Today, my words have stretched their tentacles to elsewhere on the web, outside of this mere blog. So whilst I work on some other pieces, if you’re looking to read something by yours truly, I’m happy to point you in the right direction.
At Write Anything, with new location and new design, where I write regularly, I have a piece on how I approach plotting novels titled ‘Advice from an unsuccessful plotter’:
I hope you all don’t think we’re experts here at Write Anything. If you do, I think I’m about to break the façade. We’re all just writers like you with things to teach you probably because we’ve only just learnt those things ourselves.
But for me, the game is up when it comes to plotting. I write this post with about five unfinished novels under my belt. There’s hope for perhaps three of them at most, but it’s going to take some serious work.
I don’t really have a worked out way of plotting that’s universal. Certainly, I’ve had much more success with short fiction, which is usually based around one or two ideas, and it’s often written on the fly.
When it comes to novels though, I pile a few more ideas on, perhaps use a couple of subplots to try and keep my swaying tower of dung from teetering over in a heap, but it always seems to fall down somewhere or in one case, the tower stands tall, it’s just not a very convincing tower. There are bits missing inside.
And over at Socialist Alternative, I report on last Saturday’s rally calling for children out of detention outside Broadmeadows Detention Centre:
In October last year Chris Bowen, the Minister for Immigration responsible for locking up innocent people for the crime of seeking asylum, made a promise. He said all children would be out of detention by June 2011, a promise that Kevin Rudd made when he was elected in 2007. But despite Labor making the same promise twice, and its latest deadline having passed, there are still over 300 children in detention.
No asylum seeker should be detained under the cruel policy of mandatory detention, but it is particularly abhorrent that children are detained, especially as the Gillard government pats itself on the back pretending that to shown some kind of compassion.
