Dodo Au Go-Go

It's June 2022. My last blogpost was at the end of March 2022. There's a reason for the gap. You see, at the start of April 2022, I fell down a rabbit hole about newsletters. I've thought about newsletters on and off before. It was one, maybe two, years ago that I plaintively tweeted a question about why writers are supposed to do newsletters. Yet, it's the recurring advice to all writers and wannabee writers and any kind of creator - build yourself a mailing list!  The logic begins: the mailing list is yours, people sign up because they want to know more about you and your work, and it's how you can share news about yourself, your writing, any new books. A newsletter lets you market yourself to a dedicated audience.  The logic continues: it's all very well building huge follower numbers on social media, but if anything happens to that social media platform or to your account on that platform, you're back to square one from a marketing perspective.  This mak...

It was a little bit of a weekend of losing and finding. Since we moved, pens have been one of those things which have remained elusive. They've been hard to find and even more difficult to hold onto. It's been positively umm, penful! 😜 So much so that, when working from home, I've had to resort to using a novelty, Halloween, pink, hand pen. Yes, really. I've had to make sure to keep it out of sight during online meetings and everything.  See?  Oddly enough, this pen hasn't disappeared with all the others, but that might still be pen-ding. Yes. I'll stop now. Imagine my delight then, when I found not one but three pens this weekend. Including my very,  very special pen. My so inspiring to write with, so smooth to write with, and so lovely a pen that every colleague I've ever introduced these pens to has become an instant devotee, pen. Well apparently,  it's not just adults who like these pens. After using my pen for all of 5 minut...

As the last days of December run like water to the ocean that is (was) 2021, this is a quick and very patchy self-reflection.  On the writing front in 2021, I was delighted to be a contributor to the short fiction anthology, The Shadows We Breathe (vol 1) , the brainchild of the remarkable Sarah Brentyn. Creativity and crafting words doesn't always come easily to me, but this was one of those experiences where showing up at the keyboard eventually got the words to show up too. I wrote about it here . It's nice to remember that I got some nice feedback about one of my stories, "The Coma". (Also, there's a TSWB volume 2! Check it out here !) Something I did do a bit more regularly in 2021 was blogging - especially during the Australian spring. Mainly nature- or parenting-focussed. Which is lovely and right and good as they're important things in my life.  But I haven't blogged as much about the creativity side of things. Which is interesting, and...

I've been making a concerted attempt to blog more regularly of late. For a number of reasons. Which, if I think about it, are probably interconnected.  For one thing, I'm trying to write more. And write faster. I'm a pretty slow writer. It dates back to the difficult relationship I developed with writing when doing my PhD thesis. Academic writing is very different to regular writing. It's very structured, you're using other people's ideas to contextualise, discuss and explore your own concepts, and it's a formal space for expressing yourself. It doesn't really allow a space for including yourself in your words - or at least, I couldn't figure out how to get there. Instead, I got into the habit of writing in a passive voice. It was an easy way to keep myself removed from the topic, which also had the bonus of being an easy way to boost my word count. Fiction and creative non-fiction became the antithesis (pun accidental but cel...

This time last weekend, I was feeling despondent. Not the wider blue of this post, but the specific blue of having a story deadline coming up and feeling absolutely bereft of ideas and words.  Lost in a desert, empty of words, dead of ideas, not a shred of creativity remaining. Not a unique feeling by any means, but still frustrating. Frustrating af, actually.  On Tuesday morning, I threw my hands in the air and went to my go-to-for-inspiration book, Neil Gaiman's The View from the Cheap Seats .  Indi poses for me. This is a collection of his non-fiction writings - intros, prefaces, speeches and the like - all reflecting in some way on the process of writing, creativity and the writers and writings he admires. For whatever reason, it's a book that I find easy to dip in and out of. It inspired me to write 'The Diamond Taster', one of the stories I'm proudest of in my Falling into the Five Senses anthology (see the full story here ). I browsed and read, a...

