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January was a very moody month for me. I had a great break in Melbourne for a few days. I stayed in St Kilda and played tourist. I went to the cricket too, a one day match. I thought Australia was going to lose, but Glen Maxwell hit 94 runs and Australia beat the Indians. I had my birthday, and got a couple of books I wanted. But on that same day, a letter was being signed, informing me that the writer’s program at Divine was being scrapped. I rang the editor, she confirmed that the website is changing to more of an information site, so few, if any, articles will be published on it. I was nearly in tears. After 52 articles over five and a half years I am no longer paid to write for Divine. Although I had a few ups and downs while writing for the site, overall it was a great site to write for. I got to write on many different subjects and in many different styles. I interviewed writers and actors with disabilities, and a professor who had programmed robots to aide people with d...

As I have done the last few years, here is my review of the 2015 science-fiction films I managed to catch up with last year. Compared to 2014, last year was a huge letdown for science fiction. In 2014, there was the wonder of Interstellar, the cleverness of Predestination and the action packed thrills of Edge of Tomorrow . All of them are better films than anything released in 2015, except for perhaps the one that topped my list. 2015 was the year of the sequel, only one of them was good, Star Wars: The Force Awakens . To my surprise, a tear nearly crept into my eye when the Star War’s logo hit the screen to the fanfare of the original music. But gee, wasn’t the film derivative of the first film and thus very predictable. I knew what was going to happen as soon as Hans Solo stepped onto that bridge. Still, with all its similarities to the first film, I found if fun to watch. Of the other sequels, Jurassic World was okay, because all I was expecting was dinosaurs chasing stup...

2015 is over. I won’t miss it. It was a year when tiredness had me questioning, more than usual, my writing abilities. In April, I had a bit of a writing breakdown when I realised my writing was going nowhere slowly. I simply wasn’t writing enough. I still aren’t, but my word count did go up after April, at least until I finished writing a first draft of a novel in October. After that, it was onto redrafting, editing and proofreading. I wrote about 113,000 words for the year, an average of 300 or so per day. At the beginning of the year my goal was to average 500 words a day, and if I had just been writing first drafts and redrafting I might have come close. I wrote on all but nine days of the year. I wrote a 6,000 word short story for a Christmas anthology for the Australian Writer’s Forum. If you want to read it, there are links to the free ebook on a previous post. But my major writing effort was finishing the first draft of a novel called Branded. I originally wrote...

Reading a bit about female heroes coming to the fore in science fiction because of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Mad Max: Fury Road. I reckon female heroes have been around for years, but it does depend on your definition of what a hero is. Here are some that I think fit the label: Ellen Ripley - The Alien movies Sarah Connor - The Terminator Movies Sarah Connor - The Sarah Connor Chronicles Dana Scully - The X-files Purdey - The Avengers Major Samantha Carter - Stargate Gwen Cooper - Torchwood Myka Bering - Warehouse 13 Elanor Arroway - Contact Aryan Sun - Farscape Katniss Everdeen - The Hunger Games Oliva Dunham - Fringe Echo - The Dollhouse Sarah Jane Smith - The Sarah Jane Adventures. Starbuck - Battlestar Galactica Ellie - Tomorrow When The War Began Sarah Walker - Chuck Dr. Ryan Stone - Gravity Charlie Matheson - Revolution Sarah Manning - Orphan Black Elizabeth Shaw - Prometheus. There's no doubt that female heroes are hugely underrepresented in ...

Hi all, I have gift for those who read this blog. A Christmas anthology, containing a fantasy story written by me. I have just fixed the epub and pdf file links as they did not appear to be working. epub file  mobi file pdf file    It has a diverse range of stories written by writers from the Australian Writers' Forum.    Merry Christmas. 

The graph to the left shows a drop in my word output in November, which suggests I spent a lot less time writing. That is not the case. My word output dropped because I was proofreading/editing and redrafting. I continued redrafting a novel and I also spent a week trying to finalise a long short story that was due for submission at the end of November. I ended up writing about 5820 new words of fiction for the month. Critiquing. I received three critiques of my story during the month. One was a very useful full edit, another was just a comment agreeing with the suggested edits of a previous critique, and the other… Well, first some background. I did a copy edit/critique of one of the other stories written for our Christmas anthology. It was a non-fiction story about a Christmas spent in an Aboriginal community. I really enjoyed the story, I found it informative and was interested to read about life in an Aboriginal community written by someone who had lived in o...

I finished the first draft of Branded in mid-October. At 135,000 words it is way too big for a young adult novel, so I am going to have to try to cut tens of thousands of words from it. I have already written notes for its sequel set 20 years later.  I am happy with the story, but the writing is going to have to improve. After a night spent night thinking about whether to go straight into redrafting it or to put it away for a while and go back to another novel, I got up the next day and started redrafting it. My redrafting is not editing, it is a lot of rewriting. I had hoped to start cutting the novel’s length, but by the end of the month, I had added another chapter and probably about 3,000 words to its length. Hopefully that is only because I now know my characters a lot better and I am just filling in some details at the start that will be cut out later on. So all up, as you can see from the graph, I wrote about 12,444 words of fiction for October. That’s an...