thinking aloud...

...hallow there. Where a book is coming out, so inevitably a blog does follow...so here I am, thinking aloud about thinking about Melbourne.

The contract is (nearly) signed, the image permissions are flying in seventeen directions at once and I am getting snippy over semicolons. It must be book-production time.

My book, When we think about Melbourne: the imagination of a city is, barring volcanos and what the Australian Society of Authors' standard contract charmingly calls "marine peril", due to come out through Affirm Press in about August this year.

You'll notice that there is no link to a page for the actual book yet. This is because the title took a while to get right; that was because the book is a bit of a strange beast; part memoir, part social history, part art-film-literary criticism and part guidebook. But there will, in due course, be an official Book page; this blog is more of a what-happens-along-the-way-random-posts affair.

Of course, most of it has already happened: reading the three foot high stack of novels set in Melbourne; the square-eyed movie marathon reviewing the Melbourne movies of my youth; the scribbling of notes at the halfway point of some early-morning bike ride; the hours online and in libraries and op shops marvelling at the many ways one place can be depicted, and how things have changed/stayed the same over the past 170 years.

And really, the best of the thinking, I hope, is in the book. But as the process of putting it together comes to a close, I can see another process - to be frank, selling it, in the sense of getting people to be interested in it - starting up. For instance, I'm on the bill at the Emerging Writers' Festival on May 30, on a panel of writers talking about place. To me, "selling" the book is about doing what I can to get people thinking about the city - this book is unashamedly parochial - and also thinking about representation, of this and any other place. I'm endlessly fascinated by the funhouse mirrors we make for ourselves, the ways we choose to inhabit and interpret the world and looking forward to talking about it to anyone I can buttonhole.

(btw, don't tell my editor I'm here. I'm supposed to be checking commas and finding pictures of the West Gate Bridge...)