I have to admit to cringing a little (lot) when I re-read my first (and never to be published) manuscript. What I dislike most about it is that it’s written in the first-person, present tense. Here’s the first paragraph: I watch the stream of water snaking its way down my body. It used to take a more direct route downwards,…
Last week I bought a new shirt. Made from flannel, it’s as comfy as a bed-sheet and if you match it with a leather jacket and boots, it’s a tiny bit ‘Westwood-meets-the-burbs’. That’s if you’re squinting. If you don’t squint, I could pass as a brickie. Win-win. Either way, I pretty much love everything about my new shirt, except the…
There are so many different types of authors in this world – but the ones that really excite me are those who seem to operate on a different plane to the rest of us. The ones who notice things that we (or I) seem to miss – and then convey these things using extraordinary, inventive language. The ones who reveal…
Imagine you’re at the start of your creative writing life. You have a short story. You have no idea if it’s any good. But you send it off anyway to a national, well-respected short story competition – the first one you’ve ever entered. You wait and wait. Then the results come in and you nearly fall over. You won? You…
It happens to all of us. At some point in life, we all become familiar with grief in a way we’d always hoped to avoid. For me, that happened last year. The death of my father in law was shocking and not shocking. Not shocking because he was 91 years old. Shocking because the cancer took him so swiftly. Now,…
There’s this natty little function on the Sydney Writer’s Festival website that allows you to search for events by genre. There’s fiction, of course (more than 60 events, mostly literary fiction) but also more ‘niche’ genres, such as crime (16 events), sport (6 events), even spirituality and religion (6 events). But have a guess at how many events fall under…
At nearly 50,000 words into my current WIP, I hit a dead zone. Until that point, everything had been sailing along fairly smoothly. I would sit at the computer, the ideas would come, the word count would creep steadily upwards. Happy days! Until I hit some rough weather and started taking in water from all sides. To continue the sailing…
There are times (many) when I think of the ego involved in writing. What makes my voice, my thoughts, my ideas, worth recording, let alone publishing? What gives me the right to think I can and should write? Who cares what I have to say? Then a writer comes along who makes you realise that writing need not be about…
You know how it feels when you’re a kid and it’s the night before Christmas, and you have that delicious sense of anticipation about what tomorrow will bring… Well, that’s exactly how I feel about the publication of Natasha Lester’s new novel A Kiss from Mr Fitzgerald. It’s just gorgeous. I know that so many women out there are going…
I was 19 when I traveled overseas, alone, for the first time. The only book I packed was The Lonely Planet Guide to the USA. It was my bible, telling me where to go, how to get there and where to stay. In those days, the internet was something you could only use in a cafe, and even then, it was just…
