Three Dresses by Wanda Gibson, wins 2025 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award

Showing all posts tagged: writing

Three Dresses by Wanda Gibson, wins 2025 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award

20 March 2025

Cape York Peninsula, Queensland, based Nukgal Wurra woman Wanda Gibson, has won the 2025 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, with her book, Three Dresses. Gibson’s win is the first time a children’s title has won the award. In addition, Three Dresses won the Children’s Literature category.

Winners in other categories included Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane, in Fiction, and Black Witness by Amy McQuire, in Indigenous Writing, which is also on the longlist of this year’s Stella Prize.

Gawimarra: Gathering by Jeanine Leane, won the Poetry award, anything can happen by Susan Hampton, collected the Non-Fiction prize, while I Made This Just for You by Chris Ames, won the Unpublished Manuscript award.

Farewell to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

12 March 2025

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (BLFC), a humorous literary award honouring terrible made up opening sentences to what will, presumably, be terrible novels, is no more. BLFC founder, Dr Scott Rice, who established the award in 1982, and had been running it with his daughter EJ Rice in recent years, has decided to retire:

Being a year and a half older than Joseph Biden, I find the BLFC becoming increasingly burdensome and would like to put myself out to pasture while I still have some vim and vigor!

The BLFC was a light-hearted addition to the literary award circuit, and I hazard to guess a few of the winning entries might well have inspired some not so terrible novel openers. A list of past winners has been archived here.

Rambles.NET, a webzine founded by Tom Knapp in 1999

6 January 2025

Rambles.NET is an online magazine founded by Tom Knapp in 1999, and still going strong over twenty-five later. Knapp himself continues to contribute. Rambles is another example of Indie Web in its original inception; I think a Facebook page is the only hint of social media present.

I had a crack at publishing a webzine way back in the day, something called channel static (Internet Archive link). Notice my ever-present use of lower case styling for proper website names.

Like all good webzines of the day (and today), Rambles published articles on a wide range of topics, including music, film, literature, pop culture, nature, history, science, religion, steampunk, and the supernatural. Check out the impressive list of past and present contributors.

In a way, I always considered disassociated to be more a webzine than anything else. Granted, only with one writer, and very much on and off in the twenty-five plus years this website has been online.

Rambles has no RSS feed that I can see, so you’ll have to read it the old fashion way: with a browser.

Favourite monospaced font for coding, do people have such a thing?

31 December 2024

Code is code, what difference does the font you choose in whatever app you use for coding possibly make? As long as the code works as intended, what does appearance have to do with it?

But the conversation I found on the topic — which in fact started months ago — actually relates to a writer’s favourite font for writing — as in copy, not code — which is kind of intriguing.

Intriguing, because I’ve never given the matter the slightest thought. Obviously on my website I have chosen a particular display font, but when it comes to drafting my posts, no, I pretty much use one of the fonts the app offers.

These fonts are certainly not monospaced fonts (for all their virtues), which is where the discussion seemed to later turn. I write all my posts, together with the necessary HTML tags, on a word processing app, and when ready, copy and paste the text into WordPress.

I know I’m missing something using this process, because I read about the way other people use (what sounds like) a number of apps, before their blog post drafts are fed into their blog publishing software. But when it comes to a favourite font for drafting, whatever that might be, there isn’t one.

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Katie Cunningham: write badly to write well

20 November 2024

Australian author and journalist Katie Cunningham:

My high school English teacher told me that good writing is the tenth draft of bad writing.

I saw this in The Booklist, a weekly newsletter by the Sydney Morning Herald, the other day. Sometimes I feel as if I rewrite everything I post here ten times before publishing it.

NaNoWriMo, NaBloPoMo, and WeblogPoMo AMA, November hots up

4 November 2024

National Novel Writing Month AKA NaNoWriMo, is on this month, for better or worse.

But if you’re a writer seeking distractions from various November happenings — I’m referring more to northern hemisphere inhabitants facing the onset of winter — and don’t want to write a novel, there are other options.

National Blog Posting Month AKA NaBloPoMo, is a write-a-blog-post-each-day challenge, similar to Weblog Posting Month AKA WeblogPoMo, which ran back in May. NaBloPoMo was established in 2006, and for reasons I cannot fathom, have only found out about it now. A list of this year’s NaBloPoMo participants can be seen here.

Back to WeblogPoMo. While not holding another blog-post-a-day challenge this month, something called WeblogPoMo AMA is on instead. Here’s how organiser Anne Sturdivant, sees it working:

For this challenge I want to foster writer interaction: write a blog post starting with a question — the AMA — and then answer the question yourself in the blog post. Others will likewise write AMA/question posts, but also answer the AMA/questions from other bloggers, linking to their initial post.

I write here most days, but don’t know if I could do so every last day of the month. I think NaBloPoMo and WeblogPoMo are cool with people missing a day here or there, but it’s still a pretty big ask. WeblogPoMo AMA, on the other hand, seems like the sort of thing you can jump in and out of, as and when you’re able to.

If you’re taking part in any of these events though, all the best.

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blogs, events, writing

So long, thanks for all the blog posts: Microsoft cans WordPad

10 October 2024

Microsoft is doing away with their old basic, but useful, word processor, WordPad, which has been bundled with Windows Operating Systems for nearly thirty-years. It will not be a feature at all in Windows 11. Yet another reason to migrate away from Windows all together, perhaps?

