I just flew back from Melbourne over the weekend. I was in Melbourne for a reason: to help launch a book I had handpicked and edited for the Viva La Novella competition. If you’re following me on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, you would know all about it already. The book was Formaldehyde by Jane Rawson – for months I ...

In the darkened theatre, an actor (Solayman Belmihoub) splits chalk into two and then raises his head to the audience and starts talking about dichotomies. About how when you are a mix of several different things, people want you to define yourself as one thing or the other. And I lean forward and go “Aha!” I just want to ...

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There is a jar on one of my bookshelves. It smells vaguely of tomato sauce and in it are little twists of paper. The twists of paper hold words – reminders of things that have happened that made me happy – memories, experiences, ideas, facts. I got the idea from a blog post I came across while surfing the internet. ...

“I want to leave behind a body of work where someone can look at it and say ‘that changed my life’.” – Robin Bower Beyond Home by Robin Bower When we read novels, we often argue over what makes them good. Harold Bloom’s famous list of the Western Literary Canon included no female authors and he copped a lot ...

As many of you know I am involved with the project Australian Women Writers and am responsible for herding the reviews by those reading non fiction, short fiction and poetry. For a long time, Elizabeth Lhuede who started the project has wanted to experiment with video. Of course I was keen on helping out with this. We are now starting ...

A detective. That works with the paranormal. So where do I sign up? I got hold of this because Eleni Konstantine was kind enough to send me a pdf version to review. Eleni writes short fiction, not quite flash or short story but nowhere near novella length either. And she usually is pure sci fi though much like Marianne de ...

[ezcol_1third]Given that I am now living outside of Sri Lanka, I don’t often write about Sri Lanka on this blog because I acknowledge that there are limits to what I know about what is going on. Things I am not aware of because I am not on the ground in Colombo to hear or see them that might be factors ...

Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench are two amazing bibliophiles and activists, of the literary kind. They are also all things speculative fiction crazy. They have come up with an idea that makes you wonder why it hasn’t been done yet. Together with Alisa Krasnostein of Twelfth Planet Press they are planning an anthology of dystopian speculative fiction… with the main ...

Amanda Curtin’s Inherited Precision is what comes to my mind, first. Amanda Curtin likes to write about connections, between person to person, between person and object, person and landscape. And about how those connections make us feel. Or why they are unique to us. Why they don’t make any sense or at least a different kind of sense to others. ...

I think often about what it means to stand in a spot in one place and to take it all in. To live in a place long enough to be someone who understands how life works its way through that spot’s particular urban or rural landscape. And how it feels like saying hello to an old friend when you pick ...

Stay away from the guild. No guild I have ever known has been without its share of drama. You don’t need to recreate high school all over again. Be aware of what they do as story ideas abound but maintain distance. Find a viable university paper or magazine that drama free or not is likely to run continuously without ...

[aesop_image imgwidth=”100%” img=”http://marisa.com.au/news/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/jane-rawson3.jpg” credit=”Andy Maurer” alt=”Author Jane Rawson by Andy Maurer” align=”center” lightbox=”on” caption=”Author Jane Rawson by Andy Maurer” captionposition=”center”] [aesop_character img=”http://marisa.com.au/news/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/download.png” name=”Jane Rawson” align=”left&#

So the lovely people at Book’d Out kickstarted this off. Basically each blog involved runs a competition of some sort and the point is to give away a book by an Australian author to a lucky winner or a book voucher or something like that. This means not only do I have to come up with the means by which ...

Why: Because Katie Gard reminded me that I promised to do this if I took on the AWW 2013 challenge. Current word count: Somewhere between 31,000 and 32,000 because I haven’t typed in everything I have written and the word count tends to double when I do. Usually. Process: I write the most important bits of dialogue, action and description in the scene ...

NOTE: Written originally on 2 January 2015 It was late in the day and I needed food and so off I went to ____ down the road from me and up I went to the cashier thinking “Hey, there’s no one here, this should be a breeze.” After initial confusion over what I wanted so much so that I had ...

Half a lifetime ago the words “a/s/l” meant something to me – the start of a conversation with someone halfway across the world with whom perhaps you shared a desire for escapism. But that was half a lifetime ago in the first iteration of the MSN chatrooms with its first attempts at keeping teens like me safe. It was the ...

Interview date: 9 February 2015 Full transcript below: Marisa: Just tell me a little bit about the work that you do with the Refugee Rights Action Network. Sarah: Yep. So I perform a number of roles within the Refugee Rights Action Network. One of those roles is visiting them in immigration centres in Australia, so visiting asylum seekers who ...

Here’s a secret: I don’t really like the idea of Valentine’s Day. Why? Well, because I think it can, if we are not careful enough, end up being an excuse to NOT work on our relationships for the rest of the year. Lucy on love (c) Charles Schultz   I don’t think that is a good thing. I think any ...

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