For a gumshoe, he was dark, brooding and dangerous. His clients, mostly women wanting to catch their husbands cheating on them so they could get the house, were drawn to him like a moth to a flame—a blowtorch of a flame. Their inhibitions disappeared under his flaming sexuality and many women felt stirrings under their…
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Week 9: Fear
I’m scared to write this… Lol. I’ve never written in a style that includes fear. Coming from academic and business writing backgrounds, the use of fear is usually not present. Factuality and optimism (aka ‘spin’) have been my stock in trade. I can see how the use of fear could be a great motivator if…
Can I write succinctly and let the power of my words and sentences transport the reader to where I want them to be and think what I want them to think? I don’t think so. I find it very hard to turn a long piece of writing into something short, I am always wanting to…
A guest lecture with David Waters from Green Hill Publishing made me realise that there are other avenues I can pursue as a part-time writer of bad cyber-crime novels. According to Pete, there are very few buyers of novels in Australia, but far more buyers of self-help and autobiographies/memoirs. Here’s some of my thoughts on…
My latest assignment is to create a marketing campaign for a podcast. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Ten years ago I would be able to put together a campaign in my sleep. But not for this particular podcast,, not now. The Adelaide Show is a long-running podcast and labour of love for its…
A question that I used to get asked a lot is ‘what is podcasting?’ Originally defined as an audio file that was delivered to you automatically via really simple syndication (RSS), the term ‘podcasting’ has now come to embody many different facets of audio on the web. A quick way of explaining them is to…
Podcasts. I love them. I’ve published around 300 of them, and I was the first business communicator in Australia to publish a regular podcast, way back in 2004 (around the same time as the amazing iPod was released). I was also the first foreign correspondent on the ground-breaking ‘For Immediate Release’ internationally-focused podcast for business…
Peer review. As an Honours undergraduate I undertook it when I co-wrote a couple of psychology papers and submitted them to some senior journals for possible publication. It was scary. I’d just finished four years of study, earned ‘okay’ marks but not high enough marks to get me into a Masters programme, had formed a…
Passion. Passion. Passion. Great writing—writing that moves the reader—has at its heart ‘Passion’, passion that comes from vulnerability (Brown). Making ourselves vulnerable, opening ourselves to possible criticism, is fraught with danger. Scary. Possibly soul destroying, at least for a moment or three. So why take the risk of puncturing the already tissue-paper thin membrane of…
What are we as writers if not improvisers? Some of us plan out our work, filling in every gap before putting fingers to keyboard, others of us are ‘pantsers’, writers who write by the seat of their pants, never knowing what’s going to happen next, but trusting in their muse that inspiration will strike. Both…