CategoryAstound

There’s a plan and it says: do this chapter today. It’s not easy.

I can’t say the recent past hasn’t taught me heaps, about resilience and friends in particular, but real drafting has been scant. The best place to dive in is an ideal cafe, and mine is Finders Keepers, in suburban Melbourne. As a bonus, trams rattle and clunk past every ten minutes.

The Kimberley Ranges are remote, are difficult and time-consuming to travel through, and offer stunning mountain and gorge vistas. Of all the exquisite gorge swims we experienced, that in Emma Gorge was the sweetest. You swim in a prehistoric-looking hole in front of gentle falls, with water drops plonking upon your head from fronds suspended above. At the other extreme, because today was the…

Some days what you’ve written is so higgledy-piggledy, you have no recourse but to print it out, and grab scissors for the cut-and-paste fun my grandchildren have. And it works!

This might happen to you a lot, but to me, nearly never. Last night, tossing and turning with a Covid blocked nose, a thought came to me utterly unbidden: here’s how you should write that tricky bit in Chapter 15 that you’ve been puzzling about for a fortnight. Yikes! Silly me, I didn’t even think of leaping from bed to record this inspiration, but luckily, when I arose, the…

Five days to go before heading to Darwin, where I’ll seek to work but undoubtedly poorly, because I can only take soft-copy material along with me. Then we’ll be off the grid for nine days on a tour to Broome. All that means is that I’m anxious about completing a chapter this week, hemmed in by other requirements. Nothing new, just a mind tense and fretful. Hopefully tomorrow…

I don’t often say this and who knows what tomorrow will spring on us, but this week, five days in, is a solid work fest. I am on my way.

Our natural vocabularies are a fraction of the words available, so any writer worth her salt consults dictionaries. I certainly had them at my side while writing my two murder mysteries, but that was eons ago, and lately my nonfiction writing has felt more like assembling serviceable slabs of text accompanied by references. So yesterday I dragged out my piddly suite of dictionaries and set them…

Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This reminds me of Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, not due to any confluence of style or theme, but because it is tough to read over half the book, then a brilliant plot twist plunges the reader into a new dream of life. Lockwood’s nameless hero spends her days in “the portal,” namely online, as an influencer, and the novel unfurls as madly poetic…