The Hodgepodge, a writer’s journal
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Oh my goodness – it’s Spring!
Much of this year seemed to pass in a blur of work – I joined a small writer’s group with some ex-colleagues and friends which met every Tuesday to write. We’re in recess at the moment as the two other members are overseas. (I did say small!) That meant that I actually did quite a ...
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What’s new – good question!
There is this – uncorrected proof of Lisette’s Paris Notebook! I’m at the proofreading stage now. It feels great to be at the final stages. There has also been knitting, sewing, sourdough baking. As well as teaching – I teach poetry now every week at The Avenue Neighbourhood House in Blackburn South – we begin ...
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To fragment. Or not. The question.
Sentence fragments. What is one, exactly? Well, it’s reasonably simple – a sentence must contain a main clause. A main clause consists of an independent subject and a verb and expresses a single idea. Once upon a time, students were taught to diagram a sentence. I escaped this – by the time I was in ...
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The Beats
I’ve been teaching a class on the Beat writers – specifically Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman and Diane di Prima. I’ve re-read On the Road and some of Ginsberg’s poetry and reaquainted myself with some of Waldman and di Prima’s poetry. I stepped into another era – it wasn’t just the work – that ...
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Writing Habits
Years ago when both my young adult children were very small, I would write for an hour each morning during half an hour of Sesame Street and the half hour Playschool programme. These kept them happily occupied and as I didn’t have anything as glamorous as an office back then, I wrote in the same ...
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A rose by any other name…
A couple of weekends ago, a large black sketchbook lay open on my kitchen table. Across a double page spread were scrawled all sorts of potential titles. Everyone who came into the house was invited to have a go at suggesting a title for my latest novel which will be released January 2017 by Allen ...
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This Reading Year…
Last year I began to keep a hard-copy reading journal – my mother gave me one for Christmas & then I found the same (un-used) journal for sale in an op-shop. My last entry in this journal was September – clearly I ran out of steam updating it & will have to refer to Good ...
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After the chaos of Christmas…
I always like the after Christmas period – a time to take stock of what worked during the year, what didn’t and where to go next. For 2015, I constructed a six page excel spreadsheet called Plan for Happiness. I know, raise your eyebrows, roll your eyes – is happiness ever going to be achieved ...
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The Masked Ball
On December 12th, a crowd of people attended a book launch like no other at the old Meat Market in Melbourne. This was, of course, the launch of the seventh book in the Obernewtyn series, a fantasy series begun by Isobelle Carmody when she was only fourteen and finished, more than four decades later. The ...