Kathryn's Inbox

Happy Hallowe'en everyone.

Imagine finding yourself in a place that is well ... not quite like home. (A digital world, to be exact.) Imagine being there with an earlier version of yourself. Not only does this earlier version of yourself not trust you, but the two of you need to work together to save your friends. Oh, and there are people who want you dead. That's the opening premise of Fall (published as Hollowgirl outside of Australia,) the brilliant, final instalment of the Twinmaker trilogy by Sean Williams.  I only finished reading this book a few hours ago and already it is my favourite book of the series. Seeing, well more than one, version of Clair Hill, was quite intriguing, as was meeting a pre-improvement version of Clair's other best friend Libby. Meanwhile, Q is growing up fast and Jesse remains a solid, likeable character who in many ways holds the story together. The situations are complex and action packed, and I found the complexity of the plot quite enjoyable. There are also a ...

Welcome back to Writers on Wednesday! This week I have a great interview with Australian author Russell Proctor ... Tell me a bit about yourself … I am an Australian writer, but have also been many other things in my working life, including a lawyer, teacher, professional actor, medical project manager and even a pizza delivery boy (everyone loves to see the pizza boy!) At present I am semi-retired, tutoring school and university students in the evenings and writing during the day. My interests include hiking, astronomy and cats. I have travelled extensively throughout the world, preferring out of the way places to modern civilization, for example I’ve seen Antarctica, walked the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. I do not describe myself as a thrill-seeker, but certainly prefer my travels to include adventures rather than just “tourist traps”. Tell us about your most recently published book? I am currently producing a horror/f...

Isabel Allende's latest novel is a beautifully crafted story of a woman who has lived a surprising duel life. Alma Belasco is a wealthy woman from a much loved, well-respected and charitable family, who in her old age resides at Lark House, an unusual but charming and thoroughly progressive nursing home. As Alma attempts to matchmake Irina, a careworker at Lark House, with her wealthy but socially progressive son Seth, the pair slowly learn more about Alma and a mysterious but beautiful secret from her past. From there the author weaves seemlessly between the past and the present to tell the story of Alma's life, of her arrival in the United States before the onset of the second world war, to the events that would lead to her duel life--her role as a wife and mother with a man who can provide for her, but who feels no passion for her, and her affair with a man who can give her the love and passion that she needs. Allende is, as always, an author who can deliver a detail...

This tree in Flinders Street (on the edge of the plaza that winds behind the town hall) is the latest bit of Adelaide fauna to cop a yarn bombing--a tradition that was popular a few years ago, inspired by Kate Jacob's book The Friday Night Knitting club. Yarn bombing seems to be slowly going out of fashion, so it was nice to see that someone out there is keen to keep the tradition going ...

My name is Kathryn White, I am a writer and quite frankly, I am shithouse at writing romance. My qualifications are sketchy at best--I'm working class, unmarried, have an honours degree in English Literature, prefer cats over dogs and--the big one--I don't like wine. (What is it about romance writers and wine? I've never understood this.) All of which are hardly the qualifications of one who is predisposed to writing romantic fiction. (You'll notice that romance authors are nearly always married too.) And also, my characters, especially the female ones like to swear. A lot. And sometimes unnecessarily. Which makes for exceedingly bad copy for romantic fiction. Most of the time I am cool with that. My writing is what it is--something that a librarian could possibly sort as contemporary fiction and nearly all of it independently published. And, naturally, my least commercial project is the one that consistently sells the most books. I no more feel the need to write ...

Meme says all.

I picked up a copy of Slammed with very few expectations--I knew that it was a romance, that it was Hoovers debut novel and that it somehow incorporated poetry into the plot. In other words, I was expecting to be entertained for a couple of hours by a book that I would probably soon forget. The first couple of chapters seemed to prove me right-- Slammed begins as a well, the fantasy that every teenage girl has had at one time or another about moving to a new town and instantly catching the eye of the very attractive and slightly older guy next door, who just happens to be perfect for her in every way. And then along comes the perfect plot twist ... No good romance is complete without some kind of stumbling block, and with Slammed , Hoover creates the perfect reason why Layken and Will cannot be together and tortures the pair of them with their mutual longing at every possible opportunity. There are plenty of other things going on as well, one major character has a parent d...

Welcome to another great Writers on Wednesday interview. This week I am chatting with Pete Sutton, author, one of the organisers of the Bristol Festival of Literature and editor of Far Horizons magazine ... Tell us a bit about yourself … I’m a relatively recent fiction writer. I spent 20 odd years writing for an RPG, eventually becoming its “creative director” – but a few years ago I felt it was time to move on. I’d been involved in the Bristol Festival of Literature (and still am) and a vague “I’d like to write a book one day” eventually became – “”I’m going to write a book” and eventually – “I’ve written a book”. I’ve found that writing the book was the ‘easy’ part! Tell us about your most recently published book? As well as being a writer I edit Far Horizons magazine (which has an Australian publisher) and the latest published book is a slim collection of stories from folk who were involved in the RPG I was talking about, but who are all now published write...

