Yesterday, between breakfast with friends from Beijing and a 19th birthday party at the strangely derelict patch of Melburnian harbour generally known as Docklands, I went to hear eminent YA author Garth Nix speak at the State Library of Victoria. I haven’t read anything of his since primary school, but that didn’t matter because Nix and co-convener Lili Wilkinson’s hour-long discussion was spoiler-free about his latest series of novels and touched on a wide variety of other topics, including what fruit Nix thought he would be, if he weren’t, you know, a human being.*

I really enjoyed dipping my tow back into the arena of young adult writing and publishing after over half a year of disconnect in Shanghai’s barren wasteland of uncensored book blogs, but the problem was I was also inspired. Inspired to write fiction. Now. And this is bad, because:

a) University of Melbourne Orientation Week starts tomorrow, and next week I start university, and university does not hold back its punches (4 hours of lectures on a Monday, anyone? Starting at 9am!!!)**

b) I have to prepare work and lesson plans for my 2-hour after-school ESL (English as a Second Language) class and my Year 12 student, who now wants four hours of tuition a week. And something tells me they won’t have done their homework from last week…

c) Reminding people of my existence. Yes, this is still going on even though I’ve been back in Melbourne for almost a month (!)***. And the only way to remedy this sad state of affairs is by regularly dragging people off for lunch or, failing actual contact, writing on their FaceBook wall. All of this takes time, and the lunch side of the equation is eating through my tuition money like a verbal phrase high on fairy sprinkles.

d) I’m supposed to be editing the last book before I start writing the next one, and

e) I still haven’t finished my latest zine, the Extremely Essentialized Chinese Pocket Phrasebook for Foreign Interlopers, and the bits I have finished haven’t been re-translated into Chinese yet. And I’m also volunteering at Sticky every Saturday for five hours. Bloody addictive, but it does tend to disappear my Saturday.

And then there’s this blog, which I insist on keeping up despite its current appalling stats in the hope that one day someone besides my mother and best friend will actually read it. *flicks away tear*

And if all of those reasons don’t convince you why I don’t have time for writing prose, I’ve still somehow been roped into acting out my ongoing role as Northcote High School’s one-woman propaganda machine. My latest act: coming up with a (non-disparaging) quote for some brochure aimed at reminding parents of prospective Year 7 students that their children’s education does not actually end at Year 7 and may, in fact, continue into Year 8, but only if they show particularly promising signs of delinquency.

Anyway, here’s what I came up with:

“Studying at NHS from Year 7 to Year 12 felt like a journey taken with good friends. Sometimes it was easy, sometimes it was hard, but it was never boring, and even now I can’t shake off the sense of community I feel every time I come back.”

At the time I thought it did a pretty good job of being relatively positive without saying “My years at Northcote High School were the best of my life”, which was what the Assistant Principal suggested, even after I pointed out to him that that would be faint praise seeing as a third of my life has been spent at Northcote High.

But some further deconstruction:

• going through high school did feel like a journey, as do most linearly progressive years spent doing the same thing.
• I lie, sometimes it was boring. Which I thought would have been pretty obvious to anyone wondering why I had the time or the patience to write a novel when I was fifteen. The answer: Geography. I swear I wrote the entire thing during Year 9 Geography, after our teacher had finished her rants about last night’s episode of the Bold and the Beautiful.
• Yes, there is a sense of community at NHS. Just as I’m sure they’d be among battery hens and enclaves of necromancers (one of whom came along to yesterday’s Garth Nix talk wanting to compare notes about reanimating dead corpses with the author himself).

But whatever. Busy is better than being bored, and with the power of Procrastination on my side, I’ll have probably finished the new book by next week.

*The answer, you ask with baited breath? A mandarin.

**Which is the middle of the night according to my current sleeping pattern.

***Oh, Taiwan, how I pine for thee. Ye and yer great preponderance of cheap manga.