If:book Australia is a think-and-do tank dedicated to promoting ‘new forms of digital literature’ and exploring ‘ways to boost connections between writers and audiences’, which is more exciting than I can fully express.

They are associated with the Institute for the Future of the Book in New York, and if:book London, and are based at Queensland Writers’ Centre. Kate Eltham and Simon Groth there are my newest heroes, not least because Simon found an excellent photo of a statue of Farnsy to accompany the essay I wrote for them.

I’m pretty excited about this essay because: 1) it is a call to action on governing our own literary culture and is my first steps into the territory of full-blown internet apostate; 2) it was commissioned with a Direct Message on Twitter by Simon after he read SIB; 3) they paid me really good money to do it.

I’m becoming a little tired of writing and promoting SIB in the ad hoc fashion I do, so I’m starting to think of this commission as the catalyst for the beginning of a departure, maybe.

Sometimes I’m tired of being a wannabe leftist revolutionary and pseudo-intellectual. Thinking about ideology, politics, economics and the publishing industry all the time is kind of bringing me down: the ideologues, the politicians, the failing markets, the legalese … ugh.

Doing this sort of work with good (liberal) intentions is kind of like trying to ride your bike safely: there will always be dickheads on the road, making your journey unsafe no matter how cautious you are; there will always be ideologues pushing their agendas in the way, making your journey of intellectual discovery that much more difficult by being dickheads.

I want to focus on creating literature again for a while. I had a short story broadcast on Radio Adelaide recently, and sitting there listening to it with Felice in Lucy’s lounge room caused a heartswell that I want to chase up.

Also I don’t want to burn out and become jaded ten months out of the next Academy, so after a couple of posts I’ve got lined up I think I’m going to give SIB a break and just post whenever I feel like it and, ya know, try to stop worrying about the internet.

Meanwhile, here is the introduction of the if:book essay, which is called ‘You’re the Voice’ (the rest can be found here):

There was a time, kids, back in nineteen tickety two, when people sincerely believed in the internet as the great democratising power of the twenty-first century. I, for one, thought it was the Second Coming of the Gutenberg Revolution. But then I’m one of the most naive and optimistic people I know. Gullible maybe, whatever.

Now, in only nineteen tickety three, this promise has gone the way of … well, democracy itself. Just as a concentration of third-estate power has occurred in Thomas Carlyle’s esteemed fourth estate, control of the online knowledge market is coagulating in the cloyingly, sickeningly sweet hands of our dear friend Google.

Sure, there are others (alternatives), but only in the same sense there are alternatives to News Ltd and Fairfax in Australia’s traditional media industry: they’re nominal alternatives, with no real power. Running a successful, independent newspaper in Australia would be much like going into farming against Monsanto in the United States.

The book-industry implications for this trend first dawned on me when I found another puff piece about cultural criticism, this time in the Guardian: “Is the age of the critic over?” Puff piece or not, the precis really got to me: “Critics reflect on how social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and myDigg, fit into the perennial debate on cultural elitism.”

I do hate a lot of things (Disney, marketing, Andrew Wiley etc) but I want to put it out there that this isn’t all I’m about. I got really excited when Tim Hely Hutchinson (CEO of Hachette UK) decided to go with the agency pricing model, Amazon be damned, and was excited again yesterday when Penguin and HarperCollins joined the party – soon to be followed by the kings at Canongate and Simon and Schuster apparently. One of the coolest things about this is the massive debate that rages on forums around this topic and I spent many a good work hour yesterday reading both sides on The Bookseller and the Kindle Forum.

What strikes me most is the dichotomy between the trade forums and the consumer forums. What sort of relationships do the publishers have with their audience? Will no publisher issue a statement to their public about the reasons they want to take control of prices away from the retailer? So I went on the Kindle Forum and stirred in my two pence, and then a few more things, like sarcasm and blame.

