Tag Archives: Adventure

It’s lauch day for Singular Purpose!

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Singular Purpose, the sequel to my 2021 book, Singular Focus, is available to buy now! I’m very excited for you to read what’s been happening with Freya, Jacob and Dinah and what new trouble they’ve been dragged into.

You can order ebook copies through all the usual places using the link here.

Hard copy orders can also be made through me directly, email me here to find out how.

You don’t have to have read the first one, but it will definitely help. I hope you’re ready for some exciting urban fantasy adventures; you’re going to love it.

We’re halfway there!

21 Wednesday Sep 2016

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Tonight we start the second week of my first ever Melbourne Fringe Festival show and it’s raining again. I know that Spring is supposed to be rainy, and I know that we need the rain, but it still puts me in a kinda flat mood, especially after all the sunshine yesterday.

I’ve been still struggling with the roller coaster ride of emotions that seem to come with performing. Agitation, tension, that sick feeling I get in the five minutes before show time. Then I come off the stage and I’m buzzed and bouncing, and then exhausted but can’t sleep for hours. I don’t know whether it gets better, or more likely, you get used to the crazy ride.

I question why I’m doing this in those moments, but when I’m up on the stage and people are laughing at stuff I wrote, it’s the best feeling. And afterward, when people give my amazing feedback like ‘you’re a natural performer’, ‘the chemistry between you two is great’,  ‘I can’t believe it’s taken you so long to do this!’ and ‘you have such a lovely stage presence’ I feel such pride and relief. I feel like I can dismiss all those little voices in my head telling me that I shouldn’t do this, or I’m fooling myself.

I think creative people will always have those little niggling doubts. That sick feeling will always come the moment before you go on stage. The worry that I have made something terrible, and people won’t like it.

I know that I shouldn’t be worrying about whether people like my art, I should just do it because I want to, because I need to create. But I do want people to like it. I want people to like me because they like my art.

In summary I’m having both an amazing and a terrible time doing this show. I’m so proud of it. So come see it y’all!

Fleur and Alexandra Save the World

7:30pm, Sept 21-24. $20 ($16 concession) on the door.

Collingwood Underground Car Park, 44 Harmsworth St, Collingwood, VIC 3066

 

Changes (again)

27 Friday May 2016

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Sometimes I think I have set myself up and I’ll be able to have a nice stable life for a little while.

I think ‘oh good, I can get on with being alive now that everything is set up’.

But that doesn’t seem to be how life works, at least not for me. I had a boss once who used to say that maybe our job isn’t being interrupted by constantly responding to and putting out fires, maybe putting out fires is our job. It sort of helps to stop you from dismissing stuff as in the way.

I know I’ve heard it before and I’m sure I’ll forget and have to remind myself. Life doesn’t start when everything is ready and settled and under control. All that stuff is life.

Things will always be unsettled. There will always be stuff that is out of your control.

Life doesn’t have a satisfying narrative arc. It’s a bunch of scribbles and chaos that we have to try to fumble our way through.

So as I head into another portion of my life without a stable income, at least for the moment, I’m trying to tell myself that it’s all good and that the opportunities that will come from being available will totally be worth it.

Plus, I have some money hidden away, I won’t starve. Adventures ahoy!

Welcome 2016!

01 Friday Jan 2016

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So, I went out last night with some beautiful people and had a bloody fabulous time, but now I’m feeling a little bit delicate around the eyeballs*.

You might know that I don’t drink alcohol, but it turns out staying up late, jumping up and down, and then sleeping fitfully coz it’s really hot feel quite similar to a hangover (I assume, I haven’t really ever had one).

Anyway, welcome to 2016. It feels weird to be writing that as the date. It feels a bit like we’re in the future already and that feels pretty strange.

As I promised yesterday I’m doing my goals for the new year. I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions because I believe we should all be striving to live our best lives all the time. Also because most people don’t keep them.

