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Rental

Mitch Vahldieck – after the eviction

More on the Mitch Vahldieck saga. Oh, boy!

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Creative Writing

Week 13: The joke

Person 1: “I say, I say, I say, what is the secret to successful comedy?” Person 2: “I don’t know, what IS the secret to successful co-“ Person 1, interrupting Person 2: “Timing” Comedy, as with most of life, is a subjective thing. I love the tv show ‘Lucifer’, yet some staunch Southern American Christians […]

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Rental

Artlan Menzies: rental nightmare

I took in as a lodger a young man who hadn’t had a good start. I thought I was doing the charitable Christian thing. Boy, was I wrong!

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Rental

Mitchell Vahldieck: review

What letting Mitch Vahldieck stay in my home was REALLY like (hint: it’s not pretty)

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Creative Writing

Week 12: Australiana, you’re soaking in it

Strine: A wonderfully colourful way of enhancing any communication with a ‘touch of Aussie’. When I first moved to Australia, as a 10 year old, I naturally knew no ‘Aussie’. Sure, we supposedly spoke the same language, English, but there were so many parts of the Aussie sentence that completely baffled me. This was understandable, […]

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Creative Writing

Week 11: The rise of the bots, AI and misinformation

The growth of misinformation perpetrated by ‘bad actors’ is a real and present danger. Whilst Twitter has long been known as a hive of bots (and thus distrusted for years), lately Insta, Facebook, YouTube and even TikTok have witnessed the infiltration of anonymous accounts pushing far-right agendas and ideology. With the growth in the ability […]

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Creative Writing

Week 10: Tropes (or ‘The cowboy punched the cow while his wife, dressed in her gingham shirt and gingham apron, watched on with a pot of coffee in her hand’)

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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Creative Writing

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 […]

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Creative Writing

Week 8: Power Writing (and writing short and sweet from Week 7)

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 […]

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Creative Writing

Week 7: Writing something other than a cybercrime novel (badly)

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 […]