time to, you know, write shit.

In short, 2014 has been a big year. A very, very big year. And while I haven't managed to get a whole lot of blogging done, I've managed a lot of other things that I'm pretty proud of.

Speaking of which, here's a question for you. If you have a mother-in-law named Amanda, and a mother named Margaret, and you are a children's writer and children's literature studies academic, and you are lucky enough to have a daughter, what should you name her?

Introducing Millicent Margaret Amanda Eaton!

Yep. That's right. We named our baby Milly Molly Mandy. She's either gonna love us or hate us for it when she's thirteen. Possibly both.

Still, Millie's arrival has been the highlight of the year, for obvious reasons. She's a very chilled out little girl, and all of us, especially her big brother, are totally in love with her. Which is, you know, good. It's amazing how quickly we've all fallen into our groove as a family of four.

In other news…

Busy year academically. In addition to a pretty full on teaching load first semester (nearly 500 students in two units…) I've also managed to get a couple of papers published. A piece of creative research here in TEXT, and a paper up here in FUSION journal on digital picture books, which I'm pretty proud of.

Plus I pulled together an application for study leave next year, and managed to get it approved, which is awesome news. We'll be taking off for a couple of months in sunny England, where I'll be working with my friends and colleagues at the University of Winchester on a couple of very exciting projects.

And it wasn't a completely writing-free year, either. I've continued working with Cheryl, my lovely and very patient agent, and have (fingers, toes and everything else crossed) almost finished my final rewrite of The Hunter. As those of you who read* this blog know, this freaking book has been a bit of a marathon. I finished the first draft in 2010, intending it to be a quick, 50,000 word, light and fluffy action adventure story. Now, almost exactly four years later, and with just two new chapters left to write to complete it, it's coming up fast towards 100,000 words, has morphed into a cyberpunk novel, and has a really gritty and quite nasty secondary plot running through the whole thing. This is what I love about writing. It just takes you places you never expected to go… In any case,  The Hunter should be finished and away by mid-January, and hopefully we can then start putting it out there for publishers to look at…

I've also almost finished writing another long-term side project, tentatively called Stepsister, which was started (and not completed) as a NaNoWriMo novel in 2012. It's everything The Hunter isn't - funny, for younger readers, written to be read-aloud, and dealing with (among other things) the problems that arise when you shave a cat. 'Nuff said on that…

So next year should be a pretty productive writing year. And I promise to include at least a bit of blogging in that equation. Certainly it won't be difficult to better this year's effort. (To be honest, I'm amazed I could still remember my login details!)

But for now, it's Christmas Eve, I've only had one coffee so far this morning, and the sounds currently echoing from my eldest child's cavern bedroom suggest that I'd better get the second one in quickly…

Have a lovely festive season, everyone, and I'll chat to you all in 2015!

*that's the past tense read, not the present tense one - I'm assuming there's nobody left who present-tense-reads this any longer) 

Another wall in the way of Baby Boomer Relevance

(A reply to Christopher Bantick, Writing inThe Melbourne Age, Jan 7, 2014)

In this age of selfies and X-factors, spare a thought for the insidious damage that is being done to the development of Australian serious culture. Given that Bob Dylan may have sung ‘…don’t criticize what you can’t understand, your sons and your daughters are beyond your command, your old road is rapidly agin’. Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand…’ should we be bothered? Yes, very bothered indeed.

The reality that is hidden from many in the Australian community, is just how pervasive the myopia of looking back to a ‘golden age’ is in promoting older generations’ inability to engage with the contemporary world. Moronic grumbling about young people is celebrated and published in major daily newspapers such as the Age and the SMH as significant and worthwhile. If you think I am overstating the case, well consider this.

The vanity that is known as elitism pervades the culture to a corrosive extent. Older people have lost the ability to know when something is art, and worthy. Instead, they hang on every word of their preserved conservatives, mouthing broad and unsubstantiated generalities.

Taiwan-born director Ang Lee says that, wait for it, “Kids don’t even read comic books anymore. They’ve got more important things to do – like video games.” If that isn’t selective use of a curmudgeonly out-of-context citations to back up a spurious argument, what is? Then there’s the toe-curling indulgence of those music stars, like the late Italian opera singer Luciano Pavarotti. He claimed that; “In opera, as with any performing art, to be in great demand and to command high fees you must be good, of course, but you must also be famous.” Oh please! Can you imagine Josh Pyke saying anything so crass?

