if any new south welsh-people (other than the ones i've already informed) read this and would like to come see me do my thang, sydney standup spots for monday 6th and tuesday 7th have been confirmed - details here. if you do decide to come along, come say hello.

okay! it's all happening.
off on the newcastle/sydney round trip on wednesday and am experiencing a mixture of emotions that have elements of excitement, anxiety, self doubt and constipation. in newwie, i will have wednesday afternoon and thursday morning to explore. then there's the panel on thursday afternoon. friday i am hosting a reading at 11am, doing a reading at 4pm, then doing standup at 7.30pm-ish. saturday i will sample the delights of the festival - i have my eye on a couple of sessions i definitely want to go to. most of my newcastle thoughts will be recorded on my nywf blog, nywf and me.
then sunday afternoon i head off to sydney. i have a standup spot confirmed for the monday night at an open mic in east sydney. tuesday i missed out on a spot at another open mic, but thats cool cause i think i left it till too late anyway. now the question begs - out of all the material i've done so far, what five minutes should i use?
sitting in the heated comfort of my house at the moment, i'm thinking come on, the worse that can happen is that you'll die spectacularly on stage, and then you'll get to catch a plane and get the hell out of there. as opposed to bombing on stage here, then seeing all the same people that saw you do that at the next gig. hmm. maybe now would be a good time to get over this whole 'i'm afraid i will suck badly occasionally' paranoia, because i'm human, and because shit happens.

i haven't been very active on this board, have i? ah well, i've been pretty active in my non-virtual world for once.
that's right. we moved house this weekend.
it's weird getting used to all the urban noises of this new place, but remembering the noises we have learned to live comfortably with in the past, i know it's just a matter of time. at the moment, all of our belongings are piled up against walls and each other in the loungeroom. i've tried setting up the kitchen and that's half done, though i am keen to get down to some cooking soon.
off to nywf next week - exciting but also a leetle scary!
blogger is playing up - frustrating but also infuriating! aaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

this week, i had back to back gigs on monday and last night. talk about poles apart! monday night was like an out of body experience, watching myself slowly die on stage; tuesday night i came back to life again. thank jeebas for second chances, and for ms. janet.
just in case you're wondering, no we haven't finished packing yet - but at least we have boxes now!

thank you for all the congratulatory squeals, dancing on the spot, bellowing down the phone etc. have finished and am currently undergoing final edit.
i've been feeling oddly ambivalent about having finished the draft now. when i wrote the last line, i prepared myself for elation, but it didn't happen. then i went into a bit of a low-nothingness. tried to identify cause. brain only came up with 'it's because your writing's shit'. re-read draft from beginning to end applying touch-ups as i went, and concluded that brain is paranoid. the draft's obviously not perfect, but it ain't crap either. a week later i feel better about having finished it. but, no celebrating yet - this is just the beginning.
writing for young adults class has us writing a novel extract as an assessment task, and i think i might have found another story. it's set in moto (my maternal grandmother's village in fiji) and it's about a little girl and her parents. i had actually pitched a whole different idea to class to start with, but it felt too alien. when i wrote the opening scene, the rest kind of came to me. i have a vague idea about what's happening in the novel, and it could either be about separation, discovery or a bit of both. it'll be different, but i haven't read anything like it yet.
i think that's a good sign.

oooh. i think last night, it happened; i wrote the last line in the first draft of my novel.

today, i read all of my daily horoscopes for this month. i know it's cheating, but i like to be prepared. anyway, according to my online guru, in september i will:
- doubt myself
- retreat into my cave and yearn for understanding
- be surrounded by a whirlpool of emotion which will disconnect me from others
- try to sting myself with my own tail
- be told 'like it is' by someone
- step back and let someone else learn a lesson
- fall in love with a stranger who leads me to the dancefloor
- find a 'happy, bouncy place' (i kid you not)
- become suspicious of other's and my own happiness.
ah, everything's so much clearer now. though i do have a question - how do these things make september different from any other month of my adult life?