I have been out-procrastinated. In fact, while my own tendencies to put off writing have been waning recently – I actually seem to get my fingers on the keyboard more often than I used to – Anna from the Zwei Sprachen blog has been busily writing lists about why she’s not writing. Which in itself is, actually, writing, but not the kind she wants to do, I guess.
Zwei Sprachen is German for “two languages” and I’ve been following the blog because it has interesting posts in both these languages – …

Sometimes I really regret that I didn’t study creative writing at university. I was really encouraged to write throughout primary school, and in early high school a couple of teachers were also quite complimentary about my writing skills. But as university choices loomed ever closer, and I was able to get good grades in other subjects too, then my teachers steered my career choices towards “practical” subjects and I ended up studying mathematics.
Of course, everything in life happens for a reason, and if I hadn’t studied maths, I wouldn’t have …

As I type this, quite literally, I’m sitting a way back from my desk (finally, I understand the value of the wireless keyboard!) so that I can supervise the printing of my novel’s manuscript. It’s the first time I’ve printed the whole thing at once, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t trust my printer to get it right. Neither do my two cats, apparently, because they’re both sitting next to the printer (it’s on a very low table) watching each page come out.
So you can correctly surmise from this …

Yes, procrastinatory is a word, even if my spell-check doesn’t agree. Trust me, I’m an expert on this subject.
Anyway, as you know, I’ve been revising my novel. In fact, my fingers are itching to get typing on my next novel, and I can feel my brain starting to plot it out below the surface. But I’m trying to be focused and get this revision done before I move on, or it’ll never be done.
The revision is really an up and down process. I had a good spurt on Monday: I …

Since I’ve started paying attention to the awards available to writers – particularly Australian novelists, because it’s good to have dreams of what I could achieve one day! – I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see that some very good writers are getting decent amounts of money to reward their achievements in creating great literature. Of course, I’m aware that most great writers don’t earn anywhere near as much as they should, but I’d somehow thought that the situation was absolutely dire and nobody got anything. But if you check my …

With impeccably fortunate timing, my husband was out of town when the local library chain had their annual sale of books they no longer need. Such sales, here in Perth at least, are typically held in dingy underground car parks that are badly lit and have an odd smell. This one was no different, except that the poor lighting also had a habit of going out completely every now and again. The smell wasn’t so bad, though.
But I didn’t care a bit. Scavenging through shelf after shelf of discarded books, …

Remember how I’m the queen of procrastination? Well, not long after I discovered the Titlescorer website, I read a post on the Writer’s Technology Companion blog about a website that generated random names that you could use for your characters. I checked it out but was disappointed to see it was only going to spit out English names, not very useful for a lot of my stories and also for the novel I’m working on, because in the same way my world is populated by multiple nationalities, so is my …

As I’ve been revising my novel, particular situations have been reminding me of all the rules I’ve ever used and heard about writing fiction, and one of these is what I call the “it really happened” defence.
The “it really happened” excuse is the one bad writers (and I guess sometimes some good writers too) use when a passage in a story sounds unbelievable to the reader, but the writer won’t change it because it’s something they’ve modeled on personal experience and they therefore know, for certain, that it is possible …

My budget doesn’t extend to actually buying too many books these days – especially at Australian prices – but you might remember I was excited to receive my copy of Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost last month. I’ve been keen to read this book (which won the Costa First Novel Award in 2007 and was longlisted for the Booker) since hearing Catherine O’Flynn speak a couple of times at the Perth Writers Festival.
What Was Lost tells a tale tangled by characters and time, but it focuses on the one setting: …

I felt quite positive when I blogged that I would finish revising my novel this month, but let’s just say now I’m having good days and bad days.
Sometimes, the task seems insurmountable. I’m working from a combination of my bright orange cards with plot points on them, an organised transfer of some of these into a list in a notebook, and my original draft in a Word document, written for NaNoWriMo last year. At times, I can paste large chunks of the original draft into my new chapter-by-chapter documents, making …