In 2016, I’ve grouped my goals into three categories: Writing Projects, Concrete Goals, Vaguely Defined Aspirations.

Writing Projects include:

  • Winning NaNoWriMo in 2016
  • Edit the Choose Your Own Adventure book from 2015
  • Redraft You Brought this on Yourself (2014 manuscript)
  • Finalise and pitch Adventures in Mediocrity script

I’m going to keep going to my two writing groups, I’m going to try to get into a routine of setting time aside to work on my longer stuff during the week. Of course I’ll probably still be frantically coming up with something for the writing groups about three hours before I have to be there! Maybe this year I’ll even be a bit more organised about that, but I do seem to thrive with a looming deadline, so I probably won’t.

My concrete goals are:

  • Plan or take a new trip
  • Perform with the band

The band seems to be coming on steadily, so I’m confident that this one will happen. I’ve been writing a bunch of lyrics, along with Charlie, the singer, and we’re finding our creative grooves both individually and collectively.

I want to go on another trip. I think travel is important for both sanity and growth. I haven’t been to South America, or Africa, or Asia, so one of those places might be the go this time, although having people to visit in Europe makes it very tempting to go back. I haven’t put ‘go on a trip’ on the list because I might not have the money to do it in 2016, but I will definitely be going sometime soon.

Finally my vaguely defined aspirations are:

  • Get a job
  • Learn new stuff/expand
  • Talk to strangers/meet new people
  • Exercise
  • Read
  • Explore
  • Eat well

Taking care of my body and my mind are top priorities for this year, so these items are designed to help me do that. I give myself permission to do nice things for myself, like going for walks, doing short courses, spending money on nice food, and meeting people.

I think it’s a pretty good looking list. I’ve covered all the bases of stuff I want to work on and continue to improve in the new year. If I think of any more concrete goals I’ll just add them onto the master list that I have on a Sticky Note on my computer desktop (so high-tech).

Thank-you to everyone who made 2015 amazing! I’ve learned so many things, like how to Blasphememe, and met new amazing people like Tay, Joe, and Charlie (my band, ❤ you guys). I’ve been pushing the boundaries of my mind, I’ve joined a new writing group, I’ve had a bunch of jobs, I nearly melted my brain with art, and I hope this year will be just as full of fabulousness (or possibly even more full)! I love you all. xo

 

*this has been greatly improved by consumption of coffee, I’m feeling pretty human now.

The Business of Creating

29 Sunday Nov 2015

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Last night I managed to get to the 50,000 word target of my fourth year of NaNoWriMo. Huzzah! I was so pleased to have been able to get it done, two days early, and with only a couple of thousand words worth of story to go. I’m going to wrap it up today and tomorrow and then put it away for a little while to stew.

NaNo-2015-Winner-Badge-Large-Square.jpg

I’ve had some conversations in the last little while about my plan for the future. The only problem is I don’t really have a well thought out and detailed plan. What I want is a job that I like well enough, that’s part-time so that I can do my creative stuff on the side, and possibly one day I’ll get a job where I can use my writing skills, but maybe not. That’s the plan.

At the moment I have a job placement which is three days per week doing Human Resources. It’s a refreshing change from the basic office admin job placements I’ve been doing recently so I’m really enjoying getting stuck in. It’s only until the end of the year though, and then I’ll be back to looking for ongoing work.

So here’s the new plan. Starting from now I’m going to work one day per week on my writing. Now that NaNoWriMo is finished for the year I really need to start doing something with my older manuscripts. The one I wrote last year, in particular, needs a whole bunch of structural edits and additional sections.

I’m going to do what I’ve heard other professional authors do, for example Dawn French and Fiona McIntosh, that is set myself a proper 9am to 5pm day of work for my writing. In the morning I will spend my time researching writing opportunities, applying for jobs, finding writing competitions, magazines and periodicals and blogs that are taking submissions and do that. This will be my time to work on this blog. I will also look into networking possibilities in the industry and short courses in writing that I might like to do.