Or how about this kind of Pavarotti self-centered twaddle: “For me, music making is the most joyful activity possible, the most perfect expression of any emotion.”

The Boomers lap up this kind of self-conscious exhibitionism as a “serious” statement, as they have precious little comparative contemporary comment beyond what is grumbled about at the bar during intermission in one of the recent Ring Cycle performances, or in the staffroom at certain elite private boys schools at lunchtime.

So, who’s at fault? Baby Boomers need do a little more about engaging with contemporary, progressive culture, much of which is building upon the so called ‘high culture’ of the past. Digital technology, multi-platform narratives, higher mathematics references in ‘The Simpsons’, young adult fiction that crosses readership boundaries and adds to the ongoing cultural discourse of the nation. Serious contemporary cultural artifacts that require patience and understanding need to be explained in small words to grumpy, unwilling middle-aged pupils.

In Australia, elitism is the privilege of a few, who then get into Parliament and rip funding from the public education system and universities, while complaining about ‘jingoistic egalitarianism.’ But perhaps this is going too far?  Who should have to appreciate the finesse behind a slam poem by Omar Musa? Or who on earth Sonya Hartnett or Shaun Tan are? As for admitting the value of institutions like the National Institute of Youth Performing Arts, forget it. There are many other examples.

Why this matters is that without a sense of cultural progress, then we will be stuck in the past, with only so-called ‘high cultural markers’ as the cornerstones of our national cultural identity, and of cultural discourse more generally. We won’t be able to really really concentrate or appreciate, for example, Mahler, because we’ll have no familiarity with the musical traditions and skills that have been built upon those very foundations.

The impact this will have on audiences is cause for concern. In the next two decades, the elders or keepers of the cultural treasures will be gone, and it’s completely impossible to conceive that anyone currently under the age of forty will ever have any interest in the cultural life of the country. You know, apart from all those ‘students’ who are currently enrolled in various forms of ‘higher education’ in the ‘arts’ sector.

But then, where are the audiences going to come from if today’s students are stifled in their ability to express and explore their world and culture, other than through exposure only to ‘elite’ artforms? This is already happening. Ticket prices are not the cause, either. It’s most likely to do with outdated attitudes to education among certain elements of the teaching profession who are unable to engage their students outside of a very narrow prism of experience. Clearly in the contemporary world, this is a significant problem.

Sure private schools (like all schools) are potentially important in destroying this damaging ‘elitism’ in cultural discourse. I taught in one, and I taught serious, demanding contemporary literature, right alongside serious, classically demanding literature. Was it elite? Not if I had anything to do with it. But neither did it pander to the lowest common denominator. Like all good literature teachers, I tried to teach my students that context is everything, and that a nuanced observation of contemporary adolescent life, like Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi (or even her more contemporary works, written in the proceeding 20 years, such as The Piper’s Son or On the Jellicoe Road) have as much to offer to an enquiring, critical reader as, say Jane Eyre. Can you compare the two? Absolutely. And you should.

This goes beyond subjective taste. Does Lou Reed compare with Segovia? Well… it’s kind of an odd comparison, but I guess that they might. Both were significant musicians of their eras, both served to act as focal points for the development of their musical disciplines, and if someone more knowledgeable than I were to apply themselves to the task, I’m pretty certain that it would be possible to draw lines of stylistic influence from The Velvet Underground  back to early 20^th century guitar virtuosos, such as Segovia. But I could be wrong. It’s certainly not a no brainer. Rather an interesting question, really…

These ‘frozen oldies’ are wedged in narrow cultural doorways of fifty years ago, and are unable to push through into the wider, room of cultural discourse beyond. They suck up smoothies of conservative pap when anyone says anything “pithy” out of an increasing and inevitable sense of their own irrelevance. But ‘pithy’ is a relative term. Listen to Kurt Cobain, who articulated the disaffection of his generation with the elitist ‘cultural worthiness’ continuum espoused by previous generations, and left this “mortal coil” (Shakespeare, in case you haven’t been patronized yet, today) with the following:

“I don’t have the passion any more, and so remember, it’s better to burn out than fade away. Peace, love, empathy.”

Compare the immortal lyrical beauty of John Keats, who also died young and said, “I feel the daisies growing over me.”

