AliceFraser

The Unseen Horizon

Personal Update / Mat Leave Pending / TMI

I'm one week off my 'official due date' date, which means somewhere in the next three ish weeks, the new baby will "arrive" (such a benignly passive word for what is such an extremely process-ful experience).

The closer I get to the end of this pregnancy the more I am enraged by the obligation to wear any clothes at all. Nothing is the right shape, I’m so full of juice and extra ...

Happy Birthday: here’s some free stuff! [Patreon exclusive codes for CHRONOS and Twist]

Hallo!

In the tradition of Burmese Buddhism I was brought up with, birthdays are where you give other people little presents. In the spirit of that, and as promised, here is the free link to download both of my last solo shows: CHRONOS and Twist as a pair from GoFasterStripe.

If my recommendations mean anything to you, I suggest you watch CHRONOS first, as that’s the order I wrote them in, and there are some threads I started in CHRONOS that come good in Twist. As well as spoi...

New Year Sets Sail

On Boxing Day, the boats set sail for the Sydney To Hobart Yacht race; they swoop out of the mouth of the harbour under whatever sail-type is most fashionable/technically proven this year.

If I’m in Sydney, I try to watch the beginning of the race - a family tradition to sit with a bowl of cherries and see them fly across the dark-sparkling wrinkles of the harbour water - though once the boats are out of sight around South Head, I realise I’ve never followed the race past that poin...

Baby Bundle Christmas Special: Twist [With Bonus CHRONOS] is up!

Right!

Shows! Solo shows! Come get your brand new Alice Fraser solo shows!

So, I’ll be making these available to Patreon supporters for free after they’ve been up for a month, but if you can’t wait, want something to watch or digitally gift before Christmas, or if you want to support the incredibly good work of the lovely people at GoFasterStripe, the final cuts of both CHRONOS (FINALLY) and Twist are 2023-12-20 00:44:05 +0000 UTC View Post

New Tea With Alice: Nelly Thomas - Victims and PowerCast

Nelly Thomas is an activist, author and comedian. We connected properly after Cal Wilson's funeral and I was recently on her podcast about relationships, Dear Nelly. 

This was a wide ranging conversation about everything from t how we think of ourselves to brains and how they work, the relationships we cultivate and the stories we tell. Find Nelly online at nellythomas.com 

You can find the non-video version ...

20% Identity

Not sure where to zoom in on this train of thought, and what needs to go where for it to make sense, so I’ll just start.

Here’s some stuff I’ve been thinking about this week. Thanks to John Luke Roberts and the Tea With Alice Salon attendees this week for letting me articulate it to myself.

I’m okay, but feeling a bit jittery. Mostly focused on setting up productive workflows and life things, while knowing the baby train’s coming down the tracks and about to completely ...

Day worm and Night beetle.

On Monday I finished up a long day of parenting and home-making by feeding Laser Fraser dinner, putting her to bed and then catching the 90 minute train to Brisbane to record The Bugle on Vinyl. It’s a strange thing to have a work day technically start at 10pm. Though I wrote most of the jokes on the train, so let’s say it started around 7. It felt a bit like having a secret identity; one version of me starting the day at 5am, and then handing over to the version of me that has opinions ...

Hauntings and Foreshadowings

Exciting News

After all the shenaniganry and delays that one expects with big logistical life-shifts, I have now officially got my furniture into the place where I'll be nesting/spawning. I am putting together a little podcast studio in my walk in wardrobe l. This year I have recorded on a boat, in a cupboard, on beds, couches and balconies. At one point, I took a whole bunch of blankets into the shower cubicle to make an ad-hoc pod-pod, so just having a little room wit...

Birthdays

Today would have been my mum’s birthday. It’s nice to think about her and how immensely good she was. A fun and unexpected gift is discovering how much my daughter’s brain is built to the same blueprint as my mum’s was, so that I get these daily moments of Deja-vu seeing the way Laser looks at the world.

I often share a picture of her or a story of her kindness or the episode of Tea With Alice we did, or a link to my show Savage on these kinds of anniversaries. But it’s also ...

This Week in Alice

Have just returned from a packing-up-the-stuff-of-mine-that’s-at-dad’s trip to Sydney. It was extremely lovely and I caught up with a lot of nice people. Logistically it was annoying in almost every way, because it turns out the two major skills for packing boxes and moving furniture are the ability to lift things, and bending at the waist. These are two things that I’m increasingly limited in my ability to do without extreme sound effects and long recovery times.

Despite now bei...

Numbers and Order

Hallo lovely people, Chris Skinner (Bugleverse Producer, good luck to him), just texted to say The Gargle has 3 million ish downloads, which added to The Last Post means my Bugleverse shows have been downloaded about 10 million times. Which is very cool, and also I don’t really have a way to conceive of how many a million is, so is just “a nice sounding number that is more than I expected, or would have expected if I’d turned my mind to it, which I hadn’t”.

I don’t know wh...

