Are you a risk-taker? I didn’t think I was until I thought about it. I was twenty-one when the boy I was in love with sat me down to tell me he’d been offered a job in another country. He was in his final year of an electrical engineering degree and was going to relocate […]

Hello! I am delighted to be the guest blogger for Margaret River Press during the month of November, and during a time of a pandemic. For a while I was an earnest blogger with my own blogspot page, but then something happened, writing got in the way. Yes, I only occasionally blog these days because […]

Change is inevitable. How often do we hear those words, and how much resistance do we carry for them? 2020 has been, for our entire planet, a year of deep change. The global COVID-19 pandemic has torn us all from our familiar patterns and imposed a different sense of time and place. For many of […]

Landscape and place in writing is as much a character as any protagonist. The landscape we reside in, and travel through, shapes us with the same inexorable force as wind and water sculpt the hills around us. In writing we strive to recreate, in someone else’s mind, the place we are describing – a place […]

Uncertainty runs counter to human comfort. Most of us like to feel we know what might be coming toward us, that in knowing we may somehow ward off disaster and pain, make future events bend under our will and our want. Whenever we begin to explore our creativity, in art, in music, in writing, we […]

Today I planted spring flowering bulbs in a wide shallow bowl of duck egg blue. The pot was heavy once filled and I didn’t know quite where to put it, eventually settling on a flat rock in the garden near the pond. It looks forlorn there, covered in mulched hay like an empty nest, but […]

Earlier this month I ran a session at Writers Victoria titled, Writing Groups: How to Find, Build, and Maintain an Effective Writing & Critique Group. So I thought it might be a good opportunity to wax lyrical on the advantages and occasional pitfalls of writers’ groups, with a few hot tips thrown in. I am a long-term member […]

I am writing this from the not-too-distant past. Once this blog is published, lockdown restrictions may have passed and we may all be out hugging and dancing freely on the street – although I doubt it… Stage three restrictions lifted in Victoria on Tuesday at midnight this week. The die-hards amongst us ventured out of […]

This morning, as I cycled a sweeping curve at the bottom of Molesworth Street on Kew Boulevard, I realised the antagonist in the novel I’m working on is too mean. I peddled hard as it dawned on me. Yep, his overwhelming spite is the reason the plotline has been so difficult to resolve. How can […]

One morning during the height of lockdown, I attended a live Think Inc. event from my kitchen table. As I sat, muesli in hand, peppermint tea at the ready, Jamie Metzl, an American technology futurist, geopolitical expert and sci-fi author, reminded me that despite my comfortable surrounds, the future was CRASHING IN. Needless to say, […]