The Heart Goes Last is a novel that starts out serious, before eventually moving toward a deliciously dark but hilarious slapstick ending--and is, perhaps, the best Atwood novel that I have ever read because of it. The novel opens with the gloom and doom of a financial crisis. Stan and Charmaine are a once middle class couple in their early thirties who have been reduced to living in their car. Then they are offered an opportunity to move to more comfortable surroundings ... but at a cost. As participants in a social experiment, Charmaine and Stan alternate, living one month inside a comfortable home and then next inside a prison. After a little while, Charmaine and Stan take a bit too much of an interest in the couple who they alternate with and soon, they discover that there are far greater and far more sinister forces at work in this social experiment ... I thoroughly enjoyed this novel for its quirk humour and strange situations, ones that, toward the end of the novel beco...

It's a mark! Outside the front entrance to Adelaide Oval is this statue of South Australian football legend Barrie Robran marking the ball. Robran is the only former SANFL player to be commemorated with a statue at Adelaide Oval. 

Winky Dink. This awesome guy/duck/puppet did not give me nightmares. When you're a kid, the world is an unbelievably scary place. This is mostly due to it being full of people who are taller than you who expect you to unequivocally do what they say without question, regardless of how stupid their request may be. Like the time that my grandma got upset with me for not running along a busy railway platform, but then again my grandma always had little awareness and understanding of boundaries and personal safety issues. Anyway, when you're a kid, the world can be a pretty scary place. And what is even scarier is that, sometimes, you do not even have to leave your own bedroom, that supposedly safe, warm sanctuary that has the poster of a smiling Winky Dink  on the wall. And while my bedroom may have been free of monsters who lived under the bed or in the wardrobe, which differed from those of some of my friends, there was another terrible, sinister force at work, ready to u...

A series of memes, some of them funnier than others, seem to be doing the rounds of social media, portraying Ernie from Sesame Street as a serial killer. This makes me oddly nostalgic for the late 1990s, back when Bert was considered to be the evil one ...

Moving seamlessly between the past and the present The Lake House tells the story of a child seemingly stolen from his wealthy family home in Cornwall, and that of the disgraced police officer Sadie Sparrow who, seventy years later becomes determined to solve the mystery of missing baby Theo. The mystery of Theo's disappearance is compounded by a number of family dramas--a father still suffering from the after effects of the great war, a mother and daughter who are both secretly in love with the same man and a sister who saw something that she shouldn't. Seventy years later, most of the main people in this mystery have died, though his older sister Alice is still alive and has become a beloved crime writer who is somewhat reminiscent of P.D. James. But why is Alice so coy about her first manuscript, the one that she wrote just before Theo's disappearance, and what does it have to do with her brother? Morton knows exactly how to combine a multi-generational family sa...

Welcome to another great Writers on Wednesday post. This week, I am chatting with Louise Guy who is the author of The Crafters Club series ... Tell us a bit about yourself … Getting serious about writing fiction started as a seed of an idea in 2003 when I put my marketing/copy writing career on hold and my husband and I took off on a great Australian adventure. The seed continued to grow as our adventure did. Initially, one four-wheel drive, one map, one year, that was the plan. Twelve years, many thousands of kilometers, and two kids later, we are yet to return to Melbourne. Now living on Queensland's beautiful Sunshine Coast, I’m using my writing background exactly how I dreamed one day I would; writing, publishing and promoting books. I write contemporary women's fiction as well as adventure stories for children aged 6-12. When I’m not writing, you'll find me at one of my favorite haunts; the pool, the Noosa river or at the beach with the kids. When the...

Culture, tradition and chick-lit come together in The Wedding Season , an occasionally bittersweet and sometimes hilarious story set in Melbourne during the Sri Lankan wedding season. Shani is thirty-two, has a successful career and is happily single, much to the disgust of her mother. But when Shani's horoscope predicts that now is the best time for marriage, her mother goes into over-drive, setting her up with one hundred different men. All of them prove to be unsuitable, some of them hilariously so, but a tragic event is to come, one which changes everything ... Author Su Dharmapala does a commendable job of writing a story that crosses cultures and traditions and offers a sympathetic glimpse at mother-daughter relationships, as well as some other family drama. There are some truly comical moments--such as the way that the author hints that a herbal love potion intended for a different woman was responsible for bringing together actors Hugh Jackman and Deborah Lee Furne...

I snapped this gorgeous mosaic table at Noarlunga several weeks ago. Look closely. I think that it might be trying to tell you a story ...

