There’s a chapter in Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler where aging Pearl Cody, almost completely blind, asks her son Ezra to go through her boxes of photos and diaries as a young woman. It’s a chapter that doesn’t have much tension, doesn’t advance the plot, doesn’t make readers want to turn the page, other than to develop the characters further. But yet, years later after reading the book, I can still remember this insignificant yet poignant moment. Ezra reads out to his mother a diary entry from 1910 – baking Scottish fancies which weren’t good enough for company, brown silk gloves – Pearl tells Ezra to read on.

‘Early this morning,’ he read to his mother, ‘I went out behind the house to weed. Was kneeling in the dirt by the stable with my pinafore a mess … and all at once thought, why I believe that just at this moment I am absolutely happy.’

Last Saturday, 25th July, our family of five had a Christmas in July dinner. We’ve never had one before but we decided to do it to break up the groundhog day nature of Melbourne lockdown 2.0.

We drew KK names out of a hat, and everyone had a small amount of money to buy a present. No online shopping, all local. Miss 13 pulled out a few decorations. I cooked a roast pork with red onions, apples, roast potatoes and sticky date pudding for dessert. I even found a local shop which sells nuts, spices and lollies that had some leftover Christmas chocolate! No one was allowed to exchange presents or eat unless they were suitably attired for dinner – no shorts or track pants allowed. We hung stockings over the fireplace – which was warm, unlike its usual cold version in December – listened to carols, cracked open last year’s leftover bon-bons, wore silly paper hats and ate dinner together.

Mr 11 said it was the best July Christmas ever!

We took a family selfie. Mr 11 wore a red and black patterned vest over a yellow and grey check shirt. ‘Nice pattern on pattern!’ noted Miss 13. I squashed between Mr 16’s tall frame with his magnificent mullet hairstyle with my husband on the other side, holding out his phone to preserve ourselves at this moment.

This might be the photo I want to see again in forty years time, when I want to remember a tiny moment, unobserved by anyone in the outside world, but important to us.

Wishing you memories for this weekend.

I am so late to the party with this book – Where the crawdads sing by Delia Owens. So many friends have read it and loved it – I don’t know anyone who said they didn’t enjoy it.

Kya has lived alone in the marshes on the North Carolina coast since she was small. She didn’t learn to read or write until she was a teenager but her knowledge of the marshes and her talent in documenting the birds and shells around her is as extraordinary as her resourcefulness in finding food.

Two teenage boys come into her life and the imprint they leave on both her heart and life is lasting.

This is Owens’ debut novel but she has written non-fiction books as a wildlife scientist, and her observations of Kya’s marsh life was written with an authentic and poetic tone.

It is never too late to read a popular book!

I’m planning on reading Newbery Medal winner Hello, Universe by Erin Estrada Kelly, a middle-grade novel with Mr 11. I loved it – a story about four children who cross paths one day early in the summer holidays. The characters were unique – my favourite was Kaori, a fortune-telling psychic of a girl. She has one client, an anxious and shy boy called Virgil with a storytelling grandmother. Virgil has one school class with Valencia, a fiery deaf girl. Then there’s Chet, a basketball-playing bully. And let’s not forget Virgil’s guinea pig, Gulliver. While the ending was a little predictable, I’d have followed these quirky characters anywhere.

Two books from the US – enjoy!

It’s an odd thing to imagine, how one would edit an illustration. But readers, particularly young readers, need the illustrations to read meaning into the text.

I checked some illustrations yesterday for a middle-grade novel. There was the odd punctuation mistake in the first round of illustrations, easily fixed. But then there was an incorrect date in the next round of final illustrations. The date appeared on an envelope, and it didn’t match a letter which appeared in the manuscript, about 30 pages earlier. It would take an astute, detail-orientated middle-grade reader to notice this but still, it’s incorrect. Sometimes it’s easier to change a word in the manuscript than an illustration but it wasn’t too late in our case so the illustration will be changed. Good to realise this now rather than later!

