Archive for the ‘Latest news’ Category
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Genre Bending – notes from Continuum 15
Okay – so the panel wasn’t called that! And, I admit I’ve taught a short course for the CAE which I titled ‘Genre Bending’. However, the panel on Speculative Elements in Women’s Fiction talked about the difficulties of categorisation in fiction and also the problems marketing can have with fiction that defies or crosses genres. ...
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Three Take-away Tips from Narrative Structure and Expectations – Kate Elliott
Kate Elliott’s guest of honour talk used a close reading of the opening scene of the movie West Side Story as a launching place to talk about reader expectations and the all-important opening. It was a great talk – really informative and well-structured and I’m not going to attempt to summarise quite so much material. ...
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Five Points from the World Building and Infrastructure Panel – Continuum 15, Other Worlds.
This year there were two guest speakers at Continuum, the Melbourne science fiction and fantasy convention, Kate Elliott, author of the Spiritwalker, Crossroads and Black Wolves trilogies and Ken Liu, who has published short stories as well as an epic fantasy ‘silkpunk’ quadrology, The Dandelion Dynasty, the first book of which won the Locus Award ...
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Creating Stories from Objects
My novel, The Wish Pony, was inspired by two things – the first was the well known rhyme ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride’ and the second was a marble figurine of a horse owned by my step-grandmother. The rebuttal for many a child’s wish is that rhyme. I’m sure I had it said ...
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Five Questions to Ask of Your Characters
I have to say that I’m not a writer who writes foremost from ideas or plot. I love creating characters and following their journeys. The very first novel I wrote, which turned into a verse novel, starred characters I had had in my head for years. I’d made more than a few attempts at the ...
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Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019 – Longlist announced!
WinterAnd I’m off to the library to put in my orders! The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker Remembered by Yvonne Battle-Felton My Sister, the Serial Killer Oyinkan Braithwaite The Pisces Melissa Broder Milkman Anna Burns Freshwater Akwaeke Emezi Ordinary People Diana Evans Swan Song Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott An American Marriage Tayari Jones Number One ...
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Three Easy Ways to Amp up Descriptions of Place
Describing landscapes – urban or rural – is often a challenge for new writers. How to describe the landscape you know well, whether imagined or real, so successfully that your reader can step into it? Let’s look at three easy methods you can use to amp up your descriptions of place....
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Revisiting the Greeks
I’ve just finished reading Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls – brilliant! And that led me down the rabbit hole of discovery…so many women writers are turning their attention to the ancient Greeks and revisiting those stories. Here’s a very quick list of what I’ve discovered: The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker – ...
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Procrastination
This week has been all about Frocktails – the sewists’ annual extravaganza! I have been making a very simple dress from sandwashed silk. I haven’t sewn much with silk, so that has been interesting, although I’d have to say this is silk that certainly behaves itself. It’s not fine, slippery silk. However, I also lined ...
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Book club woes!
Book clubs – love them? Ambivalent? Have had bad past experiences? I was in one once where there was so much competition to be the perfect hostess that the actual book under discussion was lost in the chorus of food appreciation noises and recipe swapping. When it was my turn to host I realised with ...