Authors Electric

“Whether it is a time of inner dignity and honor or a pitiful demise is completely reliant on how we live our lives right now, today. In that sense, the ‘moment of death’ truly exists in the present.” Daisaku Ikea My father’s diagnosis of a grade-4 angioblastoma, a fast-growing brain tumor, facilitated a hard realization: over the last two years I have been a very busy writer but not a very productive one. I would very much like to blame my phone and those confounded Facebook and Instagram and Twitter apps. After all those billion-dollar corporations spend millions of dollars every year figuring out which colors and flashing icons will induce me to retweet, heart, like, friend and share. They have to. What is Facebook but billions of posts, comments and shares written by us, for free? Zuckerberg, et al thank us for our efforts by flooding our streams with ads and dreck and junk to enhance the value of their business, which is our eyeballs. I get it. They have money to make and...

Debbie Young in Hawkesbury churchyard (Photo: Angela Fitch) In 2010, realising that no matter how hard I worked in my day job, it was leaving me unfulfilled, I made the radical decision to walk away from it without a job to go to. I intended to refocus my life on my writing ambitions . Reading Between the Lines It felt like a miracle when I almost immediately landed a part-time job with a wonderful children's reading charity , Read for Good , which served two purposes for me (apart from giving me an income, that is): It reinforced the importance of books and reading not only for children but for all ages, which in turn validated my ambition to write books myself.  It gave me space to explore different ways in which I could write what I wanted to write - and indeed to discover exactly what that was.  Using commissioned non-fiction projects and experimental short stories as stepping stones, I gradually gained the confidence and competence needed to achieve my ...