I edited a nursery rhyme book about a dozen years ago. I compiled all the rhymes, checking for the correct versions and wrote all the art briefs. One of the rhymes was about Hector Protector.

Hector Protector was dressed all in green,
Hector Protector was sent to the queen.
The queen did not like him,
no more did the king,
So Hector Protector was sent back again.

Can you predict the colour I suggested for Hector Protector’s clothing in the art brief? Correct – green!

Can you guess what colour his clothing was in the draft illustration? Nope, it was blue! Poor Hector – unwanted by royalty and dressed incorrectly!

Almost twenty years ago, when I worked as an editor for an educational publisher, I edited a language series. The illustrations were essential to teach kids new vocabulary. You can’t have a young learner confused as to whether le chien is a dog or cat because the illustration isn’t clear enough.

In children’s picture books, middle-grade novels, non-fiction books and education books for all ages, the illustrations are just as important as the text.

Even in year 12, English students are often expected to analyse a cartoon when responding to media for one of their assessment tasks.

So here’s to the unsung illustrators who blend equal parts talent with patience for fussy editors!

A newsy post today for you, dear blog readers.

Reading – The dictionary of lost words by Pip Williams. I loved immersing myself in this story about a young girl who grows up in the workplace of her father, a lexicographer in Oxford in the 1880s. I found myself bewailing the limitations of women in both their personal and professional lives, and wanting so much for the main character, Esme.

Story by Robert McKee. It’s mainly about films but there’s so many insights for novelists as well. I like his philosophy that ‘Story is metaphor for life’.

Writing – I’m working on the first act in my middle-grade verse novel, polishing this final draft before I send it out again. After having a break from it while I wrote a young adult novel, it’s so wonderful to be working on it again. I feel like my mind is skipping from one scene to another, making connections, tightening the threads, fine-tuning the subtle nuances of emotion.

Teaching – I taught a writing workshop in a school holiday program early this week, a lucky three days before the second Melbourne lockdown. The kids were enthusiastic with vivid imaginations and we had a great time making up quest stories in writers’ notebooks. They created an oral story so epic my assistant and I decided it needed to be a trilogy!

Editing – I finished up another round of a fiction book for children, and started taking in corrections to a non-fiction adult book. Both books are well-written, and will be much appreciated by their different audiences. I love the variety!

Eating – I love all the slow-cooked winter dishes – we’ve eaten slow-cooked lamb in a tomato sauce to have as open sandwiches with red capsicum, rocket and feta, plus an Italian sausage soup with beans and parmesan grilled croutons. I’m thinking we might need scones for afternoon tea or a pudding for the weekend ahead.

Sewing – I’ve been quilting a butterfly quilt for a few years – pulled it out twice because it puckered so badly I couldn’t bear it. But now thanks to some quilting advice from friends and a fabric shop, it’s starting to come together and it’s the perfect winter craft, especially while watching the footy on television.

I hope your week has been fulfilling, too!

Numbers that end in a zero are so neat, aren’t they? Turning the big 40 or 50 or 60, making a million, wrangling a deal under so many thousand dollars …

Writing a novel in 90 days has the same ring. For me, at least. At the writers’ retreat at Springfield I attended earlier this year, our wonderful teacher, Sarah Selecky, mentioned a book by Alan Watt called The 90 day novel.

Well, I am proof that it can be done! This week, I finished my young adult verse novel about a street artist and a violinist. What I loved about Alan’s book was the balance between writing exercises that tap into your subconscious and structural questions that help you work out the three acts of your book.

This style suits me beautifully because I lean on both my right and left brains, switching between both the creative and linear processes. I’m an editor so I use my left brain mostly to check minute details such as hyphens, timeframes, consistent end-of-chapter questions, with a little bit of right braining to help develop characters and move the plot along. But I’m a writer, so I use my right brain mostly to daydream, make connections, create, with a little bit of left brain to assess the pace or rearrange the structure.

In my personal life, I rely on my left brain to organise our home and the kids, but I love to relax by turning on my right brain with sewing, cooking, painting.

