Tag Archives: novel

Pre-order ‘Discovering the Franklins’

18 Friday Jan 2019

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I’m super excited to announce that my second novel, Discovering the Franklins, is now available to pre-order on Amazon and all other relevant sales channels!

Over the Christmas break away from my day job I finished the very last edits and I’m ready to show my new baby to the world.

thumbnail_discovering the franklins

I am also having a book launch event in Melbourne for fans who are interested in purchasing a signed, hard copy version of the book. It will be February 17, 2019, from 5:00-7:00pm. If you’re interested to attend please email me for address details.

For international hard-copy readers, I can mail you a signed copy, or you can order through Amazon.

I will have copies of my first novel, Sophie’s Path, available to purchase at the launch and copies of my poetry zine.

Thank you to Charmaine Ross for the gorgeous cover, to Annie Seaton for editing, and my mum, Jenny for the beta-reading and proof reading. Thank you also to all my supportive writing buddies, my friends and by family for helping keep me on track to get this done. I couldn’t have done it without you (please buy my book!).

Goals for 2019

01 Tuesday Jan 2019

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Last Friday I went to a workshop that I found through Meetup.com. I frequently attend Meetup events that have highly variable outcomes – some have been really great and positive, like one group for artists which was really positive and motivating for several months. Other times, like a board game night I went to recently can be full of people who make it not fun. But to get back to the point, this workshop was to create a vision board. These are essentially a big seven year plan with pictures. I’d heard of vision boards before, I thought they were mainly nonsense, but it sounded like it might be fun.

When I got there, a room full of women did a meditation and then cut and pasted pictures out from magazines, some of which where twenty years old, onto big coloured cardboard sheets. I’m going to re-do it – either as a list or with pictures from the internet which more closely match what I’m looking for. The magazine pictures were a bit too commercial and a bit too old school for me.

fireworks

Traditionally one of the first things I do in the new year is make up my goals for the next twelve months. Many of my goals remain the same from last year; I’ll do NaNoWriMo again, and NaPoWriMo, as they both generate a good amount of first draft material.

I’m not going to do a fringe show this year, but Alex and I are planning to work on another top-secret project instead. We’re also looking at writing a sitcom and will do a show in 2020.

I have a couple of maybe goals in there too. I have a manuscript that I started last year but abandoned because I couldn’t get the pacing right; I’ll go back to that project to see if it’s salvageable as a short story or novella. I’m also thinking about publishing one of my other back-catalogue manuscripts in the last quarter of the year, but that will depend on how much time and energy I have by then.

My 2019 Goals!

  • Publish ‘Discovery of the Franklins’
  • NaNoWriMo 2019
  • Finish manuscript from NANoWriMo 2018
  • NaPoWriMo 2019
  • Sitcom
  • Top Secret Project
  • Wasted Monday performances
  • Blogging
  • Life Models’ Society Exhibition
  • Life Models’ Society 30th anniversary

Maybe/if I have time:

  • Self-publish one of my other manuscripts
  • Finish/rework shorts story/novella

I’m glad I did the vision boarding workshop. Long term goal setting exercises are important to undertake every so often; it makes me feel less like I’m making things up as I go along. I’ll re-evaluate against the long term and annual goals as I go to make sure my priorities and values haven’t changed along the way (this happens at work all the time!).

I hope you’ve all had a productive, happy, and positive 2018. I wish you all of that for 2019. I’m starting to make my own luck and I’m really loving it.

Inspiration and Planning

15 Saturday Dec 2018

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Today I attended the end of year gathering with my poetry group. We get together in an inspiring place, today it was the National Gallery of Victoria at Federation Square, and we write, if we’re inspired, or sit and ponder, if we’re not inspired. Then we have lunch.

I went through the George Baldessin and Brett Whiteley exhibition. I’ve always like Whiteley’s work; it speaks to be somehow. I didn’t care for Baldessin. I didn’t actively dislike his work, but I didn’t like it either. Except for these pears.

IMAG1905

George Baldessin sculpture in the foreground, Brett Whiteley painting in the background.

I wrote an ekphrastic poem, while looking at Whiteley’s ‘The American Dream’ mural. I’ll post it next week after I’ve had a chance to revise it.

For now I’m just going to leave you with this teaser: I’m planning to self publish my second novel in February. The exact date is still TBC as I have a lot of work to do to get it ready, but I’ll have a cover to show you in the next few weeks and then I’ll be able to announce the release date.

