A Writer's Life
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Becoming A Biographer
Happy Friday everyone! It’s definitely easy to say that with a certain spring in your step when the most pressing thing you have on your plate at the moment is napping, reading, and working on some other projects you’ve got lined up… I won’t lie, it’s a pretty good way to live! But, about biography. I first conceived the idea for this blog post some time ago, possibly as far in the past as the middle of 2016, when I first proposed to my grandparents that I write my grandfather’s biography—but I haven’t really had the capacity to complete it. The reason for that is simple: despite having done a…
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Discovering My Own Novel
Happy Friday world! It reached about 1030 today and I realised that I hadn’t put together a blog post for the week: thank goodness for ‘to do’ lists! I’ve also been somewhat distracted from all material and worldly things while observing the strange contortions of a mammoth grasshopper who I think might be stuck in my study window (don’t worry, as soon as this is done, I’ll see if there’s some way he can be rescued). Anyway! I’ve been really enjoying some free writing adventures this week which have been taking me in weird directions, but I wanted to chat about my novel: gasp, shock, horror: the unspoken of for…
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Finding Your Meaning
Welcome to the end of another week friends! I’ve been flat out with uni this week (and done some training sessions designed by James’s coach–or by me, why do I do this to myself?–that have wiped me out), and realised at an inconvenient moment this morning that I had nothing ready for this blog. Noooooooo! But pressure makes diamonds and I’ve been wanting to talk about this topic for a while now, which is how we, as human beings and regardless of what our chosen or inspired purpose is, find our meaning for keeping on. As I have mentioned in the past, it is easy to become creatively disheartened, whether…
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Writers to Keep Your Eye on
Happy Friday anyone! I’m sure you’ve all heard of #FF (Follow Friday) before in some form or another: it happens on Twitter and invariably I miss it because I’m pretty average at getting around Twitter and doing the tweet thing with any great regularity. Anyway I’m well aware that I’ve been failing in the ‘get around other people’s blogs and read their awesome work’ recently, so I’ve decided to rectify that by taking today’s blog post as an opportunity to showcase some writers you should all be checking out—I want to use this platform to promote and amplify the voices of my brilliant fellow writers, and I hope you take…
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Aussie Expats Update – Writing, Revising and Rehab: Just Another Week!
The end of another week! It always feels like a bit of a shock to reach Friday again. Of course, since I’m on uni break, the time seems to be flying past… And, of course, I’m not getting anywhere near as much done as I wanted to. Every day seems to be jam-packed (though I’ll confess that I’ve managed to find some time for a few naps here and there, in the interests of somehow continuing to be a nice person), and then I reach the end of it and realise that there are things I wanted to get to that I didn’t. The best thing to do is to…
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Writing Writing Writing: Wearing Down the Keys
Happy Monday everyone! Never ones to sit still for long (apparently: this forever-travelling lifestyle is quite a new one for us!), I’m already neck-deep in planning our next adventure in just under a month’s time. Still, I’m also cherishing the chance to enjoy somewhat more lazy days with no study hanging over my head, especially since there are plenty of little ‘to do’ items that I’d like to tick off while I’m on a break. Regardless of everything else, what features highest on my priority list is, of course, writing—which, for the purpose of this list, includes working on editing my behemoth of a novel—and I’m feeling really excited about…
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Rules Are Made to be Broken
Happy Monday world! Despite my recent failings in terms of keeping this blog post running smoothly along, I have returned with a post: hurray! WordPress reminded me yesterday that it is now 1 year since I first created this blog out of the ether that is the internet, and I thought that, at the very least, I should drag my sorry self together and write a blog post in honour of that milestone. So, I was scrolling through the infinite pages of wisdom, inanity and cat videos that is Facebook (or at least, my Facebook feed), when I stumbled on the below image, courtesy of the Australian Writers’ Centre: It…
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Owing a Debt That Can Never be Repaid: Anzac Day 2017
Today in Australia (and thus in my heart) is Anzac Day. As James and I returned from Oklahoma City late last night, I read a news article reporting the defacing of a north Melbourne RSL’s war memorial. Vandals had used red spray paint to scrawl ‘War is Murder’ and anarchy symbols across it. On today of all days, I wanted to use this platform to share some thoughts about what perpetuates the idea that such actions are permissible. At it’s very fundamentals, I disagree with war. If we remove everything else from the equation, and present the bare facts of warfare, the idea of two groups of people killing one…
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Where We Create – A Space for Writing
Happy Easter Monday everyone!! I realise that I was a tad slack last week: sometimes blogging falls by the wayside… Mostly because last week I didn’t have anything ready, and I felt a bit wiped out just at the thought of having to put something together. So here I am again, back and loud and proud! Thanks to uni, I recently watched a youtube video of John Cleese presenting a lecture about creativity. It was excellent. Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I’m a big John Cleese fan (thanks for that Dad!). I think he’s hilarious, and as someone for whom humour is not a creative forte, I’m always intrigued…
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Finding Ourselves
For those who don’t know, I used to write on another blog. I started it in 2014 post-Afghanistan, when I was ensconced in a new city, in a new world, in a new self defined by confusion and pain and loss; I started it as a way to try and heal myself through a medium that I instinctively knew I belonged to, and that belonged to me. But the truths I found that year, that I fought and bled for in the depths of my soul, are no less true for the passage of time and the healing of those wounds. They still resonate with the parts of me that…