Over on Twitter, I'm playing along to a daily March indie-writer celebration, called #MarchOfTheWriters, initiated by the very awesome JD Estrada . The Day 7 prompt was #HomeIs So. I'm a migrant. I'm a member of a diaspora (probably more than one). If anyone asks, I claim a formal hyphenated identity that includes three places and two hyphens. Roots and routes have been a feature of my life journey, and of the stories I tell about myself. All these things have been part of the reason I wrote a doctoral thesis over an excrutiatingly long period of time (and the doctorate is also the reason I've developed an overly complicated relationship to writing, but that's another post for another time). In short, I've thought about the idea of 'Home' a lot. I was born in Country A. I left there as a toddler and haven't been back, though I still claim citizenship there. It's not home, but it's my father's home, and my parents' stories come t...

Belated Announcement: I have another blog! Well, it's a bit more than another blog. It's another blog on an actual, proper, website that I created. It's called reeimaginedworlds.com and it's my official publishing site for my Falling into the Five Senses Anthology. I'm slowly blogging on there, as well as here (trying to keep that New Year Resolution thing about blogging more regularly). The reeimaginedworlds.com blog is - obviously - for antho and any other book/project news. Dodo Au Go-Go is still my blog-about-anything-I-want space. I wrote a piece recently for reeimaginedworlds.com, but thought it applied quite nicely here too. So, I'm doubling up! (I won't do this too often - promise!) It's a reflection on my writing process for one of my fave stories in the anthology. Happy reading! :-) -------- It's subjective, I know. But my most favourite of all my five stories in the Falling into the Five Senses anthology is 'The Diamond ...

It's amazing how difficult I find some days to tweet something. Or even anything. It used to be easy to bash out something and send it flying into the tweetosphere. Try and say something witty or pithy (or try to not pith people off) and have an interesting convo or two. But now... now, I find myself staring at my feed, wondering what on earth to say that might be of interest to anyone. Sure, I could plug my antho. But people get annoyed (me included) if all you have to say for yourself is "buy-my-book-buy-my-book". These days, I keep checking my timeline with trepidation, worried that I'm just retweeting stuff rather than saying stuff. Yes, I'm retweeting stuff that's of interest to me, but they're still just retweets, rather than my own words. A timeline filled with retweets is something else that annoys me. I've previously snarkily moaned that people should use their own words on their timelines! And yet, what do I do when my own words seem to...

I was gifted a lovely new notebook for Christmas. It is beautiful and pristine and so exquisite I'm quite petrified of using it. But on the plus side, the new notebook has made me feel that it's ok to finally start using another beautiful notebook - the larger one with the carnelian stone was also a Christmas gift from a mere four years ago! Actually, four years ago, I received both of these lovely notebooks. And I'm proud to say I did use the littler one on the left straight away. It took me two years to fill up, but I used it with words I'm proud of. (One of the things that always happens with me and lovely new notebooks is that, despite my best intentions, the notebook invariably degenerates into a half-hearted and splotchy repository of half-baked ideas that are usually, earnestly over-plotted. The idea usually never goes anywhere, and I kill the notebook's mojo.) But that didn't happen with this notebook. I filled it with, of all things, my ...

There's been a gap of some twenty months since I last wrote anything here. Basically, as you can see by my previous 2-3 posts, I lost my puppy-boy, Bodie. I grieved, cried, wrote down every single blessed memory of him I had, and cried some more. In-between, life, love and light gathered. Our much-longed-for Little One arrived. Bodie is our sky-angel, and Indi, his sister, is our earth-angel. We're a family of four. In my mind, we'll always be a family of five. Then, in quick succession: I took a new job, we made a giant move interstate and we moved from the four-season climate of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales (emphasis on the freezing-cold bit of the four seasons) to the tropical north. Brisbane, Queensland, where heat, humidity, frangipanis, poincianas and very mild winters reign. For the past year-and-a-bit, we've been building new roots - as you do when you start making the unfamiliar everyday familiar - so you can live in it with some comfort. One...

