This page is for general discussion about any writerly topic you wish – if it’s related to writing, reading, books, you’re in the right place.
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This page is for general discussion about any writerly topic you wish – if it’s related to writing, reading, books, you’re in the right place.
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29 Comments
June 1, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Does anyone else get allergic to secondhand books? I would save a fortune if I they didn’t make me sneeze so much – drives me nuts. Solutions??
June 1, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Charlotte! That’s a tad weird, not to mention annoying for you! One solution might be to wear a face mask (I’ve seen a few lately on the tram, too)?! Do library books elicit the same response?
June 1, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Is it weird? Hmm dunno ’bout library books, I am so hopeless at returning things I stay away from library books. The mask is a fine idea, I suppose, as long as I only do it in private…
June 4, 2009 at 5:25 pm
OPPORTUNITY FOR ALUMNI
I have had an email from Amelia Veale of the Broken Hill Regional Writers’ Centre – they would like applications for their writers’ residency. I can’t do it next year but asked if she would like me to canvass Alumni and she said yes please – details here:
My name is Amelia Veale and I am the Literary Coordinator of the Broken Hill Regional Writers’ Centre (BHRWC). I am in the process of planning our program of events for 2010 and would like to determine the interest, availability and cost for you to participate in a residency in Broken Hill next year? The BHRWC is a small centre at which I am the only employee, working two days per week. We are based in the City Library and operate through Council so this allows us extra resources to run residencies.
An author residency in Broken Hill usually consists of a mix of activities such as workshops at local schools, writing workshops at the library, one-on-one mentoring session etc. We usually tailor the mix to suit individual authors.
If you are interested in this opporunity, can you please fill-in the details below and also provide me with:
1 – Current CV: (no more than 3 x A4 pages) highlighting qualifications, achievements and referees.
2 – Residency Proposal: (no more than 1 x A4 page), including well-defined objectives, outcomes and target group.
3 – Support material (for example, biography, newspaper articles)
Contact Details:
Name:………………………………………………………………………………………
Address:………………………………………………………………………………………..
Home Phone: ………………………… Mobile Phone: ………………………………..
Email:…………………………… ………… ABN:……………………………………….
Date of Birth: ………………………….Australian Resident: Y / N
Residency Details:
Residency stream applied for: Fully-Funded
Genre: ……………………………………………………………………………………..
Target Group/s: …………………………………………………………………………..
Residency Time Frame (Max. 2 weeks, Min. 3 days)…………………………………
Preferred Dates: Start ………………………….End……………………………………
Professional Fees (indication):…………………………………………………………. (The BHRWC usually pays $800 artistic fee per week plus $200 stipend but this is negotiable)
Fully funded residencies such as this, cover all residency costs including transport to Broken Hill, accommodation in Broken Hill at the Artback Cottage (two bedroom house which can accommodate authors family if applicable) plus a negotiated fee and weekly stipend.
If you have any questions on this, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Kind regards, Amelia
Amelia Veale
Broken Hill Regional Writers’ Centre
(08) 8080 3460 ; 0417 830 334
June 9, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Hi Charlotte,
Do you think they wold be interested in Life Writing/Memoir? I have always wanted to do workshops at Broken Hill – it’s about the only place I haven’t done one – oh Hobart and Perth too, so if you hear of residencies there….. Btw, this is my first blogging response ever, I feel naked in the street. Patti
June 9, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Hi Patti, I’m not answering for Charlotte, I know she’ll pop her head back into the discussion soon, but just wanted to say how glad I am that your first blogging response was here
and that the Katherine Susannah Pritchard Writers’ Centre in Perth is accepting submissions for residencies at the moment – http://kspf.iinet.net.au/writer_res_info.html
The house is in a beautiful part of WA
June 10, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Hi Patti – why not? I have no idea if they have restrictions on genre, but I’m sure they’d be very open to an inquiry. Just call or email Amelia and ask her – woops I meant to put her email address there but now can’t find it – anyone else have it?
C
June 7, 2009 at 8:54 am
Cheers for Catherine
Check out this killer review – congrats Catherine!
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25575026-5003900,00.html
June 10, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Congrats Catherine! Hope you frame that one on your wall for all to see (I sure would!)
June 9, 2009 at 10:32 am
Wow, that’s a DREAM review!
June 9, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Oh my god, that’s a fantastic review! Wouldn’t that give you a warm glow and a half?!
June 10, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Hello Alumni,
A request — I’m looking for multiple secondhand copies of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. If you have a spare copy you would be happy to donate to a half-baked arts project (Emma embodied by sentences) I would be most appreciative. Let me know if you’d like a copy of a much lesser novel by return post: Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living.