People are championing Amazon as their hero – who “continue to fight against higher prices for e-books” (read: pamper to a customer’s desire to pay as little as possible for as much as possible) – and are ignoring the fact this whole debate was spawned by an effective press release by an international corporation. The blinding holier-than-thou attitude that Amazon has instilled in its customers is nothing short of disgusting and gives me that drunk-on-rage feeling. But then again, you can’t spell ‘Kindle’ without ‘Kind’. (Does this strike anyone else as exceedingly sinister?)

I'll be Kind-le to you - pun definitely intended!

But with publishers staying silent, what are people supposed to think? Innocence doesn’t clam up like a pair of nun’s legs when people start asking questions.

Still, actions are louder than worms etc etc and so I applaud all publishing houses involved for putting a spanner in Amazon’s face. I can’t help but feel this is a major milestone – publishers are now taking the ebook medium seriously and won’t let retailers like Amazon give authors a short straw. It’s already operating in the US, now the UK – Australia’s next, I’d say. Publishers there better make a move before someone else does it for them.

Get involved: head over to the Kindle forum. It’s an amazing conversation that’s worth getting fired into.

Someone recently asked me to write about my mullet for an independent Adelaide newspaper, and the below ‘column’ is the result. It was accompanied by the terrible Photo Booth job that I’ve pasted in: not sure what’s worse, the ‘haircut’ or the ‘photo’ of the ‘haircut’. Or the ‘column’. Actually I quite like the column – at the very least, I immensely enjoyed writing it. In the paper it was pitched to the reader as a review.

…

Avert your Eyes!

…

Behind every good mullet, there is a great woman.
– source unknown

This production was an accident, clearly – no urbanite in their right mind would grow a mullet in the twenty-first century. But hairdressers are too expensive, they always think they know better, and they never do. Take the decision to drop out of high school to go to beauty college, for example. Mullets, like the best dreads, result mostly from negligence.

The first notable development in the process of allowing a mullet to grow is feeling like your motor skills have been compromised when you try to hack at your own hair in the mirror: suddenly right is left, up is down, and before you know it you’re hugging the toilet, trembling and sucking your thumb. Best to let your friend have a go.

My friend, being my ex-girlfriend, has obviously been waiting for nearly six years to inflict me with a faux-hawk and then not tell me for weeks, laughing silently as people jibe at my pseudo-intellectual, recovering-bogan, partway-metrosexual hybridity as we walked down the street.

This is how the best mullets develop – they are marginally respectable haircuts allowed to grow wild. Like passionfruit vines. But it’s the hybridity that really carries this retro-nostalgic production into it’s own definition of subcultural respectability – to wear a mullet these days you need to be so comfortable in your confusion about your own self image that people mistake all of your fashion mistakes for irony.

Breaching the neckline while wearing an asymmetrical fringe helps.

Breaching the neckline is important – this is the moment where someone first points out to you that the hair on the back of your head is disproportionately longer than the rest of your hair. There is no going back once the subject is breached – you now have a mullet – just make sure you do not breach the neckline with anything approaching a buzz cut up front: this will almost certainly result in your ‘haircut’ being categorised as a rat’s tail, from which no socially minded individual can recover.

After the breach, the final development in this socially challenging but ultimately unrewarding experience is to note, if you’re lucky, that your (current) girlfriend still loves you: successfully wearing a mullet this many years after Beyond 2000 was on the telly is entirely dependent on the support of a loving girlfriend. Unless you’ve decided to be single for your gap year.

In my last post about Nic Low’s manuscript I described ‘Tailings’ as ‘a beautiful duck, wearing a tiara … bobbing up and down on [the sea of mediocrity] … that results from the seemingly indiscriminate publication of some 12 000+ books per year in Australia’.

I now realise that’s a bit harsh: Australia has a proud history of publishing amazing literature, and my comment was, perhaps, inadvertently disparaging of Australia’s avid-reader population. It was a holier-than-thou thing to say, the implication being that general readers are less discerning than me, which may or may not be true, but a book editor crapping on about his discerning palate is kind of like a mechanic being righteous about the fact he knows how to tune a car better than his customers – this fact is self-evident, otherwise people would tune their own damn cars.

