Creative Writing
15 May 2023

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 explain further, to show yet one more example, to …well, […]

Creative Writing
15 May 2023

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 what else I can do, right now… In fact, I […]

Creative Writing
15 May 2023

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 creator, Steve Davis. Steve, a highly experienced and well-qualified professional […]

Creative Writing
15 May 2023

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 call them mini radio shows that you can listen to […]

Creative Writing
15 May 2023

Creating Killer Content, blogpost Week 04

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 communicators in 2005 (Hopkins). Podcasts allow the listener to multitask, […]

Creative Writing
15 May 2023

Creating Killer Content, Blogpost Week 03

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 love relationship with one of my first-year lecturers and her […]

Creative Writing
15 May 2023

Creating Killer Content, Blogpost Week 02

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 our heart, of our mind, of our very fibre? We […]

Creative Writing
15 May 2023

Creating Killer Content Blogpost 01

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 types of writers, I contend, are reliant on improvisation more […]

Creative Writing
31 March 2023

Can I live a real life if I have a Bipolar Disorder?

For what it’s worth, the answer is a resounding ‘YES’. Elsewhere in this post you will see proof that having a bipolar disorder is not a sentence to soul-destroying poverty, no friends, a life with no meaning, an inability to hold down a job or build a career, or any of the other myths other well-meaning friends and family tell you. What you will find […]