Carrie Tiffany
PO Box 1135
Mitcham North
Vic 3132
June 10, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Hey Carrie- can I be really cheeky and ask what you’re working on now? I loved Everyman’s Rules and I am desperate for more
June 15, 2009 at 8:23 pm
Hi Kathy,
I’ve had a big lump of time away from writing with a very demanding fulltime job, but just recently, this month in fact, I’ve picked up my novel again and am trying to work out if it still has life in it. Hard to describe, but it seems to be mainly about cows, kookaburras and sex!
June 16, 2009 at 7:31 am
Hooray!
June 18, 2009 at 7:14 pm
When to hold on and when to let go?
I have had a very strange month where I have gone from elation to the black pit of despair and back again…. over, of course, a novel manuscript.
The thing that kept me up at night was whether to hold on to this piece of work, redraft, and try and publish or whether to let go and move on.
On the subject, my friend H, a director, actor and writer, suggested having more than one project on the go was a very beneficial thing for a number of reasons. But did I have the concentration/energy to do this? Wasn’t multi-tasking dead?
On Monday I discovered I had an agent. This was very exciting. It seemed the book might go ’somewhere’… and I might be an author after all… and then the question came.
Did I want to keep going with it?
It was asked openly and honestly with no hint of ‘…becuase you shouldn’t’ but it took me straight back to the week before. But not for long.
I foudn myself responding that no, I wasn’t ready to let the work go and yes, I wanted to keep going.
So I am. I think I like my manuscript.
But I think this question will probably come up again and again – when to hold on and when to let go? When to let go a little? When to redo everything. Etc.
Thoughts? I need your thoughts!!!
June 19, 2009 at 10:07 am
Hey Clare! Congratulations on getting an agent- that’s fantastic news!
I came up against this same problem recently, and I asked myself what I was sacrificing by continuing with the manuscript. I came to the conclusion that it would take about three months to finish it, so I might as well. I also recognised a pattern that when I get to the middle of an MS, I often want to throw in the towel because it all gets too hard, but now know this is just part of the process, and it’s best to persevere.
I would argue that if an agent is interested in your work, it is definitely worth plugging away at! Writing a novel is like being in a relationship, sometimes you’ll bicker, fight, even walk away, but true love always triumphs in the end.
July 14, 2009 at 7:10 pm
Hi Kathy
Thanks – and I agree with all you say.
I think I have the idea that even contemplating putting something aside is giving up and that entertaining this thought = doom. But so many writers write 1, 2, 3, 4 etc. manuscripts before being published… I guess the fear I have is that a real writer keeps going, unpublished.
Looking forward to your (first) novel.
C
July 14, 2009 at 7:13 pm
… and ps. that I am not a real writer because the thought of keeping going with 2nd and 3rd manuscripts with no published first book was unthinkable (ah the shame in admitting this…)
Am not v good at this blogging yet.
July 22, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Clare
I have been working on the same manuscript for the past four years,with a great deal of time invested in it (I am blessed in having the privilege of being able to write full time, so it’s been four years, five days a week, eight hours a day.) My journey with this manuscript has been endless submissions to programmes such as the Varuna HarperCollins Award and Longlines, starting three years ago with Varuna HC (no cigar) then getting a Longlines consultation (informative) then long-listed for the 2009 V HC, then shortlisted, then winning the thing.
Only to be told by my Senior Editor that my ending sucked. As the story is modelled on my husband’s life in Pakistan, the end was what it was, dammit.
Or no?
My editor told me that the Pakistan setting was infinitely more interesting than ending it with an unfortunate emigration to Australia.
Right. (with a little voice in my head screaming “How the hell are you going to end it if not the way it hapened?”) I emailed back immediately, saying I had cut it.
During the ten days at Varuna, I had charmed, lively, enthusiastic conversations with my editor, who was utterly into the story, and I came away with a sort of wish-list we had put together. And now, two months later, I have a completely new, more interesting, more complicated ending , 50,000 new words’ worth of the total 140,000, and my editor is currently reading it.
It IS worth the doing, the refining, the refocussing – IF you believe enough in the value of the story you have to tell. In my case, I had another kaleidoscope through which to look at my work, and how positive, how helpful it has been.
July 24, 2009 at 10:46 am
Dear Maryanne
What a journey – it is sort of courageous. That belief in the importance of story and the guts to keep going. I can’t wait to read it when it is publsihed – and it will be.
