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Maggie finds a park under the canopy of a Jacaranda tree. She pulls on the handbrake and swivels in her seat. ‘All good?’  He nods, noting that one of Mark and Janine’s guests has left the side gate to their property ajar. He also sees William from the cricket club climb the steep driveway carrying a carton of beer with exaggerated care. He knows William will keep this up until someone notices. Social overcompensation. ‘Please don’t interrogate anybody tonight, Brendan.’ Maggie’s tone is light, he knows she’s only half joking. ‘I won’t.’ Maggie reaches out and strokes his arm. ‘Can you get the esky fromRead More →

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In: Human Nature, Uncategorized, Writing

I used to think AI was the devil. Not in a dramatic, dystopian way. It was a kind of unease which crept in when I understood that a machine could accomplish something that previously only humans could manage. Writing, for example. When tools like ChatGPT started producing essays, poems and stories in seconds, my first reaction wasn’t curiosity. It was a nervous tickle in the throat. If a machine can write… then what am I doing here? For a while I reduced AI to one very simple scenario. You ask it to write something. It writes it. The human quietly exits the stage. Efficient. Impressive.Read More →

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In: Human Nature

Aron Visuals on Unsplash Each New Year brings a flurry of activity as people make resolutions, purchase diaries, and press their personal reset buttons. What weird monkeys we are. What makes December 31/January 1 the day for this, and what’s more, what makes January, January? It’s arbitrary. Academic. I get seasons, natural ones. I get that the earth revolves around the sun roughly in the span of what we’ve decided is a year. I get Julius Caesar exporting his personal planner along with his legions to bring his domains into line. I even understand Pope Gregory XIII’s need to add a leap year, so thingsRead More →

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Photo: Daniel Dorsa for The New York Times/NTB For many, childhoods aren’t dreamy. It’s a coin toss after all; who we get for parents, where we get to live, the time/era of our birth, our genetics. There are many chances for a sub-optimum experience when, as children, we are at our most vulnerable. For those of us who are lucky, we mustn’t forget fate’s substantial leg-up. Shuggie Bain is one of the unlucky ones. In Douglas Stuart’s semi-autobiographical novel by the same name, Shuggie is in a tough position. He’s an effeminate little boy born into Glasglow’s working class in the cruel 1980’s, when theRead More →

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In: Happiness, Human Nature, Love, Uncategorized

CREDIT: David Gyung From the 2013 movie, Her: Well, basically I have intuition. I mean, the DNA of who I am is based on the millions of personalities of all the programmers who wrote me. But what makes me me is my ability to grow through my experiences. So, basically, in every moment I’m evolving, just like you.’ — Samantha This is a chatbot professing sentience in the 2013 movie, Her, in which a lonely man in the near future falls in love with an AI of his own creation. The ‘near future’ they spoke of back then is now yesterday (around 2017 at a guess when Replika released social chatbots) andRead More →

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In: Stories, Uncategorized

Who is she grateful for? Lily, of course…   1. Lily.  Josh could’ve chosen someone less agreeable. Jen doesn’t write that. It’s not what she means and not nice to Lily who is marvellous. 2. Dr McGuire. She has to give it him. He’s wonderful with the elderly, being almost elderly himself. And he lets her run the reception and the books the way she wants to. 3. Ally. Her dear sister, so much bravado. So supportive. Jen flushes with goodwill. 4. Mum. How can one not be grateful for one’s mother?  Delivering Joshua is the hardest thing Jen has done, but Bradley was there, holding her hand and offering his smallRead More →

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In: The Paradise Motel, Uncategorized, Writing

I didn’t work on my new novel during the first six months of the year, but I was hyper-aware of it glowering in my Dropbox waiting to show me what a horrible writer I was. I did almost anything else, a short story, a book review, ran an advertising campaign, wrote copy for a website, pondered A.I., cleaned my house badly and mowed the property over and over until the temperature cooled and the grass ceased to grow. It was classic avoidance. I didn’t want to open it and see the results of that rampant, uncontrolled first draft.  Hemingway, Lamott and King advise getting comfortableRead More →

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In: Book Reviews, Freedom, Reading, Uncategorized

CREDIT: Brian Harris (Alamy) Freakily, reading Tim Winton’s Dirt Music is like reading about myself. Looking back, it’s not difficult to find a time when I was a little lost, a little trapped, a little aimless and a lot unsure. This is what Winton does so well. He’s the master of the awkward, the displaced and the stuck, so while Dirt Music is an Australian story, it’s a universal one too.  If you like your characters neat and clean and sure of themselves, he’s not your guy. The characters in this novel are imperfect beings held in place by their pasts and weighed down by guiltRead More →

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In: The Paradise Motel, Uncategorized, Writing

When we last met, I was writing a novel synopsis, but not at the behest of an agent or publisher. I was 10 000 words into The Paradise Motel and in need of some scaffolding. The synopsis would be a living document. It needed to be strong enough to guide me, but malleable too. (If you haven’t read Plotting VS Pantsing, you might want to do so here as this post is its sequel 😳.)  Because I’d written a fair way in, I already knew my characters, what they sounded like, what they looked like.  I knew the town. But the plot was shaky. IfRead More →

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Even with the benefit of the past, we are wading knee deep through our present. We embrace the new normal, but as we do, it’s already ageing, nearly passe. Where does our gaze rest and why? What are we admiring? Is the future a distraction from our past or the present a distraction from our future? These are the questions which bubbled to the surface during and after reading Michelle de Krester’s, wonderful mind-stretching and form-warping novel, Scary Monsters. With Halloween approaching, I thought now was the time to bring it up. What we scare ourselves with might serve to distract us from what isRead More →