Anyway.

All I was trying to say is that I am excited about having the ability to get amazing manuscripts to publishers on behalf of authors. This is what I want to be doing for my day job. To prolapse the metaphor further: I want to paddle around in a leaky boat, scooping up princess ducks and bringing them to shore, handing them over to publishers and saying, ‘Feed them well, they will nourish many.’

This felt like a pipe dream until I read Nic’s manuscript. It felt like a pipe dream because I knew that I was missing an important element of the equation that equals successful agenting: quality manuscripts.

Quality manuscripts + diligent, active authors + publishing contacts + editorial savvy + youthful naivety + insanity + the empirically unfounded conviction that communication through literature will make the world a better place = Paine Management, my latent literary agency.

I have all of these now, so it’s only a matter of time, patience and dedication – the three core things that got me as far as working as a book editor by 22, something that I had never imagined possible when I was smoking bongs in the back shed and dropping out of uni and scribbling all over those beautiful Peter Carey paperback reprints that UQP released.

So, yeah, the name of my imaginary literary agency is Paine Management. Get it? I will take the pain out of getting your manuscript published, and the pain out of finding a manuscript to publish. I’m allowed to make bad jokes about my name. You are too. (In fact, Sam Twyford-Moore already did it, in a letter to Voiceworks while I was there.)

I want to bundle together a portfolio of the best unpublished manuscripts of young, emerging Australian writers, fold it under my arm and take it, in my leaky boat, to New York City.

I’m thinking of further honing the subject and theme of this blog to cover this journey as an emerging agent – to cover things like trying to develop an author-agent contract when I know almost nothing about contracts. (I’ve taken on contracts administration at work, but I still feel as though I’m learning a second language.)

So if you’re into that sort of thing, come along. Meanwhile, I have a question for you. It’s pretty broad, but here goes: what are your experiences of trying to find a literary agent in Australia?

If you don’t have any experience with this, but know someone who does, please forward a link to this post. I’d like to start a dialogue about it, so I can start thinking about how to achieve this ridiculously ambitious dream of facilitating the best emerging Australian writing onto the world stage.

In the same week that I gored myself, I accepted a job offer from Wakefield Press. I’m visiting Brisbane for Christmas, then I’ll be heading to Adelaide to resume a seat at my old desk, to make books full time again. I won’t be needing any presents this year.

This may come as a surprise to many of my friends and colleagues in Melbourne, but it’s been on my mind and in the works for a couple of months. I’m looking forward to seeing old friends and working with the wonderful people at Wakefield. I’m looking forward to having an occupation again.

For seven months after Voiceworks I drove aimlessly around Queensland in my campervan, Delilah. For the last five months in Melbourne I have found it difficult to shake my holiday habits – in particular my tendency to start the day by sitting down with a computer and/or a book and chasing miscellaneous ideas down rabbit holes, which is fun, but not conducive to gainful employment or paying the bills or saving the world.

A lot of these ideas have related to agency and social entrepreneurship, as I have dallied with the idea of starting up a literary agency. The loftiness of this ambition has dawned on me only recently – along with the fact I am wildly under qualified. So I’ve deferred these aspirations for the short term. I will spend the next couple of years gaining experience of other areas in the industry – rights and contract management, hopefully. I will knuckle down and get to New York, where I hope to gain a placement with an agency – as a reading assistant or general work-experience lacky.

Wakefield, blessedly, are aware of my long-term ambitions. They always have been, even as I fumble about figuring out exactly what they are. When they originally employed me as a typesetter, they knew about and supported my aspirations to work as an editor. I took manuscripts home to work on in my spare time, and gradually worked up to the point where I was typesetting half the time, and editing the rest of the time, or thereabouts. I will do the same again.

