A pet peeve that’s doing the rounds lately is what I term ‘attribution OCD’ which, simply put, is the overriding desire to find a single, authoritative meaning for each and every sentence uttered by anyone; and the bigger the person and bigger the quote, the greater the drive. Social media seems to play a large part in this, pile-ons and cancel-culture enforcing the will of the majority, as does the change on societal norms as we reassess everything (incorrectly, I may add) in the past through t

In 2019 I wrote a very short (290-word) science fiction story entitled Wood For The Trees where I tried to emulate the Japanese works I admire. Few words, rapid delivery, make the key elements disappear into gaps for the reader to discover.

No, I had the Aboriginal characters in the book to make a point about something, to make my psychopath stand out, to let a non-Australian reader peek into an ugly little secret we've tried to keep over here. But to make sure the book's representative? Hardly. Can any novel honestly be representative?