Critical examination of bookish events, news and debate.
Creating dreams, and pursuing them… Last Saturday at the 2011 NSW Writers’ Centre Speculative Fiction Festival, Pamela Freeman (Blood Ties, Deep Water and Full Circle) said that speculative fiction was: the kind of story that my mother would say weakens your hold on reality For me, this summarised the entire…
A multimedia storytelling project that might just inspire you. A short time ago, I received an intriguing message through the Northern Beaches Writers’ Group website (which is the critique group I run in Manly, Sydney). The message was from a rather clever cookie at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS),…
What I learnt at Conflux 7: From Here to There Looking back over the four-day writing festival that was this year’s Conflux, it might be quicker to list what I didn’t learn during my stay in Canberra. But I’m not a negative kind of person so, although it’ll take longer,…
What type of women are you, and what are you not? Different women respond to the same female character in different ways. Of course they do, because not all women are the same. So how do you write a realistic female character that will appeal to most women? Women are…
Huh? What’s the third wave of the web…? I’ve been reading a lot lately about ‘the third wave of the web’, which we’re apparently only just entering. You might have noticed it perhaps, crashing over the publishing world like a tidal wave?! Unstoppable, it’s left behind it a trail of…
Get your calendar ready… Last month, I attended a literary cage fight hosted by Sophie Hamley at Shearer’s Bookshop in Leichhardt called “When Genres Attack!”. It was an inspiring evening of intellectual and insightful debate that prompted me to ask my readers whether genre should actually mean something to them…
For those who could not be there… Saturday, 21st May 2011 was the day set by many doomsday Christians as the beginning of Armageddon, or the Rapture – the taking up into heaven of God’s elect people. It was also the day set for the 2010 Aurealis Awards. As far…
