The great thing about being a famous author (I’m guessing here) is you can be incredibly rich and phenomenally well-known and loved, without anyone being particularly sure what you look like. You don’t appear in ‘stars without makeup’ spreads in Who magazine where commentators deride your flaky t-zone. Fans are unlikely to stop you on […]

Thanks very much to Helen Merrick for interviewing me for this year’s round-up of Australian speculative fiction. It felt a little presumptuous to be saying so much when I know so little, but it was a really fun process. The interview is here, and there are links to all the other bloggers doing interviews at […]

I’m researching and writing a non-fiction book, about preparing yourself to survive climate change. I started writing it because I thought it was an interesting topic, one that hadn’t been covered elsewhere in any depth, and one where I have a bit of expertise (thanks to three years as environment editor at The Conversation). A […]

Before you get published, getting published is the most exciting thing that could ever possibly happen to you. And then when you get published, it is. Being published feels like the opening of a magical door. You’re in. You’re an author. Your book is in bookshops, it sits there in the same place as Middlemarch […]

Here’s me on the Wheeler Centre’s ‘Dailies’ page… Last month, threeseparatescientific papers came to the same conclusion: the West Antarctic ice sheet is melting, and it’s too late for us to reverse the process. If you heard the news you’d have realised, at an intellectual level, that we’re in serious trouble and something needs to be done. […]

I used to be a photographer, back in the days of film and paper and chemicals and darkrooms. I loved everything about taking, processing and printing images, but I couldn’t get excited about high-end cameras, light-meters and so on. I preferred keeping the instruments basic and using my eye and the darkroom to do the […]

Thanks to blogger, tweeter and author extraordinaire Annabel Smith for nominating me for this round of the writing process blog hop. You can read about how she makes the magic happen here. What am I working on now? Last year I had a great idea: wouldn’t it be interesting to write a handbook to help […]

These were all in a work notebook from 2007, kept during the course of a project that went from bright hope to crumbled disaster. Tucked in the back of the book I found my resignation letter. Thanks to @tinyowlworkshop for reminding me I can’t concentrate without doodling.

A week or so back I got into a twitter discussion about whether any authors are any good late in life. Many people felt like a writer’s middle years are their best,and that most make a slow (or rapid) decline into irrelevance. But offsetting age and the loss of faculties, most felt,was that your ‘craft’ […]