It’s a relatively short novel, around 50k words. I’m feeling good about it, which is a bit of a weird feeling for me; most of the time I don’t think very highly of my work.

I’ve also started thinking about my New Year’s goals. Each year I’ve written myself a to-do list and I sometimes get stuff done, and sometimes don’t. I’ll be posting a new list and a wrap up of last year in January. I feel like I’ve come quite a long way recently and I’m sure I have a lot of room to grow and develop too. I’m looking forward to it.

NaPoWrimo – Winning

02 Wednesday May 2018

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This is a short post to say I finished NaPoWriMo with thirty new poems. Congratulations to me and anyone else who decided to do the challenge.

Some are pretty good, others are a bit wobbly. I only had to catch up one. I went through the poems I had handwritten to put them onto the computer, I discovered I’d skipped a day somehow. Possibly there’s a poem hiding in a notebook or on a scrap of paper somewhere, but I haven’t found it yet.

I may post a couple of the poems here in the coming months, and I may put some into the next edition poetry chapbook. If you’re interested in buying one of the current chapbooks, for $1 (plus postage), let me know.

I’ve started to make the puppets for our new show, working on the cover image, venue selection and registration. We should have that all in place for the end of May. Well, not the puppets, they’ll take a bit longer.

I have a new idea for a story, it might be a novel or it might be a novella. It’s based on a character from another story. It’s set in the 80s so that will involve some fun/weird research. Once I get into the swing of it I hope the words will flow easier, right now they’re still a trickle.

Get the coffee pot ready

29 Sunday Oct 2017

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It’s that time again, the lead up to NaNoWriMo. Each November hundreds of thousands of writers around the world commit to writing, the goal is to write a 50k word novel over the month, but writers can approach it however it suits them. I’ve done this month long writing sprint five times already (and I got 50k words each time). Talk about glutton for punishment, am I right?

Nanowrimo

It’s only a few days away and I haven’t got a story idea yet. I’m thinking maybe

more of a family saga than the relationship focused stories I’ve done in the past. I’ll put a romance into it, because I like that sort of thing, but the family dynamics is where my interest is at the moment.

A couple of times over the last month I’ve had conversations with people about my writing. I’ve told them them I have five novel length manuscripts in varying states of polish. Four of these have been submitted to traditional publishers but so far no one has chosen to pick them up.

Sometimes it feels hard to explain to people that I’m a writer when I haven’t had my stories published. I feel like they look at it as a badge of worth. Other writers, of course, understand that if is incredibly difficult to have your writing picked up by a traditional publisher. J.K. Rowling, famously, had eleven publishers reject Harry Potter, and Virginia Woolf published herself.

I know my work is developing and my style is becoming more clear with every project I do. People I’ve shown my work to have responded positively, but occasionally I have doubts. I’ve put a lot of hours into writing in the last six so years. It’s been a labour of love; I do it because, as tortured as the process can be sometimes, I like having written. I like that I’m a writer.

Whether I make it to being an ‘author’ with a traditionally published book remains to be seen. I’ll continue to write novels, and maybe only five people with ever read them. But maybe I’ll find an audience and it will make a difference to someone’s life.

For now, I’ll put the coffee pot on and get down to business. I’ll have to say no to social outings, because for the next month I need to write at least 1700 words a day. And I’ll do it, because I’m stubborn like that. You can follow my progress here. See you on the other side.

Feeding the darkness

14 Friday Nov 2014

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This November I have undertaken my third attempt at NaNoWriMo, a challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. So far I have been doing really well, I’ve been writing consistently and I’ve managed to stay a little bit ahead of the target. Today I crossed the halfway point, 25,000 words, with a day to spare. So, YAY!

The last two times I’ve done this I’ve been writing love stories. I’ve been writing about people who are generally heading towards a happy ending. This year, for various reasons, I’ve decided to explore the darkness. I’ve heard writers talk about their characters as though they’re real people, as though writing a book is about sitting down and listening/watching the characters interact and writing it down. I’ve never really felt like I understood that concept until I started this story.

With each chapter I write, I feel like the darkness in my characters becomes more real. I feel like they’re evolving in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. It’s amazing and it makes the task of writing them really interesting but it’s also a little bit worrying. Where is this darkness coming from? What part of me is generating these awful scenarios? Am I a bad person for coming up with this stuff?

I know that I’m not, I know that everyone has darkness in them, that voice that whispers ‘drive over the edge’ on cliff roads. And I know that there are people who spent a lot of time analysing why the public are so enamoured of crime novels. Something about catharsis, about expressing our violent urges vicariously through the characters. I guess I’m just a little bit surprised by how easily this stuff is coming out of my head.

