Perth Words… exploring possibilities.

The Film:Whiplash

What’s It About? Andrew is a 19-year-old music conservatory student who is determined to become a great jazz drummer. His talent and fierce passion draw the attention of the school’s most intimidating teacher, Terence Fletcher, who believes that students excel not through praise and encouragement, but through relentless humiliation and fear.

Number of Oscar Nominations? 5

Will It Win?  J.K. Simmons is a dead cert to take home the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his ferocious performance as tyrannical music teacher Terence Fletcher. Unless he throws a chair at Ed Norton or slaps Robert Duvall in the face, he can be assured that future trailers for films he is in will bill him as “Academy Award winner J.K. Simmons”. Simmons’s win might be the only Oscar that Whiplash wins. In the Best Picture category it faces fierce competition from another movie about creativity, Birdman, which…

A hundred times a day
I come to the conclusion
That I am not meant
For this world
And immediately after
Those a hundred times
I remember how it felt
To be loved by you
And it is solely that thought
Which keeps my feet
Firmly fixed
To this place I call home.

Let me quickly say: I don’t believe any writer should be following trends. That’s not what this post is about. However, I do believe that writers who want to get published traditionally need to have their eyes open to what the market is doing.

Why You Don’t Follow Trends

• Trends are something that no one can predict–especially when they end and you don’t want to be on the tail end of something when the booksellers are no longer stocking that “thing.”
• Trends are established years before anyone knows about them. With the year(s) of writing, contract negotiation, and production, by the time a book comes out it’s either starting a trend or with a trend that you have no idea about until it’s on the market. Therefore, trends are started 2 years prior.
• Following a trend is a quick way to date yourself and risk unoriginality.
• Agents aren’t looking for trend…

AUSSIE MONTH with Rachael Johns

Describe yourself in one word:
Excitable

Tell us about The Patterson Girls:
The Patterson Girls is a story about four sisters who discover a family curse when packing up their deceased mother’s possessions. This possible curse affects them all in different ways and causes a little mayhem as various sisters try to prove it wrong.

What inspired this novel?
It was actually inspired by a weed – called Paterson’s Curse or Salvation Jane, which I thought was a beautiful purple flower. A farming friend told me otherwise and then said I should write a rural romance called PATERSON’S CURSE because it was a great title; I agreed and off I went. In the end, it became a little bigger than my rural romances and the focus is more on the relationships between sisters than lovers, but I promise you there’s still a LOT of…

Welcome back to ‘The Story Behind The Story’ series. Today’s post is by Rashida Murphy. I love and resonate with Rashida’s writing on so many levels, and thrilled to learn more about the story behind her novel.

I was born in a small town in India and came to Perth, Western Australia as a young woman with an infant daughter and my then husband, about 30 years ago. I started writing stories as a way of ‘sense-making’ in a new country. My novel, ‘The Historian’s Daughter’ was one such story. It started as a fragment many years ago, but I started to write it seriously in 2011 when I was offered a PhD scholarship by my university in Perth. It is a story about fragmented families and fragments of memory and poetry and for a long time I didn’t actually know what the story was about. Like many writers…