Before switching to Word, I used to draft all my blog posts in WordPad. Now I use Writer. I did, still do, prep all the text and HTML tags when writing up a blog post, then copy and paste the lot into WordPress. When I migrated to WordPress in 2007, I used WordPad (heh, WP) to set out all the old blog posts from the old static, manually coded HTML webpages, onto an upload template. I later imported the template in the then new database on the WordPress install. So, WP to WP. The whole process took months, and I still look through the file today, which I’ve kept in an archive folder.

I expect the end game, on Microsoft’s part, is to push everyone onto Word. For a subscription.

Writing a book may be a health hazard, just ask a writer

23 September 2024

American writer and researcher, Gwern Branwen:

But how can I not want to write a book? And I get it: writing a book is sacred and unquestionable, the ultimate achievement for Western intellectuals — better than being arrested in a protest (because you don’t have to get sweaty), better than a PhD (because not so devalued), and better even than going to Harvard (because that mostly means you got lucky in admissions).

I’m no intellectual, but I’ve been banging away at a book manuscript for years, ten years actually. On the other hand, I’ve been writing here at disassociated, on and off, since the late nineties. But what do people I know ask about the most?

A book that may never see the light of day? Or a blog that is updated regularly, and has some sort of readership (excluding the neighbour’s cat)? Surprise, surprise, it’s not the blog.

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books, psychology, writing

Ireland: home of some of the best literature in the world

2 September 2024

Publication of Irish author Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo, on 24 September 2024, nears. It promises to be quite the event. I don’t know about Australia, but in Ireland and the UK, some bookshops will open early on the day, so eager Rooney fans can get hold of her latest offering.

But Sally Rooney is only one of a cohort of popular Irish writers. The Emerald Isle* may not be the world’s most populous nation, yet it is up there with the best of them when it comes to literary output. Jonathan Swift, W.B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, C.S. Lewis, Iris Murdoch, and Edna O’Brien, are among Irish authors who are household names.

So, what’s the go? What makes Ireland a country of great writers? As Kate McCusker, writing for The Guardian discovered, the propensity to put pen to paper comes down to a number of factors.

One is the Irish love of entertaining and storytelling, of which I have some first-hand experience. Another is the diminishing influence of the Catholic Church. People no longer feel they need to restrain themselves, subsequently they can write about whatever they want, including divorce, gay marriage, and pre-marital sex. The things we all love to read about.

The Irish government is also arts-friendly. A few years ago they launched a three-year trial scheme that pays selected artists and creatives a basic weekly income. There’s an initiative that has to make a difference. Artists and writers can focus on being creative, and not getting distracted as they try to juggle day jobs and art.

* the term the Emerald Isle comes from a poem, written in 1795 by William Drennan, a doctor no less. Even non-professional writers make for great writers in Ireland…

Wanting to read more novels, versus trying to do everything else

21 August 2024

About six years ago I decided I wasn’t reading enough novels. Books sat on the side table untouched, gathering dust, and inducing a pang of guilt whenever I took notice of them. I wondered what I could do to get more into reading. One thing I am good at is meeting deadlines, and doing things I put on my to-do lists. If I could regard the period of a library book loan — being three weeks at my local library — as a deadline, maybe I could increase my reading rate that way?

So I took out a library membership, and began to borrow books. I had three weeks to finish a novel. Books could no longer sit on the side table indefinitely. They had to be back at the library after twenty-one days, or else I risked paying a late-return fee. But then I noticed the library offered a one-week loan for recently acquired titles. This so as many people as possible could read new books. And for a while, this is what I did. Read books in a week or less.

Sometimes it was a strain. But if I didn’t finish the book before it was due back, no problem: I’d make a note of the page/chapter I was up to on my online task list. I could then re-borrow the book later, and pick up where I left off. It was a plan, and it was working. I’d gone from reading no books, to sometimes, one a week. At that point I wasn’t really discriminating. I’d go over to the one-week loan shelf, and select any title I felt I could read in seven days.

But I knew it was too good to last. The first thing to come along and burst the read-one-book-a-week bubble, was the pandemic. The library shut its doors when the lockdowns commenced. Automatic three week loan extensions were granted indefinitely to anyone who’d borrowed a book prior. I think I ended up holding my then latest loan for about three-months, before pandemic restrictions eased sufficiently, so I could return it. But the pandemic wasn’t a problem of itself.

I could still borrow books through any number of library-book apps. By this stage, I’d been away from disassociated for three years (so much for the envisaged break of a few months…), and was looking at a return. But I wanted to try experimenting with the blogging format on social media. Instagram (IG) specifically. Blogging on IG was a terrible idea, and I knew it. The inability to embed links into posts being the primary drawback.

Since I’d been reading a lot, I started (a long since gone) IG page, dedicated to Australian novels. In the time the page was online, it garnered several hundred followers, and a surprisingly high degree of engagement. A little too high maybe. People sure wanted to talk about local books. Before long, I was spending most my time conversing with a regular group of followers about books, and everything else, leaving little time to read. A book was now taking several weeks, longer, to read.

I was beginning to run out of material I could write about. And not being able embed links into posts (link in bio, anyone?) was really beginning to annoy me. By this time, it was the fourth quarter of 2021. I quietly resumed writing at a temporary domain, while creating a new WordPress theme for disassociated. By late summer of 2022, I’d closed the IG page, and told followers where they could find me. But blogging, while working, while reading, does not a good blend make.

My book reading rate has slowed right down. The desire to write is in constant conflict with the desire to read, and it looks like the blog is winning. Yet, I see plenty of prolific book bloggers out there. People reading a lot, and writing a lot about that. Good for them is all I can really say. The battle for balance is without end, even if I get a chapter or two in each day. But I’m not the only one who struggles to read, as I discovered from this post at 82MHz.

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