NOWHERESVILLE, AUSTRALIA--Staff at the Dairy Fresh Ice Creamery stunned onlookers this week, when they told a young, female customer to bloody well line up and wait for her turn to be served, just like the rest of their customers were expected to. "I saw the whole thing," an onlooker, who wished only to be known as Dave told our reporter. "This stupid bimbo and her friend walked straight up to the counter and just expected to be served ahead of everyone else."  The girl, who identified herself to our reporter as Willow Bark, a nineteen year old fashion model from Nowheresville, was unrepentant about her actions. "How was I supposed to know that there was a queue?" She asked. "I didn't see those people there, I was too busy talking on my phone." With a sigh and a pause, she then added. "They could have just served me anyway. It only takes a minute to get an ice cream and I was pointing at the flavours I wanted. And who cares about t...

Still a classic Simpsons moment ...

Beautiful Liar is a rags-to-riches NA romance about a young woman who has risen some pretty tragic circumstances--first her father dies, and then her mother becomes an alcoholic--and finds herself working at one of London's most exclusive nightclubs and earning the attention of Alexander Noble, the spoiled and reckless son of the owner of the nightclub. Nina knows that she should keep away from Alex; that he is bad for her, but she cannot stay away. And while Alex may be a beautiful liar, it is other people in her life who are hiding the worst secrets of all ... I found Beautiful Liar to be a quick, easy read that delivers everything that it promises on the cover. The ending is a bit odd for a NA romance, but it's also nice to see a heroine who is not completely swept away by her lover--I get the sense that Nina is a true survivor and a true independent woman, one who is happy to have love in her life, but wants other things as well. She is not a princess who needs savi...

Welcome to another great Writers on Wednesday post. This week, I am handing the baton over to Australian author Kellie Wallace who is going to tell us about her latest novel, Her Sweetest Downfall... Kathryn has given me the opportunity to write a small post today so I'm going to give in to some harmless self promotion. My latest release, historical fiction novel Her Sweetest Downfall gave me another chance to explore my love for the 1940's. I've written two previous books, Darkness before Dawn and Skylark in the same era, and it's a time I just fell in love with. While its hard to visualise the clothes and the environment I know its vivid in my mind and hopefully, my reader's. Her Sweetest Downfall can be described as a forbidden love story. At the height of the London Blitz, Viola Craft, a sexually repressed young woman is trapped in a loveless marriage to her God fearing husband Vernon. She spends her days working in her mother's dress shop wh...

Sydney based blogger Rosie Waterland's autobiography is a mix of black comedy and a no-holes-barred account of a young woman who has survived some of the worst things that life has to offer--mentally ill parents, being sexually abused by her foster carer, being abandoned by her mother and then her uncle, school bullying, a stint in a mental hospital and her eventual battles with her weight. Or, as she writes, "I officially knew that my weight had gotten out of control when I realised that I could no longer wipe my own arse." And that's the authors writing style. The book is provocative, it's funny and the author does not take herself too seriously, even when she is writing about some of the worst events of her life. And there is hope there too--Waterland now has an enviable job writing for website Mamamia and she leaves readers with a resounding message about the importance of self-acceptance. As the title suggests, after years of trying to be cool, Waterland ...

This was part of an origami project that brightened up Rundle Mall last May. Members of the public were asked to contribute to this beautiful paper display and the result was showcased inside Rundle Mall.

Julia Venn has just one photograph of her beloved twin brother and a brand new identity as Lucy Black. She is only survivor of a horrific high school shooting where her twin brother shot her best friend, her boyfriend and many of their classmates, though she cannot remember anything about those twenty-two minutes. But things are not quite as they seem, and Julia may not be the honest and reliable teenager that she makes out to be. And when her brother's former psychiatrist comes searching for her, Julia knows that her secrets may just be about to come out ... I felt that Damage Done was an exciting teen thriller with an unreliable (and thoroughly horrible,) narrator. Author Amanda Panich plays with her readers, drip feeding them information, before giving Julia's true nature away. Equally shocking is Julia's true relationship with her brother, though the author handles the controversial subject matter well. My only real complaint is that Julia's distant parents ...

An American woman thinks that Vegemite is racist. In a short YouTube video, and in a provocative blog post which has no sources to back up her claims, twenty year old Cassidy Boon berates Australian's for being racist and declares that Vegemite is racist against Indigenous Australians because the popular spread is black. In her blog, Ms Boon makes a number of claims about Australia, the underlying message being that she thinks that Australians, and their iconic spread, are fundamentally racist.  Well, so what? Since Cassidy Boon shared her video and blog, the whole thing has gone viral and hundreds of bored and patriotic Australians have become outraged by her claims. The big question is why anyone even cares about this. We live in an age where anyone can share an opinion about anything on the internet. There is nothing to stop someone writing a blog about racist potatoes, or the secret, subliminal slut shaming qualities of peanut paste. There is also plenty of scope for...

Found this meme and it gave me a giggle. Hope you like it, sorry to all the folks out there who are offended by all the swearing! PS Road Runner actually says "Meep, meep!" not "Beep, beep!"