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, containing my piece ‘The Nabokov’ (co-authored with Ben Peek), has been released.  In honour of this, here’s a summary of a flower that exists (fleetingly) in my Downtown world:
Virginflower
The virginflower is characterised by the soft, pure flesh of its bloom, which is bell-shaped and resembles the form of a veiled [...]

I started writing Downtown perhaps two years ago now, taking a fairly substantial break (and from writing in general) whilst completing my honours year at uni last year. There’s definitely a noticeable disjunct between the then and now writing styles, not necessarily in term of my general verbosity, because that’s a given, and to [...]

Time, for me (and I suppose for everyone else), always seems to be quite spare, slipping through my fingers like fish and moving along at a rate frowned upon by whoever sets the speed limits on the roads. I always worry that I’m going to wake up tomorrow and be eighty.
As much [...]

I’ve been mulling (and cringing) of late over some of the dialogue I’ve been encountering in both my readerly and writerly travels.  There is most certainly some ongoing, insidious renaissance of sorts of old-fashioned dialogical pretension, or perhaps it’s merely a morbid authorial fear of abbreviations, or an unbridled desire to apprise the reader as [...]

Last week I received a flurry of frantic text messages from my grandmother telling me to enter a competition being run through an ABC radio show called NightLife.  The competition involved writing and sending in the first paragraph of the ‘great Australian novel’, which I did, or at least sort of did, given that mine [...]