Emily Paull

If you haven't read part one of this series, you can find it here. In early 2018, I finished writing the eleventy-billionth draft of a novel-length project that I had been working on, on and off, for about a decade.  Okay.  So it was the eleventh draft.  But it felt like a lot more. Something felt different about finishing the story this time.  Wiser writers than me have said before that when something is finished, you know.  There is a severing of the cord that binds you to it.  And while I know that if my book is picked up for publication I will likely have to work on it a few more times, the sense that I have right now is that I have taken it as far as I could have. I learnt a lot writing this particular book, and I had a lot of great milestones whilst working on it too.  I have always prided myself on having a great memory, but funnily enough, when I began writing about the process of working on this book, I realised that I can't remember t...

Writing a second novel is a little bit like learning to write all over again. I'm in that frustrated space right now, where my enthusiasm for the idea exceeds my knowledge of the topics and time periods I want to write about, and my brain is thinking of scenes and new characters faster than I can work out where they need to go.  I keep thinking to myself 'I don't know how to do this anymore.  I don't remember how I did it the first time.'  They say much of writing is an act of faith that things will come together in the end, and I am certainly putting that to the test now. When I began writing Between the Sleepers, I was still in high school, though only just.  I'd written 'novels' before.  Not to go into too much embarrassing detail, but I'd written one novella length YA story called "Quoting Shakespeare" which I printed off and put into a folder and felt very proud of, and one urban fantasy 'novel' (probably about 50 000 wor...

The Lily and the Rose Jackie French Angus and Robertson Publishing, 2018 If you haven't read the previous book in this series, you can read my review here. Sophie Higgs, heiress to the Higgs Corned Beef Empire was a Rose of No Man's Land during the First World War.  She set up and ran successful field hospitals, and even found herself dashing across occupied France in an attempt to stop an attack of mushroom gas against soldiers in Ypres.  Now, the war is over, and Sophie must find a way to return to her normal life-- if life for Sophie can ever be anything like normal again, that is.  When she receives word from Germany that her friend Hannelore, the Prinzessin von Arnenberg and a fellow graduate of Miss Lily's Lovely Ladies, may be in trouble, she resolves to rescue her and take the former Prinzessin, now without lands or income, home with her to Australia.  Accompanied by the wife of an English aristocrat who has a penchant for violence, as well as two of...

I haven't been much in the mood for blogging lately-- this time of year has been extremely busy, and when I get home from work, all I want to do is either read or watch television.  My programs of choice lately have been 'Sweetbitter' and 'Silicon Valley', and maybe this tells you a lot about my state of mind, but all I have wanted to do is watch episode after episode until I fall asleep.  Sadly, even in this age of binge-watching and Netflix, shows run out of episodes eventually. But outside of TV time, I have been reading some excellent books lately, so in lieu of a proper review, I thought I'd let you know what's been on my nightstand lately, and give you a quick little update of what I thought. Trick of the Light by Laura Elvery I met Laura a year ago on a panel at the Margaret River Readers and Writers Festival.  She'd just won the Margaret River Short Story Competition, and so we were book mates in Joiner Bay and Other Stories, Laura having w...