The Empty Page Blog

To celebrate NaNoWriMo, Queensland Writers Centre and The Australian Writer's Marketplace are hosting pizza-and-writing social events during the month of November.

One of the best things to do during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is 'social writing' - getting together with a bunch of friends with your laptops and caffeinated beverages of choice, and writing your hearts out for a few hours in the frenzied pursuit of 50,000 words in a month. It's productive, and more importantly, it's a lot of fun!

So, if you are trying to lay down a few thousand words a day in November, come hang out with us. We guarantee a productive, positive, pro-writing atmosphere.

"I’m gutted," writes Lee McGowan as part of QWC's blog tour. "When I went looking for my crimpolene safari suit, I was told it’d been burned. While I fear for the baby crimpols whose lives will be sacrificed in the name of bad taste (Thanks Billy) for the replacement, there is nothing I could have done for the original. It took seconds to melt into a ball hard enough to derail a train if left on the tracks.

"See a blog tour is like a wordy safari without the guns. The chances of coming across scary animals are just as high, but the inhabitants are generally far more entertaining and thankfully, for us all, the suit is surplus to requirements." Read more on the blog tour here.

QWC's Blog Tour is one month in! Two months to go! We've been visiting Queensland writer's blogs and having a great time. Today we visit Katherine Lyall-Watson, a playwright and theatre reviewer. Katherine has been an active and passionate member of the theatre community for 20 years. Her first play, Tinder, was short-listed for the 2008 Queensland Premier’s Drama Award.

In an effort to re-start my stagnant writing process, Brisbane writer Christopher Currie posted a brand new short story each day for 365 days between March 2008 and March 2009. While the project is now finished, he keeps posting fiction, thoughts on books and the book industry, and general stuff. Check out what he had to say as part of QWC's blog tour of Queensland writers.

Here at Queensland Writers Centre, we've set sail on a blog tour from October to December this year, stopping by a number of blogs and asking the people behind them a few questions about what makes them tick. Today we visit prolific Brisbane poet, Graham Nunn of Another Lost Shark. So here’s what this Lost Shark had to say when we came knocking.

Australians to pay more than their international counterparts for Amazon Kindle whilst the Australian traditional media increasingly threatened by social media vs it's long-standing journalistic code of ethics. Hmph. Excuse the cynicism, but what's new?

Everyone I know loves Belinda Jeffrey. As an author, she's got that rare combination of literary talent and personal magnetism so technically it's impossible not to like her. Anyone who was at the launch of her debut novel Brown Skin Blue (UQP) at Brisbane's Avid Reader Bookshop would agree, as we were treated to a hilarious story of lip gloss and coal soot from her days travelling on board the Q150/QWC Steam Train through regional Queensland.

So what other choice did I have but to inlcude her in QWC's Blog Tour?  From October to December this year we're visiting Queensland writer's blogs. Check out Belinda's conversation with QWC for more.

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So have you been following QWC's Blog Tour?  We've be visiting Queensland writer's blogs  and today we crashing Jason Nahrung's blog Vampires in the Sunburnt Country. His debut novel, The Darkness Within (Hachette Australia), is based on a novella written with his then girlfriend Mil Clayton by email when they were living two states apart. Check out his Q&A via his blog.

Seems like everyone is buzzing about how the collaborative Web tool "Google Wave" will revolutionize how we do business, organize parties, manage projects with friends, cheat on homework and market brands (trust us, says Mark Milian of the LA Times, we've seen the news releases, plural). The term "Google Wave" has been on Twitter's top-trending list all day.

The QWC Queensland Touring Program kicked off on Sunday 4 October in Sydney with a reading at the Brett Whitely Gallery in Surry Hills, writes Belinda Jeffrey (Brown Skin Blue, UQP).