Because this work aligns so perfectly with my own work, I don’t baulk at working overtime to advance my skills and experience. So I’ll continue to work with the writers I have been building relationships with, to the extent that I can in my spare time or within my new in-house capacity. I hope to bring my new networks and experience into this equation.

This decision also has ramifications for this blog: the new focus in my life will inevitably be reflected here. It’s early yet, but I have plans to move this away from a blog where I ‘empty my thoughts … on literary culture, philosophy and interesting things that happen’, and develop a focus on my exploits going into bat for young writers, as a book editor, aspiring agent and location-independent social entrepreneur.

Wakefield Press are incredibly supportive employers – such that Michael and Stephanie, as well as various members of the long-term staff have continued to be inspirational mentors and friends during my years at Voiceworks. I look forward to upholding their motto: ‘We love good stories and make beautiful books.’

I’ll be having short-notice farewell drinks at Prudence this Friday, from 5pm if you want to come.

I just found these two grouse websites, Brazen Careerist and Location Independent Professionals. I’ve been thinking of mobilising Paine Management for some time, and it’s been great to bump into a bunch of like-minded souls: people who want to be financially (and locationally?) independent. Each of them have great blogs – in fact, Brazen Careerist has many, somehow linked to members’ sites.

I even found a post called ‘Putting Together A Portable Office That You Can Take With You Anywhere You Go In The World’.

The first time I thought of myself as the sort of guy who might use a portable office was when I was interviewed by David Prater for Cordite. He described the man bag I carried at the time as a ‘portmanteau’. I’m pretty sure Orwell’s listless Gordon uses a ‘portmanteau’ in Keep the Aspidistra Flying as well.

What I’m talking about is not a ‘portmanteau’. It’s just a portable office. I always thought ‘portmanteau’ meant, specifically, ‘portable office’. It doesn’t.

But the thing with Gordon would be the second time I bumped into the notion.

It’s difficult to articulate how excited it makes me when I discover  whole groups of disparate people doing similar things with their life that I’d like to do. When it gets as specific as building a portable office, it gets kind of boggling.

Combine all this with my principle of Three Degrees of Uncoordination and a decision pops out: I’m going to create a portable office. If I do, I might need to do what this guy (presumably) did, and ditch all my stuff. Getting rid of my books is proving to require a few more than three collisions of colluding ideas, however.

I had started creating something other than a portmanteau before I found these websites, and I had begun to break it down into items I would be able to transport with me, and items I would need to buy at each location. Ideally I could have a bike wherever I go, but transporting one each time I move is simply impracticle, so that’s an item I’d need to have in my ‘Purchase Onsite’ category. Bike pants, on the other hand, would go in the ‘Transport’ category, of course.

I bought a mini stapler today, to replace my clunker, which had run out of staples anyway.

Now I will never be late again!

I’m excited about Brazen Careerist because, as a testimonial run from FastCompany said, they ‘decided to turn existing traditional online career management tools on their ear’ by merging the best of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, in a way that might practically advance your career. Basically it seems like a fun version of LinkedIn, which is a weird schmoozy site of the most boring variety, until you have hundreds in your network, which is not where you’re going to be if you’re interested in things like Brazen Careerist. A good stopgap, then, between Facebook and Linked in, via Twitter.

As you read and write around the site, your updates and comments are published in your personal feed, which is called Ideas. In the tab next to that you have your resume, so that if people like what you’re thinking, they might check out your resume to see if you’re good for a job they know about, or an opportunity coming up. That’s how I imagine the site to work, anyway – I’m still new to it.

I never cease to be amazed by what I find on the internet created by like-minded young people.

I’ve set up my profile on Brazen Careerist¹ and joined the Ning group for Location Independent Professionals, the Clubhouse. If you’re in Melbourne and this sounds like your sort of thing, it’d be great to see you there because I feel like the real value of these new mediums is found when they intersect somewhat with your physical world.

1. which, although it’s irrelevant, my fingers insist on typing as Brazeen Carerist – watch out for that one!