Category: News & Upcoming Events

So I’m teaching this year-long course on building and maintaining your author platform for work this year, and we’re kicking things off with the first class this Saturday. It’s one of the handful of courses we offer to QWC members only, and it’s a fairly hefty chunk of change besides, so I’m definitely feeling the pressure to make sure it’s worth it. The one thing I hate about doing any kind of writing workshop is getting to the end and thinking, well, I didn’t really need that. There’s a guest-post up on the QWC blog that explains why we’re doing this as a long course over several months, rather than a one-day workshop on effective blogging or rocking the hell out of twitter. The short version, for the TL:DR crowd, is this: learning the tools is comparatively easy, figuring out how to deploy them over a span of years is hard. I’ve seen plenty blogs go through the excited rush of

Hola! It’s the Brisbane Writers Festival this weekend – the final festival on the packed schedule of festivals and travel that have kept me away from the blog – which means it’s a little over a fortnight before I resume regular postings. In the meantime, I’m going to interrupt this period of non-posting with a handful of announcements that may interest you. ONE I’ve got a non-fiction piece in the latest Apex Magazine that distills writing advice from the rants of professional wrestler Al Snow. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Apex editor Lynne M. Thomas came across a blog post I did on the topic a few months ago and asked me to expand it into a full-fledged article. Being the type who is fond of getting paid to write things and the type who likes watching shoot interviews with pro-wrestlers, I immediately agreed and went into research mode. Now I just need to find someone who’ll pay me to write

Just a short drive-by post to engage in some blatant acts of self promotion. 1) Emerging Writers Series on Radio National this Saturday A few months ago I did a reading at Avid Reader that was recorded for ABC Radio National as part of their Emerging Writers series. Last week’s show played the recording of one of my co-readers, the inimitable Angela Slatter, reading from one of her up-coming stories and you can still download the recording from their webpage. My reading, an excerpt from Horn, is scheduled for this Saturday’s broadcast of Books Plus, at about 9.15 PM. To forestall the inevitable question: no, I did not read that excerpt from Horn. I read one of the other bits. 2) The Book of Apex: Volume 3 is Out Now The third of Apex Magazine’s yearly collections, compiling all the material that appeared in Apex during Catherynne Valente’s editorial run on the magazine. It includes my story L’esprit de L’escalier, which is easily the story