In the afternoon I’m just going to write (and rewrite). I’m going to start with the manuscript from last year’s NaNoWriMo, which needs some big stuff done to it, and spend a couple of hours a week just going through it and fixing it. Editing has never been my strong suit, I’ve always be much more interested in coming up with new material, but I must spend the time revising and reworking. Maybe I’ll set myself a deadline of the end of January to have it done and I can start sending it to publishers.

Some of you may have noticed that that only adds up to four days work. You’re right, and the other day I’m going to keep for my band. We meet once a week usually, and rehearse for 4 or 5 hours. That takes up most of one day of the weekend. I will spend some of the time on the other weekday practicing and the rest of the day getting the chores and life admin stuff done that I would have done on the weekend. We’re also going to start looking for performance opportunities in the new year so I’ll schedule those in too.

My aim in this is to get myself into a routine. I’m not studying anymore and I hope to have a solid, ongoing job by early next year. It’s time to get serious about the business of creating and make sure that going back to uni was not just a frivolous escape from being at work.

Choose Your Own Adventure!

05 Thursday Nov 2015

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It’s November and that means it’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) time again. I got off to a slow start but I’m cracking along now. I have a very dull/not busy/not hard job at the moment and I’m able to do quite a lot of writing while I’m there. It makes the time go faster too. Double bonus!

On some sort of nostalgic whim I decided to write a Choose Your Own Adventure Novel. Remember those? All written in the second person, mostly targeted to tweens and teens, massively popular in the 80s and 90s. Well, I wanted to write one of those, and since I seem to write romance type novels, it’s a Choose Your Own Romance Adventure.

It's true, I have planned 20 failure endings and only 5 successful ones!

It’s true, I’ve planned 20 failure endings and only 5 successful ones!

It’s going great, once I got my head around keeping track of my loose ends. So far I have about nine thousand words and two failure endings. The biggest thing I had to get used to was that I now have to write sex scenes in the second person.

E.g. You run your hand along his jaw. He turns to you and kisses you deeply.

That sort of thing. At first it was very weird to write in second person, but I’m getting used to it. Every time I have to use you as plural, though, I tend to expand it to ‘you and Joe Bloggs do this’ because part of me thinks that You is the main character and therefore shouldn’t be confused with you plural.

Additionally one of my characters is called Felicity, which is apparently very hard to spell. There are going to be so many different misspellings of her name through the manuscript, but as is the motto of NaNoWriMo, write now, edit later. I’m also doing some of my writing on an iPad, which has a very strange and frustrating auto-correct system, so hopefully Future Me won’t be looking at a sentence and think what the hell? That’s not even English.

Anyway, just keeping you all updated. I might not be posting here much coz all of my words will be going to the novel, but you never know. Maybe I’ll be procrastinating.

Oh look, Amsterdam!

12 Wednesday Aug 2015

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Hullo dear readers!

I Amsterdam sign outside the Hermitage Portrait Museum

I Amsterdam sign outside the Hermitage Portrait Museum

I have now been in Amsterdam for about 10 days staying with some of my beautiful friends who moved here about two years ago. So far I have touristed thoroughly, in addition to eating all the things, sitting with some neighbours and pretending I understood what they were saying (and mostly getting a vague idea), BBQing in Vondelpark and cycling about the town, Weesp, where my friends now live.

I had hoped that I would be able to do some writing while I was away, but it doesn’t seem to have happened. Travelling is tiring, y’know? I have taken a few pictures around the place, and seen lots of cool museums.

One of them, the Eye Film Museum, had an exhibition by a South African artist/animator William Kentridge. The photo below is of his stencils which were used in the films that they had in the exhibition.

Stencils by William Kentridge

Stencils by William Kentridge at The Eye Film Museum

Watching the film installations in this exhibition, and having read the little blurbs that went with them, it became clear that I didn’t get it. Like, at all. I mean, I can be pretty arty, I can look at abstract paintings or see avant garde theatre and usually have some appreciation for the work but these film were just a bit beyond me.

