Natasha Lester's Blog, page 5

Pink Shoes Meet Big Minds and Big Hearts

Dinner with a view.

On Friday, I was lucky enough to fly up to Miriuwung Gajerrong land in Western Australia’s north to participate in the Kimberley Writers Festival. I’ve travelled up that way before, back in 2022, when my family and I visited El Questro Station, the magnificent Emma Gorge, Lake Argyle and the Bungle Bungle Range. It’s a place like no other in the world and the minute the invitation to attend the writers festival landed in my inbox, I’ve been looking forward to going back there....

Paris, Japan, Italy, Books—So Much In One Newsletter!

A big thank you to everyone for your support and enthusiasm for my cover reveal for THE MADEMOISELLE ALLIANCE last week. I love that you all love the cover as much as I do—I can't wait to see it out in the world! If you missed last week's post and the beautiful cover, you can catch up here.

The Month That Was

It's been a busy month since I published my last author digest. I've been away to Japan, submitted the final edits for THE MADEMOISELLE ALLIANCE, started on a second draft of my 2026 book and...

Drumroll ... I Have a Beautiful Cover to Reveal!!!

You, my newsletter subscribers, are in for a treat today! You get to see the North American cover of THE MADEMOISELLE ALLIANCE several hours before anyone else does (I won’t be showing it off on social media until later), which is kind of a “thank you for subscribing” bonus.” So yes, thank you for being here!

When your book finally gets a cover, the whole process starts to feel real. As if the book will actually be in bookshops and people might even read it. I know I’ve published a few books by ...

Writers Don’t Sing, But Their Stories Do

Voice: singers depend on it, speechmakers too. And so do writers. But voice is probably one of the trickiest concepts to explain when it comes to writing.

I’ve been thinking about voice a bit lately because I’ve just finished writing a first draft of a new book. Initially—which is usual for me—the story felt voiceless, like a string of words lacking personality. But then, suddenly, the voice “happened”. I say happened because it’s a bit like that—suddenly it was there, when the day before it was...

Writers Should Probably Be Called Rewriters

I’m going on vacation to Japan next week, which I’m really looking forward to, having not been to Japan since 1994—I bet it’s changed a lot! Once I’m home and the kids return to school, I have to sit down and start redrafting my 2026 book. I have a first draft that’s messy, gappy, and occasionally—I hope!—not too bad. But I need to transform it from a m…

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June's Author Digest: A New First Draft Finished!

The past month has flown by! Between COVID, a solo writing retreat, finishing a new manuscript (hurray—and more on that further down!) one of my daughters having her first round of Year 11 exams and my other daughter coming in from Sydney for a couple of soul-restoring visits, we’ve somehow hit the midpoint of the year.

Normally around this time I’d be starting to work on early publicity and marketing for an upcoming book release. But, as you know, I don’t have a book coming out this year—you ca...

This Is What a Writing Retreat Looks Like

I’m well and truly into my solo writing retreat down at my holiday house in WA’s southwest. I call it a writing retreat because it sounds nicer than I’m-going-to-spend-5-days-staring-at-a-computer and it is, truthfully, a retreat from life so I can do nothing but write.

I do this a couple of times a year—take off, just me and my laptop, and go and write…

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My Quest For 65 Dior Dresses

Hi everybody. Today's post was supposed to be a special edition magazine about the solo writing retreat I’m meant to be on right now. But my husband gave me Covid—even though I told him I prefer gifts of diamonds! It's my first time, and I’ve been very lucky; besides a mild fever for about 24 hours and a slightly blocked nose, I've had very few symptoms and began to feel normal again after only a couple of days, besides the tiredness and slight decrease (hopefully temporary!) in mental acuity.

I...

May's Digest: If Only All Books Were Like Toby the Scoby

In my fridge in my house right now is a thing called a SCOBY hotel. It looks, depending on who you ask, like pig skin floating in a jar (my daughter’s opinion), like something you’d find in a specimen jar in a back-alley science lab (my son’s opinion), or like something that might crawl out in the middle of the night and kill me (my opinion, obviously—I’m the over-dramatic writer!

If you know what a SCOBY is and why it needs a hotel, kudos to you. I’d never heard of one until a fortnight ago and...

The Manuscript Versus the Market

Last week I was in Brisbane for a few days attending Claire Keegan’s writing course, How Fiction Works. It made me have a lot of thoughts about art, writing and commerce, some of which I’m hoping I can articulate in this post and none of which are meant in any way to cast aspersions on Claire Keegan, who I think is a brilliant writer—her book So Late in the Day is one of my favourite reads so far this year.

Hers is like no writing class you’ve ever imagined. There are eighty people in attendance,...