• The Story Behind the Book

    “This” Announcement

    I haven’t blogged since my dearest friend Blaise passed away. Outside of my tribute to her, writing – as a practice – just seemed meaningless. It took a couple of months before that internal narrative began to chug again, however sporadically. It hasn’t genuinely sparked my imagination yet. There were things I was working on, and things I wanted to begin, but I’ve (since) found trouble getting into them. The best I’ve managed is some rants about football and one Star Wars review. I’ve focused on revision – the last redraft of a new novel (which Blaise, always my primary alpha reader, was halfway through reading), and then various scripts.…

  • The Story Behind the Book

    Pride: The Journey to Publication

    After I serialized Pride on my website, I submitted it to a few publishers without any luck. That I had no idea what I was doing didn’t help. Come 2009, I applied for the Olvar Wood Fellowship – a program run by Queensland writers Inga Simpson and Nike Bourke that involved mentoring and workshops. At the time, I was struggling with the beginning of chronic neck issues – the result of hunching over a laptop while editing all day. I went to bed after one lengthy editing session with a tightness in my right shoulder blade. The next day I woke with spasms to the right side of my neck.…