I read for the times a book transports me in the same way as Ready Player One. My reading of this book was seamless and filmic -- and synchronous, because my real and made-up worlds have a habit of colliding. Mere weeks before reading, a midnight google of "What did Roberta Williams do after Sierra?" …
It is a truth universally acknowledged that when your children have school holidays, adventures must be had, and a goodly proportion of these adventures must be had in the real world. During the last summer holidays, we made fridge magnets of wooden circlets cut from fallen branches. We erupted a volcano and linked it to …
<10,000 words from a first draft. Five days from finishing my PCWC residency. Four days from PCWC's Publication Event. Three days from my last workshop as Writer in Residence. Three children and one husband forgetting my face. Two consultation appointments to book. Two days until applications to be a part of a 2019 writers' festival …
There is nothing like clicking the "Send" or "Submit" button to thrust you into a whitewater rush of doubt and self-criticality. Even dread. That's what I'm experiencing, anyway. After three years of hitting that 100-plus rejection target, I find my pain is not so much in the rejections, but in the sendings. I think it's …
Thanks so much to those of you who have read Between shelves in the last 2 1/2 months [if you haven't and would like to, you still can]. Attached below is the unedited seed that grew into this piece of flash, written in the seven minutes between two train stations. Because sometimes a story comes …
My biggest barrier to getting words on the page is time, closely followed by the paradox of choice. For me, this paradox is the clash of excellent ideas with planned projects, and it would paralyse me if I didn't have a few tricks to snap me out of it. These four continue to serve me …
Continue reading "Four ways to make your writing time more productive."
Lately I have been experimenting with pictures, sound, and video as storytelling tools. Part of my process has resulted in completely new works; some of it has involved enriching stories already posted on this blog. I will share new works with you in future posts. For now, I invite you to revisit past posts with …
These past few weeks, I have been counting my blessings. In a writerly sense, this year has already brought me a shortlisting and publication of four short fictions. Later this year, I will be a Writer-in-Residence at the Peter Cowan Writers Centre, thanks largely to my 2017 FAWWA residency and my refusal to be genre-bound. I …
It's a bit like Rumpelstiltskin, isn't it? While everyone else is sleeping, you channel ideas into golden threads, weaving them into stories and settings. Because writing fiction is a mysterious act. Being able to conjure entire worlds, let alone characters and plots, from beyond one's own mind is a kind of magick. "Writer" seems an …
In 1984, a six-year-old girl who fancied herself a writer attended a school she didn’t like with a crotchety teacher she liked even less. The adults in her life convinced her that she should learn to fit into this school-shaped hole and find something other than writing stories to earn real money, because money was …
