Read / November 21st, 2016
The Patchwork Bike by Maxine Beneba Clarke and Van T Rudd ($18.80) Here is the synopsis for The Patchwork Bike: When you live in a village at the edge of the No-Go Desert, you need to make your own fun. That’s when you and your brothers get inventive and build a bike from scratch, using…
The Creative Life Podcast: Episode Twenty-One This is a special episode to finish the first season of The Creative Life podcast – a recording of my keynote speech at the recent Small Press Network Independent Publishing Conference. The theme was ‘Why Wait?’ and covers a wide range of topics including my formative years, university, blogging,…
Read / November 15th, 2016
This hasn’t been a great month for reading. I’ve been preoccupied with keynote writing (keep your eyes peeled for this coming Thursday’s post), among other things. When I’ve found myself with some time to pick up a title, I soon put it back down again. This doesn’t reflect on their quality, more on the lack of…
The Creative Life Podcast: Episode Twenty This episode is about something I’ve done on my blog for the past couple of years that I thought would be applicable to those of us who like to assess project progression and on the basis of those successes or failures (or somewhere in between) decide where to head…
The Creative Life Podcast: Episode Nineteen In this episode, I am joined by Fiona Wood, author of young adult novels, Six Impossible Things, Wildlife and Cloudwish. She has worked as a television scriptwriter and is an ambassador for The Stella Prize Schools Program. You can find her on her website and Twitter. Books Mentioned The…
This is just a quick post to say that the Small Press Network Independent Publishing Conference is fast approaching. It’s a terrific event over four days, catering to different types of experience and interests. It’s my pleasure to say that I’ll be doing the keynote on the Fundamentals Day (Saturday 12th November). If you can…
The Creative Life Podcast: Episode Eighteen My guest is Darrell Pitt, author of A Toaster on Mars and the Jack Mason Adventures, a series of five novels including The Firebird Mystery, which was a Notable book in the 2015 CBCA awards. He was the first self-published author for Text Publishing to sign on, and it was the…
The Creative Life Podcast: Episode Seventeen I know introverts working in the arts can struggle with self-confidence. How do we cultivate it within ourselves when so much of what we do is based on feedback, gatekeepers, stakeholders, audiences and more? It can be tricky. Books Mentioned Quiet by Susan Cain. (She also has the Quiet Revolution…
Read / October 18th, 2016
I bought Fight Like a Girl by Clementine Ford when I was in the city a week or two ago and consumed it overnight. Online reactions have been similar: ‘I couldn’t put it down’; ‘two days and I was done’ etc. Fight Like a Girl is the perfect book coming at just the right time, as the…
