Welcome to my strand of the World Wide Web. Writing Toolbox: tip #8 Instagram for Writers Subscribe to receive articles and tips every week in your inbox This week's article: Crossing the Line Book 2 Image source: Pixabay / congerdesign Book two of Crossing the Line is coming along at a cracking pace with lots of travelling around the country, more magic, even more mayhem and as much insight into Australian social history as I can pull together. One of the reasons I became a writer was because I love all the research and I'm having a lot of fun with Crossing the Line. The story continues on directly from the end of Keeper of the Way (if you haven't read it yet, you can buy it from most onlin

Welcome to my strand of the World Wide Web. Writing Toolbox: tip #7 Books on Writing Subscribe to receive articles and tips every week in your inbox This week's article: History Repeats - The Historical Novel Society Australasia Conference I do a lot of social media work: for my writing, for my day job, and now, for the Historical Novel Society Australasia, in particular their upcoming conference. #HNSA2019 is the official hashtag and if you search on Facebook or Twitter, you’ll be discovering lots of articles and conference information sourced by the social media team. I’m a part of the Facebook team and will also be blogging about some of the authors feature in this year’s program (so watc

Welcome to my strand of the World Wide Web. Writing Toolbox: tip #6 The Creative Penn Subscribe to receive articles and tips every week in your inbox This week's article: Wandering around Ballarat. I've just spent a weekend wandering around Ballarat taking photos of old buildings, locomotives, and exploring the surrounding area: Clunes, Hepburn Springs, and Daylesford. Here's what I've learned: Ballarat is a large regional city filled with heritage buildings, loads of cafes, and really wide streets. Quite a few of the buildings would fit within the timeline of my current work in progress, but not the railway station, which was built a few years after. Clunes is (or was on the day) a quiet co

Welcome to my strand of the World Wide Web. Writing Tool Box: tip #5 Netvibes Dashboard Intelligence Subscribe to receive articles and tips every week in your inbox This week's article: Researching steam train travel (it was a lot of fun!) Over the past couple of weeks, I've been writing train travel scenes. Easy. Right? Put the scenes into the correct context - travelling from Sydney to Melbourne in 1882, and it's not quite as easy as I imagined. I prefer my characters to move around in settings that are reasonably accurate so I need to be careful of automatic assumptions about common activities; like catching a train. 1882 was still within the pioneer years of the Australian rail system. T