37 degrees on the tarmac while taking off from Sydney this morning, which I gratefully exchanged for the blessed relief of 32 degrees at Brisbane. Like jumping out of one sweaty post-football sock and into another one. Chuck in two days and nights spent wrapped around the great white bowl, courtesy of some dodgy chicken […]

That’s what most of my friends have said when I’ve told them that we are moving to New Zealand. Middle Earth wouldn’t be too bad, if you had a thing for pipeweed and hairy feet (which I do) and didn’t have a thing against orcs and dwarves (which I don’t) but we settled on Dunedin […]

Back row: Nicholas Tchan, Amin Chehelnabi, Roger Reynolds, Kylie Bullivant, Me, Maclaren North, Angela Rega, Kurt Mueller
Front row: Cat Sparks, Terry Dowling, Rob Hood
I could have gone with “what not to write and where not to get published”, but (my crutch word, apparently) it was a creative writer’s retreat, and that demands something a little more… creative. Plus […]

Great name for an old black and white war film I saw as a kid but also entirely relevant as I’m going on a writer’s retreat this weekend. Actually “Retreat? Hell Yeah!” would have been better. Nine aspiring writerly types have submitted one short short story and one long short story to be scrutinized by […]

Typical — the darkest discussions I’ve attended as part of the Sydney Writers’ Festival were also the funniest. First thing Saturday morning was spent listening to Australian authors Steve Toltz, Chris Wombersley, and Michael Robotham as they talked about flawed good guys and sympathetic baddies in Heroes and Criminals, followed by Memory, a very frank discussion by Australian […]

Left: Antoni Jach, author of Napoleon’s Double
Thursday afternoon was spent in the company of the erudite Antoni Jach, who led the discussion on writing historical fiction. A senior lecturer at Melbourne’s RMIT, Antoni clearly knew his subject with three acclaimed historical fictions under his belt.
A range of issues were covered, from the motivations of authors to write […]

D.M. Cornish and his map of the Half Continent
I have raised the issue before of stifling a reader’s imagination by providing them with visual reference to what they are reading; it is an ongoing issue for me as I am yet to decide whether to provide illustrations to my manuscript. It was with great anticipation therefore […]

The Sydney Writer’s Festival is kicking off next week. Flush with my new writing mission I feel obliged to attend. In typical fashion for a multi-venue program of 333 events, all the best ones take place pretty much at the same time on the same day, dammit. Oh to be gestalt.   
While it’s impossible to give […]