Adelaide - a centre of creativity...

March 13, 2023

A strange week of multiple events – real and virtual.
 
For the first time ever, I was free to drop in and out of Writers’ Week in Adelaide. Past visits were few and limited to frenzied school excursions that required school permission, parent permissions, setting reliefs, organising buses, herding students and listening to maybe two speakers before heading back to buses and collection from school. Only in 2000, when I was there as a writer and presenter, was Writers’ Week a satisfying event. But this year – enjoyment. The foci for the week were highly political writers and crime fiction writers, but I could walk from session to session, lounge in an ocean of words, thumb through books (and buy some), and run into old friends by chance.
 
Then we were treated to a performance, Recalibrate, scripted by Lucy Coombe, the daughter of an old friend, a powerful piece that forced reflection on the feminist movement, families, personal obsessions, domestic violence and men, academia, university funding and disability and…it was a rich, deep production.
 
And Writers’ Week rolled into WOMAD and three days of music, food, gin, dancing and duck feathers.
 
Seven days of creativity – what’s not to like?
 
Writing-wise, I have finished the full drafts of The Last Wizard novels and now I’m doing a final comprehensive read from beginning to end, hunting for the remaining errors (already found three glaring ones I cannot name because they were in the original first book and no one spotted them) and adding descriptive nuance to relevant sections. I’m predicting this process will take a week per book, so I’m looking to April/May before I dare begin publisher approaches with the series.

I’ve also begun drafting three new fiction works – one teenage, one historical, one contemporary – gathering plot ideas, shaping characters, assessing potential themes. The contemporary project will take precedent because it is a project that’s sat in the wings for almost fifteen years and is, I believe, ready for the current times. I’ll reveal more in a future blog as the project expands beyond the initial 3000 words.
 
And I’ve amused myself with more ChatGTP by using it to write song lyrics. It’s really very basic but fun and I’ve taken a couple of the lyrics, edited and set to chords on my guitar and they ain’t half bad (insert emoji laughing hilariously). Actually, they are amazingly trite – or could that be what they should be?
 
A new week opens. Back to the writing desk. But I have a question for you – if you had eight men in their fifties sitting on a houseboat, what would you expect them to be talking about?