The Girl with the Gold Coin Earrings is another one of my multi-tweet tales that I'm recording here for posterity - to resuscitate it from the forgotten depths of my Twitter Timeline. If you're desperately curious, my first resuscitated story is here .

On the weekend, my old friend, K., who knows I like writing fiction, emailed me and asked for some writing advice. It was for work, she said, but not the usual dry, corporate stuff. This needed to be written from the heart.

This is a piece written for the Short Story Competition 2017 , run by  Wine Tourism Spain . When I saw the deliciously quirky theme of "the possible relationship between wine and extraterrestrial life", I just had to have a go. I hope all you Earthoomans and Extraterrestrials enjoy it! -------------------------------

When I was in my last year of high school, I suffered through English Lit. For someone who loves writing, I suffered exquisitely, with all the analytical stuff asphyxiating all the creative joy out of the subject. A friend in a different English class to me was given - of all things - a creative writing assignment, on one of their literature textbook themes of "irony". I remember being both jealous and baffled - jealous that the other class got to do some creative writing, and baffled about how one would write a story on "irony". I've never quite forgotten it. From time to time, I've thought about how I would go about writing a story on "irony". Or, I've encountered instances of irony and thought, 'now, there's a way to write that irony story'. Never quite written the quintessential irony story yet, though.

I knew I had peeves about writing, but until I started this post, I'd never realised how many I had - and how very strongly I felt about them. So many in fact, I had to stop myself degenerating from peevish to rantish. I may or may not have succeeded on this last point, so consider yourselves warned. The inspiration for this post comes via the very-cool  Larysia and the inimitably-joyous  JD Estrada . They have each made excellent points about their particular writing peeves in their blogs - in admirably un-peevish ways - which are well worth reading. Check out Larysia's here  and JD's here . In fact, while you're there, take the time and check out their blogs more generally.

I saw a kangaroo die last week. Driving to work along my usual rural stretch of road, a kangaroo was lying in the middle of my side of the road. It was clearly alive, head and upper torso upright. Not a youngling, not an adult, maybe an older adolescent. Cars going the other way slowed down to rubberneck/drive carefully. I don't know much about kangaroos, but I do know that they don't stay near traffic for the fun of it.

A little while ago, in early February, my favourite Twitter-based microfiction game ,  @FridayPhrases , generated the following  #FP  effort from me: Her suitor cuts her at the opera, blatant, cruel. She is publicly silent & slips a snake onto his coach. He likes games; she doesn't lose I quite liked it and thought there might be scope for a longer story sitting in between the words, waiting for the telling. But even better, the brilliant @HopeDenney2 quite liked it too. When we realised we both thought it could be developed into a longer story, we, of course, had to give it a go! So we did, and we each came up with very different interpretations. Hope's story is immediately below, and mine is further down the post. Enjoy!

One of the joys of playing FridayPhrases is when I fall in love with the little idea/image/mood composed for an  #FP micro-fiction  so much that I can't let it go straight away and I end up playing with it for ju-u-u-st a little bit longer. Sometimes, it escapes my head and ends up on paper as a piece of flash fiction.

I go on about this all the time : I'm a huge fan of the Twitter microfiction game run by @FridayPhrases , where the aim is to write stories on the optional theme in Twitter's 140 characters or less, using the hashtag, "#FP". Last year, I made a list of my favourite FPs out of all the ones I'd written in 2014. I'm doing the same again this year. As per last year, it's interesting to see the common threads throughout my year's FPs.

I tweeted a late night thought a little while ago: During the night, all your scratched out & deleted words rise into the air to make their own stories.  A reply from the lovely @bobbibowwoman , "Damn, bet it's a good one" , made me suddenly think about the idea of actually giving life to deleted words