Susan Jagannath's Blog, page 12

An Abundance of Christmas Gifts for You

Christmas is perilously close, and I have been seriously remiss in not blogging or mailing much – mostly because, it’s that time of the year, to be giving and not selling. I had a rethink about my online presence, and this year, what I did was create an advent calendar, not chocolates, not coupons, but gifts of the abundant sort. There is a lot of great Christmas themed content out there, from “Twas the Night before ...

Walking for Mental Health and Why it will Change your Life

As a writer, your mental health is crucial – and yet it is so counterintuitive. You imagine that to be a writer you need to be chained to your desk, but nothing is further from the truth.
Physical activity is vital for your mental health and for the brilliance of your writing. One surprising form of activity is simply walking, and it’s easy to fit into a busy lifestyle.

With me, you know, it launched three bestselling hiking books–those...

Swimming against the Tide

It’s summer breaking in here in Australia, and in between the thunderstorms, and sudden drenching downpours, there is magnificent sunshine that draws us to the seaside or as we say in Queensland, to “the coast“. In this case it was the Gold Coast, and no, we were not digging for gold. I have no idea why it’s called the Gold Coast, the string of coastal settlements with awesome beaches now all roiled into one stupend...

Happy Divali – All Sweetness and Light

If it’s November, it has to be Divali, unless of course Divali came earlier and arrived in October. But this year it’s in November, soon after Halloween. I have to confess, I prefer the light of Divali over the darkness of Halloween. Divali is the Festival of Lights in India, the celebration of the victory of light over darkness, of good over evil, of mythic proportions. And vitally, in India today, of fireworks and ...

The Joy of Spontaneity

What do you do when you can’t really do any through-hikes? Or when summer is coming in too fast, and spring is an all too brief a moment?

And you realise that it is October and you haven’t hiked or travelled for a whole year.

No point crying – what I did was pack up family and head into a nearly mountain that hid an underground waterfall – and all we had in hand was bottles of drinking water and a couple of “nutriti...

3 Ways of Creating Magic from your Life

TranscriptWhy Conferences are Great and not so great

Hello and welcome to this replay of the talk which I gave at the Logan Writers Conference a couple of weeks ago. We had a few technical glitches preventing a livestream. And quite a few of you have asked for the recording because we couldn’t actually come out to the Logan Writers Festival. We were very lucky in Brisbane and in Logan that we could actually hold th...

3 Ways of Creating Magic from the Ordinary

Why Conferences are Great and not so great

Hello and welcome to this replay of the talk which I gave at the Logan Writers Conference a couple of weeks ago. We had a few technical glitches preventing a livestream. And quite a few of you have asked for the recording because we couldn’t actually come out to the Logan Writers Festival. We were very lucky in Brisbane and in Logan that we could actually hold the festival ...

The WTF of Writer’s Conferences

WTF – not it’s not a rude saying and I have not been overcome by the need to swear in writing at least – in real life it may or may not be a different matter altogether. There was a WTF in  my presentation – much to the delight of the high school students who trooped into the marquee for my author’s talk on the Friday of the conference. So what does it mean?

Want to Fly of course – that’s what reading does to you an...

Books, Brown Papers and Author Angst

Countdown

Day(s)

:

Hour(s)

:

Minute(s)

:

Second(s)

Join the Festival TranscriptPrelude to the Writer’s Festival

It is nearly here. What is at this time, I should actually be out in the forest walking about and showing your lives from the forest. But you know that...

Endings and Beginnings in August

An update on August

The end of August means a few things – typically, its the last month that you can pretend that the year has not rushed past in unseemly haste, leaving you scrambling to catch up, breathless in indignation that you didn’t really know that time was passing so swiftly. Now, you really must take stock of what you can realistically achieve before the end of the year. But before that, I’ve been thinkin...