I’m an avid follower of The Australian’s A Pair of Ragged Claws blog, a great read put out by Stephen Romei from the Australian Literary Review. It’s not just for lovers of Australian literature: this week the discussion has covered whether or not you could give up books, and exactly what would take priority over books for you. For example ,would you rather live a life without books or without coffee? Without books or without travels? Without books or without TV?
There are two things this post made me think about. …

This weekend was “that time of the season” again: time for the Writers Weekly 24 hour short story contest. I’ve participated in this contest numerous times (although scarily it looks like my most recent attempt was a year and a half ago) – it’s great fun as you have literally just a day to write a short story, less than a thousand words, which is related to a topic you find out about only at the beginning of this 24 hours.
Since this contest fell on a day when I had …

If you’re a writer, you’ve probably been directed towards the I Write Like website recently, it seems to be doing the rounds. It’s an interesting gimmick – you take a chunk of your writing, paste it into a box, and the site figures out which famous writer your style is most similar too.
I thought I’d try it out with my Bratislava novel draft. Given that I’ve tried really hard to have three different voices there, with alternating chapters narrated by three different characters (three very different characters, I had hoped), …

Ha ha. Tricked myself. I’ve been hunting around on this site for my May book of the month post, taking quite some time to realise there wasn’t one because I didn’t finish any books in May. Oh, how depressing. I did, however, finish a book in June. So I’m combining those months, and giving you an update on my writing progress during that time, all in one (probably pretty brief) post.
The good news is that my beautiful time-drainer has just hit three months of age and is sleeping a lot …

Regular readers may have noticed that I failed to give you a May update on my reading or writing achievements for the month. Yes, April was already a little meager and things just got worse in May, but if you stay tuned for the end of June, I’m hoping to have actually finished a couple of books again. (I have a good excuse, don’t forget).
In the meantime, I’ve actually been getting a little editing and rewriting done. The writing gods really blessed me this year by moving the closing date …