My step-dad* has follicular lymphoma that morphed into the more aggressive diffuse b-cell lymphoma. Yesterday he went into hospital for a month long stem cell treatment. There was a 6% chance his cancer mutate. He now has a 30% chance of survival. There’s a 2% chance he’ll never make it out of hospital. My mother…
Please remember to back up your work. I went to the UK for a holiday over Christmas and New Year. When I got back home, a month after I left, my laptop would not turn on. I could not remember my iCloud password and I ended up locked out for 24 hours. It was a…
Today I want to talk more about how scary it is being an emerging writer. A lot of people know me as a poet. Very few people know me as someone who writes fiction. Creating a name for myself in a new field is challenging. While I’m mostly focused on creating new work, I’m also…
My novel for NaNoWriMo is at 11, 719 words. So far, I’ve struggled to write as much as I would have liked. I’ve put a lot more pressure on myself as this is my second time writing a novel. I’ve had a lot more self-doubt. This novel also involves a lot more research than the…
I finished editing my first draft over the weekend, but it didn’t feel like much of an achievement. I initially wrote the novel, and started this blog, because I wanted to take writing much more seriously. This first edit is one step on a very long journey. With that being said, as I move onto…
A lot of people tend to be surprised at how much I do and how I find time to write. Given we’re coming up to NaNoWriMo again, I’d talk about how you can actually find the time to to write 1700 words a day. To set the scene, these are some of the things I…
Laundry Man, also known as Jakob Boyd, is part spoken word poet, part anarchist and next month, he’s launching his first full length book. I first met, Jakob when I was coordinating the WA Poetry Festival (now called the Perth Poetry Festival) for WA Poets Inc, but I didn’t get to know him until well…
Next month is NaNoWriMo and I have an idea for a novel. I’ve had this idea since NaNoWriMo 2017 and have been running through different storylines in my head for almost a year. I’m keen to do NaNoWriMo again this year, despite the lack of time I have available and how overworked I am. I…
Let’s talk about getting to that second draft. For me, the hardest part of editing the first draft has been reworking the plot. The plot in my novel is quite complex, though it can be broadly split into three main sections, which I’ve been able to map out quite well (see Aristotle’s plot structure for…
Yeah, so, the last few weeks have sucked. I haven’t done anything on my digital poetry project. I’ve only edited one chapter of my novel. I have written four poems, but the one I’m most happy with isn’t publishable (I wrote it while I was upset with someone, which is a shame, because it’s a…