Creative and Freelance Writer
I read ‘A Strong Urge To Fly’ from Alan Baxter’s collection Crow Shine last night on the train home from Sydney. I’d started in late in the commute and finished just before getting to my stop. A good thing too, because I was so engrossed I would have had to sit on the platform in …
Continue reading "On Reading ‘A Strong Urge To Fly’ by Alan Baxter"
I’m a lazy writer. Sometime in the last year, I don’t when, I decided I didn’t need to work at writing anymore. I had a few publications under my belt, heck, I’d won a competition. My work was good, I was good, everything was good. And so I got complacent. I stopped getting …
I get it. Rejection is tough. Sometimes you start to wonder, is my story good enough? Is it good at all? Should I just give up and move on to the next thing. I’ve talked about rejection before. I’ve talked about how sometimes a rejection letter can be the most motivating thing you receive, I’ve …
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I was watching reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer recently and it occurred to me that it would make an excellent writing exercise. Writing exercises are great to have in your back pocket for when you need an extra boost of inspiration. Exercises, whether you follow them exactly or not, get you thinking critically and …
Inspiration. It’s sacred. Sometimes we have too much. Sometimes we can’t even find a crumb of it between the couch cushions. But inspiration isn’t a mystical, magical force of nature. It is something we can cultivate, build up and harvest. Some people call it filling the well. You can fill the well by reading a …
Continue reading "Inspiration for Writers and Illustrators: Intro"
I was watching Paul Kelly Live at the Sydney Opera House (on TV) last night and during an interview he said something about song writing that struck a cord (no pun intended). He said a lot of song writing was boring yourself until you have an idea. I totally agree with that, or to put …
Portal narrative's are stories that include two worlds and characters which travel between them. The primary world (which the characters at the outset of the story) is often our world or a realist/mundane world while the world they travel to is exotic, magical or fantastical in some way. The characters reach the second world be …
I read Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes, a novel full of full of chronologies, bestiaries and other clever discourse devices, in 2014. I subsequently had a conversation with a friend about the moments in her past which, with the gift of hindsight, she was able to recognise as significant in guiding her to her current …
In 2015 I was enjoying Sunil Badami’s blog posts on Southerly. One in particular made me think. The first paragraph read “As I mentioned in my previous post, most of my characters and protagonists aren’t named; and nearly all of them are women. I couldn’t tell you why, other than that I was raised by a …
A friend said to me the other day, every decision we make is governed either by fear or greed (I’m taking greed to mean wanting something you don’t currently have, there’s nothing mean or miserly about it). It’s not hard for me to agree with this statement and when I reflect on my own life …
