Oops. I just looked back at the writing resolutions I made for 2009. There were just four of them, and in any average year I think they would’ve been pretty achievable. But this wasn’t such an average year, as you’ll guess by my dropping out of the blogosphere for half of it.
Just the same,  I did manage to partially achieve some of my 2009 resolutions. The second goal was to finish revising Kanako’s Foreigner and submit it to agents; well, I finished revising it, submitted it to the ABNA contest …

When it was announced around two years ago that the new government had created the Prime Minister’s Literary Prize worth A$100,000 for the best fiction and non-fiction books of the year, I was pretty impressed. It’s truly nice to see writers getting some monetary recognition of the thousands of hours of work that go into the writing of a novel – or in the case of the 2009 winner, Nam Le, a collection of short stories.
I’ve been having a bit of an ambivalent relationship with short stories recently. I’d like …

Last week at one of my favourite blogs, The Professional Hobo, Nora wrote a very nerve-touching post about the lack of support she felt she got from friends when she published her first book – to summarise, she kind of expected a few more of them to buy and read it, and was disappointed when they didn’t. And I had to agree with a lot of her feelings and experiences.
Being a writer is a bit of a mysterious job. Unless you write (and get published, somewhere and somehow) yourself, I …

‘Tis the season to be jolly, and all that, and I hope that it’s also the season to get lots of reading and writing done.
I usually don’t have much of a problem getting a fair bit of reading done, and with a week away from the day job and a bunch of extra public holidays, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to report back in 2010 with a bunch of great reading recommendations. I just have to hope that the writing goes as well. Well, I shouldn’t hope, rather I …

You can see one of Bratislava’s most prominent sights in this picture: the Novy Most, or “New Bridge”, built, as you might be able to guess by its appearance, by the Soviets during the communist era. They’re also responsible for the monstrous collection of bland apartment buildings across the other side of the river (which is the Danube, by the way). You’re seeing a picture of Bratislava because I’m in the middle of writing what I keep calling my “Bratislava novel”, since an actual title hasn’t made itself known to …

I’m a fairly patriotic reader, for two reasons – firstly, I really think there is such great literature coming out of Australia, and secondly, because Australian authors are the ones I’m most likely to be able to see in the flesh. Make that Western Australian and I’m even more patriotic, so this post is a little like one big advertisement for West Aussie writer Craig Silvey.
First off, I should tell you the thing that bugs me the most about Silvey. He’s younger than me (by six years). And he’s already …

Earlier this year I bookmarked a great guest post on The Urban Muse with the title Reignite Your Passion For Words. At the time, my passion for words and writing as a little below par, but the ideas in the post still seemed to ring true.
Now that my writing fingers seem to be flying over the keyboard a bit more regularly, this post is even more useful. And in fact I’ve been unwittingly following most of the strategies mentioned anyway, including:

Read more: Lately I’ve been absolutely swallowing books whole. Partly …

In my continuing effort to read outside my preferred genres – and also because Stella Rimington was a special guest at last year’s Perth Writers Festival, and I really liked her (and she appeared outdoors in the sunken garden, pictured above) – I’ve just finished reading her first novel At Risk. Rimington was the first female head of MI5 (the British Secret Service, basically) and after she retired she turned to writing spy novels – which are especially interesting because you know she writes from the voice of experience. It’s a …

A while back I blogged about writers writing ideas down “anywhere”, including writing on pianos if necessary. And in that post I mentioned that I’d been trying to figure out how to deal with all the great ideas I come up with while in the shower, which seems to be the absolute best place for me to get inspirational brainwaves.
Well, my dear, wonderful mother read that post, and without mentioning it to me, she set to work to solve my problem. She’s obviously a bit cleverer than me, and figured out …

Funny how things work out in life, but they often do. In the ever-present battle I have over deciding whether to spend time rewriting my first novel and then sending it off to agents, or giving it up as a first attempt and moving on to some of my other partly-written novels, I’ve just had an important small victory, in favour of Kanako’s Foreigner (yep, the first novel).
The thing is, one of the plot lines involves the main character fantasizing about a lesbian affair, and I’ve been wondering if that …