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I am now a full-time student, studying a Bachelor of Arts (internet communications) through Open Universities Australia. Most of my course is conducted online through Curtin University in WA. Only last Sunday did I find out that my Austudy had been approved – eight weeks after I applied. Surprised the hell out of me. I had had conflicting reports from Centrelink about whether I would be approved. One document said yes, another no, one call centre person said yes, another no. One Centrelink CSO at the local office said yes. One Centrelink manager on Facebook said yes. It was just as well I persisted with my application.  I could only afford to study full-time if receiving Austudy. The course so far - six weeks in, and two assignments done, one for each subject – has been a real challenge. Especially the second year subject Intro to Website Design. I knew nothing about photoshop, which I had to quickly learn to make mock-ups of the website I have to build for the subject. Huge...

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...