Writers are singularly obsessed with portraying their art and work as a waste of time and a moral failing, even though its negatives, environment-wise, are almost non-existent. The footprint of writing a book is approximately equivalent to sitting around doing absolutely nothing, which is largely what writing a book involves.

How should we leave the consumers of fictions we write about climate change and ecocide? What should they think and feel as they close the book or the laptop?

I finally got around to updating my ‘Stories and essays‘ page, which it seems I haven’t touched since mid-2016. All my latest publications, online and off, free and paid, are now on there. In other news, I went to a brilliant workshop with Charlotte Wood at Writers Victoria yesterday, and I now feel slightly more […]

A couple of weeks ago I went to Sydney, partly to do a talk about From the Wreck at the Thomas Keneally Centre. The Centre, at the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts, is a wonderful little retreat from the lunacy of the Sydney CBD, and they’re perfectly happy for you to pop in and browse […]

I have a new story in Review of Australian Fiction. It’s called Amy’s twin and it’s a kind of prequel to my novella, Formaldehyde. Review of Australian Fiction publishes two stories every two weeks in e-book form. My story is paired with Wayne Marshall’s The Magicians, which is a strange and funny book. These two stories are Volume 1 […]

So your first book has been accepted for publication: congratulations! You’ve been through edits, the cover is chosen, and it’s about to go off to the printers. In the next few months your face will be all over television and you’ll be getting daily bank deposits of thousands of dollars. Right? Maybe not. All authors’ […]

On 6 August, 1859, the steamship Admella was wrecked on Carpenters Reef, about 1km off the coast of South Australia. It had left Port Adelaide the previous day, making its regular trip to Melbourne. One hundred and thirteen people were aboard – 84 passengers and 29 crew. For more than a week the wrecked and […]

Australian writers are being assailed on all fronts at the moment. The government is keen to change the rules about whether bookshops can buy their books from an overseas publisher, rather than having to go to an Australian publisher. This has the Australian Society of Authors and many others super-riled. Proposed changes to copyright are […]

Hello! Here’s an interview I did with Booktopia a while back, and which they’ve just published. They asked good questions. In writing news, I think I’ve just finished the first draft of something new. You’re probably not supposed to say that; I’ve doubtless cursed myself now. Anyway, I’m excited about doing draft two. In reading […]

Well, it’s almost November, so here’s a post about NaNoWriMo (if you have no idea what I’m talking about and wish you did, you can visit the National Novel Writing Month website here). I’m going to do nano again this year: it’ll be my (counts inaccurately in head) seventh go at this thing. Seven. I […]

It’s been a hectic year for me so far. I’ve organised and run a readathon, appeared at five writers festivals (Emerging Writers Festival, Willy Lit Fest, Bendigo Writers Festival, Melbourne Writers Festival and Write around the Murray), launched two books, read at a fundraiser for Visible Ink and done a bunch of interviews. It’s all good stuff – getting […]

It’s not that long ago I was feeling glum about ever getting another book published. Look at me, here, in the past, all glum. Now I have two books coming out at the same time. It’s pretty hard to feel glum about that (though knowing me I might try). There’s The Handbook, out in a […]

Back in a previous life, when I was environment and energy editor at The Conversation, me and my deputy editor James Whitmore had a brilliant idea. We decided the world needed a book that answered questions like ‘do I need to move to another country if I want to survive climate change?’. No one else seemed […]

Last year I signed up to do #TBR20, a challenge where you agree to read 20 books you already own before borrowing or buying anything new. I’ve been awful at it, just awful – once I finish my pile of 20 I’ll let you in on all the other books I’ve read since I started […]

A short break for self-promotion: I have a story in the brand new issue of Overland. I’m very proud of this story. If you’d like to read it (there’s also a new story from Wayne Macauley, in case you need another incentive) you can get a single issue or subscribe at the Overland online shop. […]

This week I asked my boss if I could start working four days instead of five, to give me a day for writing, and he very kindly said yes. It seemed a sensible thing to do: I like writing, after all, and consider myself a writer. That’s worth taking a 20% cut to the family […]

Last year I won a fellowship – the Mick Dark Flagship Fellowship for environmental writing – which awarded me three weeks at Varuna, The Writers House. I was delighted to win, but mostly because it made me feel better about the project I was working on: I’d been worried it was a bit rubbish, and […]

Just a quick post to nervously gloat that my unpublished novella, Formaldehyde, has been shortlisted for Seizure’s Viva la Novella prize. Six of us are on the list, three of us get our novellas published. Last years’ winners were bloody gorgeous (you can see them here and honestly you might as well buy one or four while […]

If you’ve spent any time on this blog you’ll know I’ve sometimes felt like chucking the whole authoring thing in: in an industry which publishes 160 books a day (according to Chuck Wendig), what kind of lunatic would I have to be to think that anything I wrote would ever be read? But hey, it’s […]

,,,with Hell Yeah Writer’s Bloc. This is the Tumblr face of The Writer’s Bloc (an online writers’ community), and is a rather chaotic assemblage of cartoons, interviews, illustrations, videos and heaps of other fun stuff. Plus, now, me blathering about how and what I write. It’s here.