Last Friday night, after the headiness of five Melbourne Writers’ Festival engagements in four days – plus two celebratory occasions – my wife and I went out to Melbourne restaurant Prix Fixe. Now, Prix Fixe is a fine dining establishment at any time, but when we saw its August...

Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep isn’t a perfect novel. It has inconsistencies, a few plot holes, some ‘What the …?’ moments, but they’re forgiven because King does something surpassingly well, something that drags us into the story and keeps us reading right through. Character. Stephen King does character like few...

The clever people at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival have put together video profiles of some of the participating authors. Here’s mine. It was filmed in the glorious Queen’s Hall at the State Library of Victoria, with a snippet in the magnificent domed reading room.          ...

Here ’tis, my Melbourne Writers’ Festival appearance log. For more details, click on the links. See you there! Who’s Your Doctor? Thu 28th Aug 12.30pm Workshop: World Building Wed 27th Aug 11.15am A Brief History of Robots Tue 26th Aug 10.00am Do You Remember the First Time? Mon 25th...

In a dream, I imagined trawling through Tolkien’s papers and unfinished manuscripts and finding a completely new text. It was originally called Seven Habits of Highly Effective Characters of Destiny – with a scrawled marginal note showing that puckish humour that Tolkien is known for where he’s changed this...

Goodreads Book Giveaway Machine Wars by Michael Pryor Giveaway ends July 11, 2014. See the giveaway details at Goodreads. Enter to win  ...

Get your tips in the right order. Having your ‘Beginner’ tips coming in at Number 5 is an amateur mistake/ Ease your reader in with some baby tips then graduate to tougher stuff and finish with some tips for Advanced Tip Types. Alternatively, keep your good stuff until last...

All right, creative people the world over – it’s time to give up. We, as a species, have reached the pinnacle of inventiveness, the utmost reaches of imagination, the zenith of ingenuity. We can go no further. Writers, artists, musicians, everyone may as well down tools; our work here...

Many more pix below the break! I’m just coming out of a very busy – but delightful – fortnight where I was a guest at Supanova Gold Coast and Melbourne. It’s good to see this popular culture extravaganzas having a healthy reading and writing stream (thanks to Ineke Prochazka)...

Reading has become a more stratified activity than ever. Imagine a Healthy Food pyramid, but instead populated by readers. At the bottom, sadly, are people who don’t read at all. I’ll leave analysis of whether this section of the community is growing or not to people with massive research...