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Feedback is apparently coming in from Sunday's workshop and that feedback is apparently great.

It's funny - I've taught for over 20 years and I know I teach the class in front of me with the theory rather than the theory to all and sundry and I saw the looks of comprehension (and, a couple of times, incomprehension, which meant more time on a topic) in my students' eyes and yet I still need the feedback.

I've been thinking about last Sunday and it appears I really have formed a useful way to teach writers English. It uses grammar and punctuation, but it's more based on how English is read and interpreted than how grammar and punctuation are delineated in a book. The linguistics of my twenties made me think about the actual use of the language rather than about theoretical applications, I guess. For me, theory is easy, but lazy when I teach writers. Seeing how real people grasp or don't grasp, can apply or can't apply it is crucial.

At any rate, having tested my new approach, I can now teach writers a very handy way of evaluating what grammar they need and in editing themselves more strongly. It fits in with the previous way I took sentences to bits, too - in other words, this new approach has been in development for years and just emerged as an entity on Sunday. What's magic is that it works.

I needed something new for Sunday for the subject had to fit into six hours and still be useful for students. This is one of the many reasons I love teaching. Teaching tests ideas. It tests approaches. It makes it impossible to stay in old bad habits. My writing changes and my thinking changes every time I teach.

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I'm not going great guns on my lists today, but I am pondering the nature of writers coming to their maturity. The guys at Galaxy and I swapped our views of various current novelists last Saturday and we sort of realised that there is often a transition in writing lives. Only a very few authors who last the distance are who they can be early on. Karen Miller is just coming into her own, it seems. Margo Lanagan started finding out what she was capable of about a decade ago.

Sometimes these writers are quite different in their changed voices. Sometimes their changed voices are simply a level more professional and interesting than their unchanged.

Now I'm wondering if that maturity correlates with a professionalism or a change in experience or was simply going to happen in any case. Given the high level of non-similarities between writers as human beings (I will not call us 'eccentric' but I shall think it softly) I rather suspect that each and every writer finds their maturity in their own way, in their own time, and for different reasons.

If I have time for a reading plan this year (on top of PhD and teaching and Aurealis) I shall try to read the first novels writers have produced after they hit this stage. I'm open to recommendations, for otherwise I'm not going to find them.

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Only a few more days to get pictures to me of Ms Cellophane in interesting settings! So far, there is not a single NSFW picture. My publisher will be sorrowful...

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I have just experienced a moment of extreme twerpdom (or should that be twerpishness?): I can't remember anything I promised for July, August or September. My teaching is all written into my diary and so are my doctoral deadlines (which are many, at this stage), but everything else feels very haphazard, for I have forgotten.

If I promised to see you or visit you or send you a rude email, now would be a good time to remind me.

I'm going to give up on my diary for tonight, for it is a lost cause and go meet my next deadline which is a form that must be filed. I began filling it in two days ago and meant to get it in yesterday, but the virus o'ertook me and, in fact, I lost track of time. If I can get it across tonight, that would be a good thing, for then I can get the printed version in the mail tomorrow and lo, something useful will have been done. I have a heap of messages again tomorrow, too, so another won't go astray.