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Ideas… & Where to Find Them
Finding ideas tends to be something writers and other artists think about a lot. Why? Because it doesn’t take much imagination to realise that ideas are any creative’s bread and butter. Want to paint something? Write something? Carve, sculpt, knit, cast, or compose something? You need a starting point: that’s just common sense. So it’s not surprising, then, that in almost every author interview you stumble across, someone has asked the big question. ‘Where do your ideas come from?’ (Let me give you a hint: they’re not in a treasure chest or underneath that really promising-looking rock.) So, what’s your point? Tell us where ideas come from! It is, at…
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San Francisco: Aussies Discovering New Adventures!
Well, it seems that our earlier 2018 West Coast roadtrip (here and here) just wasn’t enough to sate our beach-starved Aussie souls, and we’ve just done another trip back to spend the weekend in San Francisco. Why, I hear you ask? To qualify to ‘Take the Rock’ in our swim from Alcatraz next weekend, of course! Since we only spent a day in San Fran during our roadtrip earlier in the year, this weekend offered us a great chance to see a little more of the city and learn about it from some locals to boot. We walked—a LOT—and ate some great food—again, a LOT—and had an all-round awesome time,…
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Learning Through Writing – 10 Things that 100 Days of Writing Taught Me
If you’ve followed me for a while, you probably know AZ Pascoe and writing go together like peanut butter and jam (or jelly, for any Americans). Well, at least in my mind they do. Historically, I’ve gone through periods of significant productivity, and periods of… well, not a lot of productivity, which seems to applies to a lot of writers. And I decided that I wanted to try and address that. The Plan The long and short of it is: in the past, I wrote sometimes—though typically not as many times as I’d like, or feel like I should—and other times, I really didn’t write much at all. I would go through…
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Your Greatest Untapped Resource for Goal Achievement
Arraying Resources for Goal Fulfilment It goes without saying that if you have a goal, you need to gather the resources necessary to achieve it. If you want to get stronger, you need to spend time in the gym. Depending on your starting point and your end goal, you may also need to hire a trainer, ensure you have the appropriate clothing and footwear, and possibly even invest in some of your own equipment. Each of these actions demonstrates a resource that you’re harnessing to achieve the goal you’ve set yourself All of this seems fairly obvious. To get where we want to go, we need to ensure we have…
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Creative Discouragement—The How and the Why
So, there’s a seriously big question about blogging that I’ve only recently discovered, but that I think might have been hanging over me for quite a while, and it’s this: Why do I become discouraged so much more easily about my writing/blogging than I do about other things in my life? If you read this blog religiously (I think there might be about two of you), then you might have noticed that I haven’t posted much recently. At all. I haven’t posted since we got back from Hawaii—and I regaled all of you lucky folks with tales of our adventures and recommendations for any Hawaiian trips you might have planned—about…
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Aussie Expats Update – Our Hawaiian Adventure!
Helllloooo everyone! I’m writing this blog post from my desk in chilly Lawton, OK, home safe and sound after a tumultuous and (predominantly) wonderful trip to Hawaii! It’s a long one, so if you don’t have the stamina, the short version is: we’ve ticked off another state, I am definitely a summer child, and there’s list of our recommendations at the end. Now, onto the post! Friday, 05 January. We started off less than ideally when we decided to spend Thursday night in OKC before our flight. It sounds like a good idea, right? WRONG: if you answered ‘yes’ to that question, then you are wrong. Now, it’s not your…
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My 2017 in Non-Fiction
Since I managed to spit out a ‘My Year in Fiction’ post last week, i thought it might be a good idea to create ‘My Year in Non-Fiction’ and, voila, here it is! To my shame, I didn’t read quite as many nonfiction books as I did fiction last year (I’m endeavouring to read more nonfiction this year, especially since I have a biography to write!), so I don’t have twelve to share. Instead, I thought I’d share just three of the six or so that I read—in part because I’m in Hawaii and I’m lazy and not overly keen to write a billion-word blog post, but also because there…
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My 2017 In Fiction
Hellloooo everyone! As we’re now firmly ensconced in 2018, by about 5 days—holy jeewillikers, how is that possible??—I thought it would be a really great opportunity for me to review some of the amazing books I’ve read in the past twelve months. Especially because James and I are currently winging our way to Hawaii (Hawaii everyone!), and I need to post more regularly this year (damn uni). I decided, when I conceived the idea for this post, that I would pick 12 total books to discuss (y’know, because there are 12 months in the year and that kind of symmetry just works for me)… And then I subsequently cursed myself…
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Aussie Expats Update – Settling Back In Again
Hello everyone, and happy US Friday! Well, not surprisingly, I’ve been a little off the grid lately. Between international travel, trying to stay on top of uni (and not doing a suuuuuper great job), spending time with my family, reading some great books (I finally got to books 2 and 3 in the Outlander series, thanks Granmda!), and just taking things as they come, this blog kind of fell off the priority list. But I’m back now and ready to return to posting some vaguely interesting things with some more regality. As of Monday afternoon, I returned to the US, and I’m rapidly settling back into our regular life here…
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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…
