Australia wasn't alone in underestimating the threat of COVID-19. In our defence, the country was distracted by the Black Summer bushfires, which blazed from September 2019 to March 2020. But by mid-March, with the fires extinguished, our focus shifted to the pandemic and its possible impact.
The Australian Writers' Centre runs a monthly #FuriousFiction short story competition. I submitted my first entry to #FuriousFiction on the first weekend of our COVID-19 lockdown and have taken up the monthly challenge ever since. So I was interested to see a bonus 23-word fiction story challenge.
Henry Rollins said, "A great way to learn about your country is to leave it." I learned a lot about Australia while overseas from 1987 to 1996. Books like Alice Nannup's When The Pelican Laughed helped my education. And from her memoir, I learned about the Stolen Generation and a connection with my Nan.
Ever since childhood, I've loved reading at bedtime. Even in my teens (unlike my son, sadly), I read most nights, and in my career-driven twenty-somethings, I kept up the reading habit with short stories. Now middle-aged, I still love reading, though rather than one book, I have a pile of beside books!
Life began at forty for me. Obviously, I'd had a life before my fortieth. I'd travelled and lived overseas, changed careers (several times), got married (once), bought cars and property, and owned a dog. But the birth of my son in 2002 changed everything for me. And I learned the joy of being a dad.
In 2001, I had a bright idea. I'd combine my love of writing with my software skills and create a writers' website, a forum where writers could showcase their work, readers could enjoy a wide range of writing, and publishers could unearth new talent. But it took sixteen long years to launch Tall And True!
Furious Fiction is a monthly writing competition run by the Australian Writers' Centre: 55 hours to write a 500-word short story based on a brief. The first prize is $500, with the winner published on the Writers' Centre website. And April's Furious Fiction fell on the first weekend of COVID-19 lockdown.
My niece turned twenty-six at the end of March this year (2020). And I gave her a copy of Both Sides of the Story, an ebook collection of short stories I'd recently reworked and published. The gift was special because I wrote them for a writing competition a month before my niece was born in 1994.
My birthday is on March 30. This year (2020), I turned fifty-eight, and when fireworks heralded the new year, I didn't expect to remember my birthday for COVID-19. I thought it'd be just another tick towards a more significant (sobering) milestone, sixty. But now I wonder should I forget it this year?
Former Middle East correspondent, Sophie McNeill, appeared on a recent Late Night Live to talk about her new book, We Can't Say We Didn't Know. McNeill despairs at the world's mute response to the atrocities committed in Syria and that we seem to be living in an age of impunity for those who wage war.
In June 2016, I wrote a review of Jerome and His Women by Joan O'Hagan. The book's publisher and Joan's daughter, Denise O'Hagan of Black Quill Press, liked it, and we started corresponding. Recently Denise asked if I could edit the review for another publication. I had to cull it from 477 words to 300!
Walking my dog one warm afternoon in January, I heard The Book Show podcast interview with Isabel Allende. The next day I saw her latest novel, A Long Petal of the Sea, in my local library. It seemed serendipitous. More so, as published in 2020, it would be my first book of the new year and decade.
In December 2018, I blogged about the sixteen books I'd read or dipped into during that year in My Year of Books. I'm a bedtime reader and often doze off with a book on my nose. And this is why I'm happy to report there were another sixteen fiction and nonfiction titles in my bedside books for 2019.
I have kept diaries for thirty-three years and used the Belmont A7, day-to-a-page, pocket-diary for twenty-one of those. Its twenty lines per page proved a perfect fit for my daily entries. However, last August, I lost my 2019 diary and discovered the joy of not being constrained to a page per day.
When I was a boy, I thought the spirit of Xmas was receiving: from my overflowing Santa Sack and gifts under the Xmas tree. Then I grew up, and for me, especially after I became a dad, it's giving. I like choosing gifts for family and friends, which is why I say bah humbug to the modern Kris Kringle.
I have kept a diary since I set off backpacking in March 1987. In the early years, I only recorded occasional highlights. However, as I wrote in 32 Years of Diaries (Janunary 2018), I made a New Year's Resolution in 2005 to write up every day. Hence, a lost diary is a disaster—it's happened to me twice.
Phil Collins released Both Sides of the Story in 1993. It was a catchy song, but I remember it more for the music video. Scenes of homelessness, domestic violence, military patrols on streets and a ghetto kid mugging a white man, juxtaposed with Collins crooning, We need to hear both sides of the story.
