Title: The Jane Austen Writer’s Club Author: Rebecca Smith Genre: Non-fiction/writing advice Publisher: Bloomsbury Published: 1st October, 2016 Format: Hardcover Pages: 352 Price: $36.00 Synopsis: Pretty much anything anyone needs to know about writing can be learned from Jane Austen. While creative writing manuals tend to use examples from twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers, The Jane… Continue reading The Jane Austen Writer’s Club by Rebecca Smith
Category: Writing
A Good Yarn: Australian Stories, Australian Voices
Imagine you have written and published a book, and you are starting to make a living from the royalties from this book, a goal you have been working towards for years. Now, imagine you’ve been told that not only will books published overseas take priority over Australian content, but that in fifteen years, you and… Continue reading A Good Yarn: Australian Stories, Australian Voices
Four hundred years of William Shakespeare
2016 marks 400 years since William Shakespeare died and left the world with the legacy of his plays: the tragedies, the comedies and the histories. It has been 452 years since he was born. Living in the Elizabethan era, and for the last years of his life during the reign of King James the VI… Continue reading Four hundred years of William Shakespeare
Shoes, Pirates and Unicorns
My writing as taken me to many places and on many journeys, not only through the act of piecing together my stories and works, but through the research I undertake to give a touch of authenticity to my work. Amongst the projects I am working on, I have just had pirates murder a mermaid and… Continue reading Shoes, Pirates and Unicorns
Threads and Words
NB: I was hoping for this to be longer and more eloquent but sadly it is not...I will try again. The threads of each story I write weave together to create worlds beyond my imagination populated by pirates and fairy tale characters, humans and beasts, sometimes half-human, half-animal creatures that like bacon and licking themselves… Continue reading Threads and Words
Pirates, and wenches and magic
I said I was going to post these every week but last week got busy with university and other disruptions, so here we go. I’m about 20,000 words in, and, am actually jumping between a couple of projects, adding in new words here and there. My cast of characters in my fairy tale murder mystery… Continue reading Pirates, and wenches and magic
National Novel Writing Month 2014
In about thirty days, I will be undertaking the craziest thing I have ever done: working on my eighth NaNoWriMo novel, a fairy tale serial killer plot, whilst finishing off a course entitled Writing the Zeitgeist and preparing Christmas decorations for my room. I am coming off of seven NaNo wins, even counting one where… Continue reading National Novel Writing Month 2014
Common or Uncommon Ground: writing your own or different cultures and ethnicities through time.
To follow on from my discussions of age and gendered writing, I got to thinking about how writers of different races, cultures and ethnicities write, how they represent their cultures, races and ethnicities and how they are thought to do this or what they are supposedly expected to be able to do in terms of… Continue reading Common or Uncommon Ground: writing your own or different cultures and ethnicities through time.
Time Slip Novels
Time Slip Novels A time slip novel, according to the UrbanDictionary.com, a novel that transports the main character and therefore the reader from one time to another, such as from the twenty-first century into the sixteenth century. Time slip novels, by my understanding, can combine this element of time travel and historical fiction, and fantasy. It… Continue reading Time Slip Novels
History, Mystery and Magic at the Sydney Writer’s Centre with Kate Forsyth
Two weeks ago I had the privilege to attend a very intimate writing course with Kate Forsyth and about sixteen other people. I enrolled in the course to gain a better understanding of writing, and research for writing, and an added bonus was meeting one of my favourite authors. The course covered conventions of writing… Continue reading History, Mystery and Magic at the Sydney Writer’s Centre with Kate Forsyth
The Book Muse 