I feel a great sense of gratitude that the great conspiracy that is life and the universe unfolded in a way this week that I was able to see David Byrne perform in concert in Sydney. I saw Talking Heads perform at Narara ’84 as part of the Stop Making Sense tour, and it was […]
“You will be free; you will die and be reborn. I will guide you to what you want, and to what is fit and proper for you. Tell me what it is.” “You don’t want me to kill the others …”. The Intercessor inclined his head in a nod. “It is for each of them […]
Following on from the last instalment, I am moving books around because if you move them from one spot to another quickly enough, you can magically make space for other books. In my hands I have a book I enjoyed, Real Dirt by James Woodford. James is / was a journalist and writer on environmental […]
Just came across the latest / last volume of Dave Hutchinson’s “Fractured Europe sequence” – well, that’s how they describe it on The Book Depository, where it is available for pre-order. The timing is perfect – a big chunk of my book collection returns home on Wednesday, including the previous volumes of this series, so […]
This from the SMH last weekend (the Saturday SMH is the only newspaper I buy anymore, for the occasional nugget like this, but their review section is becoming so dire I may give up on newspapers altogether): “My memory bank is not my brain: its my book collection. I can’t do without it. When I […]
My review of the Apollo / Neil Armstrong biopic is that it is bloody brilliant and you should run out and see it. There you go. I am about as young as you can be and remember the first lunar landing. I recall where I was – climbing on the back paling fence at home. […]
I have strong views about many, many things. I do not express them here. But I do speak a little bit about vampire novels and perfectionism and being true to one’s self in writing even if that means you write weird little stories about a man recovering from living in a lizard, or the unknown […]
Dear Reader, the latest edition of BREACH magazine, featuring Australian and New Zealand writers, is available for your reading pleasure. The former group includes yours truly, with my contribution being a weird tale, “Baby, cold outside”. If you are cold outside, what do you want more than anything, baby? I wrote the first draft of […]
It is quite possible you can learn something from feedback accompanying a rejection. I’m sure someone has. A recent rejection of a story of mine was accompanied by feedback from two of the slush readers for the magazine: “… really strong narrative voice and prose control. … it’s all developed and described quite well” and […]
Very sorry to read of Peter Corris‘s death today. It has been a while since I read any of Cliff Hardy’s adventures, but I read a lot of Corris in the past. Unlike me, he was not Sydney born, but in his Hardy detective stories, he exposed many sides of Sydney to me that I […]
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