Busy times, my friends

Am reading the DT Max David Foster Wallace biography and it is brilliant and fascinating and I am learning a lot about writing and processes and things like realism and modernism and postmodernism in ways I never thought about them before. It's an inspiring book too in many ways, despite the known ending for this intelligent, struggling, unusual man.

And then I am doing one last go-through before sending my ms to the agent overseas. Trying to keep a lid on that. Plus fielding calls and emails for the business, Term 4 is traditionally the time when many schools realise 'ooops we haven't done sex ed yet, let's get to it'.

It's all happening at once but this is how I like it.

And THEN, in a situation that is part schadenfreude deliciousness mixed in a vitamiser with the ongoing sombre reality of sometimes depressing/other times uplifting gender and social political struggle, we have this:

One dickhead:

plus one PM who is letting the whole world know what she will and won't stand for.

I love it:

Happy Monday

It's a good day today because:

a) the kids are back at school and I have the house to myself

b) I just bought the following:

I know, I know. It's been out for a while. I've always been a later developer.

And this:

And then this:

My plan is to read the bio, then Infinite Jest but I suspect I will have to intersperse with at least one other book, possibly the Pamuk although I think I'll want to read that exclusively.

I'm also more than half way through The Watch Tower by Elizabeth Harrower. It is interesting, not least because it was published in 1966 I think it was. Good stuff.

*

I'm also still plugging away with my first ms - let's call it The Feeling of Orange although it's had a bunch of other titles, including Moonshadows (there's something just a little too Cat Stevens-y about that.) I have an agent interested in looking at the whole ms - woo hoo. But don't get too excited, even that woo-hoo is possibly premature. I am so careful with the woo-hoos, they can be dangerous. 

And my second one, The Sugar Men I am excited about, that's still first draft stage though (some people call it Draft Zero, which I can kind of come at). Loooong way to go with that one based on how much revision and pottering and tinkering the first one has taken. Who knows?