Perhaps it’s fatigue to do with being away from home, perhaps it’s to do with his commentary on South African culture, which I admit I don’t know much about, or perhaps I just don’t get it.

The experience of being in the Netherlands was pretty surreal to start with, but after a while the architecture and the language and the flat landscape and the cars driving on the other side of the road and all the bicycles all combine and you realise you’re far from home and it’s nice. I leave here on Saturday for Edinburgh to catch the Fringe Festival. I suspect it’s going to be intense. I might have more time for blogging there but then again I might not.

An art group painting the fountain in Vondelpark

An art group painting the fountain in Vondelpark

Don’t dream it’s over…

20 Saturday Jun 2015

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Sorry, I know that’s not my line, but it seemed appropriate. Just a small update post, I feel like that’s all I’ve been doing lately, but maybe I’ll get inspired to do some more substantive posts soon.

1: Poetry

I recently attended a new poetry workshop/group in Melbourne’s CBD. This group is organised by a woman called Vicki, and I heard about it through my other writing group. I went along, I took two poems, one called “Crush”, which I’ve posted here and one which was an homage to Paradise Lost, which I wrote a couple of weeks ago. It’s always a bit of a risk going to a new group because you’re never sure how strong the criticism is going to be, and whether it will be delivered in a sensitive manner. There were nine people there, five who were new to the group. We went around the table and I was a little bit nervous because there was this one guy, (everyone I’ve spoken to about it seems to feel there’s always this one guy), who was very opinionated, talked over others, and who seemed to insist on getting the last word in. I read out “Crush” and was a bit concerned about his response to my work, but he wasn’t as bad as I thought he would be. I had some interesting feedback from some of the other poets, so that’s good. I haven’t decided whether I’ll keep going to this group but I’ll go once more before making up my mind.

2: Music

The band I was involved with disintegrated recently, I guess I should be sad, but I think it had had its time. I’m looking for other opportunities to play bass, but in the meantime I got a piano keyboard (a present from Mum), and have joined a choir, so that’s keeping me busy till I find another band or regular jamming session to be part of. I may have to re-evaluate my goal of performing before the end of the year, but I’m going to try to do it anyway! If you’re a band looking for a bassist let me know!

Here is a picture of me with the photographer Meiki’s bass and my new haircut.

This is bass face

This is bass face

3: Writing

I’ve finished the initial draft of my third NaNoWriMo manuscript. It’s pretty dark and I really need to start going through it, but I’ve been feeling a bit avoidant. Part of me is worried that when I read it back I’ll hate it, but hopefully I’ll be pleasantly surprised. I’m setting tomorrow morning aside for it.

4: Work

I’ve been offered full time temping work for the next little while, so I’m enjoying the inflow of money, and given that I’ll be travelling in August I’m trying to earn as much as I can. I’ve been applying for ‘real’ jobs, mostly in HR, but I’m not going to take one just because I’m offered one. I think the temping will see me through until I can find a permanent job that really speaks to me. I’m not 100% sure what that means just yet, but I’m sure by being open to opportunities, one will come my way that’s just right.

I promise I will read them all…

28 Thursday May 2015

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Or at least start them all. Honest!

I’ve just finished a three week seminar series at Kew Library on Romance Writing run by Anne Gracie (see the end), and I may have accidentally bought a book (which she signed, so that’s cool right?). I have so many books in the ‘to read’ pile, added to steadily by the lists of novels set for uni, of which many are now partially read. However, I have exciting news:

I have finished my degree!!

Well, okay, not technically. I have one more essay to do, due on 12 June, and then I still have to pass all my subjects, and then I have to have the graduation ceremony in October, but I still think of this as being the end. I made it through! I’m very pleased with myself for finishing it, for sticking out full-time study again as a grown up, and for pursuing things that make me happy. And soon I’ll have the piece of paper to prove it!