Susanne
July 28, 2009 at 12:19 pm
funny funny that i never for a moment thought of myself as being courageous. Just determined. Just as a believer. Just damned committed.
We’ll see if it has turned out to be what the editor envisioned.
But thank you for the encouraging thought that it will be published.
Are you the Susanne in the throes of de-tox? If you are, heated V8 juice with a blob of plain youghurt in the middle and a sprinkling of chopped coriander is quite yummy.
m
July 28, 2009 at 1:45 pm
I need de-tox, but I’m not that Susanne.
July 29, 2009 at 12:52 pm
yes I realised I had the wrong person later.
I just received my first copy of the ABR and was rather chagrined to read some of the commentary on being an artist in Australia. After having lived 25 years overseas, I found myself wondering if there is a difference between being an ‘artist’ (read writer) in Australia and being a writer anywhere else.
It seems to me that Australian writers appear to somehow accept that they abide in a country that still lives up to its 1950’s stereotype — beer and skittles, a cultural wasteland in which the voice of the writer is but a reed shaking in the wilderness.
At the risk of laying myself open to criticism, I would say the following:
In Europe, the writer is perceived as a prophetic voice, one that is treated with some amount of circumspection in that he speaks in the voice of ‘the culture.’ They are used to having a culture – like having grandparents, ancestors, whose presence is palpable and somehow relevant. Dante lives on and is referred to by all and sundry as “Il Poeta” and everyone knows who you’re talking about. In the US, the writer is something of a rebel, a revolutionary, a ’seer’ who points society in perhaps a new direction. Hemingway and Kerouac, Raymond Carver. . .
Hmmm, and in Australia? (Now, I am not one who rubs elbows with the writers of note in this country but I would say this is what I came away with from the ABR.) When a writer like Michelle de Kretser says in reply to the question, “Do you feel artists are valued in our society” the following:
“Not particularly– which is fine by me.”
Already I’m nervous. why should it be ‘fine by you’ I think. ‘You’ve dedicated your life to writing, and it’s ‘fine by me’ that you’re under-appreciated’? I read on after that. . .”Artists have more to fear from attention than benign neglect.”
What! And here I go back to my original post in which I felt the need to say that I am driven by passion, the need to tell the story I am telling. I surmise,”So I’m the weirdo here.”
Michelle goes on regardless of my interruptions to say, “What’s sad is that art isn’t particularly valued in Australia. We don’t value education either and one thing leads to another.”
Oh dear.
I have been an art dealer in my life, both here and in the US and I’m always wondering about that, especially since I sold a Picasso to a cowboy in Chicago and sold more paintings than anyone else had ever sold of a leading Australian war artist, and have to conclude that it’s about the conviction of the person doing the ’selling.’
So perhaps I am left wondering that if it is true that writers are willing or accepting of the fact that what they do is undervalued, then that is how it shall be.
I went to the dentist yesterday, who with the utmost serenity told me I was facing two appointments that would cost me $850 each (on top of the $350 the original appointment had cost) and did I wonder if he had no confidence in what he was doing, or whether or not what he was proposing to do was ‘worth’ it?
Nope.
Why write if you don’t think it’s valuable, necessary, and an integral part of the culture? Why be Yo Yo Ma if you can take or leave the cello, or Patrick White if you think Voss wasn’t really worth the bother or the ink?
Whassermatter here? Is cringing self-imposed?
“Mah!” as they say in Italy when completely baffled.
July 10, 2009 at 10:38 am
Emerging Writers’ Festival looking for board members – http://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=53416bda6a5955c6a6fe99bd6&id=dc009ebdcb
July 13, 2009 at 9:46 am
Have you checked out Meanjin’s blog, Spike? It’s great. And today Meanjin links to some excellent-sounding blogs about etiquette of ms submission to agents & publishers – have a look here:
http://www.meanjin.com.au/spike-the-meanjin-blog/post/dear-guru-publishing-and-ethical-woes/
July 13, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Hey all – Varuna gal Paddy O’Reilly’s novel The Factory is being read on Radio National for the Book Reading at the moment, 2pm every day I believe . Tune in – I will be for sure.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookreading/stories/2009/2618153.htm
July 28, 2009 at 10:03 am
A room to write in.
I’m looking for a quiet room to write in monday-friday 9-5 within wobbly cycling distance of Carlton, Vic. I can pay a small rent. Please contact Carrie Tiffany on 0405 697 548 or at carrie65@optusnet.com.au
October 15, 2009 at 8:48 am
Varuna’s screenwriting forum is now open for bookings with a brilliant lineup of industry people – check out the program here: http://varuna.com.au/pathwaysforum.html#program