Uhm… okay. Aside from the obvious difference in style, both clearly capture the essence of their context (that pesky context thing again) and both therefore have cultural worth. It might be possible to argue that the more allegorical approach taken by Keats to his impending death was reflective of his awareness (owing to his death being slow, by tuberculosis) of his own mortality, whereas the quote from Cobain’s suicide note reflects a stronger sense of finality, and evinces the emotional trauma evident in much of the cultural discourse of the time. Not sure what the point of the comparison was, but there you are…

The ambivalence that certain ‘Elite’ members of the Baby Boomer generation have to any mention of ‘contemporary culture’ is reflected in its suspicion of what appears to be difficult to understand. In this sense, Boomers have opted out of their responsibility to simply broaden their cultural awareness to include both Banksy and Hogarth.

The fear I have, is that cultural elitism will be seen as preferable, even desirable, while damaging and inaccurate generalisations are made about entire demographics, important contemporary cultural works and performers are overlooked and unable to develop careers, and culture fails to progress at all.

Of course, I might be wrong…

(Note to add: Of course I'm aware that, for the most part, the Baby Boomer generation is in no way reflected by the views expressed by Christopher Bantick in his column, and that I've been horribly and deliberately general in this response, but given the flawed premise undermining his piece, I figured it only appropriate to return the favour.)

So… yeah. Hi.

Remember me?

Tallish guy, glasses, used to hang around here a bit? Yep. That one.

So, as you probably gathered from my last post, about a century ago, it's been a busy year. Real busy. 12 months ago next week, Min and I saw,  fell in love with, and bought a new house (well, technically a rather old house, but new for us). To make life more interesting, we also both started new and very busy jobs. Toby started pre-school (and turned 5 years old last sunday!), I went to Europe for a conference and came back with a buggered ankle caused by falling down the stairs on a train in a most undignified manner, I won a teaching award, finished* The Hunter (which is currently re-titled Tabula Rasa) and sent it off to my agent (still waiting to hear from her on the most recent rewrite). I am also halfway through a NaNoWriMo novel, which is problematic, given that it's now December, and in a week or so we will be leaving for Christmas back in Perth with my gathered family.

There's some other stuff, too, but those are the highlights.

The good news is that, as you may have gathered, I'm actually getting some writing done, again. After a pretty extended period of feeling as though my writing mojo had deserted me, just lately I've been aware of it scratching away at the back door of my brain, begging me to let it in again. So a month or two ago I opened the door, just a crack, and now here we are…

Really it's one of the vagaries of life as a writer - if you want to make a living, chances are that you're going to be pretty busy doing a lot of things that aren't writing, and every single one of them kills off just a little bit of your creative time and energy. Even if you love your job, as I do.

This year, for me, the biggest issue was Course Convening. It's a two year gig, which I'm now halfway through. It means that I get a little bit of teaching relief each week in return for which I do a fairly hefty amount of work: student consultations and course troubleshooting, admission decisions, organising course credits and variations, approving and compliance checking unit outlines, organising staffing for our various units, ensuring moderation processes happen, organising and chairing course advisory committees, ensuring that our units and courses are accredited and compliant with federal standards. Plus lecturing, teaching tutorials, grading and producing research. Phew.

And even though I enjoy most of the work, by the end of the day I'm almost always totally buggered** And that doesn't leave a lot of time for thinking about writing or, for that matter, doing it.

At the start of the year, I tried to block out big chunks of my time - a couple of hours each morning - for writing.

"No phone, no email, no appointments. Just me and my book…" I told myself and anyone else who'd listen.

And, for a while there, it worked quite well. Perhaps a month, or even two.

But, of course, little things began to creep in - the emails began building up, the meeting requests kept coming up on my calendar, lectures needed to be written or revised and, gradually, those precious hours got nibbled away until the concept of 'writing time' was just a dim memory.

So in mid-october, I drew a line under the year, re-allocated my writing time to the start of my days, and started over. And apart from a few little lapses, I'm doing okay. I've added 15,000 words into the next, hopefully final, draft of The Hunter, plus written about 12,000 words of a younger readers novella which I'm thoroughly enjoying.

Plus, of course, all the course convener-y stuff I talked about earlier.

And now I'm back here at Musings from an Outer Spiral Arm.

So, anyway, that's my excuse for being away so long. At least I managed to return before the year was out. Thank you all for your patience. It's nice to be back.

*Agent depending
** who am I kidding? by the start of the day I'm almost always totally buggered

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...