All my blogs have been a bit empty over the last week, because I spent a few days at the Perth Writers Festival. It’s the first I’ve attended since coming back to Perth a year or so ago, and I was more than pleasantly surprised at how professional it all is – perhaps Perth isn’t such a cultural backwater after all!

In any case, I saw a dozen or more presentations over three days and the majority of them were FREE! Incredible. The reminder that novelists (because most of the people I went to see were novelists) are truly normal people just like me was a valuable one. Having seen some of the writers talk more than once, I’ve become quite hooked on the idea of reading the books they spoke about, and that’s given me a reading list that’s much too long!

A few of the writers were “superstars” in my mind, like Christopher Koch, whose book The Year of Living Dangerously was one I’d read four or five times as teenager. And there were a lot of writers who I hadn’t known or read before, but now want to. Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost: A Novel is high on the list, as is Louise Doughty’s Stone Cradle and Crazy Paving.

But as well as getting more reading done, I’m very inspired to do some more writing, too. I’ve now found a string of novel writing contests that should inspire me to get editing: first chapter due in March, first three chapters in April, and the whole manuscript in May or June. I’m off to get writing right now!