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It's Thursday. It has taken me hours to work this out. I keep thinking it's Friday and that I have to be at the dentist. Instead it's Thursday and I get to torment my world-building class. My inner prophet sees butchers' paper in their future, and Medieval chronicles. My other inner prophet sees that I have no medical appointments today and that my eyes seem to be operational: my day will be full of words.

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I am 90% sure I have found a way out of the Scholar's Circle of Hell (which Dante didn't write about for fear of being confined there): I've found the underlying good in a book. For three weeks this book has been nagging at me. It wasn't as bad as it read. I knew that. What I didn't know was why. If I hadn't had this nagging sense of missing wood for trees, I probably would have trashed the book and got myself into deep trouble. Thank goodness for inner scolds!

There are flaws in the book, but I had the exact opposite flaws in my reading of it. I was looking at it from the wrong discipline, quite simply.

Today I was reminded of this by a discussion of literary awareness vs historical criticism elsewhere.

And this is exactly why reading too narrowly can be a problem. Doctorates are wonderful things, for they focus the mind, but they need to *not* get in the way of really good reading habits.

Sydneysiders, flee!

Admit it, if you're in Sydney you looked at the Continuum program smugly and thought "I can avoid Gillian so very easily - she's going to Melbourne." I know one person who did. This is your warning to get out of Sydney (specifically, don't visit the NSW Writers' Centre) for a short time in July. I'm teaching for just one day there, and it will be grammar and punctuation very specifically for writers.

One thing I promise in this short workshop: I will make my Star Trek joke. Boldly.

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Teaching is finished for the week and tonight's class was small, so we took down our hair and I sat on tables a lot. One of my favourite worldbuilding exercises is to have students test their own understanding of the Middle Ages by creating a fantasy Medieval town, so that's what they did. I would go from map to map, making rude comments about the functions of a castle or how the town is fed. We did a lot else - the classtime wasn't entirely dedicated to me and my rude comments, but I enjoyed the mapmaking the best. Only one more class with this mob, and then no more teaching on Thursdays for a fair while. This means that after Continuum I get four days a week straight research/writing, which will be a very good thing. I will miss the worldbuilding class, though, for they're a lot of fun.