New Tea With Alice is Up: Mina Starsiak Hawk

It was so interesting and fun to have tea with Mina; she's had such an unusual experience of public life, while managing to stay down to earth and connected enough to have thoughtful conversations like this. You can support Mina's podcast, Mina AF HERE and follow her on on social media 2023-11-16 21:06:30 +0000 UTC View Post

Today’s Salon Cancelled

Hallo lovely people! I’m in the middle of a routine Glucose Tolerance Test (preggo admin), but they started the test late, so I will be lying around feeling vaguely unpleasant and having blood drawn at intervals to make sure I don’t have gestational diabetes during the time scheduled for this week’s salon, rather than happily sitting down with a nutritious snack and a cuppa to do the thing, as I had originally planned.

I did contemplate running the salon anyway, but have conclude...

Spherical Thinking, Reality Distortion, Depth Perception

Into the third trimester, and my literal body-building career is going smoothly so far. Have hit australia in time to have the whole machinery tell me to slow down, and am enjoying the emergent sense of a little personality with reactions and moods elsewhere in my body than where my ‘me’ moods are.

Reality distortion

I’ve been trying to reel back from social media in the current news environment (as much as work allows), thinking that all you need to exist ...

Back in Aus

I’ve landed in Australia! My child has turned 2!

I took a business week off for the process of traveling back from the U.K., (stopped in Singapore for a few days to break the journey, because 26 hours preg with toddler felt like… a lot) and now I’m back I want to make sure this Patreon is as good as it can be. So feel free to message me if you have ideas of what you’d like more or less of. I can’t guarantee I’ll meet all demands, but I’ll definitely think hard ...

Anniversary

A poem I wrote about my mum, here with us as kids. It’s the anniversary of her death today and I’m thinking about my friend Cal who died yesterday and the things they had in common, and the shapes they left in the world.

I feel like when someone we love dies, our job is to carry forward as much as we can, the good ways they were.

To pass forward the way my mum would look at you with her full attention and *care* so much, even when she was suffering. To see my coll...

Patreon’s Reboot, new horizons.

I got an email this morning about the new bloopy Patreon icon. I’m always a bit disoriented when businesses do such rebrands, though of course some are very successful and some aren’t.

I worry that Patreon has done that thing that tech businesses do of taking too much venture capital funding (see YouTube video linked here for a good summary of the argument about why that might have happened) an...

The Spirit Of The Desk

The desk I’m writing on in Bologna has a number of these excellent but creepy figures hidden in the wood.

Laser Fraser is flipping through the paper book of Neil Gaiman’s Pirate Stew while listening to Neil Gaiman read his book Pirate Stew on Audible on repeat while I finish the first draft of this silly D’Ancey LaGuarde book. The temptation to think she’s a genius when she lines the right pages up with the right words is almost overwhelming.

This week’s New...

This Week in Alice

Last weekend was a wild one of travel and podcasts. I went directly from Global Pillage at the London Podcast festival to The Bugle at Leicester Square Theatre, which was just so lovely. I am such a fan of Chris Addison’s jokewriting, and despite having done a few bugles ‘together’, we’d not yet shared a stage.

Thanks so much to Alison Spittle for taking over on the writers meeting; traveling between the gigs and home did the thing that traveling does, and meant I wo...

New Tea With Alice: Sian Docksey

The new Tea With Alice is another of the conversations I had during the Edinburgh Fringe in my tiny flat. I saw Sian’s show partly because I always love Sian’s ‘straight’ (alternative) standup and in part because I was curious about what pole dancing and stand up comedy look like when combined and was so pleased that I did. We had a fascinating chat about pole dancing, the arts, the definitions of work and the ways that value shifts among those things.

Have a listen...

Writers Meeting Today: Alison Spittle Guest Captaining

Hallo! I am traveling back from London to Italy today after all my Bugle / Podcast / Scan shenanigans. Unfortunately, travel being what it is at the moment, I’m not on decent enough wifi to do the writers meeting.

Alison Spittle will run the show for today. She did such a good job last time, and I always find her feedback so useful in my writing.

Link is here: https:/...

The Week of a Thousand Self

D’Ancey LaGuarde

Last night I woke up in the middle of the night seized with a brilliant idea for a completely different project. The day before, a super cool writer and director asked me to help her punch up a script.

Clearly we are in that phase of the writing process where every part of my brain and fate are trying to hit the eject button because it’s grind time. The bright side for my psychological makeup is that the end of this month is loomin...

TWIST ANNOUNCEMENT - Salon clip for those who couldn't make it

Hallo

I recorded this small section of this morning's salon for people who wanted the announcement [spoilers for TWIST if you haven't seen it yet], but couldn't make the salon. 

First twist is that I'm going to be taking a step back from live gigging, second twist is one of the major reasons why. 

Another thing that I think is worth mentioning, that I said after I stopped recording (and let all the nice shy people who had turned off their cameras because they didn'...