Whilst squashed between hordes of my fellow commuters on the tram this evening, I looked out at the gridlock of cars on St Kilda road, and happened to notice how many of the drivers of these cars were sitting there with novels splayed open against their steering wheels.
How whimsical, I thought, if traffic jams were [...]

No, this won’t be one of those posts lamenting the ubiquity of dirigibles and fair maidens and their related plot points, so never fear.
The Melbourne Writers Festival is currently in full swing, with all sorts of exciting things listed in the programme during the hours of 9-5, when lucky people like me are sitting at [...]

A passage from Downtown, chapter 17

The air grew spindly with the whir of spoked wheels, that sort of hissing, whizzing sound for which a hundred onomatopoeic words are coined, as though someone were knitting together the salubrious thickness of nothingness, clacking and creating with such speed that each stitch became indistinguishable beyond the blur of [...]

The other day I set aside the novel to try to work up a short story for a competition that closes soon.  I had my idea, a character, a cup of coffee, and was merrily typing away.  But then something terrible happened.
I was writing dialogue.
I picked up my laptop and waved it agitatedly* in front [...]

There are two language-related things that entertain me greatly: the creative application of apostrophes, and amibiguity.  I am aware that these two things are probably not the most exciting or daredevil of hobbies (although some of the misapostrophication out there is gasp-inducing in a manner not unlike that of watching a car spin out of [...]

I’m about three quarters of the way through the book I’m reading, which is a young adult fantasy novel.  I’ve noticed all of a sudden an abrupt shift in not just the pacing but also the level of world-building.  The characters have gone from being in a country setting into an urban environment, and where [...]

For the purpose of making my life easier whilst editing this beast of a novel (well, not so much beast as small, furry, slightly feral animal), I’ve created separate documents for each of my chapters, and organisational measure that also has the advantage of making me look wonderfully prolific. Yesterday I finished editing chapter 15, [...]

It seems last night that the stars and moon and somesuch aligned, and I actually watched something on TV.  The something ended up being a Philip Pullman documentary, which isn’t an entirely bad thing with which to break a television drought of many, many months.
One of the interesting things that Pullman brought up was the [...]

A writer friend and I were chatting the other day about titles, as he’d been told by his agent that the title of his novel was Simply Too Long, and that long titles are more appropriate to novellas or short stories (perhaps because the former are unmarketable anyway, so why bother, and the former are [...]

A Field Guide to Surreal Botany, through Two Cranes Press, has been released.  It contains my piece ‘The Nabokov’, which was co-authored with Ben Peek.