Archive for July, 2008
Success with NaBloPoMo and a Google Page Rank
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 [...]
Are my lists making me procrastinate more?
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 [...]
Visual inspiration: My wall of photos
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 [...]
Listening to the Perth Writers Festival
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 [...]
Another 24-hour short story is finished
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 [...]
Randy Pausch, the ultimate inspirer, inspires me too
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 [...]
Melbourne mind meltdown
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 [...]
Melbourne Festival of Travel Writing provides a few sparks
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 [...]
Creative naming might okay in books, but …
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 [...]
Creativity is written in the stars
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 [...]