Later, in class, I would say to students, "I don't suppose you've got a knife, do you?"
"Sir?"
"A sharp knife would be best."
I rubbed at my wrists to give the hint a little extra push, but no, they had none.
And so, once my post-it note related self loathing passed, I rejoiced, for I had coloured post--it note strips, and lame though it may be, I was busy taking notes and pasting them into books, and was good with my personal lameness. On the back of the notes I wrote a bit relating to theory or history or maybe a story fragment, each marked out by the colour of the note, and left them near the section that gave the thought. If you're curious, this research is based around the historical events relating to Indigenous family displacement in the British conquered Australia and this will inform the novel I am currently writing, and which bears the ever so funky title, Across the Seven Continents of the Underworld. I am also interested in bushrangers, the new weird, a bit of steam punk, and revenge narratives, but the main thrust of it is this history of destroying Aboriginal families and culture. It will be the final thing I've have to write that relates to Australia for a while, I think; after this I have a plan for a novel set in America, and hopefully that'll work out, but even if not, after three books* which have, in one way or another, dealt with race, immigration, and the surrounding issues within Australia, I'm thinking that it will be time to move to a new interests.
Which is not to say that the old interests will have been done with, or solved, only that movement keeps everything fresh, and if you've got to do a gig that pays badly, offers no benefits, and will likely go neglected by the majority of world, then you ought to keep it fresh.
* Black Sheep and A Year in the City are the first two (and Year isn't with a publisher yet, so there's no guarantee you'll see it). 26Lies is an entirely different book to these others.
