When you read this, it’ll officially be the last day of 2008 (yes, I’m posting ahead because I’m *going on holidays*, but I didn’t want to abandon my readers completely). Since I’m pretty sure that said holiday will mean I don’t achieve any more goals between now and the end of 2008 (a week away as I type), I think it’s safe to look back at my 2008 writing resolutions and see how I went.

Edit my 2007 NaNoWriMo novel and submit it

Check! I did edit it, and I submitted it …

I’m not at all sure that Christmas is a very inspirational time of year for writers – I’m fairly certain it’s not for me. Instead it’s more a hectic time which seems to tumble into my life far before I’m ready and tells me quite bluntly that another year has gone by. Fast.
New Year’s resolutions are another topic for another day – but let me tell you, I’m already thinking deeply about them, especially the writing-related resolutions. For now, all I wanted to say was that I hope everyone reading …

I’m sorry, muse; I’m sorry, grand goals and dreams. Getting around to writing – even this blog post – seems so difficult at this time of year. Combine summer and Christmas (as we do here in Australia) and there are long daylight hours to spend socialising, catching up with people you may not see much during the rest of the year, spending far too long in the shops to do anything because half of the city’s population is there with you and trying to plan ahead for Christmas itself and …

You’ve all heard it before – the advice that to be a good writer, you have to read a lot. I’ve always wondered why this piece of advice ever needs to be spoken, because I can’t imagine that anyone could consider writing if they didn’t love to read, but apparently it happens more often than you think.
In any case, if the measure of a good writer is how much they love to read, I’ve surely got a lot of potential. Sometimes I forget that books play a less important role …

I’ve been having one of those weeks in which my brain is completely filled with tasks that must be completed, problems that must be solved and the looming feeling that both Christmas and my as-yet-not-really-organised holiday are closer than they should be. As you can guess, that translates to not much writing, and not even much inspiration – it’s one of those survival-mode weeks.
Inspiration where you don’t expect it

As most of you know, I teach English as a Second Language three days per week, and my students often provide me …

Let me tell you a story … the first writing group experience I have was at least ten years ago, maybe more. There was a Saturday morning group that met at the TAFE college in town (TAFE, for non-Aussies, is Technical And Further Education, and it’s a place where you can learn anything from how to cut hair or speak Spanish through to, apparently, creative writing).
The story: This writing group didn’t work out well

I’ll say right from the start that this first writing group experience was not exactly positive. I …

Ideas are pretty much bread and butter to a fiction writer, right? Where would a novel be without there being an idea first? I guess it’d just be a blank book.
So on the premise that having inspiration and ideas hit is totally important, I have to tell you about the results of a study I bookmarked a while back. It was one of those weird hotel chain surveys (done by various chains, on a bizarre range of topics, just to get the name of their chain in front of more …

Over the weekend I went to a performance of Brahms, Webern and Berg (and I’d never heard of the second two composers, so you can see I’m no classical music afficionado) put on by the WA Symphony Orchestra. It’s something we do occasionally, in the cheap seats hanging over the back of the orchestra, because even though I don’t know much about classical music, it always seems to give me a creative boost.
So there I was last night, mid-Brahms I think, watching the percussionist closely because I’m always intrigued by …