Welcome to any Gippstafe students!

Hi there - Gippstafe students officially started their online courses this week - welcome to any who have stepped across to check this out.

I know I had a list of things to blog for everyone, so I'll make a little start on it.

Check out www.goodreads.com for a quick n'easy way of keeping track electronically of your reading. This also connects you to a larger reading network. If you've succumbed to the procrastination machine that is facebook, you can do a search for all your reading friends.

For punctuating dialogue check out this article.

Thanks to Stewart and Denis for being the first up to workshop in Novel 2! Good to get a handle on what you both are writing. And for everyone who participated in the character chair exercise - thanks - great to hear about your central characters and I hope you learnt something more about them, too.

Writing exercise: (for your writer's journal)
Write a letter to your character's younger self from one of their parents. You know those letters that parents sometimes write to be opened on yoru eighteenth birthday or whatever? You can make it quite specific - it could be a letter written after an argument, for example, or before a big event. It could be a celebratory letter. It could be a pull-your-socks-up letter!

Happy writing...

First one to comment

gets a prize! come on guys, comment! Hope you are all having a happy writing week.

Writing Exercises

Create a character who is obsessed by something - firearms, D & D, family history, collecting china, travelling. What would it take for them to give up their obsession? Who in their lives might resent their obsession? Explore these potential conflicts.

Your character goes home after being away - for a wedding or Christmas, a funeral or an anniversary or to celebrate a birth. During this weekend, an old family feud erupts.

What is your (fictional) family's secret? Who finds it out and how? What are the ramifications of this?

Your character is stuck somewhere with someone she/he doesn't like. Gradually over the time they are together a different story emerges...

Novel 2A students - can you please all choose a chapter from a favourite novel - one that you feel has taught you something about the writing craft. Photocopy the chapter for the next class and write a half a page on what it's taught you. Thanks - these will form part of next semester's resource book.

Okay people - the rain (yes, you heard me correctly!) has cleared so I'm off to buy noodles. I'm sorry I couldn't magically wave the clouds in victoria's direction....

Townsville

is hot and humid. I walked for over half an hour to find a supermarket which closed the instant I approached the doors - 5.58pm is the closing time of North Ward's BiLo on a Sunday. How bizarre! However, on the way back to the hotel I was rewarded with a tree full of the most beautiful little birds - chlorine blue backs, green breasts, rufous under-wings and a bright yellow around the eye. They had honey-eater beaks, I think. There were about thirty of them. Also some of the big black cockatooes that eat the palm nuts down on the Strand - they look shabby until they take off, revealing a huge bright orange V on their wings.

But I'm not actually writing this to tell you about the bird life of Townsville but to alert the crime readers amongst you to a wonderful book -
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson. I daren't start the next one of his Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Played with Fire, because I won't sleep until I finish it.

Larsson was a Swedish journalist. He delivered the three manuscripts of the trilogy to his Swedish publisher and shortly after that died. He was only in his early fifties. The book features a wonderful team Mikael Bomkvist, an investigative journo and Lisbeth Salander - a feisty and mysterious computer hacker. The plotting is brilliant as two stories unfold side by side. Read it!

Not daring to start the next Larsson, I've begun reading Qiu Xiaolong's When Red is Black. Qiu Xiaolong is a Chinese poet and crime writer living in America. I met him at the Brisbane Writer's Festival a few years ago - that's how I was introduced to his work because the Festival sends you copies of the other panellists works. Although I don't find his books unputdownable, they are fabulous, too. There's a lot of commentaary about China and politics, official hierarchies, customs - historical and contemporary, food and his Chinese police detective (a poet) quotes Chinese poetry throughout. What's not to love?

So there you are, crime fiction lovers - head straight to your nearest bookstore!

Homework!

Short Story 1 students - read Peter Goldsworthy's List of All Possible Answers. Create characters using your own lists - a list of To Do's on the 'fridge, a list of loves and hates on MySpace, a list of fears, a wishlist, a hit list. Read 'How to Get Ideas' in the resource book. There's an interview with Peter Goldsworthy talking about his new novel, Everything I Knew, here.

Novel 2A students - read the piece from Peter Carey's His Illegal Self. Again this is a piece which switches point of view, though it's written in the third person. Also read 'Plot and Character' (page 23). Answer the questions on p. 22 regarding your character/s. Read the interview with Peter Carey here.

The Poisonwood Bible

I'm so pleased The Poisonwood Bible got such a good hearing in Novel 2 - it is one of my all-time favourite novels, ambitious in scope and hauntingly memorable. Just checked my copy and the mother, Orleanna Price, does haver her own sections:

Listen, little beast. Judge me as you will, but first listen. I am your mother. What happened to us could have happened anywhere, to any mother. I'm not the first mother on earth to have seen her daughters possessed. For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a duaghter but to own her like plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain down a dreadful poison upon her. Miraculously, it causes these girls to grow. They elongate on the pale slender stalks of their longing, like sunflowers with heavy heads. You can shield them with your body and soul, trying to absorb that awful rain, but they'll still more toward him. Wihout cease, they'll bend to his light. p.217.

Read an interview with Barbara Kingsolver here. It's interesting what she says about handling the five different points of view.

Here's a more recent inteview with Bill Moyers.

For students in Short Story who want to read a review of Swallow the Air, try this link.

I'll be putting up homework and work for the week I'm away later this week, so watch this space! It might be slightly erratic over the next few days as I'm battling a computer virus. Grrrr.

Dust off those short stories...

for the Alan Marshall Short Story competition. Closing date 20th February - you can do it, you know you want to.

Flash Fiction!

This looks like an interesting site - publishing both out of copyright stories, genre stories and pieces by new writers. Check it out here.

This is a clever idea.

And an article about how to write it.

A success story from the UK.

Science Fiction flash site - with some good submitting rules.

Hope you enjoy looking around!