From the category archives:

A Writer’s Life

The Past Is a Foreign Country (but sometimes you get a visitor’s pass).

The Past Is a Foreign Country (but sometimes you get a visitor’s pass). First, an email via this website: I would like to send some material to Kathy Page. This material belongs to her and is something she would like to receive… The writer turns out to be a penfriend with whom I last communicated [...]

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Find Out

The Find is out! release (v.) c.1300, “to withdraw, revoke,” also “to liberate” (c.1300), from O.Fr. relaisser “to relinquish, quit, let go, leave behind,” variant of relacher “release, relax,” from L. relaxare (see relax). Meaning “relinquish, surrender” is recorded from late 14c. Of press reports, attested from 1904; of motion pictures, from 1912; of music [...]

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Living (Loving) Local

When you live in a vast country – and on a small island which you only leave once in a while – it is hard to tell whether or not your book has reached the bookstores. All I know is that The Find is in my nearest city, Victoria, turned outwards on the shelf, with [...]

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Third Person or First?

Extract from a notebook entry made during the writing of The Find Choices, choices: the writer’s life is full of them. Current example: do I stick with the third person, limited omniscient point of view which should ideally offer me some flexibility in telling the story, or, since I don’t seem to be actually using [...]

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Research, for Heaven’s Sake!

Research for my novel The Find included visits to clinics, hospitals, museums, and paleontological sites. I love research, but sometimes I hate it too. Here’s an extract from a notebook I kept during one of my trips to the Royal Tyrell Museum. Suspended forty thousand feet above the Rockies I absolutely knew that I would [...]

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Sales Figures

The trip was part family, part business. Melatonin did not work and for several days we had walked in an exhausted, dreamlike state through the shade of galleries and museums taking in old favourites and seeing strange new things, such as the National Portrait Gallery’s video loop of David Beckham, sleeping. He was artfully lit [...]

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The Reading

Maria hasn’t arrived. I refuse to panic myself by checking my watch but I know it’s after 7pm, and I’m supposed to read at Pages at 7:30. I peer out at the glitter of passing traffic; nothing even slows down, and finally I cave in and call her. “Hi, Maria, how are you?” “Kathy, I [...]

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Notes & Queries

The Book Arrives (Alphabet) Strawberries. Sunbathing snakes. The first garden vegetables, the first swim in the lake, the last days of school, the long, golden evenings… I write in the garden, lying in a hammock that’s shaded by an old cherry tree; in a branch above me a robin pecks at the fruit, splattering my legs with [...]

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Snakes and Ladders

Snakes & Ladders. The phone rings at 7.40 am: I’m easing the kids into raingear and out of the door along with their lunches, books, sports equipment and a recently discovered sheep skull for Show & Tell. Yes? I say, thinking it’s either a UK emergency, another cancelled soccer match or the dentist again – [...]

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