The most wonderful thing about Penny Jones' writing is it is impossible to pigeonhole her into any specific genre box. While her stories do often have recurring themes, she approaches each one with a fresh angle of attack every time. She is never predictable nor does she rely on tropes, her characters are as likeable as they are often horrible, and her prose has a delicious, dark beauty to it where dreadful events are described in layers of lyrical narration.
I turned forty-one last year in the middle of lockdown, alert level 4, and it was one of the best birthdays I’d ever had...
Writing in a new notebook feels like a strange parallel to your life. The first page, of course, will always be the best; the cleanest and neatest, the one with the most promise.
Sometimes I get ideas for things from totally random places, other times they come from things I have seen or read or heard. I want to share with you the process of one of my recent ideas – just to show how long it can take from my having the original idea for a piece, until it becomes real.
A dear friend of mine who has been writing since the 1980s once told me that there are no rules when it comes to writing. "A writer only writes for themselves and does their best to create the books they want to read."
This story is copyright. Except for the purpose of fair review, no part may be stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including recording or storage in any information retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author. No reproduction may be made, by any means, unless a licence
Short story – Long Drop. Offered for consideration for the Sir Julius Vogel Awards 2021, category of Short Story.
Offered for consideration for the Sir Julius Vogel Awards 2021, category of Short Story. If you think this work is worth a nomination, please take a couple of minutes to fill in this form at the SFFANZ page, before 31st March 2021. Thank you so much, and I hope you enjoy it.
I started 2021 with an online feud, one which had been brewing for a while. It began as an innocent and innocuous tweet, as these things often do, as to which movie was the better one: Aliens (James Cameron, 1986) or RoboCop? (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)
As pretty much everyone else has said in their yearly roundups and reviews, 2020 was, to put it mildly, a bit rubbish. One of the best things I did this year was to start outlining monthly goals and tracking data with a Life Journal.