Alan’s book – I’ve never met him but seriously, I could write him a love letter! – is the perfect blend for me. I don’t go too off-tangent because I have a framework to work within but his prompts give me lots of space to daydream and imagine.

So I now have the first draft – so rough it could be used as sandpaper, so full of plot holes you could hide the Titanic in them, such thin, underdeveloped characters you could see through them like tracing paper. But it’s a completed first draft, and I love the premise and my two protagonists.

I’m putting it away for now, because – drum roll – Alan also has a book called The 90 day rewrite! And I have a very polished manuscript, a middle-grade verse novel, that I want to revise quickly before I send it out on submission.

I’ll check in with you in 90 days time!

I went to the Emerging Writers’ Festival a few years ago – I caught a tram into the Melbourne Town Hall, I sat next to people I didn’t know and I could see the speakers – in real life! This year, the same festival is online – and most of it is free.

The best thing about festivals like this is that it introduces you to different writers and also different forms of art.

Have a look and listen to this poetry, made so wondrously into tiny films. Listen to these poets introduce themselves and their poem, read it aloud, and then you can read the downloaded version for yourself.

So far, I have immersed myself in poetry, as well as a story about a ‘vindictive mermaid’. Tomorrow, I’ve signed up (and paid) for the National Writers’ Conference.

The Yarra Valley Writers Festival also went online a month ago – it was online for a whole day (which could also be viewed later). I drank many cups of tea – then not quite as much red wine – as I listened to a talented group of writers discuss their books and writing.

These two festivals alone have given me a big enough reading list for a year!

And don’t forget that the Melbourne Writers Festival will also be online this year.

Even if we can’t sit next to a friend or a stranger, and even if the panellists are extra polite so they don’t talk over one another through zoom, we can still support new and experienced writers from home.

Mr 10 had a nightmare last week and called out in the early hours of the morning. It’s so unusual now for me to be woken up like this!

In my sleep-foggy state, I remembered my old standby for all sorts of child fears – the rainbow wrap. I used to do this for all my kids, often as part of their bedtime rhythm, often in the middle of the night or even at the beginning of a tough primary-school day.

The idea comes from Petrea King’s picture book, Rainbow kids. It’s a gentle story about different kids of different nationalities sending rainbows to the people they love. She explains it here –

Every night, before I go to sleep, my mother wraps me up in all the bright and beautiful colours of the rainbow – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. I breathe them in and imagine the colours gathering in my heart then I send rainbows to everyone I love.

It’s a beautiful way to remind children that they can send rainbows to people they want to be connected with – relatives in hospital, a friend who has moved to another school, a parent who is away from home. Such a lovely image to think of two people at either end of a rainbow, connected with love.

The wonderful thing is that it’s so customisable. I used specific objects for different colours – red is the colour of strawberries on your pancakes, of your favourite t-shirt, of Grandma’s red jelly slice, your footy.

When Miss 13 was in prep, she struggled to leave me in the mornings at school. She wanted to take her favourite teddy, Barry Bear, to school but also didn’t want to look too babyish as she already started all her school days in tears. So I took a photo of Barry Bear, wrapped in a rainbow silk. I printed multiple copies, in many sizes and had them laminated. There was a tiny one hole-punched with a keychain and attached to the outside of her schoolbag. There was one in her lunchbox, one stuck to the inside of her school desk and a tiny one in the pocket of her school dress. Every time she felt a little wobbly at school, there was a reminder that she was connected to Barry Bear – and me – and she was always wrapped in a rainbow of love. She knew that Barry Bear and I were always sending her rainbows.

Barry Bear and his rainbow silk are pushed to the back of Miss 13’s wardrobe now, and she laughs at her little five-year-old self. And Mr 10 didn’t mention his nightmare the morning afterwards – there was no need, he had been scared and he had been soothed.

Unfortunately, I don’t think Rainbow Kids is still available. But Petrea King’s website has other rainbow books and meditations.

