Archive for the ‘Latest news’ Category
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From the book stacks
I had a completely valid reason to spend too much money on books this week. So my daughter and I organised a trip in from the outskirts and it was one of those post-lockdown shocks to find ourselves browsing in shops after so much months waiting for parcels to arrive. I bought a pair of ...
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Franny and Zooey
Reading about J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey in two separate places on the same day sent me scurrying to our local library where I found a copy on the shelf. Brilliant! That just doesn’t happen all that often. I hadn’t read this when I first encountered Salinger’s work – and I’m not sure that ...
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Literary Feasts and other musings.
I’ve been reading Nigel Slater’s The Christmas Chronicles recently, as much for his musings on winter, rituals and memory as for the recipes that pop up in this book, like glace cherries in the dense molasses dark of a good fruit cake. I found, and earmarked, a recipe for gnudi – I bought a whole ...
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Murder and Other Brainwaves
One of the unexpected pleasures of semi-isolated living in the time of a pandemic has been the wealth of online opportunities that have opened up. (I bet you were thinking I was going to say planning murder!) But not so far off, if that was what you were thinking. I watched the Scarlet Stiletto awards ...
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Teaching poetry in schools, a mini-review and an invitation.
What a year! I note, with shame, that the last post I wrote here was in the middle of last year when we lived in a different world. In between then and now my husband and I have sold two houses and bought a new one, the world has staggered under the pandemic, Melbourne has ...
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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 ...