Playing Catch-Up

DELIGHTFUL ROBYN: KAREN, today we went to Target and I obtained some delightful items.
DELIGHTFUL ROBYN: Some of them were organizational/grownup in nature, such as an LED desklamp.
DELIGHTFUL ROBYN: But BEST OF ALL are new shoelaces AND some little plastic charms that go on them that blink when I walk.
DELIGHTFUL ROBYN: One is a skull and crossbones, and the other is a shooting star.
KAREN: I love you, Robyn.
KAREN: Be mine forever.

You can’t have her; she’s MY best friend.

Things I have done recently:

1) Written a post for Inside a Dog about Meat Loaf being awesome:

I mentioned that I had been listening to the Loaf non-stop for a week to writing friends, and one of them compacted her face into a black hole of distaste. “WHY?” she demanded, before revealing that she had spent the last week listening to the audiobook of Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels. That is an incredible book, deserving of all the honours showered upon it, but it’s not exactly a cheering tale. If I had to listen to Tender Morsels right now, I think all the brain-hamsters would scrabble out of my ears and run run run for the sea.

Nope. Gotta be Meat Loaf.

2) Written a post for Inside a Dog about being an adult writing a blog read by teenagers:

I spend a lot of my time thinking about teenagers, and how I want to portray them, and what I want to say to them through my books and my blog. “Don’t think about adult topics!” is NOT a thing I want to say. Young people frequently have to think about adult things because they are already happening when they are young. Often they want to think about them in advance of being adults, so that they can be prepared when they are adults, and ready to do them. Fiction is one way to encounter or mull over adult situations without having to be there in the flesh; blogs are another.

3) Written a post for Inside a Dog apologising for my part in Melbourne’s recent storm of the century.

At 2.45pm on Saturday afternoon I was heading home from a plotting-a-novel date with a friend at the State Library. I caught my train west from Flinders Street Station, making faces at the heavy stickiness of the air, and out of pique, tweeted the following just as we went into a tunnel:

kehealey: Come on Melbourne, stop being oppressive and humid and start with the rain!

4) Written a post for Inside a Dog musing on the weirdness of reviews, with samples from the L,B HipScouts:

Not only did these readers put a lot of effort into coming up with thoughtful, in-depth reviews, but they provided a wonderful reminder of something very important; someone can love something in my work that the next person will hate. The same thing, in the same work, can provoke wildly disparate reactions, and I have no control over that.

5) Oh, you know, stuff. But I have to save it, to have something to write about!