Category: Creative Writing
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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…
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Week 6: The Adelaide Show podcast
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…
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Creating Killer Content, blogpost week 05
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…