I am appearing at Brunswick Bound this Friday. To register for this free event please lick here.

​On the first Friday night of each month, Brunswick Bound Upstairs hosts a night of local author readings.
It's your chance to discover a new author and for authors to discover new audiences.
In October, the event will feature authors Amra Pajalić (Things Nobody Knows But Me), A. S. Patrić (The Butcherbird Stories) and Gerii Pleitez (On The Sunday, She Created God).
Each author will read from their work and there will be a short Q&A afterwards.
Light refreshments will be served at the event.
Amra Pajalić is a Melbourne-based author of Bosnian background. Her debut novel The Good Daughter (Text Publishing, 2009) won the 2009 Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Civic Choice Award. Amra has appeared on panels at conferences and literary festivals including at the Wheeler Centre, Melbourne Writers Festival, Williamstown Literary Festival, Reading Matters Conference Panel, and the VicTESOL Conference. She was funded by Artists in Schools to be an Artist in Residence in 2010, 2011 and 2012 in high schools, and in 2014 received funding from Creative Victoria to be mentored by Alice Pung to work on her memoir. She works as a high school teacher and is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at La Trobe University.
A. S. Patrić is a bookseller and teacher of creative writing. He is the author of two short story collections, Las Vegas for Vegans and The Rattler & other stories, and a novella called Bruno Kramzer. His debut novel Black Rock White City was published to critical acclaim in 2015 and won the Miles Franklin Award in 2016. His second novel Atlantic Black will be published in November 2017 and a new collection of stories The Butcherbird Stories will be out in 2018. Alec lives in bayside Melbourne with his wife and two daughters.
Gerii Pleitez is a fearless new literary voice. Her debut book On The Sunday, She Created God is a transgressive coming of age story that is both brutal and beautiful. A punk, postfeminist, punch in the face. Gerii's visceral poetic imagery strikes at the heart of what it is to be young, to desire and to want purpose in a world which if often without. She is also the founder of Kara Sevda Press, Australia's first publisher dedicated to illuminating the voices of local women of colour. The imprint is the cutting edge of modern literature and publishing; underground, digitally distinct and iconoclastic in it's ethos. On The Sunday, She Created God was the first book released on the imprint and will be folowed by a journal publication featuring work from women of colour to be released in 2020.
Check out the Brunswick Bound blog to read our First Chapters Q&A with each of these authors and our website for other First Chapters event details.
We acknowledge that the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation are the traditional owners and storytellers of the land on which we meet, share stories, learn and read together.

The past month or so I haven't been able to do much writing. Was feeling very tired, had a few viruses and some emotional trauma that really ground me down. School holidays have been a much needed oasis to recalibrate and get back to my writing life.

I have been working on a novel for the second year now. The working title is Silver City and it is about a 14 year-old girl and her life in the city of Srebrenica during the Balkan War.

I have written about 10 chapters that were synthesising the research I had undertaken reading first-person accounts from Srebrenica. Each chapter was in a sense stand-alone, with no continuity. Character names were changing, character arcs were changing. I was getting to the point where I had no clarity about what I had written and what I needed to write.

It was time to take stock. I paused with writing and wrote a synopsis, figuring out the story arc and what I was aiming for. I have been using this resource to write a synopsis and have found it so helpful with all of my books. 

Now for the hard part: to go back to the beginning and undertake revision, joining this chapters into a narrative that read like a book. 

This is what I've been doing for the past week. Every day I have been revising for two hours or more. Today I finished revising chapter 6. So I now have six chapters, a proper extract that is readable like a book. Total word count so far is 29,010.

I'm feeling quite content with my progress so far. Hopefully in the second week of holidays I’ll complete revision for all the chapters I have and then can focus on finishing my draft.

I'm feeling such a sense of relief and accomplishment at my progress.

If you're wondering what my novel is about here's a blurb:
"Seka Torlak is like any other regular 14 year-old-girl: she has her first crush, falls in love, and struggles with making new friends after her best friend moves away. What makes her unique is it all happens during the Balkan War while her city of Srebrenica is under siege and she faces starvation, shelling, and sniper attacks."

And if you want to read some an an extract of my work in progress published in The Bronzeville Bee click here. 

Vikki Petraitis has been a crime writer for 25 years and in that time she has written 14 true crime books. Inside the Law captures her legacy with an overview of her most interesting and lauded cases and how she came to write them. 

Vikki is a friend and she told me that a reader contacted her after reading this book and wanted to make a movie about her life, and what a movie it would be. As a 24 year-old full time primary school teacher and mother of a two year old she felt the writing bug. During a professional development session she heard about a case that captured her imagination and decided to write about it. So she contacted the police and started her interviews and research. And then she submitted her book to a publisher and got a contract. And so the Phillip Island Murder book was written, a case that still captures the public's attention.

Her second most known case was The Frankston Serial Killer, a book she wrote that no one wanted to touch. She has maintained friendships with the victims connected to the case and engages in activism to support them and ensure that Paul Denyer remains in jail.

Petraitis is a writer who was always before her time. She was writing about institutional child sex abuse long before the Royal Commission and gave voice to victims when no one else would in Rockspider. 

I found Inside the Law a riveting read. While I had always admired Vikki's achievements reading about her writing journey and the twists and turns it has taken really had me turning the pages. I'd already read The Frankston Serial Killer, and didn't sleep well that night as I was haunted by the images of Denyer's crimes, but my curiosity is awakened and I want to delve deeper into her backlist and find out more about the cases that she has written about.

This is a perfect read for True Crime lovers and anyone who wants to be a True Crime writer. Vikki has a way of writing from the perspective of the people she has interviewed and capturing their mindset with intimacy while feeding the reader all the details that True Crime fans love.

I work as a high school teacher and teach across four subject areas: English, English as an Additional Language, Humanities and Creative Writing. I have been teaching for six years and each year is getting easier, mostly because I have now taught across all year levels 7-10 and subject areas and have created resources to support my teaching.

In the first five years of teaching more than 50% of teachers leave the teaching profession. I came dangerously close to becoming a part of this statistic after numerous burn outs throughout my first four years. I want to do something to change this and so every Monday I will be a mentor by sharing my teaching resources and classroom tips.​

Creating resources is where I get to put to use my creativity and my writing background and I want them to have a larger audience. Feel free to share, use and adapt my resources. 

I developed this unit on Analysing Argument analysing anti-bullying ads. I have used these resources, with different topics, for year 7 English and year 8 English as an Additional Language.

Learning Intentions

• Understand exactly how pervasive advertising is in my own life    
• Understand the terms Contention and Intention and apply them to advertising examples    
• Develop knowledge about Anti-Bullying Advertising, and apply understanding of contention and intention    
• To become familiar with persuasive language techniques    
• To become familiar with persuasive visual techniques    
• Know the persuasive elements and use these to analyse print ads and write an analytical paragraph    
• To identify and annotate written and visual persuasive techniques used
• To complete a common formative assessment analysing two anti bullying advertisements and write a analysis essay    
• To complete assessment task analysing anti-bullying advertisements and writing an analysis essay

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