Woo-hoo! It’s the end of July, and observant readers will see that I have a post for every day in July. That means I have successfully completed my NaBloPoMo challenge to post each day for a month. Admittedly I didn’t always write each post on the day and a little bit of pre-posting and post-posting has smoothed out the daily blogging curve, but the point is, I wrote a lot more than normal.
I don’t plan to keep up daily blogging here – I think three or four posts per week …

I read a scary headline today at a website I half-heartedly follow. It went like this: News Flash – To-Do List Fans are Closet Procrastinators. The first point is that this is certainly no news flash for me, and I’m not even a closet procrastinator – I think I’ve made it quite clear to many (and especially on this blog) that my procrastinating is a highly-developed skill. And yes, my obsession with to-do lists is linked to this.
So what can I learn from this non-news-flash? Well, as they quite rightly …

When I started thinking about my second novel, to be set in Bratislava, I knew I wanted to do things differently from the first time, when I set my novel in Japan.
I set off writing about Japan with barely a look back at my diaries, notes and photographs of my time there. I did this deliberately, because didn’t want to make the novel too autobiographical and I was worried that digging too much into my own records of those experiences might do that. If I one day decide to revise …

Yes, it’s a fair while back that I actually went to February’s Perth Writers Festival but I’ve only just got around to catching up on the promised podcasts of the sessions. At the time, some of the session organisers had promised that they would soon become available online to listen to, and in February and early March I checked the website regularly to find them so I could listen to the sessions I hadn’t been able to attend, and review those I had. But they didn’t appear.
It must have taken …

When I got up this morning, I knew the topic for this season’s Writers Weekly 24-hour short story contest would be waiting in my email inbox. In previous contests I’ve been excited to get to it straight away, but somehow today my enthusiasm had waned. I read all my other email first and checked Bloglines too before finally reading the topic – in summary, it included a strange object in an old toy shop, and a word limit of 900 words, nice and short.
My strategy from here was to let …

And before you say it, yes, inspirer is apparently a real word (I wasn’t sure). If you’re the 0.0001% of people who haven’t been following the story of US lecturer Randy Pausch, then give yourself a gift by watching his famous Last Lecture on YouTube. It’s all about making the most of life, achieving your childhood dreams and dying happy.
Because unfortunately that’s the news today, that Randy Pausch has died after his pretty public battle with pancreatic cancer. But he and his family have got to be proud after his …

I was looking forward to exploring Melbourne last week to refresh my mind with a few new sights and sounds. And my Melbourne trip definitely had this effect, but surprisingly almost a little too much. I can’t imagine now how my brain used to survive when I was travelling for months at a time through places far more exotic than Melbourne, because all the stimuli on this trip were enough to almost cause my mind to meltdown: I was so full of new impressions and ideas.
While I was there (in …

It may not be fiction writing, but being able to attend the Melbourne Festival of Travel Writing while I was in Melbourne was still useful for my fiction writing ambitions.
The biggest message I got from attending the Saturday sessions of this festival was the one I usually get whenever I see writers speak: published book writers are totally normal people, just like me. (Friends might say writers, and me, are rather abnormal people, but the point remains the same – the people who can walk into a bookstore and see …

I’ve been having fun using the Behind the Name site to generate names for characters recently. When I wrote my first chapter for my Bratislava novel, I needed a Slovak girl’s name, a Korean boy’s name and an English girl’s name, and after plugging that information into the website and clicking a few times to reject the first suggestions, I found names that suited, without having to use names of people I know – I find it hard to separate a character from a real person if I’ve used the …

My horoscope looks good this week. Now, I usually only glance at a horoscope page as an example of creative fiction, but when it’s good, I’m happy to believe it. Some astrologer in a local paper is predicting me a four-star week and in particular, a good week for a fiction writer:
Classy Venus moves into the sector of creativity where it puts a glow back in your life and glint in your eye.
Good to know. I don’t have a clue what “the sector of creativity” is when we’re talking astrology, …