Whenever I’ve seen writers being interviewed, people have asked them about their writing process. Some answer this question with comments about where or when they like to write, others answer it with how they tackle a new idea and if they plot every detail out or if they just jump into the writing of it, and yet others respond with comments on the research they do first, the questions they ask, the specific details they like to know before they even begin writing a word of the story itself. Every time I hear them answer, they seem so certain in their response to this. Yet when I think about how I would answer such a question, my answer does not seem neat and clean - it seems as messy and chaotic as my life often appears to be…
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That’s the thing about schedules: I don’t tend to like them because, as a school teacher, I feel like my life is set by them constantly. Yet they’re effective and I know given how busy I am outside of work too, they’re clearly a necessity…
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Right now, my organisation system is a complete mess. Over the past ten years I have worked on four different laptops — two Toshibas, a Sony Vaio, and now a Mac for those who are interested — and as such, a lot of my writing is spread across all of those hard drives…
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This week, we get the keys to our new house.
I am excited about this for so many reasons; we plan for this to be our forever home and accordingly we have a list of dreams for what we can create in this home. One of those dreams is for myself, and it popped into my head when I first saw the small barn that exists on our new property…
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What I don’t seem to be working hard on amidst all those other things I’m doing though is facing my deepest fear – because that is seriously terrifying to me. It’s no secret that I love to write – I’ve dipped my toes into the water with a few pieces published here and there after all. I’ve taken steps forward to make this my reality, and then quickly scampered back into the comfort of my everyday life, caccooned in the hard work required in all those other areas and therefore adequately able to explain away why I haven’t been writing – because uni, work, my family all take priority and the writing gets put aside. Yet here’s the thing…
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There is nothing quite like the buzz that fills you when you get to meet your idol. Tonight was the third time that I got to witness Isobelle Carmody speak about her books, the third time that I got to speak with her about her writing, and the third time that I have been so overwhelmed by the experience that I was physically shaking from the excitement of it all. However it was the first time that I was able to walk up to her, introduce myself, and have her actually know who I was in return, and let me tell you, that was an experience in itself. For that to make sense I need to backtrack; I’m going to tell you a story.
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One of the things that no one ever seems to talk about is how hard life can be. I’m not talking about the really hard parts – the trauma of illness, broken relationships, loss of life, those devastating circumstances of any and every kind – because those hardships, unbearable as they are, get talked about. No, I mean the parts of life that get hard, but people stoically go about their business and just get on with it, rarely – if ever – mentioning what it is that has gotten hard. Yet that’s what I’m going to talk about, because I’ve been absent, and the reason that I’ve been absent, in part, is because life got hard.
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When you get into this business of writing, people always talk about how difficult it is to get published. Truth be told, this is a conversation that happens all around you before you even begin to so much as think about trying to get some writing published. So it’s not as though you go into things blind to the challenges ahead. Yet, for all that people go on about the difficulties – the countless rejections that leave you heartbroken (if you’re anything like me anyway), the constant battle to get your work in front of someone willing to give it some time to be read, the vicious catch-22 where you need to be published to have some work looked at, but you can’t get work published if no one will look at it. It’s an industry that almost seems as though it has been designed to be especially difficult. Which, in a way, makes a certain kind of sense, because surely readers what to have quality writing to read.
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At the beginning of this year, I got the idea that it would be fun to tackle my Masters degree. For the longest time I had been considering going back to university – partly because I missed learning and partly because I had always seen myself as eventually having a Doctorate degree. I don’t actually know why this has always been a vision of my future, I just know that I have always wanted it. So I sat down with my husband and we worked out the feasibility of taking on more. To give some perspective, our son was born in June 2014 (so I’m a brand new mama) and the reality was that I was going to have to return to work (at least on a part-time basis) in May 2015. Yet even with two such huge changes happening, I just felt that this was the time, and I needed something that would make me feel like me again, and not just this person who had been lost to the new label of ‘mama’.
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