Dodo Au Go-Go

Dodo Au Go-Go is suddenly looking a bit different. After many years of plain white, adorned only with a couple of quirky fonts, a bit of a sea breeze has just come through. The reason for this breeze at this particular time is a bit convoluted but amusing to me, so I'm jotting it down here. In the spirit of doing everything backwards (what the Aussies would call "arts-end up" - except they wouldn't say 'arts', but you get my drift), now that the Falling into the Five Senses anthology is out, I've been trying to wrap my head about marketing for indie (independent/self-published/self-pubbed) writers. Helpful advice on Twitter from the forever-wonderful Sarah Brentyn pointed me towards the idea that a cohesive identity/brand across platforms is one of the helpful things you can do to make yourself more recognisable.  This was a kind of first-step marketing task I could cope with. And so I started thinking about making the look of this Dodo blog more connec...

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...

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...

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.