Sending you all rainbows of love today!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve read a couple of wonderful non-fiction books. It always takes me longer to read a non-fiction book than a novel, and often I read fiction at night and non-fiction during the day. (Now I’m thinking of the scene in Harry Potter and the philospher’s stone where Hermione drops a doorstopper of a book in front of Harry and Ron and calls it light reading!) I love a non-fiction book where the author brings in their own stories which adds meaning to all that knowledge. The books below have certainly done this!

Phospherence, on awe, wonder and things that sustain you when the world goes dark by Julia Baird – hailed as the book for covid times, this book of reflective essays range from a personal letter to Baird’s teenager daughter to musings on the benefits of ocean swimming to reflections about imperfection. My favourite pieces were always the ones which had more of Baird’s story in them – her friendships, her dog, her activism. I had just started reading the first essay when my well-read sister messaged me to recommend this book – snap! This book is also a beautiful object to cherish – the cover is so tactile with a deep navy backdrop and shiny foil font and accents.

Meander, spiral, explode, design and pattern in narrative by Jane Alison – I found this book absolutely geekly fascinating – the idea of different patterns in fiction. Alison devotes chapters on spirals, meanders, cells – all of these literary patterns are found in nature and are often absent from more chronological literature. My favourite example was Eucalptus by Murray Bail – can’t wait to reread this book now! Think back to the loopy, meandering journey of the daughter who must be wooed only by a man who can name all of her father’s many, many eucalyptus trees on his property. I loved the idea of both deliberately structuring a piece of literature in this manner, as well as the possibility of seeing patterns after the first draft has been written. I always think of my writing as a kind of patchwork, with many different fragments stitched together, and similar fabrics holding the pattern together. If you do read this, please let me know! I’d love to discuss it with someone!

Untamed by Glennon Doyle – I’m reading this one as a mini bookclub book with three friends. We send each other texts with our favourite quotes, lots of them starting with wow! This is the story of Glennon’s closure of her marriage to a man and her new marriage with a woman. It’s about the effect on her children, and her struggle to break free from old patterns and ways of thinking to live an untamed life, unsullied by cultural expectations. I started to flick through this book again to find a quote to share, and found so many I could have typed the whole book here! How about this description of women:

Selfless women make for an efficient society but not a beautiful, true, or just one. When women lose themselves, the world loses its way. We do not need more selfless women. What we need right now is more women who have detoxed themselves so completely from the world’s expectations that they are full of nothing but themselves. What we need are women who are full of themselves. A woman who is full of herself knows and trusts herself enough to say and do what must be done. She lets the rest burn.

Happy reading over the long weekend!

Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it.

Meet Ana, a young woman living in Galilee in the first century. She feels compelled to write down the lost stories of women, and begs her father for parchment and ink.

She writes the prayer above into an incantation bowl given to her by her aunt, the only educated woman she knows.

Sue Monk Kidd wrote one of my favourite books of all time, The secret life of bees. And now she’s written what may well become ‘the’ favourite book of all times, The book of longings, published this month.

Not only is Ana from The book of longings a bright, rebellious and brave young woman, she is also the wife of Jesus. Let me share with you the beginning …

I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth. I called him Beloved and he, laughing, called me Little Thunder. He said he heard rumblings inside me while I slept, a sound like thunder from far over the Nahal Zippori valley or even farther beyond the Jordan. I don’t doubt he heard something. All my life, longings lived inside me, rising up like nocturnes to wail and sing through the night. That my husband bent his heart to mine on our thin straw mat and listened was the kindness I most loved in him. What he heard was my life begging to be born.

I’ve listened to and read a few interviews with Sue Monk Kidd. It took her four and a half years to write this book – and a lot of audacity. Who would dare to write a novel about Jesus’s wife? She read a tonne of history books for research. She put a lot of herself into Ana – her longing to write, her anger at women’s treatment (historical and current).

I read this book in a day and a half – I couldn’t put it down. And contrary to my need to finish it, I didn’t want it to end.

Bless the largeness in Sue Monk Kidd.