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Why I am resurrecting my Patreon account
Some of you may have already known this via social media or the mailing list. I have restarted my Patreon account. For $1 per month you can read the draft of my crime fiction book Gin & Tonic as I write it, start to finish, with two posts per month. The first one went live yesterday and they are scheduled up until mid July with more to come because I have a ton of pages of scribble to type up. For some of you, this is not your thing at all. You want to know what I do via the blog or the newsletter but you are not really otherwise…
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Things You Have Wanted to Know About Sensitivity Reading and Were Too Afraid To Ask – Continuum Panel
Jess Flint, Creatrix Tiara, Sangeetha Thanapal and I will be discussing why it is important to use a sensitivity reader and why it is important to respect readers of your work and other groups and cultures. It’s going to be a fun ride. Tickets are per day and include rates for full, concession, youth and first time members so check for pricing details on the Continuum website.
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The Inequality of Magic – Continuum Panel
We will be chatting about why there are weird gender based tropes around how magic is used in fantasy fiction stories. Come see me, Darren / Lexie, Dorian Manticore, Gillian Polack, and Jane Routley discuss the importance of representation and the messages we send when we don’t do it well. Ticket prices are per session or per day so check the Continuum website for details.
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The Romance of Structure – Continuum Panel
Come see me chat about structure issues when writing romance fiction with Jane Routley, Freya Marske, Carolyn Denman, and Thalia Kalkipsakis. This is the third Continuum panel that I will be on and I will be also around on the day to chat to people. Tickets can be bought per panel session or per day for the Continuum Convention so please check their website for details on pricing.
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Mentoring writers as an editor and writer
This blog post is intended to be a summary and cheat sheet on my part of the mentoring panel on 15 Sept 2017 at the IPEd 2017 Conference in Brisbane. Proceedings will be published online by the conference organisers so you can always check those out for more information but here are my tips, tricks and my experiences of mentoring writers as opposed to mentoring editors. First, a definition of mentoring and what I mean by it: I don’t mean actively editing a writer’s work but more reading it and discussing how they go about developing the story, how they go through the process and if it’s a business/practice related…
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The writing plan for June
It’s June today. A June day, today, let’s say since June began the day before yesterday. On this June day my TBR is neither pile nor stack, it is a scatter instead, in bags, on shelves, across the floor, under laptops and beds. It’s also not To Be Read but rather like quantum, a mix between the two, some To Be Read but some also read already so To Be Reviewed. I need a plan.
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Five years!
It’s been five years since I started freelancing. Or at least it was on Saturday. Five years. Wow. A lot can happen in five years. I started freelancing because I knew it would take awhile to get my foot in the door and work in-house and also because I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to. Freelancing is great – it allows me to work with a lot of different people, it allows me to meet different people and it allows me to mentor some and be mentored by others. It allows me to try new things and to keep constantly learning. And I am reminded that it also means that…
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Mentoring: the why and the how of doing it
If you were to ask me if I was a mentor, my immediate answer would be “No.” “No. I’m not.” But I’d have to correct myself. It’s not quite true. I’m not set up as a mentor with a mentoring program. I don’t have regular meetings with a mentee of any sort. But yes I do end up mentoring people or being in a mentor like position quite often, very unofficially. And that’s because I believe that it is important. 1) I learn a lot from having to help or train or teach or supervise someone in their work. What I usually end up doing is having to really think…
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How to get started in journalism
While meandering through Facebook one day, I noticed that a younger friend of mine had tagged me in a status post. I clicked through to see what it was about and why he would feel the need to mention my name. It was the status of a friend of his, a young university student and he had offered my name in the comments on it as part of the advice he had offered to this student’s query. The query was this: Made another application but it doesn’t look like I’ll even get an interview how the fuck am I supposed to become a journalist if no one will hire me without…
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Day 1: Explosions, books & how to keep kids keen
[<a href=”//storify.com/571811/day-1-explosions-books-and-how-to-keep-kids-keen” target=”_blank”>View the story “Day 1: Explosions, books & how to keep kids keen” on Storify</a>]