Hopefully the end result will be something people want to read, and not something that’s so completely depressing that no one can finish it. I guess I won’t know till it’s done and I give it to someone!

Onwards little words, marching towards 50,000. Now I’m going to watch something funny on the internet.

Just a sort of update post

03 Monday Feb 2014

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Dear Readers, I know that lately you have only been hearing from me doing movie review. I’m really enjoying posting journalistic(ish) entries but I thought maybe it was time for a bit of an update on where I’m at with some other stuff I’m doing.

Firstly, I’m almost finished my second edit of my NaNoWriMo novel from last year. I’ve given it to a few people to read any they have enjoyed it, so I’m feeling pretty good about it. I’m hoping to start submitting it to publishers in the next few weeks. This is ahead of the schedule I made for myself in my New Year’s post, so yay!

Sort of related to this I went to a workshop yesterday held at Richmond Library called ‘Writing Sex and Intimacy’, facilitated by Narrelle M. Harris. Narrelle is fabulously knowledgeable about writing (and writing sex/intimacy), she knows how to write and she knows how to explain what she’s doing to others (she is also a massive Sherlock fan, which helps). I went into the workshop hoping that I would learn something, and even if not that I would have some of my beliefs/practises validated by someone who gets paid to write. Both of those things were achieved, I’m really pleased that I decided to attend. I also had a bit of a chat with Narrelle after the workshop and I now have a couple of new small scale publishers that I might submit my work to.

Secondly, I’ve been working on adapting this second novel into a screenplay. It has actually been a lot more difficult than I first imagined. For example I’ve had to lose a lot of the backstory because I couldn’t work out how to get it in there without flashbacks which are awful. I’ve been aiming for it to be a feature length film script, usually between 90-120 pages, and so far I’m about three quarters of the way through the novel and I’m already at 108 pages. I’m going to have to go through with a massive red pen to get it to an industry accepted length. I considered trying for a mini-series or something, but I think the story works best as a single feature. I’m sure I can tighten everything up with some editing to get it to a reasonable length. However, I’m going to have to revise my deadline for this to the end of Feb, which is later than I had planned but it’s just taking longer than I thought it would.

Related to this, I’ve been trying to make some contacts who are working in, or hoping to work in, the film industry around Melbourne. On Saturday I attended a meetup.com gathering of aspiring film makers which was a good opportunity to meet and greet some other like minded individuals. I must admit that it was a bit awkward, the facilitators of the group didn’t seem to have a very solid structure for the meeting, so there were some mildly uncomfortable moments. None-the-less I now have contact details for a few screenwriters so I’m hoping to use them for their brains at some point in getting feedback on the screenplay when it’s done.

Finally, I attended a fantastic spoken word/performance evening at Hares and Hyenas as part of Midsumma, called ‘Trip the Word Fantastic’. There were six performers; three poets and three singer/songwriters. There were three sets, the first set was Madeline Radke, a beautiful singer down from Brisbane and poetry from Rebecca Maxwell, who I know through the Boroondara Writer’s Group and who has kindly been helping my with editing my novel. Rebecca’s poetry is extremely evocative and had at least one member of the audience in tears. The second set constisted of poetry from Marion May Campbell and music from Phoebe Jacobs. Phoebe’s voice is deep and dark and rich like honey, her guitar playing was stripped back. Marion’s poetry had a real energy to it, I hesitate to call it manic, but it was definitely driven. The third set was poetry by ReVerse Butcher, who organised the evening so props to her for fabulous event management skills, and music by Essie Thomas. ReVerse’s style seems to be reminiscent of William S. Burroughs, it seems to be cut up and mixed up and put back together in interesting ways. She also had multimedia accompaniment for her reading which added another layer to her complicated work. Essie Thomas finished up the night with a wildly passionate set of original songs. Essie has a growly, powerful, throaty voice and the most beautiful, intense blue eyes; I was mesmerised by her and by the end I’d fallen in love with her a little bit.

I know that’s a bit of a shitty review, in the sense of doing no justice at all to the experience and hard work and brilliance of the performers but I hope it gives you a sense of the event. If you have the chance to see any of these people perform in the future – DO IT!

Well, that sort of wraps up my update sort of post. I’ve been keeping busy, trying to be sociable, trying to get some work done, keep up with exercising and generally do all the things. I’m not sure how I’ll cope when I go back to uni at the end of February, but I’m sure I’ll muddle my way through, I always do.