Did you know that in the 18th century, stories could only be printed and published in England if they were true? Powerful religious influences at the time otherwise deemed stories as ‘lies’ and thus ‘evil’. You can see the effect of this in the book titles published at the time,…
Of all the questions I ask my creative writing clients and students when mentoring and editing, this is the question I ask them the most. It generally has two manifestations, which I thought I’d share as insight into the storytelling process. 1. Studying Other Writers When reading and studying other…
This month, editor extraordinaire of Women’s Ink Magazine Jacqui Brown invited five authors – including me! – to talk about how we name our characters. Kristin Darell, who co-authored Into Tordon with me, was also featured; as was Valerie Pybus, Anne Benjamin and Australia’s climate fiction queen Cat Sparks. Our…
Wow, what an exciting month it’s been reading all the entries for the inaugural Northern Beaches Writers’ Competition! As the 2022 Northern Beaches ‘Art & Words Project’, the competition invited writers to submit both a written entry of up to 2,500 words on the theme of ‘tree’, and an image…
It’s ‘Women’s History Month’! So the gracious Gillian Polack invited me to consider how we’re living through ‘epoch-changing times’ in which ‘all of us are making history’, and I put my mind to thinking how the experiences of the last few years have affected my work-life balance. The results of…
Every so often, I review my website. I refine or simplify pages, information and/or portfolio items; I look at what can be deleted and at what’s missing. In a review I conducted last month, I was horrified to see I had failed to include biographical information about two of my…
‘Library Lovers Day’ is next week, and so the good people at Australia Reads (where I am honoured to be an ambassador), sent me a text meme to celebrate. It made me think: why do I love libraries? A deluge of memories flooded into a list of 18 reasons I…
