Last week I was on a work trip. I travelled from Sydney to Broome via a connecting flight to Perth. The first leg of this trip alone was four hours. Knowing this, I decided to print one of my works in progress, The Midnight Man, because I’ve been feeling the urge to get it ready …
Just finished a Fifth Draft
These days, that's more that I usually do. But this manuscript is special. This story, The Midnight Man, took me a year to finally start as I was revisiting my earlier works for a new publisher at the time I came up with this story. And while I'm more efficient in my writing these days, …
That Manuscript you Agonise Over
Perhaps 'agonise' is too strong a word. You see, I've gone back to work on the fifth draft of The Midnight Man, a novel I need to get right. I haven't been this obsessed with perfection since my first book. It's currently novella length and tells the story of Stan, a middle aged man in an …
Outsourcing ideas from a 10 year old
My current work in progress is delayed. I have to complete assessments for a course I attended, so my current novel is still in its planning stages. I have the plot mapped out and am now going back to create character profiles for the new ones that showed up as I plotted. It's called Winter …
The characters who wouldn’t shut up!
I never intended to write a sequel to Nate and the New Yorker but it wasn't up to me to make that decision. Somehow, Nate and his friends demanded a second outing. Originally I wrote the first novella because my publisher at the time pointed out that, regardless of the books many of us like …
Slipping between genres.
"You're mixing genres." This wasn't said to me as a negative. It was an observation from an editor when I had the initial draft of my first novel assessed. At the time, I didn't realise this was such a big deal. Cinema had made an art of combining genres for a long time. Surely, literature was equally as experimental. But …
The joys of collaboration (Guest Post)
Meet The Carter Seagrove Project, four authors who have come together to collaborate and find a larger audience. I met them through Twitter and at first was taken aback by how many followers they had. Then I looked at their webpage and found that they also dip their collective toe in film projects. To me, …
