THE BIGGEST SHOW IN TOWN Last week we went to the Royal Easter Show in Sydney. It’s a huge fair, and farmers and gardeners take their produce along and win prizes. Well some of them win. I wanted to enter some of my vegetables, but Pauline Conolly (she’s my guardian)
Read more →
Hello, here is a rather sad story about my Halloween pumpkin. I forget when I planted the seeds, and also what kind they were. And maybe I was a bit late getting them in. Our bees seemed to have left when the lavender and thyme and all the Australian
Read more →
THE LITTLE WEBSITE THAT GREW! Recently this website clicked over to 550,000 visits. Maybe not a great deal by some standards, but amazing to me. When I began in late 2012 I had no idea about SEO (search engine optimization), effective tags or stop words. It must
Read more →
Hello from Editor Des, MY MUSHROOMS Well my guardian Pauline Conolly wrote a story about fungi the other day called Fungi: Flowers of the Fall . So I thought I would do a better one. Mine is about very special, magic mushrooms. I think you will love it
Read more →THE MARSDEN SISTERS MOVE SOUTH This is an extension of The Water Doctor’s Daughters’ original literary walk around the town of Great Malvern, Worcestershire. In 1876 Dr James Marsden separated from his second wife Mary to pursue an affair with Sabina Welch, a servant girl from Malvern. Emily, the
Read more →
WHAT’S IN A NAME? I recently expressed some disquiet over a book title chosen by a fellow member of a writers’ group. He was actually seeking advice on whether to include a blurb on the back cover of his memoir. Perhaps rightly, he was not impressed when
Read more →
We writers are often rather introverted people. How cruel that after we write our books in our quiet little nests, we have to expose ourselves to the big wide world. Oh dear, giving talks and speaking on radio etc will always terrify me, no matter how
Read more →BLOWN TO THE LEFT IN A COLD WIND OF CHANGE Until recently the only concept I had of being ‘left’ in any sense was being left handed. Since I am not a violinist it has never caused me huge problems, except when signing books at author functions.
Read more →
A DAY OUT FOR EDITOR DES (THAT’S ME) Well one day my guardian Pauline Conolly took me to Sydney as a special treat. Now she loves going to the State Library, but I don’t (boooooring!!) I was pretty p…..d off when we ended up there (sorry, I
Read more →
WRITING TO SANTA IS A SERIOUS BUSINESS; AN ILLUSTRATED ESSAY BY EDITOR DES…. ER, THAT’S ME! Well here is a letter to Santa written by a little Australian boy called Paddy, over a hundred years ago. Who do you think Paddy was? (see answer at the bottom
Read more →