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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 taking on 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 eskyRead 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: 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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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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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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In: The Paradise Motel, Uncategorized, Writing

This post is for people who would love to write a novel. It’s on their bucket list and it doesn’t look like its going away. I get you. I am you. But there’s a few things to consider. Anyone who has given writing long form fiction some serious thought will recognise the complexity of it. It’s a bizarre magic trick and to pull it off, all you have are words. It’s crazy, right? There’s all those moving parts, setting, point of view, voice, character, plots. That’s a lot to juggle. You are a god, creating a world which doesn’t really exist, even it resembles theRead More →

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Some relationships require a lot, don’t you think? There is no timely and gentle unveiling of our interior or a patient knock on the door from which we can turn away. No, no, these relationships are an invasion, a real pirate-boarding with swashbuckling and cannon. There is no rest even in the corners of our minds. I’ve been thinking about these differing kinds of relationships, the gentle ones where the two are side-by-side, where the internal voice is louder and has more room and then the relationship where the two are facing, asking questions and answering back, delving into all there is. It is VirginiaRead More →

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By Gabrielle Blondell “John.” He made my name a statement, nothing more. “Pete.” I said. He shut the passenger door and sat stiffly, staring along the road leading out of Cunungra barracks. I reached toward the GPS, selected Dangarsleigh Road, Armidale, and pressed START. “Four hundred and forty-one kilometres to go,” I said. Pete was a distant cousin, so distant, I wasn’t sure how we were related except that my Aunt Jas on my mother’s side was involved. It was she who suggested Pete and I share the expense of a trip to her daughter’s wedding. “So….” I said, pulling out onto the main road.Read More →