Category: Contemporary Women Writers
High Expectations Kept Me From Seeing My Success
“When did you first consider yourself a writer?” The question came from a writing coach facilitating an online group class. After considering this, the answer was fuzzy. “Two…maybe three years, after I published my book?” The teacher’s eyes widened as the rest of the class looked on, each face staring out from individual video squares […]
On Finding The Right Writing Advice
In his poem ‘In My Craft or Sullen Art’, Dylan Thomas tells of his writing being ‘Exercised in the still night / When only the moon rages / And the lovers lie abed.’ It’s a seemingly perfect image – a writer, scribbling away at a desk set before a window, his ink drying under a […]
Inspiration For The Silence
The Silence began as a story about my experience of living and working in Sydney in the late nineties. More specifically, my experience of failing to love Australia, while my ex-pat friends were excited and amazed, desperate to stay, to see more. It wasn’t Australia, it was me. I knew this as I followed the […]
Genre Hopping
I am a genre hopper. There. I said it. My first novel, Trouble the Water, is historical fiction, and my second, That’s Not a Thing, is contemporary. People keep asking me how this can be, how one author can inhabit two different spheres? But isn’t this the story of what we, as women, do so […]
From Rejection To Publication
I’m 54 years old and very proud of my age. It’s the time in my life where I feel most comfortable with me and who I am. It’s taken me a long time to get to this place where I think life is just what it is…it’s just life…just live it. I’ve been writing for […]
Sometimes You Have to Stumble
On New Year’s Eve, My Own True Love and I stood in the main square in Salzburg and waited for the countdown to midnight to begin. It was raining, an icy drizzle that occasionally opened up into something more. The square was crowded with happy drunks. Not my favorite combination. But dancing in the square […]
What Your Younger Self Can Teach You About Writing
We’ve all done those self-actualizing and inspirational exercises where we write a letter to our younger self, haven’t we? Where we look back at our frazzled crazy teenage personas, and wish we could tell them to relax, or stop worrying, or focus on the big picture instead of who has the best hair or whether […]
Make ‘em Laugh
Humour in writing? That’s a toughie, how do I know that what makes me laugh will have the same effect on you? I don’t and yet, there I am writing comedy hoping that all my readers will reach the end with a big smile on their faces. And so far, it seems to be happening. […]
Painless Editing in Easy Steps
For many authors, editing a book is their favourite part of the process. They enjoy crafting their rough first draft into the elegant book that they had in mind when they started to write, hanging flesh on the bare bones of the plot and transforming it from a series of scenes into a work of […]
Keeping Going
Like so many writers, my journey to publication was long and winding. I love telling the story because it’s the kind of story that would have given me hope back then, in my trying-to-get-published years. It started with an MA in Creative Writing in 2004. Of course, it started long before that, really, with an […]
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