I now promise myself to slowly, but surely, make my way through the ‘to read’ pile. All reading on public transport, waiting for appointments, while on lunch breaks and before falling asleep can now be for fun!

I promise to spend more time writing. It’s true that for the last 12 months while doing full-time uni I’ve been doing quite a lot of uni writing, (for example I have pumped out 5,500 words in the last two days, which I think is pretty impressive), but it isn’t the same as writing for fun. I know that it’s all very well to say I will write more, and when there’s nothing stopping you it’s easier to be disenchanted with it, but I hope to be able to set up a more productive writing routine, and finish that third manuscript! (And write more here).

For those who are interested in hearing a bit about the Romance Writing thing I mentioned at the start, it was very interesting, I got lots of great writing tips, lots of names of writers, mostly romance, for me to follow up on (even more for the ‘to read’ pile!), and a lot of new writing contacts with whom I hope to share my work for to get feedback and have fresh eyes look over it. Anne Gracie is very generous with her time and is super lovely, so if you ever have the opportunity to go to one of her sessions, and you’re a writer of any sort of genre or commercial fiction, she’s a great teacher!

Finally, here’s a gratuitous picture of me from a couple of weeks ago because I’ve been pretty quiet lately and you all deserve a photo.

GPOS - photo by Meiki

GPOS – photo by Meiki

Alright, that’s it, you can all go home

19 Sunday Apr 2015

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And so it was that we came to closing night of the MICF for this year. I have some mixed feelings about my festival experience. I saw nine shows, which is more I think than any year previously, but I also wanted to see so many more shows but didn’t/couldn’t for various reasons. I mean they were pretty good reasons, I was sick for a bit, then I spent a whole weekend in Adelaide, and then I had obscene amounts of uni work. But still –

Anyway, let me just give you a quick run down of my last shows:

Ross Noble / Tangentleman 

Ross Noble seems to make most of his material up as he goes along, it’s a sort of surrealist/childish/bollocks-fuelled journey into his brain and I laughed so hard I was sweating (please tell me I’m not the only person who does that). There was one joke that was a bit off in my opinion, but I guess that’s going to happen from time to time when you make it up as you go along.

Backwards Anorak / A Hip Hikers Guide to the Galaxy

I saw Backwards Anorak do a cabaret show last year based heavily on Game of Thrones, and it was pretty funny, except I’m not into GoT so I didn’t get some of the jokes. I’m totally into The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy so I thought I’d go better. I guess maybe they’re work is… well, absurd is maybe the word for it. I laughed, I enjoyed myself, I sang along and did the dance moves (apparently no-one else in the audience did them though, I discovered that when I turned around, awkward!) but it was still pretty incomprehensible. Good, incomprehensible, with singing.

Clem Bastow / Escape from L.A. 

I’ve read some of Clem’s work in The Age, and I respect her politics and her puke yellow armpit hair choices, so I thought I should see her. Her show was great, although her sound guy was odd. I suppose that’s a bit what you get for going on the last night. Also it wasn’t stand-up, it was an amusing story. A very good, amusing story.

There were so many other deserving, fabulous artists/comedians at the festival this year, as there are every year, and I wish I had had the opportunity to see more. I have a Facebook friend who was seeing two or three shows per night for the whole festival, I was jealous. One day, I’m going to write a show and maybe I’ll have the guts to put it on at the MICF. Until then I’ll just go to lots of shows, I’ll see weird lucky dip shows, and random what’s-on-in-the-next-half-hour-shows and see people I’ve heard of sometimes too. I’ll continue to sit in the front row, on my own, because no-one wants to play to an empty front row, and also fuck it, when else do you get to get up in a performer’s grill like that?

Anyway, I guess that’s it. I’m at home in bed with a knee blankey because it’s cold, thanks Melbourne weather. I’m looking forward to getting to some more comedy and theatre in the next few months and I might even get to some Fringe Festival show when it comes around later in the year.