Dear diary Well … it’s been a busy time on the interwebs today! So much so that I got barely any work done. Oh well, tomorrow will be a catch up day I suppose. But forget tomorrow – this entry is about today! As always I kicked things off with a visit to my favourite online forum (HRW – Hate Readers of the World). I often wonder at the special kind of genius it took to create this … [Read more...]
Never ever set up the baby’s room any earlier than 1-2 weeks out from your due date. Just don’t do it. I applied this rule with my first-born and other than one government client deciding to get feedback from a ‘few key stakeholders’ four days before J was due (on a piece of artwork they’d approved and signed off on the previous week!), there were no unexpected, last minute, … [Read more...]
As a writer I deal with rejection on a fairly regular basis. Every story idea that gets knocked back. Every ‘this needs a bit more work’ from an editor. Every negative comment on a blog post. They all really really sting. And I have always marvelled at just how much these things would shake my confidence for a solid day. At least! Things improved a bit when I did some editing work for an … [Read more...]
For a long time (ie 34 of my 35 years on this earth) I didn’t identify with the label ‘feminist’. And the more ‘how very dare you’ articles I read from feminists lambasting high profile women who also didn’t identify with the term, the more I felt the need to distance myself from it. The final straw that broke my back was reading the *Jezebel article from which this post’s title … [Read more...]
Well I have just finished watching the single most baffling press conference in the history of man. Some quick background: Last year at the London Olympics the entire Australian Swimming team performed well below expectations. Post-Olympics it became clear that there had been a shift in the way the team had been managed in recent years and this had affected the general happiness and … [Read more...]
Over the last six months I have lost count of the times someone has shared a problem with me and I have felt completely and utterly useless. No mind blowing solutions to offer. No brilliant advice. Just an ear to lend. And while an ear is sometimes all people want or need, I do like to be of actual help (beyond listening) and I like having something to offer by way of a solution. For this … [Read more...]
This is an interesting question that Michaela asked me recently and one I know many grapple with: Writer or blogger - can you be both? What Michaela was saying was: everyone has limited hours in their day and a limited number of words they can write. So where should those words go? For me, I love writing here on my blog because it is the one place I can write purely for myself. I also … [Read more...]
Over the last few months I have been doing a lot of work on my writing. I have been talking with mentors and getting my words critiqued. And boy oh boy has it been … interesting. The feedback from these people has been pretty universal. “There’s nothing wrong with your writing Kelly. You form sentences nicely. You tell stories nicely. You wrap things up nicely. It’s all very … … [Read more...]
You would think that when you’re writing a book about your adult life*, and said book covers the death of your brother, two close friends and four babies in utero, that grief would feature pretty highly in the pages somewhere. But my experiences with grief are largely absent from my book and many readers have asked me why this is. The major reason is this. As a rule, grief doesn’t … [Read more...]
We are one, but we are many, and from all the lands on Earth we come, we share a dream and sing with one voice – I am, you are, we are Australian. This song never fails to move me to tears. Most likely because it is often sung by angel voiced youth choirs. But also because, for me, it really encapsulates so much of the emotion I feel when I reflect on the fact that I get to live in this … [Read more...]
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