Random 
No Comments Hello out there! If you’re reading this, you’re probably a bit lost. On the off-chance that you are actually here to read about this blog and its author, here are some highlights.
The title “SELECT * FROM Shane” is a simple SQL statement that essentially means “select all columns in the data table called Shane,” or in non-geek-speak, “Everything in Shane.”
Katie, My baby, Work/Vocation, Writing/creativity No Comments I can’t believe it’s only been a year since the release of The Lesser Evil (Book 3). Re-reading this old blog post was like a trip in a time machine to a past so distant that it might as well exist only in concept.
The last twelve months have been huge. Amazing, difficult, hectic. And productive. Extremely productive.
Writing/creativity No Comments Shortly after receiving my first royalties for The Lesser Evil, I took a few moments to calculate an hourly rate based on the estimated number of hours I’d put into the graphic novel, and the novel that it began its life as. It turned out that I’d earned between one and two cents per hour (before expenses). Minimum wage in Australia is currently fifteen hundred times higher. I think it’s pretty fair to say that, despite the fact that money is very nice in any amount, I’m not in this caper with a realistic hope of getting rich.
So why do I feel such a compulsion to keep writing, to keep getting published, to press forward? And why is that feeling so much stronger now than ever before, after I’ve been published?
Geek Stuff, Writing/creativity No Comments At Adelaide’s Oz Comic-Con in 2012, I found validation for my art. This year, I found a community. Here’s how it happened.
Friday: From Canberra to Adelaide
Writing/creativity No Comments Being an independent creator is hard work. Getting a project finished is hard work. Getting a contract to publish/distribute it is an uphill battle. Getting noticed is an endless and typically fruitless endeavour.
But there’s a lot to like about it too. Being an indie creator at the start of your career is a baptism of fire, an unbelievable pressure cooker of tribulation and inspiration in which time behaves extremely unpredictably, the notion of rest is a theoretical concept at best, and all your nerves are blazing rapturously at the entire process. It’s sink or swim time, and by all the gods you ever believed in, are you going to swim.
This post is going to chronicle my early experiences as a creative professional. My hope is that it will guide the expectations of prospective hopefuls, resonate with those who have gone through this stage of their careers (or who are going through it now), and strike a chord with me in many years to come when I look back at the ‘early years.’
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Writing/creativity No Comments Well, it happened this week: I put the finishing touches onto the first draft for my 558 page graphic novel Death’s Feast. It has taken somewhere in the vicinity of thirteen months to do all the artwork for it, and has sucked up almost all of my free time for that period.
