So, I was supposed to be writing a bunch of blog posts that are due this week, and today’s my day away from school, in other words, writing day. But just for a change, I got a little off track. It’s not my fault, of course – the Perth International Arts Festival brochure was delivered to my letterbox last week, and when I saw the page for the 2010 Perth Writers Festival, and read the magic words “check out the complete list of authors on our website”, well, I was …

Just a few more sleeps and it all gets started: you might remember I’ve been waiting for the Perth Writers Festival for ages. I’m looking forward to getting a huge dose of inspiration both for reading and writing.
Special events – Some evening experiences

While most of the events of the Perth Writers Festival are free – and I have to say again how fantastic that is, and I hope that never changes – they usually hold some evening presentations, daytime workshops and special events like lunches that require tickets. And that’s …

When the programme for the 2009 Perth International Arts Festival arrived in our house last week there was a flurry of excitement: we love going to see the international films at the outdoor cinemas they set up (although we’re disappointed by the number of French films this year and not enough German ones …); and as for me, personally, finding out about next year’s Perth Writers Festival is exciting too.
The only problem is the Writers Festival doesn’t seem to be organised as far in advance as everything else, so this …

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 …

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 …

All my blogs have been a bit empty over the last week, because I spent a few days at the Perth Writers Festival. It’s the first I’ve attended since coming back to Perth a year or so ago, and I was more than pleasantly surprised at how professional it all is – perhaps Perth isn’t such a cultural backwater after all!
In any case, I saw a dozen or more presentations over three days and the majority of them were FREE! Incredible. The reminder that novelists (because most of the people …